Back to 'soft' Brexit?

 In response to the question of what Remainers actually want, S Jenkins might come closest to spelling it out in the Gruan today

The evidence is all around us: life outside the single market is an utter disaster

 [Pointing to events since leaving the single market]  All [sorts of workers, mostly low-paid ones  in agriculture and farming] have benefited in the past from the open market in European labour. All must now lobby Whitehall for permits, visas, waivers and, if not, compensation. Hundred-page documents must accompany every food convoy to and from Dover and Belfast, where hours of tailbacks quietly rot produce.

 [Whitehall] officials are now peering into food containers and poring over job advertisements, exerting the full force of their regulatory zeal. Jobs must be categorised by specialism, shortage, pay and length of stay. Vast Whitehall charts must be mapping labour flows. The Home Office aversion to foreigners has bred a “hostile environment” culture...private care homes were forced to sack 50,000 unvaccinated staff. To pretend to compensate, the government then offered care homes extra visas. It turned out they could be only for one year – despite the essence of care being continuity. As for getting a visa, it is said to take a minimum of 16 weeks. 

 Leaving the EU had some arguments for it. Leaving the single market had none. “Soft” Brexit within that market would have been far been easier to negotiate. Leaving it has meant wrecked supply chains and terminated scientific collaboration. It has undermined recruitment patterns and destabilised Northern Ireland. It has crippled the fish industry and impeded billions of pounds of UK trade. Its consequences have wavered between nuisance and disaster.

Brexit has seen a consummation of the very thing Tories are supposed to hate – bureaucracy... Brexit is estimated to have required a civil service army of 50,000 new officials, more than the entire central bureaucracy of the EU in Brussels. 

 Britain’s position as an island has to be one that trades openly with the mainland....

No, this is not revoking Brexit or rejoining the EU. It is just embracing sanity.

 

As ever, some good points here. There was an underestimate of consequences,especially when the EC played hardball with the restrictive practices. There may indeed be some independent enthusiasm for bureaucracy in Britain. But these are thin gruel. All the consequences are easily seen as the reponsibilities of EC punishments. There has been a compounding influence of covid admitted here. There is a good reason behind some of the policies in squeezing out the low pay/immigrant labour regime of the past. There is no possibility of having 'free trade' without political control by Brussels as well know, so it is still all a pipe dream, and always was -- can Jenkins have forgotten the KitKat option pursued by T May's civil servants? As always, only the insane oppose this common-sense.

 

Zombies attack

More last twitches from the Remainer camp in el Garun yhesterday:

Why the panic among Boris Johnson’s allies? Because they know Brexit is unravelling

I’m the president of European Movement [writes M Heseltine] – Andrew Adonis is chair

[referring to the pressure on Johnson at home and abroad] did the wreckers of the European dream slowly begin to realise that if Johnson goes, it shifts the sands from beneath their feet?...“If Boris goes, Brexit goes” said it clearly enough.

 If the prime minister is found to have lied to parliament and to the people, what defence is there to the allegation that the Brexit cause – mired in similar controversy over lies and dissembling – was conducted with the same disregard for the truth?

 So did something happen in February 2022? Maybe it’s just a feeling, a cloud no bigger than a man’s fist, the first breath of wind before the storm when the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph employ two of their most renowned columnists to attack Andrew Adonis and myself [ah -- something personal as well] , merely for making the point that their hero may have feet of clay and take the Brexit house down with him. Perhaps they have smelled the wind, just as I have.

I return to the question I asked a while back -- what do the Remainers actually want now? What do they mean by 'Brexit goes' or 'taking the Brexit house down'? How exactly would the eviction of Boris lead to the UK rejoining the EU? Heseltine and Adonis returned to power on a tide of popular support? Immediate steps taken to reapply? Do they think it can all be cancelled after all?

Surely it now means only that they want some sort of vindication and petty revenge. More recruits for the zombies.

