The EndGame approaches

It’s the endgame moment for the BREXIT farce…with the British parliament totally deadlocked on the PM’s strategy (voted down last week by 230 votes) - and the only alternatives appearing to be

-       (i) the UK’s ignominious and chaotic exit - with “no-deal” - in 2 months;

-       (ii) a second referendum (impossible to organize in time); or 

-       (iii) a postponement for up to a year of the withdrawal (difficult for EU to accept - not least for its complication of the May Euro-elections).

Started the day trying to read all four of the lectures delivered by Ivor Rogers – our Ambassador to the EU until his sacking/resignation..….His first (October 2017) lecture set out the factors which led the country to the referendum of June 2016 – reminding us of the eurozone crisis of 2011 which had led to the UK’s isolation…The second lecture (May 2018) explored the technical options then facing the country. But it was his Nine Lessons which, in December, made the real impact.

And he has now followed up with Brexit – where is it going to take the UK?

I like the idea of such a series from someone who was at the heart of European negotiations for some years – particularly when it tries to suggest lessons for our political masters. But, somehow, he loses me…

- Perhaps it’s the lecture format……not as concise as the more formal written text?

- Perhaps it’s the complexity of the mental processes involved in the endless negotiations – where nothing is real except the computing of the perceptions of those involved?

- Perhaps it’s the absence in his lectures of references to (at least the more technical of) the commentariat – which I seem to need to test if not “legitimate arguments?

Whatever it was, I soon drifted into a more gripping podcast on “the crisis of globalization” by Mark Blyth – whose analysis, in turn, led me on to Chris Bickerton (author of a recent Citizen’s Guide to the EU) who actually manages to make analysis of the architecture of EU member states clear and interesting.

Bickerfield has written more journalistically on this in the radical Brave New Europe website and indeed wrote a little book in November 2017 supporting the case for Brexit - A Brexit proposal; and has been pinpointing the structural weakness of the EU for some years eg The new intergovernmentalism – European integration in the post-Maastricht period (2014) 

as the European states have evolved from nation-states to member states, democratic representation at the national level has been squeezed out, leaving only populist protest and technocratic responses by national executives acting in concert at the European level…… Since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992,

European integration has moved forward in leaps and bounds. In addition to monetary union, the EU has also expanded into many new policyareas: foreign policy, police and border issues, justice, social policy and employment policy. However, this expansion has not come with the transfer of powers from national governments to European institutions.But, over the same period, key EU institutions, like the Commission, have seen their powers reduced.

We have therefore seen a form of integration without supranationalism, which can be explained by the fact that the EU is a union of member states rather than a supranational state of its own.
 Member state governments are the leading agents of integration, not the traditional supranational institutions like the Commission and the Court./……The internal organizational arrangements of “member states” have a number of characteristics. One is the dominance of the executive. Another is the proliferation of institutions to which powers are delegated by central government. A third is the reduction of power of the “mediating institutions” such as political parties between the state and domestic society.

The executive dominance comes from the fact that policymaking is being undertaken less by parliaments as legislators and more by executives as negotiators. International agreements tend to empower executives in so far as they conduct the negotiations, set the terms for them, and are able to select which domestic interests they want to represent and which to leave aside ( …… The result of this shift from nation-state to member state, and the effect on the way state power is constituted, is that political life at the national level is no longer based on a combination of democratic contestation and governmental effectiveness. Political parties have been, since the beginning of the 20th century at least, the main vehicles within European democracies for the reconciliation of the competing demands of representation and responsible government (see Peter Mair’s “Ruling the Void” 2009).

Member statehood, based as it is on a thinning of the state-society relationship to the point that mediating bodies, like political parties, are increasingly marginalized, generates a kind of political life that is unable to combine representation with responsibility. Instead, the two have become uncoupled and appear as opposites that challenge one another: populism, on the one hand, and technocracy, on the other. It is the people versus the elites, rather than competing representations of the popular good and its realization through concrete sets of policies.

Further Reading

Brexit and the British Growth Model – toward a new social settlement; Chris Bickerton et al (Policy Exchange 2018)

The new intergovernmentalism – European integration in the post-Maastricht period; C Bickerton, D Dodson and U Puetter (2014)

Brexit and Beyond (UCL 2018)

The European Union and the End of Politics; James Heartfield (2013)

Judicial Power and the Left – notes on a sceptical tradition (Policy Exchange 2017)

Spelling out the Lessons

If you try to follow Brexit closely, you are soon overwhelmed with the details. Much therefore as I enjoy Richard North’s EUReferendum daily blog, I prefer the weekly overview I get from –

- The Brexit Blog – a sane voice of sense from an organisational sociologist of all people!!

