This week in Brexitland, March 25th, 2022

1. Boris Johnson compares Ukrainian opposition to Putin to Britain leaving the EU……or does he?

“I know that it’s the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom every time. I can give you a couple of famous recent examples. When the British people voted for Brexit in such large numbers, I don’t believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. It’s because they wanted to be free, to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself.”

• Prime Minister Boris Johnson, speech to Tory spring conference, Blackpool, Sunday, March 20th, 2022

How you interpret the remarks above will depend heavily on your political outlook and loyalties. Many Tories jumped into the breach after the speech was heavily criticised, saying that no, Boris Johnson did not just compare Brexit and the horrors of the war in the Ukraine, no sir, he did not. Of course, what ruined this defence somewhat - apart from the attempts at vindicating the speech being expressed in the most abstruse language possible a lot of the time - was the fact that there were other Tories insisting at the same time that not only was that exactly what the prime minister was trying to express, he was absolutely right to do so.

I think it goes without saying in my book that the only way that passage in the prime minister’s speech makes any sense at all is by interpreting it as trying to draw parallels between Britain leaving the EU and Ukrainian resistance to Putin. We’re all freedom fighters, you see. Okay, yeah, we get that Brussels never rolled tanks into Brighton when we voted to leave the EU but……draw your own conclusions, people! Whatever they might be!

What’s most interesting to me about the portion of Boris Johnson’s speech in question, the backlash that followed and then the two-pronged counter-attack by Tory spokespeople is what it says about what the Conservative party is trying to do at the moment. I’m sure Johnson’s attempt to link Brexit with the war in Ukraine will have been appreciated by a large section of their current voting base. Yet they are clearly aware that lots of other people they need the votes from hate this sort of stuff, which is why you’re getting two different messages, ones that are mutually exclusive, going out simultaneously.

So, we have one MP denying that’s what Boris Johnson meant by his Brexit-Ukraine remarks on the BBC, while at the same time having another one on Sky saying that Johnson was completely correct to draw the comparison. Let each audience hear what they want to hear and hopefully ignore the other, opposite comment. It sounds mad when you discuss the strategy in straight up terms like I’m doing right now given everyone has access to both messages, except that I have to admit that it works. At least, it has worked so far for the Tories.

A good example of this was Rishi Sunak’s response - I have to say, he rode both of those horses about as well as anyone could. Of course Boris didn’t compare the current situation in Ukraine to Brexit. But if he had, would that have been so bad? Freedom means freedom, after all, whether it be from Brussels trying to tell you how to regulate light bulb luminosity to having maternity hospitals blown to pieces, it’s really just about scale here. It’s all about tyranny, that much is certain! But no, Boris would never say anything like that, never. But if he did, well….

This is how the current leadership of the Conservative party operates. They say they are the party of low taxes while they are putting taxes up. They tell everyone they are the party of free speech but are in fact open to all sorts of new incursions on what it is appropriate to say. Brexit will help us as a country to be more self-reliant, needing to trade less, but at the same time we’ll be trading way more under the banner of “Global Britain”. “Brexit means Brexit” used to be the slogan, but now it’s “Anything means anything else”, where literally anything at all can mean whatever anything needs to mean in order to benefit the governing party. Which is a handy trick, so long as it works. But the question the cabinet should ask themselves is: will the doublethink act work on enough of the voters of the United Kingdom to allow the Tories to win the next general election when it comes around?

2. The worst of the Nationality and Borders Bill

There is a lot to dislike in the Nationality and Borders Bill if you are in anyway shape or form a liberal. The fact that someone can be stripped of their British citizenship without notice and even, really, without a reason when you consider that it is down to the discretion of whatever government is in power at the time of the passport negating. Several Lords amendments have been rejected in the Commons, including a very reasonable one that would have allowed refugees to work after six months in the UK.

There are two Brexit related dimensions to all of this. One is that this is one of those bills designed to show what a post-Brexit government can do on immigration, after freedom of movement has been conquered. Apparently, Her Majesty’s Government can now be pretty draconian if it wants to be. Not that it couldn’t be when we were in the EU, but it has given them some extra freedom to go full on alt right.

The second is how this bill relates to the Common Travel Area. This continues to be a problem created by Brexit that even the NI Protocol cannot solve - the fact is, Ireland is in the EU, thus has freedom of movement, and the UK is not and does not. The government could at least bear this in mind when creating ridiculous immigration bills, but apparently that is beyond them.

The Lords wanted an amendment that would ditch the requirement for foreigners to have an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) pass when making a local journey to Northern Ireland from Ireland. The Commons, of course, took it out. In one sense, I get it - you want to create this super right-wing immigration system and then leave a backdoor in Ireland for people to just saunter through? Except, when combined with other aspects of the bill, there are some major problems created here, many of them almost certainly unintentional. For instance, anyone travelling back and forth across the border on the island of Ireland without an ETA could be committing a criminal offence worth up to four years in prison.

How does the UK government intend to police this? Not at the border itself, that much is obvious. But of course, the more you think about all of this, the more everything falls apart like a house of cards sat in the middle of a rowdy Downing Street lockdown party. Have roving border police, INS-style, wandering through Northern Ireland doing spot checks? Can’t think of any problems that would cause, really, none whatsoever. But again, how can they talk a big game about “protecting our borders” when anyone who got into the EU can just waltz into the UK via Ireland? And then you think, well, why should anyone care all that much anyhow? And then you wonder whether Brexit was such a good idea in the first place, and if you’re in this government, that’s the last thing you want to be thinking about.

3. British ex-pats in the EU selling up

A headline this week reads, “UK expats 'selling up' property to survive ‘unstable’ post-Brexit life: 'Not worth it'. That’s in the Guardian…...oh, whoops, sorry, the Daily Express. They do like running these stories that don’t make Brexit look too good more and more often these days, which I find sort of cute.

The article carefully explains how if you didn’t manage to get permanent residence in Spain prior to Brexit happening, you can now only spend 90 days out of any 180 day period in Spain. Unless you get a work visa, which I’m imagining would sort of put the spanner into your whole retirement plan, wouldn’t it? I kept waiting for the Express article to blame the EU for all of this, but no, this is the choice quote, from one of the ex-pats returning to Blighty themselves:

“Previously as an EU citizen, I had the right to be here and now I just have permission to stay.”

That’s a great summary of what Brexit did to British ex-pats rights. In fact, to all of our rights, now that I think about it. Perhaps I should read the Daily Express more often if they are going to continue having insights like these into the perils of Brexit.

And with that, I wish you all a lovely weekend. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Here’s the full site, if you want to have a poke around:

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I’ll be back next week again with the worst of Brexit.