There have been various types of Brexit-related news this week; some good, some bad, some ugly. Which is which is not always easy to tell at first glance. In fact, Brexiters are still very much on a mission to claim victories and ‘Brexit dividends’ where there aren’t any. It seems that after one year of actually existing Brexit, all Brexiters can point towards are things that demonstrably have nothing to do with Brexit, could have happened without it, or do not matter much. Chief among which is the ‘vaccine roll-out,’ which Vote Leave boss Matthew Elliott had to resort to in order to come up with anything positive after one year of Brexit. Still, let us start with some (fake and genuine) good news for a change.

Fake good news, (possibly) good news, not so good news

The fake good Brexit news comes from Devon. The Daily Mail’s Robert Hardman penned a piece with the headline “Brexit success story to make Remoaners choke on their sea bass.” The Brexit success story he is referring to is the record value of fish sold at England’s most valuable fish market in Brixham. Barry Young - Managing Director of Brixham Trawler Agents – is quoted in one outlet as saying “[d]espite the doom-mongering about life outside of the European Union, we have a clear example that shows the opportunities and the benefits that can be found through the UK as an independent trading nation.” What does not become clear from any of the articles covering the story, is how exactly Brexit has helped fishers in Brixham to achieve this new record. Digging a bit deeper, it becomes clear that this may simply be a continuation of a trend that has very little to do with Brexit. Thus, an article from 2017 explains the local fishing community’s success as being the result of  ‘many years of stock conservation and gear development, which we are now starting to see the benefits of.’ So, what we see in Brixham may simply be the continuation of a trend that started long before Brexit and was hence possible as an EU member. It is also not clear how Brixham’s good fortunes compare to the industry as a whole, with other recent media reports drawing a much less positive picture. So, it would seem that this alleged ‘Brexit success story’ is at best a story about Brexit not having reversed the upwards trend in fish sales at Brixham rather than one about Brexit in anyway causing or helping that trend.

In the category of genuinely good news: This week the government has presented its plans for the post-Brexit agricultural policy which will replace the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Replacing the CAP – one of the EU’s worst policies in particular regarding biodiversity  – with a system that incentivises farmers to move towards more environmentally friendly production methods is definitely good news. Although, environmentalists and farmers have reacted by warning that nearly six years after the Brexit vote, the policy still lacks detail and was mainly based on the government’s usual ‘blind optimism’ rather than a clear plan.

More – moderately – good news came from the talks about the Norther Ireland Protocol (NIP). Liz Truss and Ireland’s foreign minister Simon Coveney had their first meeting, which was qualified as ‘good.’ While on the substance the two positions seem to remain incompatible, as the UK government has not changed its demands after the departure of Lord Frost. It continues to demand the removal of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) as instance overseeing the NIP. Yet, the good news is that the triggering of art. 16 seems less likely now than a few weeks ago and there now seems to be a pathway to a solution emerging. This pathway consists of finding an agreement on the issues of paperwork and physical border checks for goods crossing the Irish Sea by February and leaving the trickier governance and state-aid questions for after the Stormont elections in May and after the French EU presidency ends in mid-2022.

Another piece of superficially good news has to do with the introduction of the new border controls on EU imports to the UK. The new border checks led to some disruption and lorries queuing at the border due to issues with the new Goods Vehicle Movement Service (GVMS). Overall, however, the government managed to avoid disruption at a scale that would have made it onto the front pages of the national papers. Brexiters will decry ‘project fear’ of course and –  like Shanker Singham – claim that all is well in terms of post-Brexit trade. The reality, however, is that British and EU companies have just been administered ‘another dose of pain’ in the form of increased costs and red tape. The reason why there is no visible problem at the border are simple: For one, the checks came into force during a ‘seasonal lull in trading’ so that the real test for the new system will come in the coming weeks when trade picks up. More importantly, as trade expert Sam Lowe pointed out this week, the UK government has been very successful in keeping visible disruption away from the borders. In fact, goods simply do not leave the factories and warehouses in the first place due to increased costs and paperwork. So, if there is no visible problem at the borders, it is to a considerable extent because Brexit had led to a decrease in trade, contrary to what we were promised.

Trading in fantasies

Chris Grey discussed this week the growing acknowledgement in Brexit quarters that something is not going quite to plan. However, in terms of trade Brexiters largely persist in claiming that everything is well – despite the reality of an estimated 15% decline in trade with the EU last year.

