This past week was all about Brexit in the British media – illustrating once more for everyone to see that Brexit is far from done! The big event overshadowing everything else this week was the fast approaching end of another ‘grace period’ on border controls on goods traded between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This time the goods concerned are chilled meats. As a third country, Great Britain will no longer be allowed to export chilled meats to the EU after July 1st, 2021. The Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) implies that Ireland remains within the EU customs union and single market, meat products exported from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will now have to be frozen. While this has been – or should have been – clear to everyone ever since the NIP has been agreed on by the UK government and the EU, senior members of the UK government now consider this effect of Brexit to be ‘bonkers.’ With the first meeting of the Partnership Council, which overseas the manage the Trade & Cooperation Agreement (TCA), taking place on Wednesday and the G7 meeting later in the week, the disagreements around the implementation of the NIP led to unprecedented tensions between the EU and the UK – which the tabloid press was quick to label ‘sausage wars.’

Maros Sefcovic, European Commission vice-president, used rather undiplomatic language to clearly tell the media that the trust in the UK government had all but gone and warned the UK government against any further unilateral action (such as unilaterally extending the grace period on chilled meats). Conversely, an oft-cited article signed by Lord Frost published in the FT continues to insist that the EU should show more flexibility  – by which the minister evidently means that the EU simply accepts that the UK follows its own rules without guarantee that they are compatible with EU rules, but should still be allowed to export without constraints into the single market.

There has been a great amount of commentary on the issues surrounding the NIP this week and the upcoming end of the ‘grace period’ (e.g. Chris Grey’s Beyond Brexit blog, Tony Connelly’s analysis, and the FT’s Brexit Briefing). So, its not worth that I summarise this once more. Rather, I want to focus on what the UK government’s handling of the NIP situation tells us more broadly about this government and possibly the future of the country.

In my day job as a Professor of International Management & Political Economy at Loughborough University, I mainly study the democratic backsliding in Central Europe and especially Hungary (and the impact this has on multinational companies’ strategies). So far, I have resisted the temptation to compare the Johnson government to the government of Victor Orbàn, which I’ve been studying together with my colleague Dori Sallai literally since Orbàn came back to power in 2010. But it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the striking parallels between the steps Orbàn took to entrench his power, leading to significant ‘democratic backsliding’ in Hungary. These steps include a reform of the electoral system, high-level corruption to create a clientele that will support the governing party, and bringing the national media in line. Last week, I was struck to find signs of all three of these anti-democratic populists mechanisms at work here in the UK.

Electoral Reform – Gerrymandering to retain power

Gerrymandering designates the practice by a governing party of redrawing the boundaries of electoral constituencies to increase the likelihood of winning the next elections. This practice has been widely used by Orbàn in Hungary after 2010, which assured him a massive electoral advantage over the opposition and has secured him large parliamentary majorities ever since.

There is increasing concern that the UK government is attempting exactly that. Labour has warned for some time that the current reform of electoral boundaries is an attempt to entrench the conservative’s grip on power. But political scientists – like Victoria Honeyman – too are expressing concerns over the current conservative attempts to redraw the electoral map.

The suggested changes to constituency boundaries would affect contested constituencies such as Bately and Spen in West Yorkshire (where, incidentally, Kim Leadbeater – sister of murdered MP Jo Cox – will defend a labour seat in a by election on July 1st 2021). According to the conservatives’ plans, this constituency would be integrated with Hipperholme – a firmly conservative area – and thus increasing the Tory’s chances of gaining or holding this seat at the next General Election.

Institutionalised Corruption

There is now also ample evidence that the current government is highly corrupt. This week the High Court rule in favour of the Good Law Project’s case against the government over a contract awarded to a market research firm Public First, whose bosses had personal relationships with Dominic Cummings. This ruling means that Michael Gove – as minister responsible for the Cabinet Office when the contract was awarded – acted unlawfully. More generally, there is an increasing amount of evidence showing that coronavirus contracts were awarded to companies and people with close ties to people inside the government. The Good Law Project speaks of ‘institutionalised cronyism’ in public procurement. I do not see much difference with what we call institutionalised corruption in our research on Orbán’s Hungary.

The current government’s corrupt behaviour is not limited to public procurement, but also affects the use of public funds to generate support amongst the population for the government and the governing party. Like I discussed before, the ‘levelling up’ policy has already been shown to be essentially as pork barrel scheme whereby the government channels taxpayers money to constituencies it considers marginal seats in the next elections. That too is an instrument often used by Orbàn and other anti-democratic populist governments to increase popular support.

Another parallel is that the high-level corruption has not legal consequences for the government, which is driven by ‘nepotistic corruption’ as Peter Kreko and Zslot Enyedi put it. Indeed, despite two rulings already judging that senior figures in the UK government – Matt Hancock and Michael Gove  – have acted unlawfully, there is no sign of any consequences for these politicians. This is a government that has prove time and again that it does not care about the legality of its actions or the rule of law. It considers itself above the law and thereby signals to citizens that compliance with laws is voluntary – at least of those with money and power. Needless to spell out what such an attitude will do to trust in our public institutions in the long run.