- LSE Brexit

- The Guardian’s Brexit

When I googled “Brexit blogs”, I got a very right-wing list of blogs – and no mention of Chris Grey’s highly esteemed Brexit Blog…..

I tantalised my readers yesterday with the mention of the “Nine Lessons” drawn by one individual who has, for many years, been in an ideal position to observe those at the heart of Brexit -

Ivor Rogers was not quite your typical civil servant since he spent 2006-12 working in the private sector – but he had been an EU Commissioner (Leon Brittan)’s Chief of Staff in Brussels for a couple of years before serving under Gordon Brown at the Treasury and was then Tony Blair’s chief adviser for 3 years.

What he brings to the analysis is a rare negotiator’s insight about the Realpolitik involved….Hardly surprising therefore that he takes no hostages when given the chance at last to tell his side of the story!

Ivor Roger’s Nine Lessons	The “bottom line”
1. Brexit means Brexit	All sides of the argument need to start understanding how being a “third country” puts the UK in a completely different role from that it has enjoyed for the past 45 years. “And the most naïve of all on this remain the Brexiteers who fantasise about a style of negotiation which is only open to members of the club. The glorious, sweaty, fudge-filled Brussels denouements are gone. The Prime Minister is not in a room negotiating with the 27. That’s not how the exit game or the trade negotiation works, or was ever going to. We are a soon-to-be third country and an opponent and rival, not just a partner, now. This is what Brexit advocates argued for. It is time to accept the consequence”
2. Other people have sovereignty too.	“If you think that the pooling of sovereignty has gone well beyond the technical regulatory domain into huge areas of public life are intolerable for democratic legitimacy and accountability, that is a more than honourable position. But others who have chosen to pool their sovereignty in ways and to extents which make you feel uncomfortable with the whole direction of the project, have done so because they believe pooling ENHANCES their sovereignty - in the sense of adding to their “power of agency” in a world order in which modestly sized nation states have relatively little say, rather than diminishing it. Brexit advocates may think this is fundamental historical error, and has led to overreach by the questionably accountable supranational institutions of their club. They may think that it leads to legislation, opaquely agreed by often unknown legislators, which unduly favours heavyweight incumbent lobbyists. Fine. There is some justice in plenty of this critique. Then leave the club. But you cannot, in the act of leaving it, expect the club fundamentally to redesign its founding principles to suit you and to share its sovereignty with you when it still suits you, and to dilute their agency in so doing. It simply is not going to. And both HMG and Brexit advocates outside it seem constantly to find this frustrating, vexatious and some kind of indication of EU ill will”.
3. Brexit is a process not an event. And the EU, while strategically myopic, is formidably good at process against negotiating opponents. We have to be equally so, or we will get hammered. Repeatedly.	“One cannot seriously simultaneously advance the arguments that the EU has morphed away from the common market we joined, and got into virtually every nook and cranny of U.K. life, eroding sovereignty across whole tracts of the economy, internal and external security, AND that we can extricate ourselves from all that in a trice, recapture our sovereignty and rebuild the capability of the U.K. state to govern and regulate itself in vast areas where it had surrendered sovereignty over the previous 45 years. The people saying 3 years ago that you could were simply not serious. And they have proven it. They also had not the slightest fag packet plan on what they were going to try and do and in which order….. there could never, on the part of the remaining Member States, be the appetite to have TWO tortuous negotiations with the U.K. – one to deliver a few years of a transition/bridging deal, the other to agree the end state after exit. One such negotiation is enough for everyone. So transitional arrangements were always going to be “off the shelf”. When the first set of so-called Guidelines emerged from the EU in April 2017,, it was hard to get anyone in the UK to read them. We were, as usual, preoccupied more with the noises from the noisy but largely irrelevant in Westminster, while the real work was being done on the other side of the Channel To take just one technical example, though it rapidly develops a national security as well as an economic dimension, cross border data flows are completely central to free trade and prosperity - not that you would know it from listening to our current trade debate, which remains bizarrely obsessed with tariffs which, outside agriculture, have become a very modest element in the real barriers to cross border trade. The EU here is a global player - a global rule maker – able and willing effectively to impose its values, rules and standards extraterritorially”.
4. it is not possible or democratic to argue that only one Brexit destination is true, legitimate and represents the revealed “Will of the People”	An argument you hear commonly is - “we only ever joined a Common Market, but it’s turned into something very different and no-one in authority down in London ever asked us whether that is what we wanted”   “One can’t now suddenly start denouncing such people as Quisling closet remainers who do not subscribe to the “only true path” Brexit. Let alone insist on public self-criticism from several senior politicians on the Right who themselves, within the last few years, have publicly espoused these views, and praised the Norwegian and Swiss models, the health of their democracies and their prosperity. In an earlier lecture, I described Brexitism as a revolutionary phenomenon, which radicalised as time went on and was now devouring its own children. This current phase feels ever more like Maoists seeking to crush Rightist deviationists than it does British Conservatism”. “My real objection is to the style of argument espoused both by the pro “no deal” Right and by Downing Street which says that no other model but their own is a potentially legitimate interpretation of the Will of the People – which evidently only they can properly discern. “I fully accept that control of borders – albeit with much confusion about the bit we already have control over, but year after year fail, under this Government, to achieve any control of - was a central referendum issue. But don’t argue it’s the only feasible Brexit. Or that it’s an economically rational one. Of course the EU side will now back the Prime Minister in saying it is. They have done a great deal for themselves and they want it to stick. Who can blame them?”
