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Posts Tagged ‘Brexit’

Brexit anxiety: Panic on the streets of London

23/10/2018, 11:33:22 PM

by Jonathan Todd

I don’t, unfortunately, think it is an exaggeration to say that I am terrified of Brexit. I burst in to tears – not something I do frequently – on the morning of 24 June 2016, a few hours before Jeremy Corbyn advocated invoking Article 50. It seemed to me that my country had invited catastrophe and now, sadly, I feel surer of that.

“There was always a core who could not accept the outcome; it has swelled,” reckons Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times. I am not sure that this is quite right and certainly do not consider myself part of such a grouping. While we should be vigilant to Russian interference in our democracy and Vote Leave broke electoral law, I do not question the legitimacy of the actions taken following the 2016 referendum.

Theresa May was perfectly entitled to set out her redlines, to invoke Article 50, and to proclaim, “Brexit means Brexit”. Albeit the redlines have been mugged by reality, her government has appeared unprepared for the consequences of Article 50, and “Brexit means Brexit” is no less a meaningless platitude than “a red, white and blue Brexit”.

In the face of this staggering incompetence, what has remained constant is not lack of acceptance at the outcome of the 2016 referendum but – pace Shrimsley – unease about where we are headed. No convincing leadership has emerged to meet worries about the ending of a relationship that has been integral to the UK for approaching half a century.

“The easiest trade deal in history” came to not be that easy. “The exact same benefits of single market membership” are illusive. Only Michael Caine is still saying that German car manufacturers will make everything ok.

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Devolve immigration policy to the nations and regions to answer the demands of Brexit

16/10/2018, 05:45:47 PM

This piece by Atul Hatwal is an updated version of his chapter in the Compass report, Causes and Cures of Brexit

“It’s like this mad riddle.” Thus spake Danny Dyer, the sage of Brexit. Our modern day Zarathustra wasn’t wrong and nowhere are the contradictions thrown up by Brexit more evident than on immigration.

How to ‘take back control’ of migration while not cutting numbers so precipitately that skills gaps cripple public services and drive businesses to the wall? Or that the EU’s red line on freedom of movement is so egregiously breached that the broader Brexit deal is derailed?

At the heart of the riddle is an impossible question on the right number of migrants to be allowed into the UK.

The most significant area of migration is people coming to the UK to work (as opposed to study, family reunion or asylum) and on this, whether Tory or Labour, the government has a choice of two policy options, both a wrong answer.

Option A: Set a numbers target that is so low as to be either unattainable or disastrous for the economy. The past eight years have tested this approach to the point of political destruction. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario more corrosive to trust in politicians on migration than the way the government has stuck to its target of cutting migration to the tens of thousands, while continually missing it by huge margins. It raises migration as an issue and then casts the government as incompetents or liars, not prepared to do what’s required.

Option B: Set a target high enough not to buckle public services or hit economic growth but one that then opens the government to charges of allowing uncontrolled immigration.

Labour’s proposals for an integrated work visa, where the current tiering system with its caps is scrapped, suggest the party is headed towards Option B.

The detail is yet to be fleshed out but this represents a positive move from Labour. However, it’s one that will not be without cost.

It’s inevitable the Conservatives would use this as a dividing line in any election and in the event of a narrow Labour election victory, there is a question as to whether this policy could be carried through the Commons given a significant minority of Labour MPs would likely rebel on the basis that this would not, in their view, honour the Referendum result.

Over the past few months, there’s been some recourse on all sides to try to focus on skilled migration while advocating for restrictions on low skilled migration, as an alternative approach. But this just leads back to the same underlying choices.

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Labour Conference 2018: Time for a new direction on Brexit

24/09/2018, 09:44:22 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Labour Party conference meets amid the UK’s deepening constitutional and economic crisis. Merely by reiterating its long-established red lines, EU leaders inspired a haughty and incoherent speech from our out-of-her-depth prime minister, bringing the calamity of no deal Brexit nearer.