The Government’s Media

The third worrying parallel between the UK and the Hungarian case was the way in which the BBC seems to have started to uncritically adopt the government line on the Northern Ireland issue. Andrew Marr’s interview with Maros Sefcovic last Sunday was heavily criticised for suggesting that a clear majority of people in Northern Ireland ‘hated’ the NIP. Moreover, in a shocking interview by Evan Davis with Thomas Byrne – the Irish Secretary of State for European affairs – on Radio 4’s PM programme on June 9th, Davis uncritically insisted on the point that British sausages do not pose any health threat to EU citizens, implying therefore that the EU’s approach was unreasonable. He insisted on the question: ‘What is the danger to any European of a British sausage smuggled into the EU single market via Northern Ireland?’ The whole interview suggested that the EU not accepting UK food standards as equivalent was simply based on a stubborn insistence on applying the rules for the sake of it. That is terribly close to the government’s recurring – and wrong – accusation of ‘legal purism.’ Such uncritical reporting on why the EU has the rules it has, clearly fuels unreasonable and unjustified anti-regulation attitudes that have played an important role in the history of Brexit.

Bryne’s completely ineffectual answers that missed the broader point (that the EU giving in to UK’s current demands would undermine the basic principles on which the whole single market is based) did not help of course. But the point is that presenting the problem in the terms Davis did means accepting the government’s discourse, when it should be challenged, not reproduced by journalists. Instead, the BBC increasingly sounds like a government channel. The simplistic and biased way in which the NIP issues were covered in the Andrew Marr Show, on PM, and on other BBC programmes implies that the BBC simply accepts the government’s interpretation of the situation.

I may be overreacting and reading too much into some isolated examples of bad journalism. Nevertheless, observing the toothless reporting of the BBC about crucial Brexit issues alongside what can only be seen as political appointments to key positions at the BBC in the past year (Richard Sharp – a former banker, advisor to Rishi Sunak, and large Tory donor – as chair of the BBC and Time Davie – a former Conservative politician – as Director General) does remind me of how Orbàn and other authoritarian leaders in Central and Eastern Europe try to bring the national media under control to better serve their goals.

Readers may consider this an exaggerated comparison and I am not suggesting the UK’s democratic system will quickly crumble like the Hungarian did. At the same time, there are few things I would put past this government. And foreign leaders seem to increasingly become disillusioned with the UK government too.

Signs of lost credibility

EU officials and political leaders of EU member states seem to increasingly drop any diplomatic pretence and openly voice the loss of faith in the UK government as a viability partner. This week European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen lectured the UK government on one of the most basic principles of international politics, namely ‘pacta sunt servanda’ – treaties have to be respected. French President Emanuel Macron explicitly questioned the seriousness of the UK government stating that “I think this is not serious – to want to have another look at something in July that was finalised in December after years of discussions and work.”

The UK government, however, seems rather to follow Johnathan Swifts bon mot that “promises are like pie crust, made to be broken.” The government continues to insist on ‘flexibility,’ ‘common sense,’ and pushes back against ‘legal purism,’ to try and get an arrangement whereby EU rules do not apply to the UK. The only arrangement it will accept are either unilateral recognition by the EU of UK rules as equivalent or a mutual recognition solution where both countries accept each other’s standards as equivalent. The UK also insists on a ‘risk-based approach’ whereby the EU simply accepts that the risk to EU citizens from food imports from the UK  - without guarantee that the UK will maintain its current standards. Such a level of trust in UK standards after Brexit may be difficult for the EU to muster, especially given that the memory of the BSE crisis in the 1990s has not completely faded. But independently of that, the problem is that the UK essentially asks the EU for a paradigm shift in its approach to safeguarding the integrity of the single market, by exempting the UK from following the rules that all 27 member states have to follow to be part of the single market.

Some had hoped, the G7 summit this week in Cornwall might provide an opportunity to overcome the impasse in Northern Ireland through the intervention of US president Joe Biden.

Uncle Joe and the ‘special relationship’

Indeed, the UK government seemed worried about Biden potentially weighing in in the dispute, accusing the EU of trying to use American pressure to solve the issues. Biden, of course, has been very outspoken about protecting the Good Friday Agreement – both because of the US’s role as a broker of the agreement and for personal reasons. The US’s most senior diplomat in the UK – Yael Lambert – is reported to have formally reprimanded the UK over its stance on the NIP that – according to the Americans – ‘inflames’ tensions in Northern Ireland.

This puts the government into a difficult position. Post-Brexit, the US was meant to be a key ally for the UK notably by agreeing to a new free trade agreement that would help compensate for the loss of access to the EU single market. Yet, it increasingly looks like the US government under Biden agrees more with the EU than with the UK over the interpretation of the NIP.

What does this tell us about the relationship between the Johnson government and the Biden administration?

