Brexit - is the tide starting to turn?

The big overnight story is that the Liberals have taken Chesham and Amersham from the Conservatives in a by-election after the death of the sitting MP Cheryl Gillam, overturning a 16,000 majority to lead by 8,000. It was an amazing win. Turnout was down to 52% but the Conservative vote absolutely collapsed. Is this a warning to the Tory party that the Brexit tide is finally turning?  Maybe, but maybe not. Apparently planning concerns and HS2 were big issues, but we shall see.

The next political earthquake occurred in Northern Ireland where Edwin Poots, like his predecessor, was forced out as leader of the DUP. He has lasted less than three weeks!  Even by the standards of the DUP this is stunning.

Poots resigned when it was clear he had lost the confidence of party members after he had named Paul Givan as the party's choice to replace Arlene Foster as first minister, when the vast majority of DUP assembly members (MLAs) - 24 to four - voted against his appointment.

These political convulsions are all the result of Brexit, something the DUP campaigned for and supported - and still do -  but not the NI protocol. Poots himself was a supporter of Brexit but opposed to the Australian trade deal which half the Tory party think is the whole reason for Brexit. It is complete insanity.

On the question of the Irish border, I note Dr North has come clean and admitted that he had underestimated the problem because he 'assumed' we would go for the Norway/EFTA option. This is what he now writes:

"The legacy media has written more about Northern Ireland over the last couple of weeks than it wrote throughout the entire referendum campaign. That would not be difficult, though. Barely anything was written about the province.

"Certainly, I wrote very little and what I did was based on the assumption that the UK would take the 'Norway option', and stay within the EEA. That would not have solved all the problems but, with a few tweaks, it would have been close to business at usual for Northern Ireland."

Very little is a slight euphemism, Flexit, his magnum opus, doesn't actually mention the Irish border issue at all.

So, this is a first, I think.  Brexit for him was about 'taking back control' - having decisions made by British MPs and the UK parliament rather than collectively through the EU.  When this happened, the result was that the decisions made by those democratically elected idiots in Westminster were among the worst ever by a modern western country, but he still supports Brexit.

It is as if nothing, including the destruction of the nation you are supposed to be 'saving' must stand in the way of some mysterious thing called Brexit, whatever that means.  

He 'assumed' the government would go for the EEA in the same way that Frost 'assumed' the EU wouldn't apply the terms of the NI protocol.  As my old sales trainer used to say, never assume - it makes an ass of u and me.

Meanwhile the UK government has apparently quietly requested another extension to the grace period for chilled meat products to 30 September:

The European Commission confirms it has received the UK’s request to extend the chilled meats grace period by 3 months

Sefcovic will organise a meeting with Frost to discuss it as soon as possible

EU is open to finding solutions but UK must implement the Protocol, it says pic.twitter.com/eQeI7HJRNc

— Adam Payne (@adampayne26) June 17, 2021

I don't believe the Commission are going to refuse but you can be sure it will come with strict conditions. At least the UK has stopped making unilateral decisions, again a small sign of reality breaking through. 

Lord Frost appeared before the NI committee on Wednesday and I note he is still talking about 'equivalence' in standards and a ‘light touch’ implementation of the protocol. As Richard North points out, there is nothing in the protocol about a light touch. Nobody asked him why he thought that was ever possible. It was, like nearly all of Brexit, pure wishful thinking- and terrible negotiating on the part of Frost and Johnson.

As for equivalence, forget it. The EU has a ready made solution to the problem of checks on the Irish sea border and it's called dynamic alignment. It must be clear to everybody that this must one day be adopted - as news comes that British food and drink exports to the European Union almost halved in the first three months of the year, compared to the same period in 2020.

All the artificial deadlines set by Johnson have done is ensure there was never any proper consultation, consideration or scrutiny and it is now beginning to show.

Dr North's mea culpa over Ireland is matched in another blog post about the Australian trade deal and democracy where he mentions how much more power the EU parliament has over trade negotiations:

"There are those who might remark, in passing, that the European Commission does not have such power [to sign off trade deals]. Negotiating objectives must be approved by the Council, the European Parliament has a right to receive updates on the negotiations and, once the text is finalised, the Parliament must approve it by majority vote, following which the Council must conclude the agreement by qualified majority. 

"In the event that the Commission doesn't have exclusive competence, in so-called "mixed agreements", the member states must also ratify the treaties, according to their own constitutional procedures, although an agreement can apply provisionally pending ratification. 

"In all cases, the texts of any treaties must be published before they can be ratified, but there is no such obligation for the UK government. Under Royal Prerogative, it is entitled to conclude a treaty without making the text publicly available."

In Flexit he talks on page 14 about 

"Any settlement must be accompanied by measures which resolve the democratic deficit which allowed politicians to give away the nation's powers. It must also ensure that any future government is not able to repeat the process".

There is a democratic deficit but it's the reverse of the one he imagined. The EU Commission is held to account by elected representatives far more than our own civil service. This government in particular does not want scrutiny of any kind and they routinely avoid it, mislead and lie about policy and policy aims. Nowhere is this more true than in these trade deals.

I wonder if I'm being a cock-eyed optimist in thinking these the first signs of the Brexit tide starting to turn?  If Dr North is starting to recognise the problems, perhaps others will, too.