The message from Nigel Farage at the Leave Means Leave rally is clear: “No deal, no problem.” The message from Labour’s conference needs to be equally straight-forward: “No deal, no way.”

Brexit, as President Macron noted, “was pushed by people who predicted easy solutions.” Now the same people tell us not to worry about no deal. Surely the will of the people is not to be fooled twice.

The warning lights from Labour should be flashing brightly to avoid the kind of no deal scenario depicted in a Financial Times editorial in July:

“The UK would spill out of the EU on March 29 2019, guaranteeing chaos on all fronts. It would spell international isolation, as well as a shock to the economy and a political backlash. No competent government could contemplate such an option.”

Given this, the prime minister is wrong, pace her Friday speech, to assert that no deal is better than a bad deal. Labour must say so.

The prime minister is mistaken, too, to claim that EU leaders provided no explanation for their rejection of Chequers. It followed from their consistent position on the indivisibility of the EU’s four freedoms. We must hope that Labour, as an internationalist party, demystifies this hardy mysterious reality.

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People have the power on Trump and Brexit. But will we use it?

03/09/2018, 09:04:23 AM

by Jonathan Todd

“Ultimately,” as Edward Luce wrote in the Financial Times recently, “the American people will decide Mr Trump’s fate.”

Impeachment depends upon majorities in both houses of Congress. Which the Democrats do not have. But might after November’s mid-terms.

If Republican voters rally to an embattled Trump, they might retain both houses. Conversely, if the stench of corruption emanating from Trump drives an anti-Trump vote, the Democrats would triumph.

Beto O’Rourke, seeking to unseat Ted Cruz to become the first Democratic Senator for Texas in 25 years, describes the election as, “the most important of our lives”.

Like all Democrats, however, he is riding against the headwind of an economy enjoying (at least in the short-term) the sugar rush of Trump’s tax cuts. In which case, recovering one of the two houses might be a reasonable Democrat performance. Albeit this would leave them requiring Republican votes to impeach Trump.

These votes would only be forthcoming if Republicans deduced they would be in their interests. This would depend upon another people’s verdict: polling on Trump and impeachment.

While unpopular with the rest of America, Trump remains viscerally popular with his base. This is an advantage that he enjoys over President Nixon in the early 1970s, creating a firewall against elected Republicans turning against him.

Robert Mueller is methodically diligent, but the questions that hang over Trump are more political than legal.

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Stringer faces deselection battle over Brexit vote

29/08/2018, 03:51:58 PM

Over at the New Statesman, Stephen Bush has a story that Manchester MP and former minister, Graham Stringer, faces a deselection battle, following his decision to vote with the Government last month in opposing an amendment to the Trade Bill that would have kept the door open on a customs union with the EU. Stephen writes:

‘A motion brought before the constituency’s Broughton ward says that Stringer’s recent actions have “undermined the party and bolstered the Tories’ position”, and that the constituency party should start the process of removing him as the Labour candidate at the time of the next election, whenever that should be.’

Over the weekend, Stringer wrote an uncompromising piece for the Manchester Evening News restating his views:

‘It has always perplexed me that friends within the Labour Party with whom I generally agree on issues such as extending and enhancing democracy as well as redistributing wealth and income nationally and internationally, support the EU,’ he wrote. ‘The EU is an affront to democracy.’

Commenting specifically on last month’s vote, Stringer wrote that a ‘myth’ had developed ‘that a government defeat would have led to a general election.’ He made the point that the Government was defeated on the European Medicines Agency, but that didn’t result in a confidence motion:

‘It would have been even more surprising had Conservative and Democratic Unionist MPs voted for a motion of no confidence in their own government or for an immediate general election. These are the legally necessary hurdles to be passed before an early election can be called. The Conservatives and DUP revile Jeremy Corbyn – they are not going to give him a free hit.’

