Author Archive: graham

Now that we are several months into the post-Brexit world, with all manner of outcomes, mostly negative, clearly visible and documented, it is interesting to note the response of many Brexit supporters.

A classic line, being used in many variable ways, is “this is not the Brexit that I/we voted for”. Here is fisherman Chris Vinnicombe, interviewed on TV, uttering a classic version. 

His exact words were “Most fisherman, me included voted for Brexit but we didn’t vote for this”.

Well, no, they didn’t vote for “this” (the actual outcome). There is a very simple reason for that. There was no outcome specified on the EU Referendum ballot paper. Here is the exact text of the June 2016 referendum ballot:

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

with the responses to the question to be (to be marked with a single (X)):

Remain a member of the European Union
Leave the European Union

So, Chris and his fellow fishermen were presented with a binary Yes or No question to answer. There was no information, not even a hint, as to what the final outcome would be if they voted Leave.

When anybody who voted for Brexit says “I didn’t vote for this”, the correct answer is “no, you voted for nothing except to Leave. Everything else was, and still is, in your imagination”.

Of course, there were plenty of politicians, charlatans and bullshitters who were only too willing to predict the outcome if the UK voted Leave. They seemed to think it would be easy. The messaging from the Leave supporters was charmingly simple: leave it to us and we will negotiate an excellent Brexit which will make you all very happy.

We know how that has turned out. After prematurely triggering Article 50, internal strife over what exactly the UK should try to negotiate resulted in 3 years of disputes, 2 General Elections and, after months of posturing dickery by the UK, in the negotiation of what has now turned out to be an alarmingly deficient trade deal with the EU.

When disappointed Brexit supporters say “this is not the Brexit I voted for”, my response may depend on how charitable or snarky I am feeling.

The snarky response would be “you never voted for any Brexit. You just voted to leave. So how you can say that is beyond illogical”.

The more polite response, which is more akin to playing a fish on a line (haha) is to politely inquire “so which detail Brexit did you think you voted for?”

You can expect that, most of the time, this will result in hemming and hawing, with a weird list of bits-and-pieces cockamamie ideas involving “sovereignty”, “fishing”, “freedom” and other slogans with no useful content. Like any cockamamie idea based on regressive ideology, slogans played a major part in how Brexit was promoted as a good thing. Sometimes people will be more detailed.

The response to the response is then going to be “and what evidence did you have that the government intended to negotiate that sort of Brexit, or was that just your hope?” That will probably result in another long silence.

As you can guess, this will be an uncomfortable conversation, but that is not all the fault of the Brexit voters. The real issue is that there never was a Brexit strategy. Nobody in government seriously expected that Leave would win, so when that was the result, the government had no ready answer to the obvious question “what would Brexit look like?”.

The government certainly couldn’t expect to get any useful input from Leave voters. When your reasons for leaving the EU consist of slogans mixed with bullshit anecdotes, that is not a credible starting point for any thought processes. Any chance of getting input from Remain supporters was squandered with the juvenile campaign against Remainers, with its use of school playground sloganeering, triumphalist dickery, and pseudo-patriotic demands that Remain supporters “shut up”.

So, after June 2016, we had a shocked government with no strategy for how to negotiate Brexit, umpteen million Leave supporters, all with their own individual sets of hopes, dreams (and in some cases, cockamamie fantasies) about what Brexit would be, and almost the same number of Remain supporters sitting off to one side, alienated and pissed off.

This was always going to end badly. If Brexit had been a project, it would never have passed even a preliminary review. No strategy, no vision, no plan, millions of competing stakeholders…shred the paper and let’s forget about this damn stupid idea.

So when Brexit supporters say “this is not what I voted for”, the tough question has to be “so what did you think you voted for in June 2016, and what made you think that there was any chance of that actually happening?”

Because, when the history of Brexit is written, probably after I am gone, the conclusion is going to be that Brexit was a terrible decision made by an uninformed electorate that had been fed BS by all sides for decades about what the EU was and how it operated. Having made a bad decision, the implementation by the UK government was even worse.

