This week in Brexitland, May 13th, 2022

1. Why Penny Mordaunt shouldn’t be prime minister, part 438

The Tory left, the One Nation types, usually have a sort of saviour figure held in reserve at any given time - someone who is going to steal the party away from the hard right nutjobs and make the Conservative party all about calm steadiness once more. Matt Hancock filled this role for a while, if you can believe it (which gives you some idea already of its lack of historical effectiveness). For some at present within in this section of the Conservative party, a possible saviour is Penny Mordaunt.

To be fair, this is because most of the actual One Nation Tories have been expelled from the party, which means there is a real shortage of those within the parliamentary group that might in any way be considered both senior and sane enough to be the heir apparent for liberal Tories. But there is an article out this week in the Express which demonstrates perfectly that even with the ranks of good guys on the Conservative benches as depleted as it is, Mordaunt has far too many flaws going against her to be taken seriously.

The headline reads “Many doomsters want Britain to fail perhaps because they're also failures”. Now, I know how things work at these sorts of outlets and the person who wrote the article usually has nothing to do with the headline. So, I figured that it was a red meat click-baity headline and what the Minister of State for Trade Policy had to say in the piece itself would be much more reasonable.

Oh boy.

This is the first paragraph, with no edits by me, I promise:

“What the Prime Minister has called the doomsters and gloomsters are at it again. Project Fear is getting another outing and bad times are just around the corner. We’ve been through tough times. There are challenges ahead. But all around us, spring is reminding us that every year, every day, brings new beginnings and opportunities for us all. The Queen’s Speech signifies the beginning of this in the new political cycle. It’s an opportunity for us all to start again.”

Now, that’s just poorly written and extremely stupid. The problem is, the article just keeps getting worse from there. She then talks about Britain “waking up” from Covid and goes on to set out some of her meagre achievements:

“The Queens speech contained a Trade Bill to bring the Australia and New Zealand Trade Deals into effect. In the long run, those agreements could increase household wages by £900m and £200m respectively.”

These numbers are bandied around by the government as if they are impressive. To put it into perspective, there are about 28 million households in the UK. Which means that the Australian deal - using the government’s own numbers, remember - will be worth around £32 per house over the course of its existence. The New Zealand deal, about £7. Compare this to the 4% GDP loss the Office for Budget Responsibility figures we’ll experience over the course of Brexit. GDP for 2021 was £2.2 trillion. 4% of that is £88 billion, or £3,142 per household every single year. Kind of makes the £7 you’re getting off the Kiwi deal over the course of time feel a little insignificant, doesn’t it?

Mordaunt eventually turns her ire upon those who think “we cannot be successful without Brussels”. And what follows is, I swear to you, word for word from the article, in the sequence presented:

“What we believe matters and there are too many that want us to fail just to satisfy their only vanity – that they were right all along. They seem to hate our country and want it to fail, maybe it’s because they have failed themselves. You hear this from many over-educated, under-achievers.”

There’s a lot of information given over there in a few sentences. If you question Brexit, it is because you hate the country. You want it to fail because hey, you yourself are a failure if you dare to question any aspect of Brexit, including the government’s own handling of it. Further, it’s only over-educated, under-achievers who would ever doubt that Brexit is a massive success already; “real” Britons, imagined as caricatured working-class men and women, in the north and the Midlands of England (the Scots and the Welsh don’t really feature in this fantasy), love Brexit and would never even think to question its genius.

“So remember that despite all their collective misery, Spring is happening all around,” Mordaunt goes on to say. I am hyper-aware of the dangers of discussing parallels with fascism, inflating each and every transgression a democratically elected government might do into something on par with the Nuremberg rallies, but am I the only one who isn’t a little discomforted by this sentence? It’s weirdly more Stalinist than Third Reich, though, as is in fact, the whole article - it kind of reads like something that would have been written by a Soviet apparatchik for Pravda in 1935. “Chocolate rations up! New tractors for all good communists! Spring is all around you, comrades! Only the over-educated city folk dare to question the wisdom of the cossack!”

Penny Mordaunt was the one who went on TV and was willing to spout the line about Turkey joining the EU during the referendum campaign. She was the one who gave that insane speech in America, the one about how Brexit was an example of a tiny nation state throwing off the shackles of an oppressive dictatorship. And now this Express article. How much more of this sort of thing does she have to do before enough people start to get that she isn’t some level-headed, solid thinker, waiting for her big break to show her prime ministerial qualities - she’s the female Dominic Raab. Someone who seems to feel comfortable with the alt right leaning stuff but really it’s all much of muchness anyhow - whatever needs to be said for the good of the team, let’s get out on there and say it. Do we need yet another prime minister with that mind set?

