Learning to live with Brexit means looking to the future

Like a rather surprising number of Remainers, Brexit has been like a bereavement for me. Before the referendum in 2016 few people would admit to an emotional attachment to the European Union (indeed this was one of the reasons Leave won), but I was among them. I can date that attachment to attendance at a rally in Westminster Hall in 1975, when the keynote speaker was Ted Heath, my first political hero, when I was 17. Or perhaps it was before then, when I identified as “European” when living in Jamaica, in order to distinguish myself from the many Americans I was at school with (while doubtless trying to stay ay arms length from Britain’s colonial legacy). Whatever the origins, I have been following the classic five steps of bereavement since the referendum.

Compared to many Remainers I went through Denial and Anger pretty quickly, but then I got stuck for years on Negotiation. This partly revolved around pressing for a new referendum, and thinking about how that should be conducted – though as time went by I became more sceptical that this was the right way to go. But mainly I got drawn into discussion about the terms of withdrawal and the future relationship. This was a furious paddling to try and stave off the inevitable next stage: Depression, which duly struck with the December 2019 General Election result. I turned away from the whole subject and busied myself with other things. But I can now confidently say that I have reached Acceptance. Acceptance does not mean that the pain has stopped: there will be pangs every time I get stuck in a passport queue when ravelling in the EU, and with every young friend or relative that complains that their opportunities are blighted as they can only find work into Union with difficulty. But I can than talk or think about the EU without trying to roll back time.

The breakthrough moment came last summer, when the EU agreed a post-pandemic aid programme which involved the creation of shared debt. This was a massive breakthrough in the evolution of the union. The deal itself, as usual, will not live up to the hopes placed on it, but the union is now better placed to deal with the challenges facing it. I quickly realised that this deal would have been much harder to reach if Britain had been a member. We had become paranoid about taking on debt from other EU countries – the idea of EU solidarity had so little currency. Whether or not a small majority of Britons were now in favour of British membership at any time, the country was irretrievably divided and it became increasingly difficult for the country to be a constructive member. Both John Major and Tony Blair found this, after starting their premierships wishing for Britain “to be at the heart of Europe”; they failed and subsequent premiers did not even try. The EU is actually better off without us, even though our departure has weakened it in many ways. If Britain is to rejoin, it has to be wholeheartedly, with a referendum majority of much more than 52%, and with prospective membership of the Euro agreed and understood. That will not happen in my lifetime, or not without some catastrophe changing people’s outlook, which I do not wish on my fellow countrymen. I have got over it.

So how does an ardent Remainer like me cope with Britain’s new status? I think there are two key rules. The first is to look to the future, and not to refight the battles of the past. It is very tempting to say “told-you so” as one promise after another of Leave campaigners comes to naught. But it doesn’t help; we can’t turn the clock back. And anyway, we need to understand that Remain campaigners got things wrong too, if not quite so egregiously. The second key rule is to be more realistic and critical of the European Union itself. It is useless to try and sell it to the British public, and we must understand what opportunities Brexit presents, even when we are acutely aware of the costs. In fact if Britain does things better than the EU, it will provide healthy competition that might guide it to a better place.

In this spirit, one of the most important things to understand is that the Union, and especially the Single Market, is a neoliberal project. It is based on the promotion of free trade and competition, and it aims to limit government interference in commerce. It is ironic that many Conservative Brexiteers are ardent neoliberals, and think that Brexit opens up opportunities for Britain to pursue more neoliberal policies. I differ from most people on the political left in thinking that neoliberalism is not necessarily a bad thing. This week’s Economist has an article which suggests that Britain’s economic progress in the 1980s up to the Great Financial Crisis was more down to EU membership than the liberalisation pursued by Mrs Thatcher’s government. It makes the case by tracking total factor productivity of the three countries that joined the EU (or European Common Market as we then called it) in 1973, i.e. Britain, Denmark and Ireland, compared the original six members (France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries). This had been in steady decline until 1970, flattened in the 1970s and then rose steadily until the mid 2000s. Mrs Thatcher did not rule Denmark or Ireland, so but the county’s economic performance was no better. This is false dichotomy. A large part of the economic benefit of joining the union arose from the Single Market reforms, which were Mrs Thatcher’s gift to the EU, and probably her most enduring political achievement. The Single Market was not a conspiracy to inflict pointless bureaucracy on British industry – it was in fact the opposite: to free intra-union trade (and movement of people and capital) from unproductive bureaucracy. We are learning this the hard way. It is a neoliberal project par excellence.