Right now, most Brexit supporters would rather live in Denial than come to terms with the results of the decision. Many of them will refuse to own the result, and will continue to blame everybody and everything in sight. Because ultimately, deflection is more comfortable than accountability.

Unless you just woke up, after the style of the Woody Allen movie Sleeper, or you just arrived from another planet, you will probably have seen the latest round in the very-public public relations battle being waged between Prince Harry and his wife, and what seems, superficially, to be the whole of the rest of the British Royal Family.

The latest round in the battle occurred when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle gave an interview to Oprah Winfrey, THE doyen of UK chat show interviewers. During the interview, they listed a number of events that have happened, and itemized a collection of complaints against the Royal Family.

Predictably (after all, why else would they have given the interview, and why else would it have been broadcast?) the content of the interview has aroused strong reactions, of all types.

The UK tabloids, who have a Faustian bargain with the Royal Family (more of that in a minute) have, predictably, chosen to side with the UK end of the family, and paint Harry and Meghan as hypocritical back-stabbers.

I have read numerous reactions online. My initial conclusion is that how you view the interview depends to a large extent on how you view families and how you think they should operate.

I have deep ambivalence about families. They are great when they function well, but, as most of us know, there is nothing as messy and mentally lethal as a family rupture. When people in families fall out, it is often not only terminal, but all manner of primitive emotions are activated, and then family members are unable to stop themselves from doing and saying Dumb Stuff. Like divorces, family ruptures can trigger appallingly bad behavior.

The rupture in the Royal Family between Harry and his sibling, and what seems (superficially) like the whole of the rest of the family, has clear roots and causes. Harry’s mother Princess Diana was badly served by the Royal Family as her marriage to Prince Charles disintegrated, and, if truth be known, it was almost certainly a form of arranged marriage, with Charles apparently wanting to marry Camilla Parker-Bowles, but being told that she had “a history” (she was married, with a string of affairs already), and therefore being steered towards marrying a chaste virgin who would, presumably, be content to do The Royal Thing and be obedient, and produce the required heir to the throne. We know most of the rest. Diana soon became dissatisfied with her obedient nodding-dog life, and began to assert herself. This did not play well with the “Do Your Duty” mindset.

Ultimately, Diana and Charles were divorced, and Charles is now back with Camilla Parker-Bowles, which is probably who he should have been married to all along. Diana, meanwhile, had ended up in an invidious position, as the focus of tabloid curiosity, being followed everywhere, her every move reported on with prurient glee by the UK tabloids and gossip magazines. We know how her life ended, in the crash in Paris. What was not so obvious was that her driver at the time was trying to shake off paparazzi in following cars, which might have had something to do with the car crashing on what is a dangerous stretch of road. I have driven that exact road, and it is not a good road to drive, especially at night.

Harry, not in line to inherit the throne, but being smart, would have known all about the “nothing to do” syndrome that infects lesser royals, which has in the past led to feckless male royals engaging in all manner of scandalous behavior. He certainly knew all about how corrosive tabloid attention was to his mother. So while William could bask in the security of knowing that one day he will be King, Harry had to build a purposeful life. That included joining the army, rising to the rank of Captain and doing 2 combat tours. It also led him to chafe against many of the restrictions that his public royal position imposed.

One thing that seems to be almost universal among people who have met Harry in person is that they like him. To them, he is genuine, thoughtful and personable, with no airs and graces. That would have put him into a different orbit than most of the other royals immediately. Worthy though Prince Charles may be, struggling himself to lead a useful life while his mother continues to rule, nobody has ever described him the same way that people who meet Harry describe him.

The Royal Family is all about duty, a crushing sense of obligation and tradition that means that Prince Charles, for example, has had no agency in most of his life. It was mapped out for him before he was born. Little wonder that the history of the Royal Family in England is replete with affairs, juvenile behavior and a fair few scandals that have mostly been kept hidden from public view. If the rest of your life is mapped out, drinking and shagging suddenly look a lot more exciting.

