Brussels bluff called by dead cat?

This was big news briefly last night but it seems to have subsided today:

Northern Ireland minister orders halt to Brexit agri-food checks

Northern Ireland’s agriculture minister has ordered all Brexit checks on food and farm products to be stopped from midnight in a unilateral move that will set him on a collision course with Brussels....

“I have taken legal advice in relation to my position from senior counsel. Earlier today, I received that legal advice,” he told the Stormont assembly....“The advice concluded that I can direct the checks to cease in the absence of executive approval....“I have now issued a formal instruction to my permanent secretary to halt all checks that were not in place on 31 December 2020 from midnight tonight.”

There were reports last week after the visit of the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, to Northern Ireland that Westminster would not oppose Poots’ mooted move.

The Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, indicated on Wednesday evening that the UK government would not intervene over the DUP’s decision....“Obviously this is a matter for the Northern Ireland executive; it is something that is within their legal remit,”

There is the reek of dead cat all over this as Boris seeks distractions from the obsession with illegal/inappropriate parties in Downing Street during the Covid crisis, but it is a rather neat way to rebuild the Brexit alliance that got him elected with a landslide. Snubbing the EU would be very popular./ Getting the DUP to do it, and claiming he can do nothing is clever if only as sabre rattling.

Sabres are certainly being drawn if not rattled yet as a local crisis in NI develops:

Northern Ireland has been plunged into political crisis amid reports that the first minister, the DUP’s Paul Givan, is to resign over Brexit....The reported move comes just days after the DUP gave Brussels a 21 February deadline to resolve the dispute over Brexit checks and just hours after Stormont’s agriculture minister, Edwin Poots, also a DUP representative, ordered a halt to Brexit checks on food and farm products coming into Northern Ireland from Great Britain.

[If Givan resigns] The Northern Ireland executive would be unable to approve a three-year budget that is currently out to consultation. Also under threat would be the appointment of a victims’ commissioner to deal with Troubles legacy killings and injuries and a scheme to give householders a £200 grant against rising energy bills....The latest DUP manoeuvres are being seen by rivals as positioning ahead of the May elections and come amid repeated threats by the party leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, to quit Stormont over the Brexit checks. The party’s popularity has fallen over its handling of Brexit,

The Gruan hopes that 'Sinn Féin [will be] in pole position to be the largest party for the first time according to recent opinion polls'. That will be good for the Graun because Sinn Fein are pro unity and pro EU, but the polls were taken while the DUP was seen as compromised over Brexit, of course.

Anyone for a Bourbon?

The Bourbon Royal Family, it was said, learned nothing and forgot nothing which explained their continued disastrous cockups when restored to the monarchy in France after Napoleon.The same can be said for Remainers. Two examples from TV tonight:

1. C4 News, introduced by C Newman, who has now lost the ability altogether to ask an open-ended question (see below). She introduced the item on the crisis in the current Cabinet induced by the froth about possible illegal parties and the rumblings of discontent this has caused among the Tory Party by saying 'Boris Johnson, the man who wanted to take back control [geddit] now finds himself unable to control his own Government' or words to that effect.

2. A BBC documentary called 'The Decade the Rich Won' (bit clumsy, but standards have become more 'popular') described the course of the financial crash of 2008 and the remedies the Labour then Coalition Government took -- QE then austerity. Various persons were allowed to criticise these policies from conscience-stricken bankers and forex traders to J Corbyn. The main thrust was to argue for the massive increase in socio-economic inequality that was produced.

A first whiff of rodent appeared when sundry spokespersons began to predict social unrest and populism as a consequence. Varoufakis appeared to say that public anger was justifiable but misdirected -- eg towards Europe. As 2016 approached in the narrative, Nick Clegg (!) blamed 'snake-oil salesmen' (that bastard works as PR spokesperson for Facebook!)  who persuaded the discontented that all would be well if we left the EU. George Osborne regretted that so much attention had been given to Cameron's hypocrisy and denials about his investment in tax evasion scheme, instead of focusing on the more important issue of Brexit.

I wonder if Part 2 of the doc will develop this tired old stuff? [Of course it will].

BBC journos have learned nothing from, for example Briefings for Brexit/Britains' careful arguments about the actual evidence that the EU has always been unpopular, and not only in the UK,and that feeling left behind was not a particularly strong argument.The same old tropes surface again and again. No-one considered whether global developments of cowboy capitalism, addicted to risk, so well described by the forex trader, might have some connection to the EU.