Brexiters use several strategies to prop up their trade fantasies in face of a stubborn reality. The reification of FTAs is one of them. Thus, Singham maintains that Brexit has gone well in trade terms by measuring Brexit success simply by the number of new trade deals concluded, rather than their content and likely impact on the UK’s economic performance or people’s (including farmers’) livelihoods. But even on his own terms, Singham’s positive assessment seems like another case of ‘blind optimism.’ The Australia deal is literally the only new FTA concluded with the New Zealand deal having been agreed. All others are roll-over deals of EU FTAs. Some have been slightly amended compared to the EU predecessor deal (the one with Japan), but others have already fallen behind what the EU has, because the EU has since concluded a more comprehensive new deal than the one the UK rolled over (the one with Mexico). Most importantly, all new trade deals are more than offset by the end of free trade with the EU. Indeed, the new trading arrangements under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), due to new non-tariff trade barriers, make trade less free. So, even on this superficial criterion of number of deals, Brexit has not delivered more free trade.

Another defender of the myth that Brexit is good for free trade is the ‘hight priest of Brexiter economists’ Patrick Minford who insists that that ‘civil servants’ are overly pessimistic about the huge benefits from falling consumer prices due to increased free trade post-Brexit. Minford’s outdated theoretical assumptions and methodological choices have been debunked years ago. His flawed economic modelling predicted that Brexit would lead to a 4% increase in GDP due to the impact of free trade on consumer prices and competition, which is in stark contrasts with the OBR’s forecast of a 4% decline.

Minford’s belief in free trade is based on a century-old libertarian trope, namely that free trade will benefit people through falling consumer prices. Based on that belief, the FTAs with Australia and NZ are great ‘because those are very big agricultural producers, which could have a big effect on food prices.’ He thinks the OBR’s prediction of a 0.02 % impact of the Australia deal on GDP is ‘the most stupid underestimate, because it's completely leaving out the enormous impact it should have on our consumer prices.’ The neglect of the impact of the Australia FTA on prices in the OBR assessment is demonstrably wrong. Yet, the more fundamental problem with Minford’s argument is that any benefit to consumers may be more than offset by the costs that import-competing producers and localities will bear. Concretely, there is the risk that British beef and sheep farmers are wiped out or forced to engage in a race to the bottom in terms of environmental impact, food standards, and animal welfare.  Minford is indifferent to such effects. His enthusiasm for free trade goes as far as rejecting FTAs and instead advocating a complete, unilateral abolition of import tariffs even when it means – as he admits – that it would ‘cause the ‘elimination’ of UK manufacturing and a large increase in wage inequality.’ 

But the impact of import competition matters. Recent scholarship has provided evidence that trade liberalisation has had devastating effects on certain regions in the US and the UK, leading to deindustrialisation and long-term declining living standards. It made people so miserable that they were willing to vote for Trump or support Brexit. That is not to say that free trade is necessarily all bad, but ‘when and where trade is costly, and how and why it may be beneficial’ are still open questions for policy-makers and researchers that require careful consideration. Simply opening up one’s domestic market – without compensation or support for those who may lose out – clearly is not the sort of policies that will make trade liberalisation a success.

What explains such fanatic belief in the benefits of unconditional free trade as Singham and Minford demonstrate?

Partly, it’s economic and historical illiteracy. Minford maintains that “Before the First World War, we traded all around the world, basically with free trade and [it was] tremendously beneficial. We were very much a powerhouse.” The reality of course is that what we had before WW1 was not free trade among equals, but mercantilist and selectively protectionist trade policies within the British Empire backed up by gunboats and colonial armies. It was not free trade that made Britain great. It was colonisation and looting at immense human cost to the peoples forcibly subject to the British Crown that did. Free trade only started to be seriously considered as a policy once Britannia completely ruled the waves.

Brexiters’ use of the myth of free trade has of course a long history. Ever since the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 the belief that free trade benefits consumers by reducing prices has become a common place. Yet, as historical research shows, the free trade ideology was in reality aggressively pushed by producers – such as Richard Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League – pursuing their own interests. Evidence that other trade arrangements (e.g. import substitution) may provide similar or even better economic and societal outcomes were simply ignored.