The new generation of royal family members are increasingly marrying commoners. This is because of a simple reality; there are fewer and fewer eligible aristocratic or royal partners out there. At one time, the European royal families married amongst each other almost as a rule. That has more or less ended.

We also have to remember that what is now called The House Of Windsor is not its original name. It was, in the day of Queen Victoria, the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The Royal Family, on the patriarchal side, was German. King Edward VII and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany were cousins. The family name was changed in a hurry to Windsor in World War I for obvious reasons. The roots of the Royal Family are Prussian-German. This probably contributed to a lot of royal admiration for Adolf Hitler in the run-up to World War II. The obvious liking of King Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor for Hitler in the pre-war years proved so embarrassing that when World War II broke out, the British government had him and his new American wife shipped off to the Bahamas, where he spent the war in the entirely ceremonial post of Governor-General.

One can imagine that when it became clear that Harry wanted to marry Meghan Markle, an American actress, that members of the Royal Family sat there thinking “uh oh, here we go again”. A royal prince marrying an American actress? Alarm!

What is clear is that, just as the Duke of Windsor ended up largely estranged from the rest of the Royal Family after marrying Wallis Simpson, living in Paris for the rest of his life, Harry is now largely estranged from the Royal Family after marrying Meghan Markle. Clearly, being an object of public curiosity 24×7 is not what either of them had in mind, or feel they can tolerate. Harry did not want that mode of operation because of what happened to his mother. Meghan did not want it either. Their move to Canada and then the USA was obviously a “get me out of here” move. Their retirement from being working royal family members was also clearly a refusal to Play The Game. It cost them most of their royal income, and it seems that they are now living off of Harry’s trust fund left to him by his mother.

The legal actions by Meghan against the UK tabloids, which she keeps winning, were also an unmistakeable message to the UK tabloid press that they were not going to control her or Harry, and that she was prepared to wield the stick of libel law against them if they did not behave.

The Royal Family’s relationship with the UK tabloids is a complicated Faustian bargain. At one point, the relationship was deeply antagonistic, with Prince Charles routinely snapping at tabloid reporters and wishing their editors a miserable Christmas, among other quips. However, these days, there is a sort-of-understanding that the bedrock of reflexive support for the Royal Family is largely comprised of tabloid readers. (I think this is true; most people I know in my circles in the UK are agnostic about the Royal Family, and many professional people would not be upset if the Royal Family in its current form was abolished).

The era where the Royal Family enjoyed uncritical public support is long gone. The death of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother broke the link for good, but other aspects of Royal behavior, with the 24×7 intrusive news cycle, have become public knowledge, revealing the soft underbelly of a dysfunctional family crushed by duty and increasingly dominated by people way past State retirement age. The Royal divorce rate is appalling, and the hugely debatable behavior of Prince Andrew has thrown a shadow over the family.

The Royal Family’s reaction has been predictable. In classic stiff-upper-lip UK family mode, they are expecting that everybody should keep quiet in public, and sort things out behind closed doors. The problem with that approach is that the media will dig and dig for anything that can be used to drive public commentary. So now we have the Faustian bargain in place, with the Royal Family leaking snippets to the tabloids to keep them interested, give them stuff to print and speculate on, and also to promulgate the “party line”. There is an entire industry in the UK devoted to royal-watching, generating hundreds of jobs. It is a big business for the media. A beast that must be fed.

The “party line” in this context is that Harry is a naif, captured by an American bitch. It is a classic story line, and in the grand tradition of tabloid journalism, whether it is factual is irrelevant. One of the classic UK tabloid rules is that one should never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Having observed the way in which the UK narrative about their move to the USA was being shaped by the tabloid relationship, I suspect that Harry and Meghan decided that they had to put their side of the story in the public domain. Hence the Oprah interview.

In family management terms, the Oprah interview was never going to have a positive outcome. I am sure that Harry and Meghan knew that, but I suspect that at this point in time, they don’t care enough, given their exile, to let it influence their actions.

Who do I believe? I don’t think that you can believe either side’s version of events and take it at face value. I suspect that selective memory is playing a part in the explanation of events on both sides.