2. The rhetoric on the NI Protocol ramps up once again

Once more, the UK government is threatening to invoke Article 16 of the NI Protocol as a response to several things happening to them that they aren’t happy about.

Conor Burns, Minister of State for Northern Ireland, was on Channel 4 this week, and what he had to say was telling. Burns is actually one of the cleverer members of the cabinet and thus I can take what he had to say about the Protocol as being deliberate, as opposed to just the usual stuff you get from someone like Patel or Raab or whomever where they clearly don’t understand any of it and are just repeating lines they’ve memorised.

As a prop, Burns held up the amount of paperwork needed to bring goods from Great Britain into Northern Ireland. For what it’s worth, I agree that having to do that much paperwork to transport goods from one part of the UK to another is indeed outrageous - which is why, one, Brexit was a bad idea because that’s what has directly led us here and two, the NI Protocol, which was Boris Johnson’s baby, was a terrible idea within a terrible idea.

Burns then brings up Article 16, telling viewers that it allows either the UK or the EU to “unilaterally take safeguarding measures if necessary” - except that this is not what Article 16 says in its entirety and the other bits of it are extremely important for context. For instance, after the sentence that Burns quoted almost verbatim on Channel 4, the protocol then reads:

“Such safeguard measures shall be restricted with regard to their scope and duration to what is strictly necessary in order to remedy the situation. Priority shall be given to such measures as will least disturb the functioning of this Protocol.”

You see that? Scope and duration need to be restricted. You cannot just suspend the Protocol indefinitely using A16, until the EU comes up with some other solution, as seems to be the thought throughout Toryland. In fact, the Protocol shortly tells you what the side that has invoked Article 16 can expect in return, if they’ve done so with no solid timeframe in mind:

“If a safeguard measure taken by the Union or the United Kingdom, as the case may be, in accordance with paragraph 1 creates an imbalance between the rights and obligations under this Protocol, the Union or the United Kingdom, as the case may be, may take such proportionate rebalancing measures as are strictly necessary to remedy the imbalance. Priority shall be given to such measures as will least disturb the functioning of this Protocol.”

In other words, the EU can engage with any level of trade war it feels comfortable with in accordance with how badly the British government abuses the terms of the Protocol.

Article 16 is for specific issues that may arise in the Protocol’s functioning. For instance, let’s say that there was a milk shortage in Northern Ireland and the only obvious way to remedy the situation immediately was to allow loads and loads of it in from Great Britain. Then you could unilaterally suspend checks on milk going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland for say, a period of three weeks, enough to alleviate the crisis. That’s what the Protocol is there for, not to be suspended whenever the UK government has buyer’s remorse.

Burns gives some insight into the excuse they are intending to trot out to use Article 16: “You can’t get more societal interruption than not being able to form a government in Northern Ireland”. This is sophistry at its worst. The reason for a government not forming in Northern Ireland is because the DUP, directly via their allowing the NI Protocol to be agreed in the first place through their own mishaps, did not end up the largest party and have decided to throw a strop about it. You see, if there couldn’t be an election in Northern Ireland because pencils were in short supply and the quickest way to get enough pencils was to have them shipped from Britain, then that would be a good reason to invoke Article 16 of the NI Protocol.

Burns then mentions Article 13.8 of the NI Protocol, which for the benefit of the reader, I will give you in full:

“8. Any subsequent agreement between the Union and the United Kingdom shall indicate the parts of this Protocol which it supersedes. Once a subsequent agreement between the Union and the United Kingdom becomes applicable after the entry into force of the Withdrawal Agreement, this Protocol shall then, from the date of application of such subsequent agreement and in accordance with the provisions of that agreement setting out the effect of that agreement on this Protocol, not apply or shall cease to apply, as the case may be, in whole or in part.”

All this means is, the EU is willing to talk again if the UK changes its mind on areas of alignment, such that the Protocol may become watered down or even unnecessary. Yet Burns talks about it as if it’s proof that the EU knew the Protocol wouldn’t last all along, so hey, this is all just par for the course. When in fact, it’s clear that the EU assumed that the United Kingdom would abide by both the letter and the spirit of an international treaty that they had signed.

Part of me almost hopes that this government goes ahead and triggers Article 16, simply because it will backfire on them ruthlessly and make the foolishness of Brexit seem ever more obvious to more and more people. But then a bigger part of me worries about exactly how long it might take for the UK to regain its international standing after having broken an international agreement, particularly in such an egregious manner.

That’s all I can handle talking about on Brexit this week. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do. Here’s the full site:

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I’ll be back next week, as ever, with the worst of Brexit.