Why is the UK media coverage of Brexit so superficial?

The recent post about Brexit was a long one simply because most of the British commentary about the issue is so superficial – tending to focus on personalities rather than issues. It was left to the “Open Democracy” website to offer the sort of analysis we need - with this article which applies Dani Rodrik’s impossibility trilemma to the Brexit issue. This states that democracy, national sovereignty and cross border economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.

In the context of Brexit, it means that we can do any two of the following:

a) Retain the benefits of economic integration that come via membership of the EU’s single market and customs union;

b) Reclaim national sovereignty by returning powers to the British parliament that currently lie with the European institutions;

c) Uphold democratic principles by ensuring that we have a say over all the laws we are subjected to.

Theresa May’s plan partially achieves a) and b), while sacrificing c). Her strategy has been to retain some of the benefits of economic integration to avoid the damage resulting from a cliff edge, while reclaiming national sovereignty over certain key areas (immigration, agriculture, fisheries etc). 

The Labour Party’s position has become clearer over time. In a speech delivered earlier this year, Jeremy Corbyn stated that Labour’s priorities were as follows:

– Negotiate a deal that gives full “tariff-free access” to the single market;

– Negotiate a new customs union with the EU, while ensuring that the UK has a say in future trade deals;

– Not accept any situation where the UK is subject to all EU rules and EU law, yet has no say in making those laws;

– Negotiate protections or exemptions from current rules and directives “where necessary” that push privatisation and public service competition or restrict the government’s ability to intervene to support domestic industry.

The first two of these seek to keep the benefits of economic integration that come via the single market and customs union. The third is about maintaining democracy, while the fourth is about reclaiming national sovereignty. Labour is trying to have all three ends served at once. This is an internally contradictory position that falls foul of the Brexit trilemma, meaning that trade-offs will likely have to be made

I’ll continue the analysis in a minute - but first let me give you a taste of how the serious British media has been covering the issue. Andrew Rawnsley is one of the country’s most respected political journalists and concludes his weekly overview of what has been perhaps the most dramatic week of the past two years in this style

The risks to Britain are enormous and yet Britons have no more faith in the official opposition than they do in a government falling apart before the country’s eyes. In the midst of the worst period for the Conservative party since the ERM crisis, the poll tax, Suez, the Corn Laws or any other precedent of your choice, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour has become less popular and the leader’s personal ratings are even more negative than those of the prime minister.

Labour is getting a similar warning from the private polling that the party commissions. However lustily they may demand a general election when in front of a live microphone, some members of the shadow cabinet are muttering privately that they are not at all eager to go to the country for fear that their party will get a verdict from the voters that it will not like.

The endless ducking and diving about when they might call a no-confidence vote against the government makes Labour look like opportunists desperately hoping to luck into office on the back of Brexit turmoil rather than a party with the national interest at heart. You can’t keep demanding that the Tories “make way” for Labour, the daily mantra of Mr Corbyn and his drones, and then never trigger the only mechanism for making that happen.

At the heart of it is Labour’s continuing refusal to come clean about whether it will or will not support another referendum. What has always smelled of unprincipled tactical prevarication now reeks of a refusal to be honest with the electorate.

Failed by both its major parties, the biggest loser of all is Brexit-broken Britain. Our country is careening towards disaster. All of its political institutions know this. None of them seems capable of arresting it. They continue to play their games of charades as we lurch towards the abyss.

Now this is a very concise and fair assessment - but what it fails to offer is any analysis of the reasons why the politicians are behaving in such an apparently childish way….For this we have to go to sources which the public rarely access – the Think Tanks - but one which few Brits would be aware of - The Dahrendorf Forum. There I found (on its Publications List) a fascinating paper “ Cultures of Negotiation – explaining Britain’s hard bargaining in the Brexit negotiations” which, plausibly, points to three explanatory factors for the embarrassing mess the UK has made of these negotiations –
- the Conservative “ideology of statecraft”,
- the adversarial political culture of the UK
- its “weak socialisation into European structures

But revenons aux moutons – ie to the rare analysis the Open Democracy article offers of the options the British parliamentarians currently have at their disposal -

Some MPs have backed a so-called ‘Norway plus’ option, which would see the UK remaining in the European Economic Area (EEA) and joining a customs union with the EU. However, with the exception of a car crash disorderly Brexit, this represents the worst of all worlds – sacrificing both democracy and national sovereignty in order to maintain the benefits of economic integration with the EU. It amounts to “all pay, no say” – accepting all EU laws and regulations while sacrificing any democratic say over them, while also contributing to EU budgets.

It is hard to imagine a world where our politicians and electorate – who voted for Brexit in order to “take back control” – would stomach such an outcome. In any case, Norwegian leaders have made it clear that they would oppose Britain’s application to join such an arrangement.

This leaves two possible options which, on the face of it at least, do not involve a significant loss of democracy and sovereignty.

Firstly, Labour could favour a harder Brexit which seeks to reclaim national sovereignty and take back control of our rules and laws, while sacrificing economic integration with the EU – and incurring whatever economic cost that might carry (hereafter referred to as the ‘Lexit’ option). This effectively combines options b) and c) in the list above, while sacrificing a).

