Wednesday 19 February 2020

Brussels: not always sweeter after a bit of Frost

We finally got the full text of the Frost speech in Brussels on Monday night. You can read the whole thing HERE if you're minded to and I think you should because it unintentionally explains why Brexit will be a failure. It will fail because unlike the EU, it has no coherent intellectual underpinning, no evidence of benefit and no obvious purpose.  It is a mixture of blind faith, hubris, muddled thinking and delusion. In fact when I think about it, Brexit is all of Britain's age old problems encapsulated in a single word.

Frost actually said he hoped that Michel Barnier, after reading his speech, would 'see things differently'.  Some hope. It was so totally empty of facts and cogent arguments that it wouldn't convince anybody, let alone the EU chief negotiator. It is proof certain that Brexit is a disaster in the making. If Frost can't articulate an intellectual basis for Brexit, surely nobody can.

Anyway we didn't have to wait long. Barnier 'rebuffed' Frost within 24 hours. No, we can't have a Canada Style trade deal without agreeing a LPF.  He pointed out that Johnson himself had signed up to “robust” level playing field arrangements in the political declaration agreed with Brussels only a few months ago.  Plenty of people have pointed this out on social media so I won't dwell on it, except to say that along with the NI protocol David Frost seems to have no idea what he has negotiated.

But let's look at some of the other quite extraordinary things he told his audience in a speech that reads like a work of fiction instead of setting out a multi-pillared line of reasoning for the future trade talks:

He admitted to being in a small minority of UK diplomats who voted to leave but clearly thinks he is right and all the others wrong. Britain, he declared was never committed to the European project but by "Britain" I think he must mean Paul Dacre, the Barclay brothers, Nigel Farage and an assorted but tiny band of dedicated nutjobs who systematically poisoned the minds of the electorate.

To get any sort of political philosophy underneath the whole idea of Brexit he has to go back 200 years to Edmund Burke, a man for whom the European project might have been a desirable thing. He says everywhere else in Europe the EU is looked upon with reverence as … and here he quotes Burke, "a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection".  He uses that to question the whole legitimacy of the EU. Only Britons for some inexplicable reason fail to see Brussels that way, he suggests. If true, it's certainly a minority and his boss' Telegraph columns had a lot to do with it. Nobody, Frost included, ever tried to persuade them otherwise. 

Frost, the former head of The Scotch Whisky Association, then claimed that the new friction at the customs and regulatory border is only a "one-off cost". Most commentators seemed totally baffled by that one. Trade barriers and frictions are permanent costs that will burden our exporters forever.

Will Hutton caught it well with his tweet, "David Frost, Britain’s lead trade negotiator with the EU, had to talk crap and bilge yesterday in Brussels - career advancement demands no less. Sovereignty is not an absolute. His trade “ frictions” are not transitional but permanent blockages. We are led by ignorant nincompoops"

Frost was adamant we will not follow EU rules - even if they were beneficial, he implied  - "we must have the ability to set laws that suit us – to claim the right that every other non-EU country in the world has". Norway, Iceland and Switzerland must have escaped his notice. They are non-EU countries happily following a lot, if not most, of the EU acquis communitaire. He was starting to sound like Chemical Ali at this point.

I do not know what Nicola Sturgeon or Sinn Fein will make of his assertion that one of things he is not prepared to compromise on is that he is "negotiating as one country".  All the devolved nations have either voted against Brexit or complained of a lack of consultation - and usually, except for Wales, both.

On the economy he admits there have been a lot of economic studies about the negative consequences of Brexit but to nobody's surprise, certainly not mine, he doesn't believe any of them:

"As you may have guessed, I would question some of the specifics of all those studies. This probably isn’t the moment to go into the detail – maybe I will get a chance in the future to do so. But, in brief, all these studies exaggerate – in my view – the impact of non-tariff barriers they exaggerate customs costs, in some cases by orders of magnitude."

The costs of the extra friction on trade with our most important partner as forecast by our own Treasury are dismissed because "we aim to manage it down as far as we can through modern customs facilitation arrangements – and I am convinced that other factors will outweigh it". He is convinced by faith alone and back we go to those unicorns of trade facilitation that have yet to be invented. What these 'other factors' might be was left hanging.

On sovereignty, Frost said some argue that it is "a meaningless construct in the modern world, that what matters is sharing it to gain more influence over others. So we take the opposite view. We believe sovereignty is meaningful and what it enables us to do is to set our rules for our own benefit."

There we are again, those nebulous 'benefits' keep cropping up don't they? He might have been more credible if his speech wasn't delivered on the same day as the SMMT and the BRC published their own requirements for the trade deal. They, like every other trade body, are crying out to keep the same rules as we have now to avoid price increases and shortages. Who is doing the benefiting?

The nearest he gets to identifying something as a reason for Brexit, and I use the word nearest in the sense that we are 'near' Saturn, is this: "Brexit is a re-establishment of underlying reality, in my view, not some sort of freakish divergence from it. And one reason why ‘take back control’ as the slogan was so powerful was that that was part of it – we had clearly lost that control."

At least he didn't have to explain the tautology Brexit-means-Brexit, but perhaps his audience might have preferred that to the 're-establishment of underlying reality' - I think he means a return to Britain as a slow growth economy beset with chronic problems of poor productivity, short termism, mean investment levels, and creaking infrastructure. The sick man of Europe once again.

I wonder if there wasn't a bit of doubt creeping even into his mind as he uttered these next words, perhaps destined to go down as famous last ones:

"We aren’t frightened by suggestions there is going to be friction, there is going to be greater barriers. We know that and have factored this in and we look further forward – to the gains of the future."

More whistling in the dark I think and as for the 'gains of the future' - if only we knew what they were, eh?

As I mentioned earlier, rigorous evidence of any tangible benefit is entirely absent in Brexit. It is raw faith that all will be well. Frost's supreme confidence is based on nothing  except pure wind, so this next bit was fascinatingly hypocritical:

"I think looking forward, we are going to have a huge advantage over the EU – the ability to set regulations for new sectors, the new ideas, and new conditions – quicker than the EU can, and based on sound science not fear of the future."

 Sound science?  If only.  A few minutes before he had been dismissing 99% of the world's economists in favour of his own evidence-free convictions, his faith in other words.

In anticipation of the UK breaking up perhaps, he argues that smaller countries can be more nimble and take decisions quicker.  People around Heathrow airport might question that of course. Frost again:

"My experience of the EU is that it has extreme difficulty in reversing bad decisions it takes. Yet every state gets things wrong. That’s clear. Course correction is, therefore, an important part of good government. Britain will be able to experiment, correct mistakes and improve. The EU is going to find this much, much more difficult."

The first mistake to be corrected is Brexit I think.  Britain under the awful Cummings/Johnson nexus will no doubt be 'experimenting' for years ahead going in and out of blind alleys while the EU will take time to properly consult, consider and legislate to get it right-first-time. The Germans have been doing this for decades by the way.

Frost wants a relationship of "equals" although the EU is 27 nations and we are just one (at the moment anyway, we might be three soon). Also I wonder how that approach will go down in Beijing or Washington?  Will they regard themselves as equals to us? He may be in for a shock.

Others far better qualified than me to analyse Frost's effort tweeted about it yesterday, including this by Peter Foster:

And David Henig:
And perhaps best of all Helene Bismarck (what a monicker that is), an Anglophile Historian and writer:
Last but not least, Holger Hestermeyer, a Reader in Intermational Dispute Resolutions at King's Law School:
If Frost is the best we've got to lead the trade negotiations, Brexit will be a disaster much sooner than anyone predicted.
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