Clearly Stringer – and Labour’s other leading Brexiteers: Frank Field, Kate Hoey and John Mann – are in the overwhelming minority in terms of the parliamentary party. However it bears restating that 39 per cent of actual Labour voters opted for Brexit.

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Where would the UK be with any other Labour leader?

30/07/2018, 10:50:40 PM

by Jonathan Todd

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of no deal Brexit. The building prospect of this epic disaster makes Theresa May’s triggering of Article 50 in March 2017, sixteen months in advance of anything resembling a united government position on the biggest decision facing us since World War II, recklessly premature.

Jeremy Corbyn demanded that Article 50 be triggered on 24 June 2016. As, in the period since, Labour has done no better than the government in offering up a Brexit plan likely to be compatible with the EU’s long-established and clear positions, we would now be over a month into the wasteland of Corbyn’s no deal if he were then prime minister.

Any other post-Michael Foot Labour leader, recognising that Brexit is incompatible with any viable Labour political economy, would have thrown themselves into the Remain campaign in 2016 with more gusto than Corbyn. We’ve got our party back, Neil Kinnock said when Ed Miliband became leader. But, despite their differences, all leaders from Kinnock to Miliband would, in the circumstances that Corbyn now finds himself in, be putting the national emergency of Brexit above all else.

Once we heard of “one of the easiest trade deals in human history” and Brexit with “the exact same benefits” of EU membership, now we are told of “adequate food” – but even this might prove overly optimistic. There will be, as Corbyn never tells us, no Brexit dividend, no £350m extra a week for the NHS. There will be, to almost recall a bleak Daniel Day-Lewis film, stockpiling of blood. No deal Brexit was meant to be impossible – don’t they want to sell us their prosecco? Not as much as they want to preserve the integrity of EU institutions, it, predictably, transpires – and yet, it looms ever larger.

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Corbyn’s ill-judged reaction to Margaret Hodge’s comments may just become his undoing

27/07/2018, 09:50:38 PM

by Rob Marchant

Jeremy Corbyn has really not had a good week. It was the week when the dam really finally burst on anti-Semitism, with the PLP wholeheartedly rejecting the party’s “doctored” definition of anti-Semitism, one-third of British voters surveyed thinking him an anti-Semite and an unprecedented and scathing joint editorial on the front page of the UK’s three most prominent Jewish newspapers, condemning Corbyn. But more of that later. On Tuesday, he also finally came out as a full-blooded Brexiteer.

Over the last two years, Jeremy Corbyn has increasingly irritated Labour’s Remainers (who, according to überpollster Prof. John Curtice, are actually in the majority in the party nationally and not just in London, as many previously thought), by his disingenuous attempts to ride two horses at once over Brexit.

And somewhat inexplicably, he has chosen this moment, when everything is going spectacularly badly, to “come out” for Brexit and try to sell its “benefits”.

His “British jobs for British workers” 1970s schtick may resonate with some Labour voters, yes (let us not forget that Gordon Brown once tried much the same). However, apart from the economic illiteracy of the approach, toughness on immigration is not actually the vote-winner it once was, as the latest Social Attitudes Survey now shows.

In fact, in view of the recent Cabinet turmoil over Brexit and dire warnings arriving from all quarters about the possibility of No Corbyn could scarcely have timed his “coming out” as a Leaver worse.

No, one of Corbyn’s many problems as leader is that his judgement is hardly consistently good.

On that note, let us turn to the issue of his spat with Margaret Hodge. The spectacular own goal of allowing his acolytes to attempt the rewriting of a perfectly serviceable definition of anti-Semitism reeked of bad faith and caused a huge backlash two weeks ago.

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Corbyn fiddles while Europe, and the world, reach for the matches

02/07/2018, 08:14:20 AM

by Rob Marchant

It is somewhat inevitable, in the current, febrile political climate, that Tony Blair’s few interventions elicit disproportionate responses in Britain. Even when those interventions conclude little that most Western commentators outside Britain, or a European historian of average talent, would disagree with.