Secondly, Labour could favour a second referendum and campaign to remain in the EU, and seek to transform it from within – and incur whatever political cost this might carry (hereafter referred to as the ‘Remain’ option). This effectively combines options a) and c) in the list above, while sacrificing b).

The case for Lexit relies heavily on four key assumptions.

-        that EU membership places significant constraints on key levers of domestic policy that would prevent a left-wing government from implementing its agenda.

-       that these constraints can only be escaped by leaving the EU (i.e. reform within the EU is impossible).

-       that once outside the EU, the UK will be able to exert sovereignty over these areas of policy as an independent country.

-       that the benefits of this will more than offset the economic and political costs of leaving the EU. In the following sections, each of these will be examined in turn.

This post is long enough – for the detailed assessment of the extent to which these assumptions can be sustained read Labour’s Brexit Trilemma for yourself!

Further Reading

- EUReferendum daily blog  A critical daily blog from someone who long argued for Brexit - but also drawn attention to the triviality of the UK press see http://eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=87090

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

- LSE Brexit – a good selection of items

- The Guardian’s Brexit - ditto

The Causes and Cures of Brexit (Compass 2018)

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/12/17/let-the-people-take-back-control-of-brexit - an important article for anyone imagining that a second referendum will solve anything.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/12/12/a-way-out-of-the-brexit-chaos-parliament-may-have-to-ask-the-people-to-decide/

http://fedtrust.co.uk/brexit-a-national-government-or-no-deal/

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/18/brexit-big-decision-didnt-even-think-about-eurozone-studies

https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/

Hacks? Critics? Writers?What's in a Name?

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time these past few weeks going over the year’s posts (60) to try to give them a little bit more “shape” ie coherence. It was probably this post back in June which planted the idea of the need for some editing of my posts. For whatever reason, there does seem to have been more of a pattern to my writing this year..  The interest in organisational reform didn’t entirely peter out – but morphed into a larger concern about systems of power and the State..

I will, in a few days, be uploading this year’s collection of posts which also shows that an important thread running through the year has been the need for writing which – as one post put it - 

jolts me – not for its own sake but to help first identify minds which look at the world in original ways but which also understand that clear language is an essential tool for such originality…Recently deceased essayist Tom Wolfe was a favourite of mine ever since I first read his Mau Mauing the flak catchers in 1970 but the “creative writing” courses which have contaminated journalism in the past few decades have made me suspicious of even good journalists these days. James Meek remains an exception for his ability to reduce economic complexities to 5 or 10 thousand word essays – ditto Jonathan Meades for his forensic analyses of cultural issues.

But it was Arthur Koestler who first stunned me (in my late teens) with memorable writing – hardly surprising given his amazing background. Only Victor Serge could rival the enormity of the events which shaped him. How can those who have known only a quiet bourgeois English life possibly give us insights into other worlds? And yet a few writers manage to do it.

But somehow, academic specialists are rarely able to produce prose which grips…Is it the unrealistic restriction of the scope of their inquiries vision which causes the deadness of their prose – or perhaps the ultra security of their institutional base??

It’s this question which led me to offer this matrix of good journalistic writers – dividing them according to their focus on people, ideas, events and places. This made me realise, in turn, the fine line there is between such categories as journalist, novelist and travel writer. Or perhaps the distinction is, more properly, that between generalists and specialists – with the latter including not only travel writers but those who focus on books, films, drama and art (designated "critics") and sports (of each variety – including politics).  And the former covering essentially those we refer to, derogatively, as “hacks” – since what they do is to hack out “news” from the public relations handouts they receive

I accept that the focus of my table on the former type of writer is as a result somewhat elitist....

I wanted to include examples from countries beyond the UK and managed 20 – whose nationalities are clearly designated in the table. I’ve tried googling (in French and in German) to try to get a sense of who might be the equivalent European journalists but the google curse of neophilia means that only references to younger names are given….

Good “Journalistic” writers – by focus, base and nationality

Source of income	People	Ideas	Events	Places	Mixed genres
freelance	Masha Gessen (RU) Biographers	Peter Watson Naomi Klein (Can)	Victor Serge (Be) Kenneth Roy	John Ardagh Dervla Murphy Jan Morris Neal Ascherson Philip Marsden Giles Milton	George Orwell Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Ger) Francis Wheen Arundati Roy (India) Joan Didion  US Tariq Ali (Pak/UK)
Academia	Biographers	Mark Greif USA Mark Lilla USA Perry Anderson USA	Historians Political scientists Economists	Geographers Anthropologists Sociologists	Raymond Aron (France) Michael Pollan USA
Journal newspaper television	Oriana Fallaci (It) Clive James	Francois Bondy (Sw) Claude Roy (Fr) Chris Hitchens Martin Jacques Paul Mason George Monbiot Duncan Campbell Owen Jones Adam Curtis	Arthur Koestler Vasily Grossman (Ru) Seb Haffner (Ger) Joseph Roth (Ger) Rudolf Augstein (Ger) Paul Foot Patrick Cockburn Simon Jenkins	Luigi Barzini (It) Andrew Sampson Svetlana Alexievich (Belarussia) Robert Kaplan (US) John Hooper John Pilger Robert Fisk Tobias Jones	Anthony Lane James Meek Andrew O Hagen
Think Tank		David Goodhart Susan George (US)

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.”