5. If WTO terms or existing EU preferential deals are not good enough for the UK in major third country markets, they can’t be good enough for trade with our largest market.	“You cannot simultaneously argue that it is imperative we get out of the EU in order that we can strike preferential trade deals with large parts of the rest of the world, because the existing terms on which we trade with the rest of the world are intolerable. …. AND also argue that …. it is perfectly fine to leave a deep free trade agreement with easily our largest export and import market for the next generation, and trade on WTO terms because that is how we and others trade with everyone else…” “Market access into the EU WILL worsen, whatever post exit deal we eventually strike. And the quantum by which our trade flows with the EU will diminish – and that impacts immediately – will outweigh the economic impact of greater market opening which we have to aim to achieve over time in other markets, where the impact will not be immediate but incremental”
6. If the UK with reverts to WTO terms or to a standard free trade deal with the EU, it will have a huge negative impact on its service sector.	This the section I found most difficult to understand – partly because several different points are jostling with one another “The U.K. currently has a sizeable trade surplus with the EU in services, whereas in manufactured goods we have a huge deficit and yet it appears that “UK services’ industries needs have been sacrificed to the primary goal of ending free movement” “”For politicians, goods trade and tariffs are more easily understood than services. They rarely grasp the extent to which goods and services are bundled together and indissociable. They even more rarely grasp how incredibly tough it is to deliver freer cross border trade in services – which, by definition, gets you deep into domestic sovereignty questions in a way which makes removing tariff barriers look straightforward. “We are dealing with a political generation which has no serious experience of bad times and is frankly cavalier about precipitating events they could not then control, but feel they might exploit. Nothing is more redolent of the pre First World War era, when very few believed that a very long period of European peace and equilibrium could be shattered in months”.
7. Beware all supposed deals bearing “pluses”.	This refers to the recent emergence of options such as “Canada Plus” (which has the disadvantage of being favoured at the time of writing by idiot Boris) and “Norway Plus”. This detailed explanation of  “Canada Plus” soon had my eyes glazing over…., “The “pluses” merely signify that all deficiencies in the named deal will miraculously disappear when we Brits come to negotiate our own version of it. As the scale of the humiliation they think the Prime Minister’s proposed deal delivers started, far too late, to dawn on politicians who had thought Brexit was a cakewalk - with the emphasis on cake – we have seen a proliferation of mostly half-baked cake alternatives. They all carry at least one plus. Canada has acquired several. Besides “Canada +++” or SuperCanada, as it was termed by the former Foreign Secretary, we have Norway +, which used to be “NorwaythenCanada” then became “Norwayfornow” and then became “Norway + forever”. And now even “No deal +”, which also makes appearances as managed no deal” and “no deal mini deals”. What is depressing about the nomenclature is the sheer dishonesty. The pluses are inserted to enable one to say that one is well aware of why existing FTA x or y or Economic Area deal a or b does not really work as aB rexit destination, but that with the additions you are proposing, the template is complete”.
8. you cannot conduct such a huge negotiation as untransparently as the U.K. has. And in the end, it does you no good to try.	“At virtually every stage in this negotiation, the EU side has deployed transparency, whether on its position papers, its graphic presentations of its take on viable options and parameters, its “no deal” notices to the private sector to dictate the terms of the debate and shape the outcome. A secretive, opaque Government, hampered of course by being permanently divided against itself and therefore largely unable to articulate any agreed, coherent position, has floundered in its wake. “It is a rather unusual experience for the EU – always portrayed as a bunch of wildly out of touch technocrats producing turgid jargon-ridden Eurocrat prose up against “genuine” politicians who speak “human” – to win propaganda battles. Let alone win them this easily”
9. real honesty with the public is the best policy if we are to get to the other side of Brexit with a reasonably unified country and a healthy democracy and economy.	“We need a radically different method and style if the country is to heal and unify behind some proposed destination. And that requires leadership which is far more honest in setting out the fundamental choices still ahead, the difficult trade offs between sovereignty and national control and keeping market access for our goods and services in our biggest market, and which sets out to build at least some viable consensus.”

