Sunday 21 May 2023

Brexit sinking into oblivion

Brexit is sliding inexorably towards becoming a historical aberration, but to do so it’s had to pass through chaos and disenchantment first. At the moment we have paused temporarily at farce, with an unnamed former Tory cabinet minister telling The i newspaper, we now have the worst of all worlds by following EU regulations but with a bare-bones trade deal: “You’ve got a bunch of Brexiteers who want to keep EU taxation rates and EU regulations, but without access to the single market. It’s f***ing mental.”

The former cabinet minister is clearly a Truss/Kwarteng acolyte and wants to have another round of insane tax cuts plus I assume a slash-and-burn approach to product, environmental, employment, and consumer protection rules.

Meanwhile Tobias Ellwood told the i that the country was “learning the hard way that our model of Brexit is economically sub-optimal” and Sir Robert Buckland said the right approach is “working now to widen and improve this bilateral agreement." We are almost back to 2018 territory.

Britain has the highest tax rate as a percentage of GDP for seventy years but paradoxically it still has one of the lowest tax rates in Europe. That alone should tell us how out of step we are. How cutting it further, even if it was possible, is supposed to help matters I really don’t know.

Investors are investing in the EU as France has more projects for the second year running. How does that work?  The Brexit-supporting billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, owner of Ineos, couldn’t be persuaded to build his Land Rover Defender replacement - the Grenadier - in this country, preferring high tax, high regulation France instead.  Don't they ever put two and two together?

As I said, it is all becoming farcical now, with Farage declaring Brexit has failed while others swear it’s a success. I noticed among this whirlwind of bulls***t a piece by Clive Thorne, who is Vice Chairman of Lawyers for Britain and a specialist in intellectual property and administrative law, but clearly, he knows zilch about industry. He’s convinced himself that Britain has been shackled for years by EU laws that need to be urgently rolled back.

On the REUL bill, he writes:

“What is also apparent is that many of the 'around 600' laws as described by Bill Cash MP are 'trivial, obsolete, and are not legally and/ or politically important'. Examples identified by Bill Cash included laws relating to anchovy fishing in the Bay of Biscay and the allocation of fishing rights to Sao Tome and Principe.

“What is of greatest concern is that the government no longer appears to have the political courage or desire, despite the outcome of and mandates given by the Brexit referendum, the 2019 General Election and previous assurances to proceed with a significant reform of REUL. It is as though the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak and his government have given up on replacing EU law with laws designed specifically for UK needs and to liberate the UK from the EU straitjacket  to promote much-needed economic growth.”

As usual, he doesn't identify a single one and is deaf to every UK trade body that has been screaming to KEEP the EU laws we have now because it would damage growth to scrap them.

As a Brexit-supporting lawyer, Thorne isn’t too bothered that ministers have all the power and not parliament.

He says that during a Lords debate, it was argued that the unamended Bill “could have a significant impact on the UK’s relationship with the EU so as to damage the workings of the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement. That argument ignores the fact that it was always contemplated that post-Brexit the UK would in any event depart from EU law and the machinery for doing so is immaterial.”

Leaving it all to cabinet ministers to choose which of these laws to ditch or not is fine apparently.

Of course, Sunak’s government is free to repeal, amend or replace any laws they want, subject to getting the REUL Bill through parliament and with a big majority he ought to be able to do that. Unfortunately, the EU is also free to take retaliatory measures that would also damage growth.

Sunak is between a rock and a hard place. He has to prove he’s a true Brexiteer by diverging like mad from the EU acquis communitare knowing that if he does the economy is going to take a bigger and bigger hit. But he can’t admit that because his supporters don’t accept the premise and genuinely think we can prosper by having totally different rules to those of our single biggest export market.

So he’s caught dithering, not strong enough to tell the ERG types to shut it, and too scared of retaliation from Brussels to change anything substantive. It is not a sustainable position.

And in the background all sorts of things are happening:

A few days ago Liz Truss has suggested we need an "economic NATO" to challenge China. Now Jessica Simon KC tweets a bizarre quote from Sunak who is in Japan for a G7 meeting, calling for more "working together and avoiding competition between friends, [so] we can lift our prosperity, innovate faster and out-compete autocratic states."

This isn't that far removed from Richard North's idea of a "Europe-wide single market, with common decision-making for all parties."  They all seem to want to recreate the EU or something remarkably close to it - but presumably with Britain at its heart. 

Arron Banks, the man who funded Leave.eu and Farage for years still doesn’t even get what the EU is or the problems that Brexit has created. Touring musicians have been complaining for months about the added costs and difficulties that Brexit has created. This is about the carnets needed for all the equipment and the limitations on the amount of time they and their crew can spend in the EU.

This is Banks' response to Damon Albarn from Blur criticising Brexit as a travesty:

The Beatles traveled to Hamburg in a single small van with their guitars and may well have needed carnets but that wouldn’t have been too difficult or costly. And they were eventually expelled for not having work permits anyway.

The fact is modern groups, even minor ones, have an awful lot of kit, amplifiers, computer-driven stage lighting systems, and so on. They travel in articulated trucks, often several of them. It’s totally different but Banks doesn’t understand and isn’t interested in finding out. His supporters all back him of course.

Banks doesn't export goods to the EU or import them as far as I know and his pet project probably hasn't troubled his businesses at all.

The announcement of £1 billion for the UK Semiconductor industry has been dismissed as not enough compared to the £40 billion the EU is investing. This is I must say, par for the course in Britain where we never invest sufficient money or for long enough periods on anything. The government offers something that looks a lot, and satisfies the press for a week or two but is simply nowhere near enough.

The Europeans either invest what it takes or they don't do it at all.

The economist Robert Kimbell is one of the reasons Brexit is going to go on for a few years yet. He is engaged in a desperate rearguard action and is now asking on Twitter:

I honestly don't believe any of these things, even Sterling, necessarily need to be given up if we rejoined the EU, but Kimbell is suggesting they all could go. This is what we are up against.

His Twitter feed is full of announcements of investments in the UK, presumably as a counter to all the bad news and the Yorkshire Bylines' Davis Downside Dossier. Unfortunately, the DDD entries are all a result of Brexit, his alternative 'good news' stories would have happened anyway as far as I can see. That's the difference.

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