It is tempting to explain them, as classic characteristics of ideology. Ideological themes have to be continually repeated,  as much to encourage the faithful as to persuade the heathen.Ideology also limits what can be explored in thought so that alternatives literally become unthinkable, let alone trying to search them out.Critics of the BBC who have referred to an insulated mind-set where the BBC really cannot even see what they might be doing to maintain particular worldviews are on the right track.

Tory scandals show Brexit was really right-wing populism

 An excellent revival of the frequent attempts to show how it all makes sense to the Islington petite bourgeoisie (journo tendency) in this welcome piece by J Freedland in the Grauin

This scandal reveals a Conservative party corrupted by Boris Johnson – and by Brexit

 Recent events show that the Conservatives aren't really (nicely) conservative according to Freedland:

no Conservative would have dreamed of partying in a government building on the eve of a royal funeral, even if there was no pandemic. They would have been affronted by the very idea of it....Once upon a time, a member of the Conservative and Unionist party would have understood that the fate of the union is imperilled if Scottish voters believe Westminster regards them with contempt

It’s Brexit that transformed the Conservative party.Where once Tories revered tradition, Brexit filled them with revolutionary zeal....Vandalism became a Brexit habit – hardly surprising for a project dedicated to uprooting a tangle of connections with our continental neighbours that had grown dense and thick over half a century – and this is the Brexit government. Like all revolutionary endeavours, it believes that the end justifies all means, no matter the damage to those things conservatives once cherished.... The Brexiters believed the referendum result had given them a super-mandate that trumped any conventions or norms: it made them anointed instruments of the will of the people, who could brook no challenge. The landslide victory of 2019 reinforced that conviction.

 The final conclusion:

 Brexit transformed it from a conservative party into a national-populist party. Its instincts now are those of Viktor Orbán, funnelling public money and jobs to ideological allies, ready to burn down even the most valued institutions that stand in its way

The critique of Johnson's boosterism and cronyism has something going for it, of course. What the whole piece also reveals is Freedland's own Little England nostalgic conservatism, of course, a place where we respected our elders, the Royal Family and the Union. His fears of the popular and thus populist have always been there and now they have surfaced in this overall nightmare that has only proved him right all along.

Old story given new legs

There have been several repeats of the OBR forecasts that Brexit has damaged the economy, and will have a worse impact than Covid, not least in, of course, the Graun (28 Oct -- link in Briefings for Britain article below).

Briefings for Britain this week offers a concise critique -- again 

Why the OBR is wrong to claim that Brexit will cause a 4% drop in long-term growth 

Several news outlets have been carrying the Office for Budget Responsibility’s claim that Brexit will have a worse effect on the economy than COVID.  For the OBR’s report, see the linked pdf.  From the outset, it’s worth noting that the quoted figure of a 4% Brexit impact on long-term growth is not new or original. It comes from the Treasury five years ago and was heavily criticised by BfB years ago. 

We’ve carried rebuttals of claims like this many times before - particularly in our Report from last year. This time, we’ll look in detail at the Report itself, and suggest a few places where the analysis relies on unsafe assumptions.

Firstly, it’s worth noting that the report stresses the negative impact that a fall in exports has on UK trade (pp. 58-60).  But the report admits that it doesn’t incorporate the very latest trade data, which revised up the estimates for Quarter 2 of 2021.  Moreover, it doesn’t give enough attention to the fact that EU exports have been performing better than non-EU ones – which makes no sense if trade barriers to the EU are supposed to be the cause of difficulties.

In response to this, Remainers might argue that the disruption caused by Brexit to British supply chains could have related to lowered exports.  But again, there is a difficulty in explaining why EU exports should not fall more than non-EU ones in this scenario.  More generally, though the OBR mentions shortages of hauliers as a Brexit factor (p. 47), we’ve demonstrated before that the shortages of hauliers come from a cocktail of local factors, in which reduced EU labour supply is a minor element.

Nor can one argue that British businesses are particularly prone to reshoring their suppliers due to Brexit.  As the OBR’s report itself acknowledges on p. 40, ‘a survey of 353 companies across 77 countries found that, post-pandemic, two thirds of businesses were planning to source more locally and 20 per cent planned to hold more inventories.’