The Nine Lessons of Brexit

Anyone making an honest effort to explain what’s going on in the UK to a foreign audience faces a major dilemma - namely that we know either too much …. or too little…Let me explain…..
If you’re one of the few who really understands the ins and outs of the arguments and issues of Brexit over the past 3-4 years, you will effectively have become an “expert” and therefore (as Steven Pinker has so eloquently explained) unable to convey your message clearly to your audience – whether in writing or speech.
You will suffer from what is called “the curse of knowledge” - unable to put yourself in the shoes of the average person who has difficulty understanding jargon such as “single market”, “WTO rules”, “Red lines” or “the backstop”.

If, on the other hand, you know very little, then you shouldn’t be trying to explain things to other people!

Most British journalists fall between these 2 extremes – they know enough to be able to pretend they know more than they do. Don’t take my word for it – just read the website of Richard North, one of the original Brexiteers.

It was his site that alerted me to the speech earlier this week by one of the few real experts on Brexit – our erstwhile Ambassador to the EU from 2013-2017, Sir Ivan Rogers. Rogers had just been knighted when he wrote a memo, subsequently leaked, warning that a settlement with the EU could take as long as ten years to achieve….Such unpalatable advice was not acceptable to the government and he chose to resign when it got out….

Since then his speeches (and appearances before parliamentary Select Committees) have proved to be a thorn in the government’s side.

Earlier this year Ivor Rogers gave a lecture at Cambridge University entitled Brexit as Revolution which he has now capped with a lecture entitled Nine Lessons. It’s 22 pages long and my initial reactions were very positive – this, I felt, is that rare expert who can actually put himself in the shoes of the average citizen and help us understand…Unfortunately he couldn’t sustain this focus and….. about half way through…I fell by the wayside or – as we say - “he lost me”..

But I will persevere – and now try once more this technique of translating arguments into language I can understand – but this will take the rest of the day….So I will leave you for the moment with the 9 arguments as he expressed them……The Guardian nicely summarised the nine lessons here

Brexit’s Nine Lessons

1. Brexit means Brexit

2. Other people have sovereignty too. And they too may choose to “take back control” of things you would rather they didn’t.

3. Brexit is a process not an event. And the EU, while strategically myopic, is formidably good at process against negotiating opponents. We have to be equally so, or we will get hammered. Repeatedly.

4. it is not possible or democratic to argue that only one Brexit destination is true, legitimate and represents the revealed “Will of the People” and that all other potential destinations outside the EU are “Brexit in Name Only”.

5. If WTO terms or existing EU preferential deals are not good enough for the UK in major third country markets, they can’t be good enough for trade with our largest market.

6. the huge problem for the UK with either reversion to WTO terms or with a standard free trade deal with the EU is in services.

7. Beware all supposed deals bearing “pluses”.

8. you cannot, and should not want to, conduct such a huge negotiation as untransparently as the U.K. has. And in the end, it does you no good to try.

9. real honesty with the public is the best - the only – policy if we are to get to the other side of Brexit with a healthy democracy, a reasonably unified country and a healthy economy.

By the way, if you;re read this far you might well want to pose the question of where I lie in what might be called the "spectrum of ignorance". That's what they call a "leading question" to which I'm happy to answer that I am neither an expert nor totally ignorant.......which just goes to show...how tricky dilemmas are!

Other References
The Causes and Cures of Brexit (Compass 2018)

 Gordon Brown Brexit speech Nov 2018

December 2018 Brexit Select Committee Report on The Withdrawal Agreement

Treasury Select Committee’s Report on The UK’s economic relationship with the EU

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/08/age-lacks-gravitas-brexit-coverage

http://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-brexit-ultras-could-have.html
Ivor Roger's previous two Brexit speeches

https://policyscotland.gla.ac.uk/blog-sir-ivan-rogers-speech-text-in-full/ May 2018

https://policyscotland.gla.ac.uk/blog-sir-ivan-rogers-brexit-speech-text-in-full-october-2017/ Oct 2017