Yet, the myth of the social benefits of unconditional free trade is deeply rooted in this country. Brexiters’ staunch defense of free trade against any economic realities exposes another reason for that state of affairs. Namely, the belief in the inherent superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxons,’ which logically means they will come out on top in a perfectly free and competitive marketplace. Indeed, Brexiters’ free trade fantasies illustrate the mishmash of ethno-nationalistic myths and alleged economic common sense and pragmatism on which the Brexit ideology is based.

Anglo-Saxon superiority and English internationalism

There are many reasons why people voted for leaving the EU in 2016. Frustration with actual and feared declines in living standards, the decline of local infrastructures and public services, worries about immigration, and frustration with too many rules and regulations. The architects of Brexit had managed to convince many voters that all these things were to be blamed on the EU and that exiting would solve them. Over the past year, however, it has become increasingly clear that the suspicion many of us had was right: The architects of Brexit never intended to solve any of these problems facing ‘ordinary people.’ Rather, the project was about something else entirely: Re-establishing Britain’s rightful place in the world – namely at the very top.

Partly that project is rooted in English nationalism. But it is not an isolationist project as the Global Britain slogan illustrates. Rather, it is a project of English – or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ – internationalism where the Anglosphere is supposed to form an alliance to reassert its world dominance.

The idea that Anglo-Saxon culture and civilisation is superior to continental European and other cultures has of course a long history. It may indeed be a reaction to the fact that for most of its existence England was a country ruled by others. In his lectures entitled ‘Society Must be Defended,’ Michel Foucault provides an interesting discussion of how the Norman invasion in 1066 gave rise to considerable intellectual effort to try and demonstrate the superiority of the ‘indigenous’ English common law over the continental roman-law inspired civil law of the invaders. These efforts have not only survived into the 20th and 21st centuries, but have actually become increasingly influential in the 1990s and 2000s when serious legal and economic scholars in prestigious universities developed a whole legal reform programme based on the idea that common law leads to better economic outcomes than civil law. This so-called Law & Finance School has influenced policies promoted by the World Bank, IMF, OECD and other international organisations who pushed countries towards ‘best practice’ in company law based on the allegedly superior Anglo-Saxon common law system (see here for a review and critique).

A very different type of literature, but making a fundamentally similar point, are popular books by arch-Brexiters like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Daniel Hannan who attempt to demonstrate the exceptionalism and superiority of English-speaking peoples. With Brexit and Johnson’s GE victory of 2019 these ideas seem to have gained more influence over politics and the society than they have had in a very long time, as Peter Jukes’ piece on Englishness suggests.

It is of course somewhat funny that, of all people, Boris Johnson – the person other world leaders call a clown – has come to incorporate Britain’s claim to superiority. Clearly, other ‘Anglo-Saxon’ are not convinced, as the post-Brexit evolution of our relationship with the US illustrates.

The not so special relationship

Just before Christmas Trade Minister Penny Mordaunt toured the US in order to reaffirm the special relationship between the two countries – a key pillar of the Brexiters plan for the UK to reclaim its place in the world.  Concretely, Mordaunt sought to make progress with discussions about a UK-US FTA and it was hoped her trip would lead to an agreement on the removal of Trump-era tariffs on British steel exports to the US.

Mordaunt’s speech in Atlanta during her tour is extraordinary in many respects. It contains passages that read like Mordaunt lecturing the US about what sound policies should look like and it even contains language that almost sound like a threat (“For the US to wait to seize this opportunity [of teaming up with post-Breixt Global Britain] would be to all our detriment, but also to its own. It is in its own interest to step up its trade policy and negotiations [with the UK]“). It also included a cringeworthy plea to be taken seriously: “[T]he US needs to understand and recognise the UKs new position. This is far more significant than just the size of its market – when America set itself free, it was a small economy.” Most of the speech, however, seeks to demonstrate the profound cultural bond and similarities between the US and the UK – including the shared ‘common law tradition’ – that sets them apart from the rest of the world.

Despite all these efforts (or maybe because of them?) – and despite praise from the pro-Brexit press – no tangible progress was made on either the FTA or the steel tariffs. While Brexiters may forgive the UK government for not having pulled off an FTA with the US yet – that is a hugely ambitious goal after all – it may be more difficult to stomach the fact that the EU has managed to agree a deal on removing US import tariffs on EU steel, but the UK has not. That seems to contradict the idea of the special relationship within the Anglosphere.