Secondly, we note that the OBR makes reference to the estimates derived from a report from the Centre for European Reform published in May 2021 (p. 59).  But this methodology, as Graham Gudgin argued in 2018, is highly speculative.  It tries to mock up a model UK based on the weighted performance of a selection of countries, and is highly influenced by which you choose and how they’re weighted.

Ultimately, the OBR falls back on its November 2016 predictions, trying to argue that trends since then back up its predictions.  But one glance at the graph on p. 59 makes clear that there’s been massive volatility – and that the trend line hardly follows the path of the predictions with any significant fidelity.

Finally, to end on some good news.  While the UK economy suffered particularly from the effects of the pandemic, Britain is also on course to see a substantially stronger recovery than the Eurozone in 2021.  Needless to say, Remainers have ignored this particular international comparison.

 According to the Gruan, however, the public are right behind the pessimists,and, strangely, the nerdy economists at the OBR. In a classic link:

The survey comes after Richard Hughes, the chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility, said his organisation calculated that the negative impact on GDP caused by the UK’s exit from the EU was expected to be twice as great as that resulting from the pandemic.

Implying the two aspects of the story have something to do with each other, just because one comes after the other! In the  pages of the Observer/Guardian that is.

Almost twice as many voters now believe Brexit is having a negative effect on the UK economy as think it is benefiting the nation’s finances, according to the latest Opinium poll for the Observer, carried out during budget week...

The actual data show fairly small differences of opinion on matters such as effects on salaries and wages and 'your personal situation' (with lots of 'don't knows'/undecideds), but big differences on 'prices in the shops' and 'ability to import goods from the EU'. Overall, 'The Opinium survey found that 44% of people think Brexit is having a bad impact on the UK economy, compared with 25% who think it is having a positive effect', hence the headline.

Then we return seamlessly to the OBR report which claims that: 'shortages of lorry drivers were at least partly caused by Brexit.'

However, one disappointment from the survey:

While Opinium found evidence of clear anxiety about Brexit, this has yet to translate into a negative effect on support for the Tory party.

Could be all sorts of things beyond the ken of  liberal Remainers here, of course, like even if the economy is being harmed at the moment, Brexit is still worth it and we would be nuts to rejoin?

 

 

EU concessions entirely pragmatic and peace-loving as realpolitik haunts Newsnight

The Graun reports that:

The EU will scrap 80% of checks on foods entering Northern Ireland from Britain...Maroš Šefčovič, the EU’s Brexit commissioner, also announced that customs checks on manufactured goods would be halved as part of a significant concession to ease post-Brexit border problems....The EU proposals on goods and medicines represents a significant concession for Brussels, which had previously called for the UK to align with the bloc’s food and plant health rules to avoid checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland....

 

The EU is now proposing a “bespoke Northern Ireland specific solution”. This means checks would be removed on 80% of lines on supermarket shelves, with carefully labelled and sourced British sausages, the product that became emblematic of the row between the two sides, no longer at risk of being prohibited.

In a further concession, trucks carrying mixed loads – for example a lorry bound for a Northern Irish supermarket laden with meat, dairy and confectionery – would only have to provide one health certificate for each journey rather than one for each product line....Customs paperwork will be hugely reduced through a more generous definition of goods deemed “not at risk” of entering the EU single market via the Irish border.

 

In response to threats to affordability and availability of generic medicines in Northern Ireland, the EU will waive a requirement that medical manufacturers move out of Great Britain into Northern Ireland. Companies supplying the Northern Irish market can continue to have their supply “hub” in Britain, a privilege not usually afforded to countries outside the EU single market.

Following criticism that the protocol is “undemocratic”, the Northern Ireland assembly, civil society groups and businesses will be invited to take part in “structured dialogues” with the European commission on implementing the hundreds of EU laws that apply in the region, although they will not have any decision-making power.

About as close as the EC get to grasping the term 'democratic'?  However...

Šefčovič said: “It’s very clear that we cannot have access to the single market without the supervision of the ECJ.  ...In exchange for looser controls, the UK will have to ensure border inspection posts are up and running and that EU officials have access to real-time data on checks....Some market checks will also be intensified to prevent British goods being smuggled into the EU single market through Northern Ireland. Products for the Northern Irish market would have to carry individual labels, rather than labels on pallets.