In part, this is because in Britain the effective, yet unspoken, May-Corbyn alliance on Brexit has meant effective mainstream unity on that subject.

That is, the only senior politicians who speak out against it are either (a) the leaders of minor parties (Greens/Lib Dems/SNP), or (b) retired heavyweights not bound by the party whip. So it is easy for him to outweigh the rest of the pack.

Love him or hate him, of all those, Blair is unquestionably the heaviest, in terms of prime ministerial experience at least. Against fellow living ex-PMs Major, Brown and Cameron, he wins on years (10 vs. 7, 3, 6); general election victories (3 vs 1, 0 and 2); and was never defeated in either a GE or a national referendum either, unlike the others.

And his latest intervention is not just correct: even if you disagree with him on Brexit (which, according to the latest YouGov poll, now puts you with less than half the population), it’s difficult to disagree with what he says about populism and the similarities to the 1930s.

2018 is a genuinely scary time to live. Not just through the narrow prism of Brexit, through which it seems all political questions are currently viewed here, although that is arguably a major disaster in itself and not just for Britain.

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Labour should back a ‘cooling off’ referendum on Europe. After all we did it before

12/06/2018, 04:55:26 PM

by Joe Anderson

‘Armaggeddon.’ There’s not much ambiguity about the word.

That’s the Whitehall assessment if there is no exit deal or transitional arrangements as we enter the Brexit endgame.

Even on civil servants’ less cataclysmic judgment, there is a chance that the Port of Dover collapses on the first day we leave the European Union. Food shortages follow.

Is this what Brexiteers mean by ‘taking back control?’

Their starry rhetoric and inflated claims are dissolving day by day.

The boast that the US is poised to sign an early trade deal with us – always a wide-eyed assumption – has been utterly shattered by Donald Trump’s trade war – which now puts 30,000 British steel workers’ jobs at risk.

Now all the talk is that the Government’s White Paper setting out its final negotiating position will be delayed until after the European Council meeting at the end of the month.

Will the Prime Minister be applying for an essay extension?

The impacts of Theresa May’s rickety negotiation position will echo for a generation to come.

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Country before party, reprise

12/06/2018, 07:28:39 AM

by Rob Marchant

Today, Parliament will have arguably its most important day of votes in decades.

There are three particular ones which matter: on the EEA, on the Customs Union and on a “meaningful vote” for the Commons on the final deal.

The Customs Union one Labour will vote for, but it’s not to get us to stay in the Customs Union. It’s just to get Theresa May to actually tell us what progress she’s made towards any participation in a Customs Union. As The Independent’s John Rentoul put it: “ ‘I haven’t made any’ would meet that requirement.”

As if this were not enough, the current position of both major parties on a customs union is nonsensical. Both are asking that Britain be able to negotiate its own trade deals as well, the absence of which power is the whole point of a customs union.

In other words, they are subscribing to what we might reasonably refer to as “Schroedinger’s Customs Union”, that is, a customs union that Britain is part of and not part of at the same time.

Next, that Parliament should effectively be left to sort out the next steps, in the event that the “meaningful vote” on the final Brexit package is lost. Labour will at least vote in favour of that.

No such luck with the vote on staying in the EEA, Britain’s last chance to have a Norway-style arrangement and actually hold onto the trade benefits the leadership is disingenuously claiming to want to hold onto (although, in reality, it doesn’t really). Labour MPs are being whipped to abstain.

But why are Labour MPs, the majority of which are apparently Remainers, even caring about the whip?

A PLP that rebelled on mass against Corbyn two years ago are now – with some honourable exceptions – supine, either for fear that their constituents will punish them or that their careers in a politically-destitute Labour Party will suffer? Even with the public now turning against Brexit, albeit slowly?

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