The Economist suggests that outside the EU, Britain might again suffer from “British Disease”, as our markets become less competitive. But where I agree with the left is that neoliberalism has little to offer most developed world economies in 2021, and certainly not Britain’s. Our future economic wellbeing is much less dependent on free trade with other countries, and state intervention is going to be much more important. Free markets are still critical, but they are not enough. Furthermore, conventional economic measurements, such as gross income (i.e. such measures as GDP) and productivity, are an unreliable guide to wellbeing.

The Conservative plan to use Brexit to drive through neoliberal reforms is doomed. If they succeed in implementing them, which they will find hard, they will deliver disappointing results with Britain outside the Single Market. There will doubtless be opportunities in some industrial sectors, but for each these there will be other sectors ruined by Brexit. Last month the Economist painted a depressing picture for the outlook for the British chemical industry. Brexit may not be as dire for Britain’s short-term economy as many predicted (though the jury is still out on that one), but medium term the outlook for GDP and other conventional economic measures is poor. But I have just said that does not matter so much. Instead we should be focusing on national wellbeing, and here there are possibilities that may be improved by Brexit, or at least not harmed. To get this sort of thinking started I will suggest three.

The first is environmentally sustainable agriculture and fisheries. We need to look at these industries not from the old-fashioned point of view of extracting the maximum quantitive output from our land and sea, but to restore those natural resources to health. Marginal agricultural land should be rewarded; alternatives need to be found to the mass use of environmentally damaging pesticides and fertilisers. We need more marine conservation zones and a war on destructive industrial fisheries. We can do this much more easily outside the EU’s management structures.

The second, and more economically significant, area for development should be the health economy. The overall importance of health to the economy is growing, but it is not an industry that takes well to conventional economic measurements. Often less is more (healthier people require fewer medical interventions; more effective medical interventions often require more economic inputs a balance that is often seems to lead to reduced productivity). We need to develop better ways of managing public health, as well as more effective interventions. Britain has advantages here, especially those that arise from a single national health service, and the way it can draw medical data together. Covid-19 has shown the good and the bad of British health services. The country has led the world in developing vaccines and other medical interventions, but public health services have been chaotic, and central government interventions ineffective – though the country’s armed services have shown some rare organisational effectiveness. The country has palpable strengths, but the whole area needs to be rethought.

And the third area for focus is developing of opportunities for people with weak paper qualifications. This should be easier now that access to our labour markets from less developed corners of the EU (and the rest of the world) is being reduced. As a good liberal I support freedom of movement, especially within Europe, but the main benefits are for those with good qualifications. But keeping foreign labour out is far from sufficient for improving the prospects for people already here. This needs much more focus than it is getting – pushing more people in badly-paid and insecure jobs is not the answer, but it is where neoliberal policies will take us. One idea on the left that I would like to be given more time and thought is a government job guarantee. I think this has more promise for national wellbeing than the much more fashionable Universal Basic Income.

I need to make one further point. These ideas, and others which make wellbeing their focus rather than aggregate income, require a much higher level of government competence than we have ever seen in this country (except maybe in the days of Victorian metropolitan development). The British government is far too centralised to be effective (a criticism I would lay against the French one too, also shown up by the pandemic response), and it is made worse by excessive faith in management consultants and outsourcers. There are pockets of excellence in British public life (much of the education system, aspects of the NHS, and the operational side of the armed forces, though not its procurement side). But something big needs to change.

The current government is ill-equipped to take advantage of the opportunities that now present themselves. They should be challenged not for promoting Brexit, but for mismanaging it.

Trump is not a proper fascist; his coup might have succeeded if he was

Throughout his presidency, I have waited for the moment when Donald Trump overstepped the mark, causing him to alienate a large part of his support base. There were moments when I thought he had reached such a point, but I was proved wrong each time. But the events last week in Washington are surely that moment. His presidency is nearly over anyway, of course, but he is surely unlikely to come back from this.

Of course an astonishing number of Americans thought that the storming of Congress was justified, but the Republican coalition is still breaking up, and it is likely to reform without Mr Trump in control. You could tell Mr Trump was in trouble when he read out his statement disowning the protesters and conceding that he would hand over to the new administration. He normally doubles down; he does not do light-footed manoeuvre.

