As the umpteenth round of negotiations is set to begin in Brussels this week, the government appears to be descending into chaos with the A Level fiasco now threatening to be repeated on an even bigger scale. GCSE results are due in a few days where a similar sort of algorithm has been used to calculate them and is expected to end up with the same sort of row that is currently filling newspaper with negative headlines. This is on top of the announcement that the Health Secretary is set to close Public Health England, blaming it for the slow response to corona virus.
Meanwhile Johnson has been described as "invisible" by Kier Starmer as he apparently takes a staycation in Scotland.
Johnson claimed our performance against covid-19 has been "amazing" but is now poised to close the body responsible. He will soon have to fire Gavin Williamson about whom there has been not the slightest criticism so far. And this is Johnson's perennial problem isn't it? He is soon going to have to eat his own words, something he is actually quite good at but I wonder if voters aren't beginning to notice that he is often to be seen behind a microphone arguing against something he supported (or vice versa).
The Scots are pressing ever harder for Indyref2 and if the SNP do well next May in the Scottish parliament election he will probably be forced to concede a new referendum, perhaps in 2022 or later. In it he will find himself making all the remain arguments while the SNP will steal all of his leave clothes in arguing that independence is easily achievable and a border between Scotland and England can be arranged with no difficulty allowing "unfettered access" to the English market.
Sam Lowe made this point on Twitter:
If you’ve spent the last few years saying that UK leaving EU customs union and single market will increase costs for business, create border friction and be economically damaging but that Scotland leaving UK wouldn’t mean at the very least the same that’s not okay.— Sam Lowe (@SamuelMarcLowe) August 16, 2020
And in a subsequent tweet he makes the opposite point too. That you cannot say that the UK leaving the EU is good, cheap, easy and desirable but that Scotland leaving the UK is bad, expensive, difficult and shouldn't be done. But this is indeed what Johnson will be arguing.
It is precisely where you find yourself when you have repeatedly told lies or mislead people. But the issue of Scottish independence and the break-up of the UK as a consequence of Brexit is waiting down the line. As I said at the top of this post, the next round of UK-EU talks starts tomorrow with our negotiators "vowing" not to agree any alignment with EU rules, according the The Daily Mail.
An unnamed "source" says:
‘We have been repeatedly clear that we are looking for a deal with, at its core, a free trade agreement similar to the one the EU already has with Canada – that is, an agreement based on existing precedents. But what we cannot have is a form of relationship which requires alignment or one that constrains us to the EU’s rules."
This is spoken as if the EU has totally different rules to us, although as we know they are identical. The source might have said we don't want to align with our own rules but that would have sounded perverse and ridiculous.
However, if you read Chapter 21 of CETA - the Canadian agreement on Regulatory Cooperation, there are at least five clear references to convergence and the "promotion of convergence". What we are asking for, as Barnier has pointed out several times, is actually much more than CETA while demanding to diverge from EU rules. This is another case of the government saying one thing and doing another.
David Davis chips in saying we ought to be sending a couple of hundred negotiators today instead of fifty because there are so many things going on in parallel:-
"We are also negotiating with Japan, and the New Zealanders and Australians... and the Americans and the New Zealanders are complaining we’re not moving fast enough. And that is partly because of the capability in Whitehall, and I dare I say it, the enthusiasm in Whitehall."
Brexiteer Tory MP and former minister Theresa Villiers is someone else who has not read CETA because she is quoted saying, "Boris’s negotiators have said alignment is off the table. That’s the right approach and they should stick to that so we get Brexit done."
Which brings me back to the beginning. Brexiteer ministers and ex ministers are very fond of blaming government departments for problems. PHE are paying the price for minister's decisions and I am sure OFQUAL will soon go the same way after the A level fiasco. IDS is quoted at the weekend saying every decision PHE ever made was wrong, or something very like it. I think he and Davis have also said the much the same thing about Treasury forecasts. The Department of International Trade will soon be attacked for its incompetence amid calls for it to be reformed or slashed.
Entire government departments are summarily dismissed as useless or wrong and never does it occur to them that they might be wrong. There is no self-doubt whatsoever. They are starting to look like Titanic captains calmly reassuring passengers that it was all the designer's fault and that they were in no way to blame. The nation is steaming at full speed through a great iceberg field at night and in fog, with the radar operators warnings dismissed as scaremongering.
We do not have long to wait.
