Toxic Johnson's unpopularity spreads

Johnson’s visit to Scotland yesterday in what appears to be a forlorn attempt to shore up the union by the man perhaps more responsible than any other for bringing it to breaking point. The visit has been described as a boost for the SNP. He apparently refused to even meet Nicola Sturgeon who is probably the most popular and respected politician in Scotland. He is utterly toxic north of Berwick and not altogether welcome anywhere else apparently.

The government seems to have been taken aback to find we have become persona non grata in EU circles. The Times are reporting that the UK has been trying to organise a 'summit' with president Macron of France for some time and that Macron is 'stonewalling' us. I am really not surprised.

Johnson lacks any kind of self awareness, like the man who is always needlessly insulting people left, right and centre, totally untrustworthy and a congenital liar but shocked when he hasn’t got any friends.

It is not even clear what the summit is for. The Times claims that the diplomatic relationship between London and Paris is "toxic" which rings as true to me in Paris as it does in Edinburgh. I don't see how it could be anything else.  They go on:

"[British] Diplomats have been attempting to arrange a high-level meeting between Boris Johnson and the French president for months in an effort to reset the so-called 'entente cordiale'. But amid recriminations on both sides the French are understood to be refusing to agree a date for the summit, with one source saying the relationship was 'appalling'.

“The government has reached out to try to arrange a summit but the French aren’t interested,” said one senior diplomatic source. “They’ve simply said there’s no point.”  

A senior UK government source said, without any sense of irony, that “elements of the French system are basically crossing the street to pick a fight every day”.  This is after Brexit, the equivalent of crossing the Sahara every day in order to shout insults and abuse at your friends and neighbours.

I think this is precisely the sort of thing that the European Union was created to avoid. Countries always disagree about things, that’s taken as read. But disagreements shouldn’t develop into disputes and public spats. This is how conflicts begin isn’t it? Brussels for all its faults, is good at keeping things together and that alone is reason enough to justify the EU.. It helps that everybody is behind a united Europe.

It’s hard to see any leader of any reasonable or moderate western democracy wanting to meet Johnson. He’s not trusted by anybody and has given Britain a reputation for acting selfishly - wanting to have our cake and eat it in every case. Only men like Orban or Bolsanoro or Putin would want to be seen in Downing Street, because they have a reputation even worse than his.

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, told The Times that the French were “definitely annoyed with the Brits” and this had led to a reluctance to agree to the bridge-building exercise.  Grant explained it like this:

“The British want a summit. The French say, ‘Great — so what should we talk about?’ The British say, ‘I don’t know — let’s have a summit.’ The French say, ‘No — we’ve got to have substance.’ ”

Lord Ricketts, a former French ambassador and head of the diplomatic service, said that things were in pretty bad shape. “The post-Brexit year has been a scratchy and difficult one. I suspect Macron was very surprised to come to Cornwall and find himself in a public row with Boris Johnson over sausages and Northern Ireland,” he is reported saying, and adding:

“He is in no great hurry to fix a summit with Boris Johnson. He doesn’t know what the man might say at the joint press conference and how it might turn out.”

And that's the nub of it, isn't it?  Nobody trusts him to stick to what was agreed in advance or even to a treaty he has personally signed. His word is as worthless as his signature.

I see he is also asking for financial rules to be changed to boost investment in the UK by private investors and has urged pension funds to make riskier bets on emerging businesses. This follows his ultra hard Brexit and essentially the shrinking of our market to about 15% of its original size. This alone must have driven lots of potential investors away. We can already see hundreds of UK companies relocating or moving some existing operations into the EU, why would foreign investors be different?

Brexit has boosted investment in EU member states, that's the truth.

You can easily imagine acquisitions by foreign companies of UK businesses serving the domestic market. This will see profits repatriated abroad What we need are business that export and earn money for this country and Johnson has made that far more difficult.

And pensions experts, according to The Guardian, claim the government doesn't understand how the pensions business works. One has said the announcement was 90% hot air.

What it shows to me, again, is that those at the top of government still think there is some quick rule change that will magically transform Britain’s fortunes. First it was the EU that was dragging us down (Jenni Russel in the New York Times said in 2018 the EU was propping us up!), now it’s UK investors. The fundamental problems of low educational attainment, low ambition and low productivity are all set to be exacerbated by Brexit.  We are not even looking in the right direction. Europe is laughing at us.

We have said goodbye to thousands and thousands of EU workers who were well qualified and hard working and were in the UK to help us.  Now supply chains in the food business are set to break down in the next 2-3 of weeks.  It is a complete disaster.

The Independent had an article about UKCA marking to replace the CE mark, a change that’s supposed to happen at the end of the year but there are too few certification authorities in the country to recertify all the necessary CE approved components. 

"Manufacturing is at risk from serious disruption because the government has failed to devise a suitable replacement for the EU’s safety standards system."

Anyone who thinks this will happen on 1 January 2022 needs their head examined.

I could walk into any British manufacturing plant in any industry and it would be full of foreign made machines, most of them European. All would be chock full of components, motor control gear, motors, photocells, proximity detectors, labellers, coders and everything you can think of (and each with dozens if not hundreds of different variations from hundreds of suppliers in the EU) and all CE marked.

If the government continues to insist only parts and items which are certified as UKCA can legally be sold after 1 January, they will bring industry to a grinding halt. It ain't going to happen.  Trust me.

Finally, I noticed this article the other day by Gerhard Schnyder, professor of international management at Loughborough University, mainly about the NI Protocol. It's called the Brexit Impact Tracker – Appeasement, Division and an Increasingly Hostile Environment and is well worth ten minutes of your time.