What happened? It was very clear from even before the election that Mr Trump would try to cling to power if he lost. His plan to do so amounted to a coup, but one that maintained some vestiges of legality. He thought he could mobilise Republican Congressmen and state administrators, and sympathetic judges to annul the state election results he didn’t like, and substitute more congenial ones. For the most part they did not cooperate (the Congressmen being a shameful exception), because Mr Trump could not provide them with any serious evidence to work with, and they had too much respect for the rule of law, or at any rate understood that the risks for them personally were far too high. His last chance was on Wednesday, when Congress was due to ratify the election results. He organised a march of his supporters on the Capitol. What was Mr Trump trying to do? Here it gets murky. His hope may have been to intimidate the law-makers into overturning the election results. He may simply have wanted a spectacular demonstration of the strength of feeling on his side to sustain the betrayal narrative, from which he could build his comeback. If you want to build a conspiracy theory you can easily find enough to work on. After he lost the election Mr Trump cleared out the senior appointees of the Defence department and put in complete loyalists. The Washington National Guard was under the control of the Defence department, but it had not been mobilised for trouble, as it had been for the Black Lives Matter protests.

But it looks as if there was no clear plan. Once the protesters got into the building they did not know what to do. This was the worst possible outcome for Mr Trump. The protesters engaged in vandalism and showed general disrespect for one of the United States’s most hallowed institutions without achieving anything more than a delay to proceedings. This was fine by those of Mr Trump’s base driven by a hate for those institutions and of revolutionary intent: the white supremacists, the QAnon conspiracy theorists and the wild fringe in general. But a large part of the Republican coalition prefers to see these people as a tiresome sideshow. For many conservative Americans, having somebody dressed in a bison outfit leading the way is not a good look. Funnily enough, if the protestors had been met by a robust police and National Guard presence, it would probably have worked much better for Mr Trump – they could blame failure on the “deep state”. The plan had not been thought through and it lapsed into farce, albeit a farce in which several people were killed.

That is very revealing. Many people claim that Donald Trump is a fascist. It is perfectly true that there are many common threads between Trumpism and fascism. The cult of personality, the demand for personal loyalty amongst officials, the disrespect for the rule of law and political convention. The tactics were fascistic too: the use of elections to gain a foothold, the cooption and then subordination of establishment conservatives, and the indulgence of mob violence from supporters. But there are big differences. Fascists concentrate power in a militarised state, subordinating all other civil and private organisations. They adore administrative competence (Mussolini wanted to make the trains run on time; Hitler built autobahns). They are also driven by a clear, if fantastical, vision of where they want to take their country. Donald Trump worked to dismantle the state, not build it up. He let private corporations run riot, including ones he did not like. He has very little regard for administrative competence. He was not a warmonger either – he tried to end foreign wars, not start them. His supporters were not organised into paramilitary formations that could drive through a violent coup. Some of his supporters were heavily armed, it is true, but there was something anarchistic about them; they viewed their weapons as an extension to their personal autonomy, rather than part of being a soldier for a cause. Once you take the narcissism away from Trumpism, there really is very little left.

Which is why the coup failed and Mr Trump has been humiliated. There were no storm troopers ready to enter the Capitol and neutralise opposing Congressmen. There were no leaders on the ground with a clear idea about what they needed to do.

Very soon Donald Trump will leave office. So much of his power, and self-esteem, derived from that office that it will be difficult for him to come back, especially after this fiasco. But his popular base is still there, angry at the turn of events and convinced that it is they who are the victims of a coup. The new administration faces many difficult choices. Joe Biden wants to be a figure of healing and reconciliation. But can he simply let the forces of darkness reorganise with impunity? Republican leaders face hard choices too. Their no-prisoners resistance to the Democrats has unleashed a tiger that is consuming them. Is it time to change tactics in order to capitalise on the fears that much of the American public has of left-wing radicalism?

And all the while the pandemic runs riot. What a moment to become President. But it will not do to underestimate Joe Biden.

