The Institute for Government recently published a report (HERE) about Whitehall's preparedness for Brexit, which it calls, "the ‘biggest and most complex task in its peacetime history’. And even this may be underestimating the scale of the challenge since the changes will also impact the private sector, not just Whitehall. We know now there was no plan to begin with and no realistic one was prepared by the time the Article 50 letter was sent. Since then we have probably gone backwards. The fatal flaws in the unrealistic visions set out by Theresa May in her various speeches are now becoming clear.
The report should be required reading for leavers. The IfG does not pull any punches,:
"The greatest challenges faced by Whitehall now stem from splits within the Cabinet on major policy decisions. These divisions are reflected in the Conservative Party and in Parliament. Two years on from the referendum, Whitehall is working to a sketchy vision of future relations with the EU, built on a fragile Cabinet consensus, that no one in the Government can expect to survive negotiations with Europe".
The objectives set out in in the Future Framework series are simply not available so It's hard to see what Whitehall's planning is based on. But don't worry, it doesn't matter because the departments aren't allowed to see the planning guidance anyway, as we see from this:
"As a result of these deep divisions, a culture of extraordinary secrecy has developed. This goes well beyond documents that contain sensitive negotiating material, with even rudimentary planning guidance kept locked away and largely inaccessible to the teams – all across government – that need to use it. Key documents are over-classified, important information is not being shared between departments and those with a legitimate reason to be informed, such as Parliament, are kept in the dark."
"In this environment, effectively co-ordinating work across almost 20 departments, devolved administrations and a large number of public bodies is impossible. No clear end-state, poor information flow and competing ministerial preferences make delivering Brexit extremely difficult."
"The UK and EU had not started talking about what the future relationship might look like when they agreed the length of the transition, the period in which preparations are supposed to take place".
In other words, for this "most complex task in our peacetime history", set the timetable then decide what needs to be done!
"When the EU changed its customs regulation, creating the new Union Customs Code, it involved new systems and changes to border processes. There were seven years between the agreement on the design and the point at which governments and businesses needed to be ready. The end of the ‘implementation period’ is now two and a half years away, but the UK hasn’t even agreed on its opening position for negotiations."
"The task of Brexit has been compared to delivering the Olympics, a major cross-government delivery project with a hard deadline. This comparison makes Brexit look far too easy. The degree of uncertainty makes it like delivering an Olympics without knowing the year, the location or whether it is the summer or winter games. It fails to take into account the effort needed at the same time to support the negotiations and the need for a minority government to get contentious legislation through. Moreover, there is a travelling cadre of experienced people to be hired to help stage each Olympics – and the International Olympic Committee on hand to keep the host government transparently on course. On Brexit, the Government is going where no government has gone before."
"By the time the EU declared ‘sufficient progress’ had been made in December 2017, the details of the UK’s desired end-state, and the obligations that would be acceptable in order to secure it, remained unclear. Aside from a handful of Future Partnership papers, published in Summer 2017, and some more recent discussion documents and slide packs, which avoided most of the contentious issues, ministers have struggled to reconcile their different visions of Brexit and the competing priorities underpinning them."
"It took the Government a year, from the point at which it chose to trigger Article 50, to come up with this sketchy vision of what the future relationship should look like. The focus of ministers, and often their key officials, is on what can and cannot be agreed around the Cabinet table. The unique challenges of minority government mean the Prime Minister must also listen more carefully to her back benches and take in to account the views of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). The process is slow and key meetings are often less than decisive. The time and effort spent corralling opinion in the corridors of Whitehall is time and effort that could be used influencing in Brussels and European capitals."
Over the last few weeks I have visited several aviation museums, memorials to the men and women who designed, built, maintained and flew the aircraft used by the RAF in both world wars and other later conflicts. Don't forget the entire Second World War only lasted six years and one is amazed at what was achieved in incredibly short time frames, with decisions made, aeroplane designs tried, scrapped, revised, built and tested sometimes in months. If Brexit is comparable to planning for a global conflict, it's proceeding at a snail's pace. It's as if by the end of 1941 we were still trying to decide what the war's objectives were with the nation waiting to be told what to do. Had the Brexiteers been in charge Adolf Hitler would by 1942 have defeated the Russians and met up with the Japanese advancing westward through India. We wouldn't have stood a chance.
