Friday, 29 April 2022

Brexit, the end game

The government has confirmed what we all suspected from numerous recent leaks. There will be a delay to starting the customs and SPS checks that were due to be phased in from July. It's the fourth delay to such checks. The announcement came in a written statement from Brexit Opportunies Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg in which he said with rising prices and the war in Ukraine it “would therefore be wrong to impose new administrative burdens and risk disruption at ports and to supply chains.”

It is an admission that there are new administrative 'burdens' which I suppose represents something of a step towards the truth.

But it is more than just an embarrassing delay, the written statement talks about abandoning EU style checks in favour of a “transformative programme to digitise Britain’s borders, harnessing new technologies and data to reduce friction and costs for businesses and consumers.”

No reason is given for why there should be 'disruption' to supply chains so we don't know if all the staff and infrastructure is ready or if the government is concerned about EU suppliers being reluctant to get involved in all the paperwork, delays and extra costs and cutting food imports even more.

Whatever the reasoning, it has prompted outrage by Britain’s port owners who have spent millions of pounds, partly subsidised by taxpayers, to build infrastructure which may never be used:

"Richard Ballantyne, CEO of The British Ports Authority, said ports had rushed to get infrastructure ready on time: “This announcement is a major policy change, meaning the facilities will effectively become white elephants, wasting millions of pounds of public and private funding”.

They are now considering legal action according to The Guardian. The whole thing is becoming farcical.

Later in a visit to Folkestone Rees Mogg told reporters that implementing the checks would be an “act of self harm.”

If you listen to the clip, he says small shipments of cheese would have seen an increase in the retail price of 71% had the checks gone ahead. Remember he once told us food would be cheaper after we left the EU.

What leave voters will make of it I do not know. Brexit was supposed to lift the burden from British industry and agriculture, but it turns out they are facing a massive increase in paperwork in order to sell into Europe, while EU products and produce will continued to be waived smoothly through for another 18 months or more. It is a major handicap on our exporters for no gain. 

If the plan really is to replace the Border Operating Model with a "transformative programme to digitise Britain’s borders"  then I would strongly suspect we will have much longer to wait since our record of developing and implementing these vast IT projects quickly is lamentable. There isn't even a published plan so far and you can see a huge black hole for taxpayer's money to disappear down.

Minette Batters, the NFU leader is as mad as hell about food entering the UK with no checks whatsoever. She is angry about the fairness of it all.

The EU were worried that Brexit would mean the UK lowering standards and exporting more competitively into the bloc, to the detriment of EU agriculture. They thought we would tilt the playing field in our favour, in fact we are doing the opposite.

Northern Ireland Protocol

Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s chief of staff has tweeted a stinging response to a self serving speech delivered by Lord Frost to the Policy Exchange. Peter Foster at the FT described the speech as “sophistry” and although it was heralded in The Sun as “Brexit guru Lord Frost to break silence on why Boris Johnson signed up to deal with EU he is now trying to rip up” it was hardly that. He has talked about little else for the last year or more. Far from 'breaking silence' he just went over the same ground again.

Frost still thinks everyone is to blame except him and Boris Johnson. 

I suggest you read a briefing note written for The Constitution Society by Andrew McCormick, the lead figure from the Stormont Executive in the Brexit negotiations.  He is adamant the UK government and therefore Frost and Johnson knew exactly what the Protocol entailed and are responsible for what was agreed with the EU in October 2019.

A few quotes:

“Responsibility for the Withdrawal Agreement of 2019 and the Protocol lies fairly and squarely with the UK government,”

“There is little credibility in any argument that the UK government either did not anticipate the implications of what it had agreed, or was constrained and unable to choose any other option."

“The facts and choices had been spelt out clearly over the whole period from 2016 onwards and the detail of the provisions (notably most of the applicable EU law contained in Annex 2 to the Protocol) were known at latest in autumn 2018."

And this is the killer for me:

“And the time constraint to ‘get Brexit done’ was entirely self-imposed. Indeed, as some have pointed out, the UK government could not explain the Protocol without having to explain properly the wider consequences of Brexit.”

And Anton Spisak, then a civil servant but now with the Tony Blair Institute, has tweeted his letter to The Times which backs up Mr McCormick's account:

Spisak wrote:

"When we were renegotiating the protocol in the autumn of 2019, civil servants, myself included, advised Boris Johnson, the prime minister that there were serious consequences with the type of arrangement he wished to agree for Northern Ireland. To claim the UK signed the protocol 'on the basis it would be reformed' as Brexit Opportunities Minister Jacob Rees Mogg said last week, is rewriting the history."

The only conclusion one can draw is that Frost, Johnson, Cummings and Gove all acted in bad faith in (a) signing the agreement without any intention of sticking to it and (b) wilfully misleading voters in the 2019 general election about the 'oven ready' deal.

McCormick again on the NI protocol:

"It is hard to imagine anything (other than Brexit itself) with greater democratic legitimacy under the UK constitution than something that was the very centre of the manifesto on which a government secured a clear majority in a general election."

And he doesn't think there is any basis for any argument that 'cross-community consent' is required for constitutional change – either on the functioning of the union itself, or on Brexit, or the Protocol.

"Such evidence as there is would strongly suggest that the Protocol does have the consent of a simple majority both of the electorate in Northern Ireland and the Assembly: in the general election of December 2019, there were 444,227 votes for the parties which, in the Assembly debate of 30 December 2020, voted for the implementation of the Protocol, and against the use of Article 16, and 337,874 votes of the parties that oppose the Protocol (a 56 per cent/ 42 per cent split). So, it is reasonable to infer that, had consent been sought in October 2019, there is a very strong likelihood that the Assembly would have approved the Protocol."

Two things flow from this.  First, that the EU are not going to renegotiate the protocol and second that there will be a united Ireland much sooner than anyone thinks and the break up of the UK as I have known it all my adult life will be down to the duplicity and bad faith of four men, but particularly Johnson since he signed the treaty that started the fragmentation.

We are starting to see the end game of Brexit.

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