So there is still much room for further mischief making. Indeed:

in Westminster there is a concern that the market surveillance and checks on sources of products will be as much of a problem for traders as the status quo. There was no solution contained within Šefčovič’s proposals to the issue of pets travelling from Northern Ireland to the rest of the UK and back.

 

The EU people are trying to see this as a new pragmatic approach, burying the old problems of the (very recent) past and moving forward.That annoying Irish MEP and former Deputy Trade Commissioner, M. McGuiness,once so arrogant when Brexit was stalling, just said on Newsnight she wanted to get the best for the people of Northern Ireland, and the EU ambassador to the UK, J de Almeida, also appeared to say it was time to move on and be pragmatic. Not concessions, he said, but proposals.

 

Apparently, EU persons had been to NI and asked people, mostly 'businessmen', what the problems were, and were responding to their concerns. No businessmen had mentioned the ECJ, of course. That was sufficient democratic consultation for the EC though. Another Yesterday's Man, L Varadkar weighed in with his view that no country would ever trust the UK if we broke our word and tore up the Protocol, a view reinforced by the latest Cummings tweet saying that of course they only signed to get the deal through and had no intention of actually implementing it

 

Even C4 News and Newsnight asked why the EC had not made all these concessions earlier, and whether this meant the Protocol was no longer as non-negotiable and as written in stone as it had appeared to be in the Summer.

 

Both journos also feared, as does the Graun, that' Brussels officials were “preparing for the worst” amid signs Boris Johnson is set to reject the terms of the deal.'

 

 

Moral panics-- a technical account

 A very interesting account in today's Briefings for Britain on how a Remain/Rejoin narrative was able to gain a good deal of traction by combining and amplifying a number of events focused on the petrol shortage. That  rapidly got connected to a shortage of truck drivers which in turn led to denunciations of policies to exclude cheap immigrant labour after Brexit as we saw.

 

Elements of the shortage for the author (G. Prins) included the recent switch to more ethanol in the mix -- E10 fuel as it is called -- for 'green' reasons which caused temporary problems in stocks, Prins argues. These minor shortages were then amplified in social media panics driven by a deliberate campaign and Government were slow to resist.

Incidentally, the Daily Mail (!) floated a story, I recall, that the Road Haulage Association's PR Department specifically released a story about panic buying at petrol stations and the person responsible was a notable Remainer -- I'd have to look up that source so I can't rely on it yet.

Prins uses models from cybernetics and psychology to explain how small disturbances can get amplified into major disturbances, which I will leave you to purse. It reminded me a bit of some chaos theory. His is a bit of a conspiratorial account -- he talks of Rejoiner Central and specifies the ubiquitous Gina Miller and Jolyon Maugham, familiar names to those still haunted by the appalling events of the hung Parliament and the High Court interventions in the run-up to the final split with the EU.

He also0 argues that the pressure is now being applied to a rather odd debate about whether the UK should reapply to join the EU Galileo project satellite navigation system like the US GPS from which we were excluded (from the military bits anyway)  as a 'third country'  if we dared leave the EU. It would introduce EU control through the old backdoor again, of course, and it looks like our 'own' One-Web system might be better anyway.

Fish wars spark into life again

 The Gruan is particularly keen on this story and has reported it for a few days running:

France threatens to cut UK and Jersey energy supply in fishing row

The EU could hit Britain and Jersey’s energy supply over the UK’s failure to provide sufficient fishing licences to French fishers, France’s EU affairs minister has said. ...Last week a third of French boats applying to fish in Jersey’s waters were turned down by the island’s government. The previous week the UK government provided only 12 of 47 French vessels with permits for its coastal waters. The UK and Jersey authorities have said the vessels that had been turned down had failed to provide evidence of operating in the relevant waters.

Under the post-Brexit trade and cooperation agreement struck on Christmas Eve, in case of a dispute with Jersey the EU can take unilateral measures “proportionate to the alleged failure by the respondent party and the economic and societal impact thereof”.

That term 'proportionate' might be interesting.

Unilateral measures affecting the energy supply to the rest of the UK would also theoretically be possible. But France would need to gain the consent of other member states in both cases and the action would need to be proportionate, as the UK would have the right to take the EU to arbitration after any such move.

Note the GHRaun's careful usage of the preferred term 'fishers'.