If Michel Barnier provided a master class in negotiating technique during the protracted EU-UK withdrawal and trade agreement talks, Lord Frost is now giving an excellent example of how not to do it. He gave a speech on Friday to the British Irish Association which was described as being full of sophistry. I think it was intended as an olive branch, but in Frost's clumsy way it came over as a club.
He talked of wanting a close relationship with the EU but in the speech he has the not-so-veiled threat of implementing Article 16 and suspending parts of the NI protocol. He claimed the U.K. government already had grounds for doing so.
Someone suggested Frost was more or less proposing a renegotiation with a revolver on the table. This is precisely how he took up the withdrawal agreement talks in 2019 after Theresa May was forced to resign. We were threatening every week to walk away without a deal.
Before the trade talks started in 2020, he went to Brussels and threw down the gauntlet. He played down the problems of introducing border checks and controls and said they had all been exaggerated.
There is nothing like riling your opposite number from the start to help you achieve your objective is there? Frost simply can't help himself. None of it had the slightest impact on Barnier or the EU and this latest effort will be equally fruitless. The EU have no negotiating mandate, no team and no negotiator so it’s not obvious how this is going to play out.
I think the EU commission will simply say we have a treaty and if you break it we will take whatever legal and trade related measures are open to us, to force the UK back to compliance. The newspapers are already full of reports of supply chain problems, forecasts of shortages of food and other goods and we are supposed to be implementing checks on EU goods coming in at the end of the month which can only make matters worse.
Shortages will soon turn into increased prices and rising prices will soon feed through to inflation. This is going to be imposed on an economy struggling to grow and many low income families losing £20 per week from their Universal Credit payment.
The notion that Britain, under these circumstances, has any leverage whatsoever over Brussels is ludicrous. We are in a desperate state which is likely to get worse before it gets better - assuming it can, of course.
Frost is the worst possible person to win any concessions from Brussels, even if they were minded to. They don’t trust him and they don’t trust Johnson.
You cannot sign a formal treaty with another country and within weeks of it coming into effect, unilaterally extend dates in it that you agreed to. You can’t continually threaten to break it. You cannot make zero effort to sell it to your own side, or show little willingness to provide the infrastructure needed.
The NI protocol is here to stay for as long as we are out of the single market and there will be constant issues with it. They thought they could agree to it and then back out later.
The sorry truth is the EU have us over a barrel. We may have a revolver on the table but they have a tactical nuclear weapon. The TCA provides for retaliatory action on trade to be imposed if the British government does not live up to its word and we cannot afford that.
You can see the developing narrative on Brexit from Frost's Twitter profile:
You "can't have freedom for free" is code for prepare for hardships ahead. You must crawl through a minefield before you get to Utopia?
On this point, Andrew Levi has suggested on Twitter another trilemma, similar to the one we face over Northern Ireland which Frost is still trying unsuccessfully to resolve. Levi says Johnson’s trilemma is one where you can have any two but not all three of these:
A implement a hard Brexit
B increase spending to boost the economy
C control inflation
You can spend a lot of public money and control inflation, but not with Johnson’s Brexit. Alternatively, you could have Brexit and open the spending cocks but inflation would quickly take off. You could control inflation and have a hard Brexit but austerity would have to continue for much longer. You get the problem.
This morning we learn Tory MPs are revolting over planned rises in tax or National Insurance. We have borrowed eye-watering sums and some tax rises are inevitable in my opinion. Governments raise revenue either by taxes or by growth. This one has crippled the chances of increasing the tax take from economic growth by Brexit and now its own MPs want to block the only other path to balancing the books!
David Henig has a nice thread explaining where Frost is going wrong.
Purely hypothetically shall we imagine the speech a UK minister wanting in good faith to renegotiate the Northern Ireland protocol might make? What sort of thing might be said to make the other side want to engage, and not feel under attack? ...1/
— David Henig (@DavidHenigUK) September 4, 2021
Finally, some polling. The Times continues to poll voters about whether or not Brexit was a good thing or a mistake. They have done 191 since August 2016. As you will know if you’ve read this blog, in the beginning the polling reflected the referendum result but there has been a slow changing of minds. By 2018 there was a switch and since then a majority have believed it to be a mistake.
However, the majority hasn’t really increased and the latest shows at 47 - 41 the gap is actually slightly wider than it has been.
I thought this would have been much wider by now, simply on demographics as the older pro-Brexit types fade away and younger pro Europeans realise what they have lost, but no. It is stubbornly stuck.
I wonder if it’s because we started out thinking Brexit would be a quick disaster but it is as professor Chris Grey has said, like a slow puncture and we have muddled through. This year has brought real consequences although many have been masked by COVID-19. Younger people are perhaps less inclined to look through the pandemic and see the wider problems of Brexit.
If there are food shortages and price increases which can undeniably be put down to Brexit, perhaps finally more and more people will see the light?
Johnson is amazingly still over 40% in the polling, despite his terrible handling of the pandemic, Afghanistan and Brexit and his increasingly dishevelled appearances in front of the camera. I note he does not do serious set piece interviews with anybody any more and relies on cabinet ministers who must be sick of standing up for a man so clearly out of his depth.
It cannot go on forever. When the fall does come it will be a big one, I am convinced of it.
I know I have been rather lax of late on this blog, but this isn't because I am any less committed. I have been spending hours (a lot) on a project which I hope will help the cause and which I'll be able to tell you about very soon.