2020 ended well for Boris Johnson: do not underestimate him

“All’s well that ends well.” This seems to be the motto of Boris Johnson, our Conservative Prime Minister in the UK. He’s had a terrible 2020, with his government constantly being wrong-footed by the developments on the coronavirus epidemic. But he ended it with two major successes and that pretty much neutralised it all at a stroke. This is how he does his politics, and it is why he should never be written off.

His first success was on the virus, with the approval of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. The development and roll-out of vaccines is the one area of virus policy where Britain’s record stands up to international comparison (actually alongside development of treatments, though the benefits of this are less visible). And the Oxford vaccine was developed largely in Britain, and is manufactured here, as well as many other places worldwide. It seems to have the best balance between effectiveness, cost and deployability of the leading vaccines – though it lost the battle of the press releases earlier in the year, with misleading comparisons of efficacy being made with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Britain may now beat other major countries in the speed with which it tackles the crisis through vaccination, just when infection rates are starting to explode in much of the world. Britain should be among the first to see the benefits of mass vaccination.

Meanwhile, Mr Johnson’s most dangerous critics, the lockdown sceptics, have been silenced. With hospitals now under extreme stress it has become much harder to make the case that lockdowns are an unnecessary evil. And a lot of the stories being peddled by sceptics, such as that London was starting to benefit from herd immunity, have been shown to be idle speculation. Also the presence of a new, more infectious strain of the virus has served as an alibi for a lot of dodgy decisions in the run-up to Christmas. My suspicion is that much of the recent explosion in infection rates, which is leading to hospital overload, is in fact down to pre-Christmas behaviour, following the government’s announcement that a five-day easing of restrictions would be allowed. But everybody is talking about the new strain.

So, although the news from the pandemic is very depressing here in the UK, Mr Johnson has managed to limit the political fallout for him personally. The fumbling goes on, but if the vaccine goes as well as we re al hoping, then Mr Johnson can put a positive glass on the whole thing.

Mr Johnson’s second triumph is the Brexit deal. This is a huge political success, whatever one thinks of its substance. Without it there would have been a lot of Brexit-related noise and hassle in early 2021; with it the end of the transition period was a bit of an anticlimax. Furthermore, the process of pushing the conclusion of the deal to the very last moment was solid politics. Doubtless it helped to wring more concessions from the other side on the sort issues of nominal sovereignty that get his MPs so worked up. Better still, the lateness, and its proximity to Christmas, reduced public scrutiny; this critical piece of legislation was rushed through parliament in a single day. Another hope of government supporters, that the short-term economic effects of Brexit would be masked by the effects of the pandemic looks as if it will come to pass too.

It is not hard to see how the government hopes things will go from here. after a “bumpy” couple of months, the vaccine will start to push back the effects of the pandemic, precipitating an economic boom, which masks any short-term costs of Brexit. On Brexit the government doesn’t need to deliver on its preposterous promises of economic benefits (which isn’t to that there won’t be benefits), it just needs to say “There, that didn’t hurt so much did it?”. Remainers painted a picture of short-term economic catastrophe. There has been such a catastrophe, of course, but that is clearly because of covid-19, not Brexit, and the country will bounce back.

Of course this does not mean that things will keep on going well for Mr Johnson. His serial incompetence and weak ministerial team will lead him into yet more mess and muddle. It is not at all clear how he plans to get away from the carnage inflicted n government finances – though the betting is that he will try to ignore it, which is what quite a few sensible people are saying he should do. He will have a huge political headache in dealing with the bid for Scottish independence, which will be harder to ignore, though there may be political capital to be made in England.

But the point is this: we should not underestimate Boris Johnson’s command of the art of low politics. He may well last until another election (likely to be before 2024), and win it.

UPDATE

I started drafting this piece last week, and, in spite of some edits, its perspective is a bit last week. Soon after I pressed the button to publish, Boris Johnson went on the television to announce six weeks or more of heavy lockdown in England, including the reversal of his position on schools that he had been defending only that morning. To many this just shows how bad he is at managing this crisis. This could all have been done long a go – the evidence was clear then – but leaving it until later ensures that the damage inflicted will be greater. So that looks like a bad start to 2021.

But my main point stands. If the government can implement the rapid rollout of the vaccine, and if that succeeds in beating back the virus, the momentum will switch and the trials and tribulations will be forgotten. Neither proposition is a certainty, but both look probable. What is currently missing is expanded financial support for those adversely affected by the measures – but looks as if it is on its way.