Sir Ivan Rogers has delivered another telling contribution to the ongoing Brexit debate with a speech made this week at Trinity College, Cambridge (HERE). He was the former UKREP to the EU until he was sacked for being too honest about the difficulties of negotiating our exit and warning against triggering Article 50 too early. Time has proved him to be absolutely right but the Brexiteers will not acknowledge it or thank him. The Cambridge speech is an excellent summary of the present miserable state of play.
He portrays Brexit as a revolution like the French and suggests it is now beginning to eat its children. He uses words like "naivety" and "plausible bullshit" to describe the way the PM is running the negotiations and almost accuses the Brexiteers of nihilism:
"...those who drove Brexit politically are clearly not seeking incremental change. Most wanted, and want, a radically different UK, and some want a radically different - or even, no - EU. There was never a version of the EU to which the other 27 could have agreed with which the bulk of the leading advocates of Brexit could have been content".
What it shows is the collective delusional thinking at the very top of government. Some that has already been shown to be delusions, while some still persists. This it seems to me to be the worst of it. Serious, supposedly intelligent people who have not and cannot learn from their own mistakes continue to engage in wishful thinking. After Brexit they will have sole charge of the tiller.
A few extracts if you haven't the time to read all 21 pages:
On Brexiteer ministers (DD is one I suggest):
"Before I quit the Civil Service, I was dealing day by day with senior Cabinet Ministers, many of whom were and still are central players in the process, who argued that the “trade deal with the EU” had to be negotiated, agreed and ratified BEFORE we left and in operation the day after legal exit, and that we had to have a plethora of new trade deals with other global players in force as well. Plenty of such lofty promises were made in the referendum campaign of course. They were, and have been proven, total fantasy"
On the inability of our political elite to understand what the EU is:
"We live, and have lived for some time, in a comprehensive regulatory union, but despite wanting to leave it, we struggle at political level to understand what that means.
"This is all written off as the preoccupations of ghastly incumbent multinational CEOs, who themselves, we are told regularly, do not understand their own businesses’ business models as well as the gurus of the revolution. And therefore need, like their trade federations, to be ignored and / or replaced, presumably by corporate titans who spontaneously align with the revolution".
"Brexit advocates are often caught between contempt for the EU’s complete inability to function as a “hard power” player and fear that this might then end when we are not in it. But core Brexit advocates also believe, bizarrely, that in the one area the EU HAS genuine superpower capabilities - the regulatory and trade domain which we were central to building via the Single Market project - it will not exercise its superpower muscles when dealing with us as a former member".
"Brexit advocates are often caught between contempt for the EU’s complete inability to function as a “hard power” player and fear that this might then end when we are not in it. But core Brexit advocates also believe, bizarrely, that in the one area the EU HAS genuine superpower capabilities - the regulatory and trade domain which we were central to building via the Single Market project - it will not exercise its superpower muscles when dealing with us as a former member".
On the delusions of the timescale:
"In reality, as is clear 28 months after the referendum, I am afraid it was stating the obvious about the complexity and longevity of the exit process, stating the equally obvious about when the trade negotiation could even BEGIN – 2019 – let alone end, and pointing therefore to the inevitable need, if we were to get the best conceivable Brexit outcome for the UK, for a really protracted transition before we reached the post Brexit destination".
On future trade deals:
"And finally that the business of negotiating free trade deals worth having with the other strategic players in world trade would also take very many years, be highly uncertain in outcome; would see those partners wanting real clarity in our new relationship with the EU before they could be sure what they wanted in a deal with us; and would be preceded by the major work to prevent UK trading arrangements worsening on exit day via our slipping out of the EU’s network of existing preferential deals, which is larger than any other player’s on the planet".
"...we read on China that “the UK should initiate discussions with China but be clear that its requirements for a UK-China deal are likely to be difficult for China to meet in the short term.” It goes on that the UK would need “progress in many areas of China’s approach to trade”. Good luck with that".
"...we read on China that “the UK should initiate discussions with China but be clear that its requirements for a UK-China deal are likely to be difficult for China to meet in the short term.” It goes on that the UK would need “progress in many areas of China’s approach to trade”. Good luck with that".
On exiting to Canada via Norway (the Boles plan):
"This is the 'Norway then Canada' model one now hears so much about. But, even leaving aside the legal objections, which I will not rehearse, there is now no earthly reason for either the EU27 or the EEA to agree such a deal. The ancien regime, after all, has no good reason to provide the finest transitional feather bed for the revolutionaries who want to leave it. Its own best interests are served by offering the bread and water of the 21 month voiceless ruletaking transition which is now on offer".
On the Canada +++ deal:
"It [the EU] is therefore never going to agree to some generalised equivalence system which opens up regulation/legislation effectively to joint decision-making between itself and the UK. Yet that is of course what appears in the Canada ++ propositions we now see floated as superior to Chequers. As with the core economic elements of Chequers, the chance of the EU agreeing them is precisely zero".
On how the EU will deal with us during the trade negotiations:
"But Brexit advocates gave very little serious thought to how the EU would inevitably conduct an exit process. They also always believed that the mercantile interests of individual key Member States would, in the end, trump the collective interests of the bloc. And that the dread theologian lawyers of Brussels would therefore be overruled and undermined by leaders, who were closer to their publics and their business interests.
"But Brexit advocates gave very little serious thought to how the EU would inevitably conduct an exit process. They also always believed that the mercantile interests of individual key Member States would, in the end, trump the collective interests of the bloc. And that the dread theologian lawyers of Brussels would therefore be overruled and undermined by leaders, who were closer to their publics and their business interests.
"This is an age-old British misunderstanding of how the EU functions, or could ever function.
"Of course, when one points out that this is how the EU will behave vis a vis the UK as a third country – it will, in other words, treat us with the sheer lack of sentimentality in trade negotiations that the US and China, the other trade superpowers, deploy against everyone - and will also deploy against the UK in the next few years - one elicits the “just as well that we are leaving an organisation that can be so horrid” reaction".
On the transition period:
"The aim of the 27, perfectly legitimately, whether or not it is wisely, has been to maximise leverage during the withdrawal process and tee up a trade negotiation after our exit where the clock and the cliff edge can again be used to maximise concessions from London.
On the prospects for remainers and a second vote:
"...some Brexit opponents have now taken up their own “revolutionary defeatism”, seemingly yearning for the worst outcome possible from the negotiations, and political paralysis here in the hope that this will deliver the masses from their “false consciousness” of June 2016 and drive the case for a second referendum.
"The fact that the European question has helped turn our political debate both somewhat, indeed sometimes seriously, mad and increasingly polarised and toxic should, I think, worry us all. It’s hard, in my view, to think of anything that would toxify it more than a further referendum. But purist revolutionaries have spawned purist counter-revolutionaries".
So, I am afraid he is not uncritical of us. None of this bodes well for the future of the United Kingdom but perhaps it's as well it is all being done now. If we can show that Brexit was and is a disaster and that the EU is not the corrupt bogeyman many people think it is, perhaps we can eventually become good Europeans and join our friends over the Channel to help make the world a better place.
There are plenty of other quotes too in a speech that reveals what a shallow bunch of chancers are negotiating our future and led by a PM who is unable to make a decision or face down the Brexit revolutionaries. The EU has outmanoeuvred us from day one and in the coming weeks it is all going to be brutally exposed.
There are plenty of other quotes too in a speech that reveals what a shallow bunch of chancers are negotiating our future and led by a PM who is unable to make a decision or face down the Brexit revolutionaries. The EU has outmanoeuvred us from day one and in the coming weeks it is all going to be brutally exposed.
