The past week has been marked by what clearly was a government push to provide some – any! – good news around Brexit ahead of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Predictably, we observed the re-emergence of news about what seems to become the most often-mentioned Brexit benefit (sorry, ‘Brexit triumph’!) – namely the return of the ‘crown stamp’ on pint glasses! Tellingly, the flagship Brexit benefit – as so many alleged Brexit benefits – is based on the provenly false claim that the EU prohibited the use of the crown stamp (The reality is that it was perfectly possible to have glasses with both the crown stamp and the EU’s CE stamp).
Equally remarkable is the fact that while Brexit’s (alleged and false) impact on ‘EU red tape’ is omnipresent in the media, Brexit’s negative impact on things that actually matter is not. Indeed, while journalists have been busy in the past week dispelling the false claim about crown stamps (e.g. here and here), the link between Brexit and the never-ending news about flight cancellations and massive queues at airports (and train stations) does not get much attention. There was one rare sighting of a BBC news item where the relationship between Brexit and the travel chaos was made clear. Most others focus on the pandemic as sole explanation of UK companies’ problems hiring sufficient staff. That is a genuinely disingenuous way of reporting on the issue, that shows that a year and a half after actually existing Brexit, there is still no honest discussion in the British public sphere about how Brexit is impacting the economy and what could be done to make it more resilient to the shock.
The shocking fact is that while pro-Brexit newspapers sell crown stamps on pint glasses as a ‘triumph,’ while more neutral and anti-Brexit outlets attempt to fact check these claims, none seems to focus on the real problem here. Namely, that it is simply silly to focus anyone’s attention and energy on such a trivial matter. To be sure rules on accurate measurement are important for consumer protection and should be part of any modern society, but whether or not we have a crown stamp, or a CE mark on our pint glasses simply does not matter – especially not compared to all the other pressing problems the country is facing!
The crown stamp saga is further proof that the Tories are successfully dragging the country down the path into fantasy land, clearly banking on the fact that voters are stupid.
The BOGEMin’s Brexit opportunities list
This was illustrated this week by our Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency Minister (aka BOGEMin) Jacob Rees-Mogg’s list of anti-EU-red-tape actions to be taken following the direct input from the public into which EU rules they would want to see scrapped. If you showed this list to a British voter – say – ten years ago, they would probably have thought this was a satirical take on Brexit promises from the Private Eye or another humorous outlet. Sadly, Brexit Britain has slid into a parallel universe where our Brexiter in Chief seems to genuinely think the list of things he came up with is something to be proud of, or at least something people will take seriously.
For those readers who have not seen it yet, according to the Express the BOGEMin’s list of the top ideas consists of the following nine items:
“1. Encourage fracking, shortcut rules on planning consultation via emergency act.
2. Abolish the EU regulations that restrict vacuum cleaner power to 1400 watts.
3. Remove precautionary principle restrictions (for instance) on early use of experimental treatments for seriously ill patients and GM crops.
4. Abolish rules around the size of vans that need an operator's licence.
5. Abolish EU limits on electrical power levels of electrically assisted pedal cycles.
6. Allow certain medical professionals, such as pharmacists and paramedics, to qualify in three years.
7. Remove requirements for agency workers to have all the attributes of a permanent employee.
8. Simplify the calculation of holiday pay (e.g. 12.07 percent of pay) to make it easier for businesses to operate.
9. Reduce requirements for businesses to conduct fixed wire testing and portable application testing.”
What’s wrong with this list? Three things at least: Firstly, there is the usual dishonesty about the fact that it is very uncertain whether we really had to leave the EU to make the proposed changes to UK laws and regulations (e.g. fracking is not banned in the EU and indeed the UK – when still a EU member – played a key role in making sure it would not be regulated).
Secondly, most of the measures on the list concern so obviously ridiculously unimportant issues that it really is an insult to anyone’s intelligence to suggest that they should be on a list of top Brexit benefit priorities. Adding insult to injury is the fact that – as Chris Grey mentioned a while ago in his analysis in the Byline Times of the government’s Brexit benefits report – the alleged ‘benefits’ are presented net of Brexit costs. That is to say, if we assume for a minute that changing the way holiday pay is calculated makes it really significantly easier for businesses to operate, it still is an open question whether any associated reduction of costs due to that measure would offset any increases due to other Brexit-related changes in the business environment. Does the calculation of holiday pay reduce the company’s operating costs more or less than the increase in expenditure due to the need to fill in customs forms when exporting to the EU, the increasing difficult to hire staff, the disruption of supply chains due to new border formalities? I guess the answer is easy to guess. In fact, I very much doubt that any of the things on the list are indeed “choking British businesses and innovation.” What is choking British businesses is the inability to hire sufficient workforce, delays and increased costs at borders, not holiday pay calculations.