 

 

Joining the dots (with a six inch brush)

Is there any connection between the personal and continual campaigns against Boris Johnson and the embittered Remainer rump? Bears and their sanitary habits in woods spring to mind. Even the Graun recently confessed that the Islington literati loved Boris the clown as Mayor of London but turned against him as a Person when he opted for Brexit and have been out for revenge ever since. So not much news in this Times comment piece (subsciption reqd) on Monday February 14 2022 

Of course Remainers are out to get Johnson

“By spooky coincidence,” writes Nigel Jones in the Spectator, the bulk of MPs who have sent or plan to send letters of no confidence in Johnson also come from “the wringing wet Remainer wing of the party”

H Rifkind is the actual author, a Guardian stalwart usually, and his own view is: 

if it is not a Remainer plot then it damn well should be....There was a reason that Boris Johnson made for such an effective champion of Take Back Control and then Get Brexit Done, and we all know that it was not his sober risk/benefit analysis of differing modes of integration with the global marketplace. Right? In my view — and I downgrade it to “a view” merely to be conciliatory [so much for journalistic balance then] — it was because he is an opportunist, unbothered by consequence. It was because he tells people what they want to hear, when they want to hear it, and feels not a shred of responsibility for what follows

As usual Rifkind cannot possibly grasp what might explain the continued determination to carry on with Brexit though, and can only resort to insults:

True, not all of Johnson’s critics are Remainers. There is also Dominic Cummings, best understood as the human version of the venomous arachnid in the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog. (Look it up.) [Chance to flaunt a bit of cultural capital there] There are also European Research Group hard Brexiteers such as Steve Baker and Andrew Bridgen, who seem to move according to rhythms and influences simply unknowable to the rest of us [we smug minority that is] , which I suppose might have something to do with the moon.

[It was always a lie to think] a Britain heading for Brexit could have ended up being led by a sane, sober, responsible cool-headed technocrat who had genuinely wanted it, because that couldn’t have happened, because there weren’t any.

So, no doubt he feels better now nice and smug and superior, relishing the media campaigns and urging on the constant tide of stories of crisis about parties, police incompetence, undue influence by Carrie (bit of a tricky one),corruption, foreign policy cock-ups etc. People like C Newman and the editors on C4 News can always remind us of the links with Brexit as we have seen in recent posts.

However,  Remainers have not learned lessons from their earlier campaigns, perhaps because they cannot. By confessing that it was always about Remaining, they have now lost any moral authority they might have had in protesting about parties or rule-breaking -- they didn't really care about those issues after all, they were just a way to discredit Johnson. The morality informing these crusades always looked pretty petty anyway, of course, despite efforts to extend them into issues such as 'one rule for us and another for them' which did run for a bit.They ran the risk of extending the common cynical view towards all politicians including that nice 'Keir'. Now media commentators are players too, it is apparent.

 

  

C4 'news' scrapes bottom of barrel again

 It's hard to reference TV broadcasts accurately, and I can't be bothered to find them on catch-up channels, but to my recollection, C4's item on Brexit tonight was pretty weak.

It was introduced as a kind of progress report apropos nothing really, a bit late to catch up on news of truck delays at Dover or anything. I couldn't see any of the usual news values in the piece. It did have footage of queues of truck but said these were earlier ones, and produced by an IT problem. Video of queues appeared later as well which were not explained. The main coverage was of a cheesemaker who claimed his products would sometimes take 3 weeks to arrive in the South of France which would make them worthless to his customers - strange sort of cheese I thought.

There was an interview with a man running a truck company who said paperwork had increased. One consequence,apparently was that there would often be delays in sending his trucks on journeys while he still had to pay his drivers, which shocked the interviewer. We were also shown a truck very lightly loaded -- the customer had not wanted to wait to share the truck with other loads. Quite what that had to do with Brexit was unclear.

Then we had the interviewer telling us to camera that form filling had increased dramatically, that many of them had to be completed on paper,, despite the UK's hopes (the EC was not to blame, of course), and that 'trade' with Germany  had decreased compared with other countries -- he was choosing just one country to simplify things for us.

Overall, the triumphant conclusion, same as the smirking introduction, was that the promise of considerable benefits from Brexit was still a long way off -- so there!

I suppose the fainthearted Remainers still needed cheering up? Perhaps they are worried that the DUP will call the EU's bluff? Perhaps the continual onslaught on Boris is not enough for them? Perhaps 'Keir' as the literati call him is not reliable enough to rejoin? As usual, it is not at all clear what they actually want now, so a few final told-you-sos might be enough?

 

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.