His post begins here:
"No 10 appears to realise that at some point opponents and voters will start asking when the Brexit dividend is going to turn up". Iain Martin asks a good question here. [short thread] https://t.co/VSf0W2I55h
— Marcus Leroux (@marcusleroux) June 3, 2021
It is indeed a good question, perhaps even the central one. But I noted that Leroux also mentions our old friend John Longworth who has featured on this blog quite a few times. Longworth is mentioned because of his obsession with getting the ergonomics directive binned.
Mr Leroux once, when he was covering trade matters for The Times. asked John Longworth, who was Vote Leave's business committee at the time, a straight question: what red tape should be first for the bonfire? It was the question Iain Martin feared because he couldn't answer it but Longworth, one of the 'nerdy Brexiteers' that Martin probably assumed could answer it, was quite happy to respond.
Longworth said it was the Ergonomics Directive and Leroux then quotes Longworth from The Daily Express on April 6th 2018:
"The Ergonomics Directive requires employers to measure people's chairs and desks and record them each year to make sure their sitting position is correct.
"As if people can't work it out for themselves, it's complete madness"
I covered a Longworth tirade about the same directive in July 2017 after an article of his appeared in The Telegraph. However, as I pointed out at the time and as Leroux points out again, the Ergonomics Directive doesn't exist!!
The point of it all is that (a) I don't think Martin is going to find there are plenty of nerdy Brexiteers who can produce these lists of scrappable regulations and (b) Longworth and others who think there are such lists are going to be rumbled. Leroux asks rhetorically why people like us focus on this sort of detail and answers that "it shows that Leavers didn't have a grasp of regulatory detail and unforgivably still don't" and that it is a "microcosm of the larger Brexit dividend rhetoric." I agree.
It also begs the question in my own mind: where has Longworth been sending his list of office furniture with carefully recorded dimensions every year?
The lack of any tangible benefits of Brexit is slowly emerging and will continue to do so over the next few years. Tiny cosmetic changes to EU regulations are not going to cut it.
But that other potentially Brexit breaking issue, the Irish sea border, is emerging much more quickly as this tweet by Tony Connelly of RTE explains:
NEW: The EU is growing increasingly pessimistic about the prospects of a breakthrough on how the Northern Ireland Protocol is implemented, with senior officials and diplomats warning that the UK appears determined to undermine it.
— Tony Connelly (@tconnellyRTE) June 4, 2021
Senior figures have told RTE that next week's meeting of the joint committee on the NI protocol will be "a showdown over the UK’s continued sniping against the Protocol, and ongoing unilateral moves to delay its implementation, rather than a breakthrough that might end months of tension."
The EU’s co-chair of the Joint Committee, Maros Sefcovic, has apparently told EU ambassadors that the European Commission is "running out of patience and will consider using tougher retaliatory measures unless the UK changes course."
There is what Connelly describes as "growing alarm" in the EU at a combination of alleged British tactics, including things like the unilateral measures delaying full implementation, constant attacks on the EU’s position on the Protocol by the UK’s chief Brexit minister David Frost and the alleged failure of the UK to provide full access to import databases and the completion of permanent Border Control Posts (BCPs) at NI ports.
This is coupled with the UK's refusal to consider an SPS agreement, which officials say would eliminate 80 per cent of the checks and controls on the Irish Sea border.
One EU diplomat is quoted as saying:
"We can't let the UK destroy the Protocol with a thousand cuts. If they continue on like this, bit by bit, it will wear away, and they will end up with permanent derogations - or they think they will.”
This comes as Britain threatens to pull out of the EU Horizon research project alleging the EU is deliberately going slow in formalising the UK's participation and the BBC reporting a big increase in the numbers of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers crossing the Channel, despite Priti Patel desperately trying to reduce them - indeed for many people, Farage included, it was the whole point of Brexit.
Patel's job has been made far harder by Brexit because the EU and France is refusing to take these asylum seekers back and there is no bilateral agreement to allow it to happen and no likelihood of one in the foreseeable future. It is not going to get any better any time soon.
But in the meantime, look out for sparks flying as early as next week.