The third, and possibly greatest, problem revealed by the list is that, in their desperation to find anything to show for one of the biggest disruptions to the UK economy in decades, the only idea Brexiters seem to be able to draw on is a deeply flawed, provenly disastrous, and positively dangerous approach to deregulation. I have criticised Brexiters’ libertarian misunderstanding of how markets function, how regulations work, and what the state does in the economy and in society many times before (e.g. here). BOGEMin’s list succinctly summarises all these misunderstandings and provides a glimpse of things to come in areas such as consumer- and environmental protection:
The Brexiter base assumption is that any regulation is simply some ill-advised or even deliberately harassing rule made up by a mindless bureaucrat for no good reason or perhaps just their own personal interests.
The reality, of course, is that there are good reasons for regulations on GM crops, on planning applications for fracking projects, on the length of qualifications of paramedics and pharmacist etc. Most regulations have evolved in evolutionary fashion in reaction to past problems – such as the impact of large and disruptive building projects on local communities and their properties, the real risks associated with an unregulated roll out of new, not well understood technologies, or the live-changing impact of the lack of training among medical professionals on patient safety. All this is simply ignored by Brexiters who divide the world into experts versus the people; expertise versus common sense; the (bad) state versus the (good) market. The only valid ‘knowledge’ is people’s feelings – anything else is dismissed as elitist, academic rubbish – and anyone who dares criticising that approach out is chastised as patronising, ‘out-of-touch,’ ‘Islington-dwelling’ elite.
The bitter irony is that the BOGEMin’s list clearly shows that it is Brexiters who do not take the people’s worries seriously. Indeed, the list reveals the ‘fakeness’ of Tory populism, by including suggestions to further deregulate labour markets (which was due to its impact on wages, living standards, and inequality a key root cause of Brexit) and by suggesting to remove people’s rights to opposed fracking projects in their neighbourhoods. Giving power back to the British people anyone?
Tiny things Brexit
Be that as it may, it seems to me that anyone without a horse in the Brexit race looking at the BOGEMin’s list will be struck by the smallness and triviality of most of the proposed measures when compared to the grand claims during the Brexit referendum campaign. Increasing NHS funding by £350m a weekly may certainly seem to many people like a fairly decent reason to vote for Brexit and forgo one’s EU citizenship rights (especially if one simultaneously buys the argument that there are not costs). It may be less obvious to many people how the ability to buy a vacuum cleaner with over 1400 Watts performance or an electrical pedal cycle without power limit may justify that decision.
Deep down the BOGEMin and other Brexiters know this of course. (Tory MP Tobias Ellwood’s article on the Politics Home web page is probably the clearest and most explicit sign to date that outside of a narrow elite of ideologically blinded nationalists, none believes in the Brexit project anymore). The BOGEMin knows that presenting a ridiculous list of proposed changes to regulations most people probably hadn’t even heard of before Brexit will not convince many people that Brexit was worth it. As a result, he resorted to what I think is a new addition to Brexiter’s rhetorical arsenal, namely to talk about the ‘cumulative’ nature of Brexit benefits. ‘No, we cannot deliver the promised £350m weekly for the NHS. No, a trade deal with the US is not forthcoming. Yet, over time – in 10 or 50 years perhaps – the tiny little things we are doing will amount to at least as much as all the big things we promised you!’….Except of course that they will not. One way of illustrating this is another piece of Brexit news in the category of cumulative, ‘tiny things Brexit,’ namely the alleged trade deal with the US State of Indiana.
The Indiana ‘Trade Deal’…or is it?
Also this week, Penny Mordaunt and other trade ministers finally could brag about a ‘milestone’ ‘trade deal’ with a US state. Such state-level trade deals have been pursued by the government ever since Biden poured cold water on any notion of a fast US- UK Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Since then, the Secretary of State for Trade and various trade ministers have been touring the US to seek to conclude deals at the state level. Clearly the strategy is to show the Brexit-voting public back home that Johnson’s fearless Brexit government has found a cunning strategy to bypass the Democratic administration in the White House, defying – like in other policy areas – the odds and achieve something ‘Remoaners’ said could not be achieved.
Looking more closely into what has been agreed with Indiana and what the reactions were on both sides of the Atlantic quickly reveals that here to we are in the realm of fantasy and symbolic policies.
The potential impact of a free trade agreement is usually inversely proportional to the size of the signatory country’s/territory’s population size. For a small country signing an FTA with a large one will hold a lot of opportunities for the country’s exporters, as the number of potential customers increases proportionally to the size of the partner market. For producers competing with imports from the larger partner, on the other hand, an FTA may increase competitive pressures on those producers massively, while perhaps leading to lower prices for consumers. Either way, an FTA will be more significant for the smaller than the larger signatory. In the case of the UK-Indiana deal, given that the UK has roughly 10 times the population of Indian, we could expect the conclusion of the deal to make some headlines in the Hoosier press. Yet, As Peter Ungphakorn explains on his trade blog, in Indiana one official Tweet and just one newspaper report in the Inside Indiana Business paper mentioned the deal. In contrast, in the UK it was considered newsworthy by the BBC! Given the above argument about market size and impact, the lack of interest in Indiana in itself is proof that what has been agreed is far from a milestone free trade agreement as the UK government wants to make us believe. If it were, Indiana would be talking about it.