Interestingly, the Prime Minister was recently reported to have objected to the term ‘special relationship’ between the US and the UK, which he finds ‘needy and weak.’ In the current context, the announcement by Biden that he would be “meeting with Prime Minister Boris Johnson to affirm the special relationship between our nations” may indeed almost sound like a threat.

Johnson’s dislike for the ‘special relationship’ and his willingness to portray himself as the leader of a Global Britain that has regained its independence and self-confidence does contrast quite starkly with his behaviour during the meeting with Biden at the G7 this week. His response to a joke Biden made about their marriages was ‘I’m not going to dissent on that one. I’m not going to disagree with you there or indeed on anything else, I think highly likely’. This does not sound like the PM affirming Britain’s new-found ‘sovereignty,’ but rather like cringe-worthy submissiveness. But then, of course, Saturday evening’s defiant statements by the PM about the NIP was a clear indication that Biden’s intervention has not changed much in the government’s attitude.

Moreover, whatever happens to the NIP, the US is likely to eventually pursue an FTA with the UK. Such an agreement would fit the US current international strategy to counter Chinese influence around the world by strengthening its ties with Western allies. Perhaps Biden’s suggestion this week that an agreement between the UK and the EU on Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) standards would not jeopardise the UK’s chances of sealing a trade deal with the US is not just trying to provide a solution to the NIP issues, but also preparing the ground for future trade negotiations.

What’s going to happen next?

It seems very unlikely that the UK government will back down in the dispute over the chilled meat rules. Once again it has adopted a bellicose and intransigent attitude that leaves little room for compromise without losing face domestically. That may very well mean that the UK government will go ahead and unilaterally extend the grace period beyond July 1st. That in turn would leave the EU no other option than taking retaliatory actions as defined by the Withdrawal Agreement and the TCA. The problem with that, of course, is that such action may take a long time to take effect, lengthy mediation processes and possibly a court ruling. In the meantime, the integrity EU single market will be de facto breached. This has led to some reports that the EU is considering an emergency solution, namely imposing checks on trade between the Republic of Ireland and the rest of the EU. Needless to say that this would be a major change in the EU’s approach to Brexit and would cause massive objections from the Irish side. Naomi O’Leary talked about the return of the ‘colonial nightmare,’ because such an arrangement would imply that the Republic of Ireland would be cut off from the EU single market and would de facto become part of the UK’s domestic market.

There is little chance of such an emergency plan to become reality. Nevertheless, given the UK government’s bellicose approach it does seem difficult to imagine any possible solutions to overcome the impasse. It is extraordinary to see the stubbornness with which the UK insists on an ‘equivalence’ or ‘risk-based solution,’ while not even complying with the basic requirements need for such a risk-based solution to be viable (namely sharing data about the movement of goods imported into NI from Great Britain). This is a clear sign of what Chris Grey called the Brexiteer’s refusal to accept that ‘Brexit means Brexit’. Indeed, it becomes increasingly clear that Johnson’s Brexit government believed that even after exiting the EU, the UK would receive special treatment from the EU and hence the commitments made in the NIP and TCA would not actually have to be respected.

An interesting possible solution to the impasse is described by Raoul Ruparel in a Politico article, which he calls ‘managing divergence.’ This solution would take advantage of the fact that after 40 years of EU membership, the UK and the EU are currently aligned in terms of regulatory standards. This makes it possible to adopt a light touch approach to checks and border controls, until the UK actually decides to deviate from its current standards and regulations. This is indeed the basic mechanism that underlies much of the TCA, which contains non-regression clauses that makes the current market access conditional on both parties not reducing labour and environmental standards below current levels.

This currently looks like the only solution that might be acceptable to both parties. Although, this arrangement would only kick the can down the road, as the problem of border checks in the Irish Sea would re-emerge as soon as the UK decided to indeed diverge (or rather regress) from current standards.

More importantly, perhaps, it is not clear at all whether the UK government is actually interested in any solution that might look like a compromise. Rather, the Johnson government seems to be willing to simply hold its tough line, extend the grace periods unilaterally, selling it domestically as a sign of strength and sovereignty, and then blame any negative effects – including the potential of renewed violence in NI – on the EU’s ‘legal purism.’ Indeed, Johnson’s intransigence after a week of continuous pressure from the EU and the US is remarkable. On Saturday night, after talks in the margins of the G7 meeting, he threatened that “[i]f the protocol continues to be applied in this way, then we will obviously not hesitate to invoke Article 16” (which would suspend the protocol).  There does not seem to be any willingness to find a solution to preserve peace in Northern Ireland.  The government seems to simply bank on the EU not following through on its threats of retaliation – which is another parallel with anti-democratic populists in central Europe. The government simply does not seem to take the threat to peace in Northern Ireland seriously. Its childish and cavalier approach to the very serious issues was perfectly illustrated by  Lord Frost who reportedly wore union jack socks at the G7 meeting. With Biden’s intervention seemingly ineffectual, it seems increasingly doubtful that anyone can reign in this childishness and safe the Northern Ireland agreement.