Sunday 27 August 2023

Hannan's hatchet job

Peter Foster, is the public policy editor at the FT. Three years ago he was Europe editor at The Telegraph reporting on Brexit and a voice of reason among the headbangers who usually write for the best-known pro-Brexit broadsheet in Britain. This year he took some time off to write a book which has just been published: What Went Wrong With Brexit, Canongate £14.99. It's obvious that Foster was never a believer in Brexit and he attracted a lot of readers through social media and not surprisingly the FT snapped him up.

Anyway, the book has been reviewed (no £) for Foster’s former employers at The Telegraph by none other than D. Hannan, AKA Lord Hannan of Kingsclere, a man who has never been knowingly right about anything for more than thirty years - and possibly ever.

Let me say I haven't read the book, but Foster himself tweeted:

And he is largely right. Hannan sets out to do a hatchet job although I doubt any readers of The Telegraph will want to fork out £14.99 to read how they have been duped, so it's not likely to impact sales - and may even prove to be a boost. If Hannan thinks it's rubbish, a lot of remainers will take that as an endorsement.

He accuses Foster of using polemic (employing contentious rhetoric to support a specific position and thereby undermine the opposing position) and candidly admits, “I wrote one myself before the referendum” - which is a bit of an understatement, to say the least. He has engaged in nothing but polemics before and after the referendum.

He seems to believe that is the preserve of Brexiteers like him. Foster has always written from the perspective that Brexit is damaging because it is and this is what nearly every reputable economist says. I assume the book uses factual references to develop the argument that Brexit has gone "wrong" - something which most people, even leave voters and ardent Brexiteers like Farage, now agree with.

And this is the difference. Foster uses facts or expert opinion while men like Hannan prefer assertion, distortion, hearsay, prejudice, and lies. This is the type of thing he does. 

However, if I'm really picky I would say Foster isn't entirely correct to say there is zero engagement because there is one example. Read this from Hannan:

“At no stage does Foster recognise that the EU can be vindictive or inconsistent. At Salzburg in 2018, Theresa May offered to accept Brussels standards unilaterally and even to pay for the privilege; but, conditioned to reject every British proposal, EU leaders said no, thereby missing their best chance to have the kind of tight relationship that Foster wants. This episode goes unmentioned.”

Unfortunately, to engage in the substance, Hannan is forced into a rewrite of history, either because it suits him or because he simply can't help himself.

Theresa May did not 'offer to accept Brussels standards unilaterally.' She proposed a ‘common rule book’ and a 'facilitated customs arrangement', thereby giving a soon-to-be ex-member state influence over future EU rules. This was the Chequers agreement over which both David Davis and Boris Johnson resigned. She was told by every expert that the idea would never be accepted by the EU long before she ever got on the plane to Salzburg. This was all in an effort to avoid a hard border in Ireland or a sea border between GB and Northern Ireland.

It was never a realistic proposition because the EU had always made clear it would never sacrifice its decision-making autonomy and it's a matter of unchallengeable record that Brexiteers in the Tory parliamentary party wouldn’t accept the Chequers deal either. In fact, Boris Johnson went on to negotiate the very deal that the EU was proposing before Salzburg.

The sorry Salzburg episode was covered by this blog at the time, HERE and HERE.

The EU was not being vindictive or inconsistent as Hannan claims, it was Britain wanting to have its cake and eat it and have someone else make compromises to allow us to avoid the disadvantages of a decision that our own folly had led us into.  

This is how the review ends, with an interesting use of words:

"That, reader, is what you get here for 175 pages – pamphleteering dressed up as analysis. And, no doubt, it will sell. A terrifying number of people are unable to move on from the 2016 referendum. Some actively wish for Brexit’s failure so as to be able to say “I told you so”. Yet it isn’t even as though they had a plan to rejoin. Foster accepts that such a move is off the menu, and instead he proposes various ways to deepen our co-operation with the EU. But you feel, somehow, that all this is secondary. Like 18th-century Jacobites, the #FBPE crowd have no real plan beyond insisting to one another that they were right all along. This book is for them. "

Note, that he talks of the "terrifying" number of people who are unable to move on. He means people like us, me and you, who won't accept his arguments and who are now in the majority. I assume he believes that no matter how many change their minds and object to Brexit, it must go ahead. That seems to be his position - and it's why he's terrified.

Also, he says in the book Foster proposes ways to "deepen our co-operation with the EU" which is not that different to what May was proposing and which he admonished the EU for rejecting in 2018. 

It's clear to me they are beginning to get worried.

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