It is also interesting that the BBC bought into government discourse by calling the MoU a trade agreement. This is misleading, because there is precious little about trade in the agreement for the simple fact that US states do not have the power to remove tariffs and other trade barriers. What the agreement does instead is setting out very vague commitments to support ‘regulators and professional offices’ if they want to pursue mutual recognition of professional qualifications and to set out rules on UK companies’ treatment in Indiana public procurement. The latter is indeed the only potentially substantive clause in the MoU. Here, the MoU proposes a most-favoured nation (MFN) treatment to UK companies – albeit with some caveats. Thus, the agreement states that in tender process for state-level public contracts, UK companies will be treated no worse than companies from other US states. Yet, this MFN excludes US states bordering Indiana (Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan) and it is unlikely that the MoU overrides the ‘buy Indiana presumption,’ i.e. the privileged access to public contracts for producers from Indiana.
Therefore, an honest look at the content of the agreement and the reaction in Indiana illustrate clearly to anyone open to reasonable arguments that this ‘trade deal’ is part of a now well-established pattern of symbolic policymaking by the UK’s Brexit government that completely separates discourse from reality. In this context, Penny Mordaunt’s disingenuous and dishonest piece in the Conservative Home illustrates one of the key strength of this government: given that none of the members of the Johnson government seem to have any moral standards or any self-limiting commitment to truth and honesty, the most useless piece of legislation or policy can be turned into a major achievement. Since the government is not bound by reality, it does not need to achieve an actual trade deal with the US to take credit for it. It is enough to convince one state governor in the US to sign an MoU that they clearly do not care much about, to be able to come home and grandstand about your incredible achievements. The liar’s privilege is to be able to make something out of nothing; a privilege someone committed to reality and truth does not have.
The only hope we have that Britain, one day, may leave the path of fantasy and ideology and come back to the path of reality and reason is that those who cannot escape reality start pushing back. This week, different business sector’s reaction to governmental policies provided some hope in that respect.
Reality checks – businesses versus fantasy
There were at least two signs this week that perhaps as the Brexit impact becomes increasingly painful for British businesses the Johnson government may not be able to get away with purely symbolic policies and lies.
The first one came from the UK retailers’ reaction to the announcement of a return of imperial measurements in UK shops. The consultation on Johnson’s plan to reintroduce imperial measurements – pounds and ounces – instead of or alongside the metric system will launch on Friday. Yet, the industry body British Retail Consortium alongside other businesses and organisation have warned against the move, which – in their view – creates additional costs for now obvious reason. Indeed, the only reason for the return to imperial measures is in the name – imperial nostalgia.
The second sign was UK airlines’ call on UK to ease visa rules for European workers to tackle the current travel chaos. This is probably the clearest non-partisan sign today that Brexit is indeed partly to blame for the problems plaguing the travel industry.
In other areas too the evidence is mounting that Brexit is an undeniable disaster for the British economy. Latest figures reported by Bloomberg, for instance show a 17% decline in food and drink exports to the EU, while exports amongst other countries have increased and reached pre-pandemic levels. So, the claim that the pandemic – rather than Brexit – is to blame for the UK’s now well-documented export underperformance is increasingly difficult to sustain.
The BOGEMin of course still tries to sustain it! In a telling statement he accused ‘Rejoiners’ of “giving a false impression that Brexit has been negative.” The statement is telling, because it reveals – although unconsciously of course – that Brexiters do not distinguish between impressions and evidence. Yet, the evidence is damning, and reality cannot be denied forever.
As reality inevitably continues to bite, Brexiters have to resort to increasingly implausible and absurd rhetorical tricks (such as the idea of ‘cumulative tiny Brexit benefits’) to maintain the illusion. The level of absurdity in which politicians willingly engage, in turn, starts having a clear effect on people’s trust in politicians and in democracy itself. Thus, the percentage of UK citizens considering politicians are ‘merely out for themselves’ increasing by 15% in the past eight years of Tory government and now stands at 62%. No healthy democracy can function properly without people trusting the political institutions and the political personnel.
Paradoxically, the one glimmer of hope that this trend and hence a complete breakdown of UK democracy can still be averted stems from the Johnson government’s disastrous handling of Brexit itself: Hard Brexit means that the coalition of people and businesses who pay a heavy price for Brexit and are willing to speak up against it grows stronger every day. It is to be hoped that it will grow faster than the government’s capabilities to mislead the public so that the devastating effects of Brexit may still be reverted.