A direct reason for the Biden administration to hold off with an agreement on steel tariffs is that they may be used to pressure the UK government to agree to a deal on Northern Ireland. More fundamentally, however, while the famed British pragmatism increasingly looks like a ‘big myth’ as Christian Lequesne puts it, the US still is pragmatic – even opportunistic – when pursuing its foreign policy interests. Much was made of the shock AUKUS agreement that seemed to provide some support for the idea of a special bond among Anglo-Saxon countries. However, other events last year show that this agreement – like most things in US foreign policy – was driven by the US’s cool calculation and strategic pursuit of its interests rather than some sense of Anglo-Saxon solidarity. Thus, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer is largely seen as a case of US unilateralism and indeed a humiliation for the UK.

 The UK’s failure to find an agreement on steel tariffs seems like the starkest reality check Global Britain and the idea of an Anglosphere have faced since Brexit. Of course, an agreement on steel could still be reached, but the fact that the EU has done so more quickly is crucial and is indeed already damaging the UK economy. BBC4’s Today (4 Jan 2022 @ 6:20am) spoke to United Cast Bar (UCB) Ltd in Chesterfield who are preparing to move part of their production to Spain to avoid the 25% tariffs on steel exports to the US. In the interview, UCB made it clear that if an agreement with the US is not reached quickly, that move will be permanent.
Also interesting was what the Economist’s Soumaya Keynes had to say about the reasons why the EU successfully negotiated a removal of the tariffs while the UK has failed to do so. As a far bigger market than the UK, the EU’s threat retaliatory tariffs on US products would hurt the US much more than the UK’s equivalent retaliatory measures. For the same reason, US importers are more concerned about tariffs on imports from the EU than from the UK. But another interesting factor Keynes mentioned was that the EU was more explicit about the retaliatory measures, while the UK was ‘friendlier, chummier.’ This perfectly illustrates Brexiters’ complete lack of realism and delusional ideas about special bonds among Anglo-Saxon peoples.

 Grandeur, pride, and destruction

 As Prof. Anna Deighnton put it “Global Britain” is a policy of grandeur. Ultimately, grandeur and British – or Anglo-Saxon – supremacism is the UK’s own worst enemy. It leads to the essentialist belief that Britain is by its very nature superior to other countries and Anglo-Saxon culture is the pinnacle of human civilisation. That’s where the Brexiters’ ‘bellicose victimhood’ comes from. If you firmly believe that you are the best in the world, then the fact that you objectively are ‘only’ a middle power must be somebody else’s fault.

It is British ‘supremacism’ that explains why the country has gone down a cul-de-sac, because it makes believers in that ideology – who now sadly control the Tory party and government – blind to the possibility that the failure of the country to provide decent living standards, jobs, and perspectives to all its citizens may actually be home made. This leads to a flawed analysis of what is going wrong and to providing all the wrong answers to the right questions. It suggests that re-establishing Britain’s rightful place on top of the world requires a purely negative political agenda, namely ‘unchaining’ or ‘unleashing’ it by removing the obstacles that its enemies – from outside and within – have put in place and that prevent it from reclaiming its place at the top. Once these obstacles are removed, everything else will follow naturally. There is no need for a positive policy programme to change the country’s fortunes. Simply break the chains and the rest will happen naturally. In other words, you do not need a plan, you just need a wrecking ball – the Brexit Referendum itself is the perfect illustration of this destructive approach.

The big problem with that ideology is that Britain’s problem is not, and never was, that it was ‘chained’ and held back by its European partners. Britain’s problem is that it has chosen economic and social policies that have left a large part of its population struggling to maintain the living standards and perspectives that people have come to expect after WW2. ‘Unchaining’ Britain – even if that were actually possible in our interdependent world – would not solve any of these issues, but make them a lot worst. Rich people – those who sponsored Brexit – do not need the NHS or the welfare state. They do not even need Britain as they are mobile and can buy a house wherever they please, as Farage made clear a while ago. They can afford to believe in their natural superiority. For everyone else, however, the reality is that they will have to rely on the state and public services at one stage in their lives. For them, the belief that superior Brits do best when unhampered by any constraints will soon turn into the nightmare of seeing their livings standards erode even further.

Ironically, then, it is those who are trying to convince Brits of their supremacy who are making sure that the country’s fortunes and position in the world are not what they could be with an honest assessment of who we are and what needs to be done. Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.