A "Must read" brexit piece

The former British ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers, delivered a lecture at UCL's European Institute this week which is available on the Spectator website here and which I really think everyone with a serious interest in the issue of what Britain should do about Brexit ought to read.

He is severely critical of a lot muddled thinking on all sides of the debate, from hardline remainers to supporters of a "WTO" or "no deal" Brexit, although Jim King may be interested to know that one of the comparatively few nuggets of praise which fell from his lips was describing the Leave Alliance's Flexcit plan as follows:

"the most thoughtful sceptic attempts to map an exit route – embodied, I think, in a lengthy tome called Flexcit, which is a genuine, serious attempt at least to grapple with what insider experts knew were inordinately complex issues."

He explains why the EU does not take the possibility of Britain leaving without a deal seriously, but adds that they seriously underestimate the danger of it happening by accident:

Here are another couple of extracts.


"There is therefore nothing more vicious in British politics right now – and that is really quite a high bar, sadly – than the attacks by the People’s Vote supporters on the proposed Norway + option. Or the assaults by the European Research Group Right on anyone in their Party who might countenance supporting a permanent Customs Union. 

We have thus reached the point in what I have previously described as the Brexit Revolution when it is essential for both the revolutionaries and the counter-revolutionaries to extirpate any “compromiser”. 

That is a pretty common feature of revolutionary politics. It is just that the UK is not very used to revolutionary politics, in which polarisation progressively narrows the space for compromise, and indeed compromise, always a fairly dirty word in UK politics, becomes a term of abuse. 

The revolutionaries declare that every version of Brexit bar their own is not truly Brexit. The People’s Voters declare every soft Brexit version playing on variants of either a Customs Union or a Common Market without the political integration, is an unacceptable compromise, and that only reversal of the referendum result will do. 

We are left with the bizarre spectacle of Brexiteers, many of whom used to argue that exiting to Norwegian or Swiss style destinations would be a vast improvement on remaining in the EU, because these were vibrant Parliamentary democracies whose peoples had bravely spurned European political integration in favour of free trading relationships from outside, arguing that if the U.K. now “escaped” only to such a destination, it would be a terrible betrayal."

"Now, with the road running out, and under the pressure of simply having to specify where one wants to end, and how to get there, the option of “WTO only” – which all serious leave thinkers and politicians had themselves disparaged before the referendum – has now emerged, in various guises, as the preferred option of the hard Brexiteers. As one astute commentator, who voted leave, put it rather superbly this weekend, it is the “I have no solutions and can’t be arsed to think” option. In all honesty, though now it’s a gross dereliction of responsibility and a huge failure of leadership, under cover of increasingly empty demagogic rhetoric about betrayal."

"The Prime Minister’s proposed deal is now suffering precisely the same fate at the same hands as did continued EU membership in the referendum. It is there: concrete and attackable. Everyone can specify what they do not like about it.

Which is plenty. To both sides, it seemingly looks worse than what we are leaving. You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose, as the saying goes. And the campaigners – on both sides, because this applies in spades to the Remain lobby now too – still vastly prefer to carry on campaigning in poetry than having to govern in prose."

"The proponents of reversing the revolution before the mandate from the referendum has even been fulfilled, are likewise now utterly determined not to compromise. Their guns are therefore trained on all “softer” versions of Brexit, involving close and deep relations with the EU from outside it.

Nothing is worse for them than either the Norway+ proposals or the kind of Association Agreement type models advanced by federalists like Andrew Duff, who accept the fact of Brexit, and want to find pragmatic solutions for a post Brexit relationship which might work. And might keep the relationship deep, amicable and robust.

Because they think that if they can eliminate all softer Brexit options from the field, they would face a straight fight with the Prime Minister’s deal which the avid Brexiteers will have helped them discredit and demolish.

But this means that if they do not succeed in stopping Brexit via a new referendum, they will have spent much of the last year attacking the type of post Brexit relationship which they will then want to advocate as the post exit trade negotiations get under way. Unless the only option they can support after exit is a campaign for immediate re-accession to the EU, using Article 49. In which case, we are seeing the mirror image of the Brexiteers’ strategy pre referendum: a rather masochistic hope that things go as badly as possible.

But I fear I also see in the incipient campaign to stay in “a reformed Europe” many of the British exceptionalist delusions which have run through pro EU circles since at least Maastricht. The key reason David Cameron shifted over time from a Bloomberg vision of pan EU reform and flexibility to a narrower focus on entrenching key bits of a sui generis British deal was, as he once put it to me: “most of these people (his fellow leaders) don’t really agree with me on much of that”.

With the highly ironic – in today’s circumstances – exception of trade liberalisation, on which actually they largely did agree with him, and are much more liberal than the US Establishment, that was largely right."

I strongly recommend reading the whole lecture which you can find here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Quote of the day 24th July 2020