Article 13.8 of the NI Protocol and how it relates to the Brexit scam
As much as I loathe Brexit and all it has brought to this country, I have to admit that the Brexiters are pretty clever, at least the ones orchestrating everything. One of the weak spots amongst Remainer thinking is this idea that all Brexiters are stupid and were only following their desire to take Britain out of the largest single market in the world out of profound ignorance. Yes, they are taking some stupid people along for the ride, as happens all the time in politics, from all sides - but they know what they are doing here, believe me.
Take the recent citing of Article 13.8 of the Northern Ireland Protocol by Tory ministers as an example. This is the latest in a gambit which involves taking bits of treaties and using them as a sort of shield for Brexit. Don’t worry about how bad Brexit seems thus far, folks, we have discovered this new, magical article within a treaty that will act as a get out of jail free card! What, you thought we signed Britain up to something unmentionably awful? No, no, no! Don’t worry, we are on top of the detail and guess what, it all works out in our favour!
For a while, the shield of choice was Article 24 of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). We were told by several leading Tories that this would be our way out of any of the downsides a hard Brexit would deliver. As Rees-Mogg said in 2018:
“If you are in a negotiation for a free trade agreement, you can maintain your existing standards for ten years under WTO rules. So we have ten years from the point at which we leave the European Union to negotiate a free trade agreement with the EU which would mean we can carry on with our zero tariffs.”
This, as it turns out, was total rubbish. But Article 24 of GATT is long, written in old-fashioned legalise and tricky even for people who are into this stuff to fully interpret without reading many times over. Thus it became a rallying cry for Brexiters, 99.99% of whom had never attempted to read any part of it even once. What the GATT 24 exercise demonstrated was that even when what you said would happen doesn’t materialise, the vast majority of watching Brexiters don’t even care. Just dangle another article from an international treaty in front of them and they will forget all about how the last one didn’t work the way you said it did.
As a for instance, we have had Article 16 of the NI Protocol name checked by Conservative MPs for ages now. They have intimated to us that this could be used to suspend the Protocol for any length of time, for any reason whatsoever, unilaterally. Unfortunately, this didn’t turn our to be correct either, so they have started to slightly back away from that one. Again, they’ve already figured out there are loads of articles in any treaty to choose from, so long as you just want to pluck one out of the document and bullshit about it to buy you some time/cred with those who are eager to cling onto to the vision of the sunlit uplands.
These days, the article du jour is 13.8 of the NI Protocol. I know I put it in last week’s article as well, but it’s worth revisiting what the actual text from this bit of the Protocol says:
“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.”
To boil this down, if the UK and EU can agree between themselves that something better than the NI Protocol could exist to solve the issues raised by Brexit, then that agreement will supersede the Protocol. It’s like when you sign an employment contract and there is a clause in it saying, “If the employer and the employee should come a new arrangement, this contract becomes null and void”. So, staying with this analogy, it would be like if your employer offered you a new job, which would mean you needed a whole new contract, so the clause in the original contract was just to head off such an issue should it arise. Again staying with this analogy, it would be unlikely however that your employer would offer you a better job in the organisation if you constantly came into work quoting bits of your contract incorrectly, likened your employer to various authoritarian regimes and then threatened not to do any more work at all while saying you should still receive your pay, again incorrectly citing your employment contract on this front.
As I say, this stuff works. The reason is does is because it achieves these three things at once:
It makes it look like the Tories know what they are doing with Brexit to those either not clued in or not fussed about the detail, when in fact they don’t have any real idea what they are doing
It makes them sound like they are completely on the minutiae of all the treaties they have signed, when really they are just cherry picking mostly random bits from them and then explaining it all incorrectly
Brexiters at large then have something to distract them from the cruel reality of Brexit. It is a false flag exercise to give the impression that there is a magical clause out there which will transform Brexit into something genuinely good from where we are now, which is so bad even Brexiters think it’s bad (otherwise, why are we trying to renegotiate the basics of the deal?)
The question I have is: how long will this trick work? When will enough people go, “Hold on, you have this habit of quoting articles from various treaties that you will use somehow to make Brexit work and yet this never actually achieves any positive results? Are you having us all on?” What the timeframe is on this, I do not know. But the Tories have to hope it’s not before the next general election.
2. A brief ode to freedom of movement
One of the things I’m struck by in interacting on social media with Brexiters is how many of them are under the misapprehension that British people are allowed to live anywhere in the world they like, with no red tape involved whatsoever. As if by dint of the Empire, a British passport gives you the keys to the globe, free from the hassles citizens of other countries face in trying to live abroad.
This is, ironically enough, the result of decades of having freedom of movement. You have a couple generations at least of people who have been able to go and retire in France or Spain if they like with no need for a visa to do so. During that period before we left the EU, they travelled across the continent without having to even get their passport stamped. This seems to have given many Britons the impression that there are no restrictions on living anywhere you like.
I would hate to see one of them pack up all their things, buy a house in Florida, only to find out that living there as a non-US citizen is actually rather complicated. You’d need a green card - or some form of visa at the very least - to actually live there and getting one is time consuming, a hassle, very expensive and in the end, might not even be successful. The States is probably the most extreme example of this but most countries you would probably fancy living in have some barrier to entry that one has to overcome. That’s what’s so great about freedom of movement - it allows the individual much more freedom to live where they like.
Freedom of movement left it to individuals to decide where across most of the European continent they would like to live and work. Brexit made it so that this power was taken away from British individuals and handed to foreign governments. You’d think this would be exact the sort of thing that they would be against, but alas.
And the reason might be that a lot of them still don’t get that freedom of movement wasn’t just something that allowed Polish people to come and work in Britain - it also allowed they themselves to retire to Spain. It will be interesting to see what happens as travel post-Covid opens up and more and more people realise that tangible, important rights have been stripped away from them directly because of Brexit.
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And I will be back, as ever, next week with the worst of Brexit.
I think it will all come down to the economy and the cost of living in the end. Not really directly a result of Brexit, but with people struggling in their daily life to earn enough money, food bank use going up, and a government that clearly doesn't have a clue how to deal with any of this, I think by the time the next election rolls around people will want to hear about how the government solves all those problems. If it is still going on about article x of treaty y about Brexit and the EU, I would guess that most ordinary people might say "Didn't you sort all that out in 2019, when you said "Get Brexit Done" and "Oven Ready Deal"? Maybe then will be the point where people will say whatever article you talk about, Brexit was supposed to make things better and it hasn't worked, and why are you STILL going on about it.
Or maybe the Brexit true believer will still be believing that Gatt 24, or Article 50, or WTO terms, or clause 20 will sort it all out, even though they already heard it 20 times before. Sure, they are still coming up with the old tunes of the "German Car Industry need us more than we need them". But you've got to hope that there will only be a small number of Brexit True Believers left by then...
Yep. Brexit was an exercise in people thinking everything would change (we'd be better off, fantastic trade deals with markets much further away, removal of Freedom of movement for those pesky EU foreign types) whilst at the same time nothing would change (full and free access to the Single Market despite having left it, freedom of movement for British 'ex pats'). British exceptionalism at its best...or worst!