How will all of this play out? To use the old English phrase, buggered if I know. The Royal Family can, if they really want to, just forget all about Harry and continue to manage the brand with the on-deck royals. However, that has its own risks. If other people associated with the late Jeffrey Epstein (perhaps with family names like Maxwell) end up revealing more information about what really happened at parties involving a certain Royal Family member, the Royal Family may suddenly start to wish that they had Harry and Meghan onside instead of in exile. The current generation of Royals are no more publicly exciting than the last generation. With the exception of the Duke of Sussex.

After more stops and starts than I can count, the UK and the EU appear to have agreed the outline of a trade deal.

There is a lot more work to be done. The deal has to be “nodded through” the Council of Ministers, and then voted on by the European Parliament. In the UK, the deal was voted through after half a day (!) of debate. That a treaty of this importance could be voted on that quickly is not a testament to the efficiency of parliament, but a very powerful indication of the way in which the current government has no interest in debate or discussion.

There are 2000+ pages in the draft deal, so anybody who claims to have read it all is probably bullshitting. However, it is clear that on the most contentious issue, fishing rights, both sides (as you would expect) ended up compromising, and the UK and the EU have kicked the can down the road by referring vaguely to “working groups”. This is a classic piece of double-speak for “we couldn’t agree on the details, so we will hash it out later”.

The big question is how the deal will impact the UK economy. The problem in answering that question in the short term will be impact of Covid-19, which is probably impacting the UK more than any part of Brexit, especially since the UK is still in the Transition period out of the EU. After January 1st, the UK will be outside of the EU, obliged to follow the same rules in many areas as non-members.

A smart government would have asked for an extension of the Transition period, since there are enough curveballs out there being thrown at the UK due to Covid-19 to make taking on any more risks highly unwise. However, this is not a smart government, or maybe it is a government trapped by promises made to covert controllers (like the oligarchs that increasingly dominate politics and media ownership).

I expect the economic impact to be gradual. There may be short-term fresh food shortages, but those can always be mitigated – for a price. I expect the prices of many imported food items to rise significantly. This may give UK producers a boost in the short term, but most of those producers will also find it a lot more difficult to sell into the EU, so the overall impact to businesses will be neutral at best.

One of the aspects of the modern world that many Brexit voters and supporters still do not understand is the extent to which countries trade with each other, and the extent to which disruption of that trade has an immediate practical impact on a country. The UK will find this out, immediately for items such as perishable goods, and slowly over time for non-perishable goods.
The main medium-term impact will be in the services sector, which is a large percentage of the UK economy. The trade deal does not cover most of that area of the UK economy, so UK service providers will be operating at a disadvantage when trying to sell into Europe. I expect to see a lot of service-based businesses, especially financial services, relocating to Ireland or Northern Europe in the next 1-3 years. I believe that Ireland will be a main beneficiary of the shift.

The most damaging medium-term impact will be in manufacturing, which still provides a lot of employment, especially in the former heavy industry areas of the UK. I expect overseas manufacturers to cease inbound investment in the UK in favour of other EU countries. The hassle and expense of running a manufacturing location in the UK, outside of the EU, will make new investment unprofitable. This will unfold over time, but will be very economically damaging to many of the old industrial areas, and I would not rule out social unrest.

The UK is going to get an expensive and painful lesson over the next 5 years about the practical meaning of the word “sovereignty”. It is my belief that when future historians write about the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, they will conclude that the terms “sovereignty” and “trickle-down” were two of the most egregious bullshit political slogans ever invented. This article explains why “sovereignty”, as used by Euroskeptics, was, is, and always will be a pile of streaming brown fertilizer. 

To some extent, the lesson on “sovereignty” will be irrelevant. The Leave vote was never about “sovereignty”. That was a post hoc rationalization, a slogan to hang Leave on as a strategy. The real driver for the Leave vote was resentment about increasing inequality and austerity, channeled successfully by demagogue politicians into hostility to the EU. Remember that until 2015, when the idea of a Referendum on EU membership was floated, the EU was not even at 10% in surveys of UK electoral careabouts. But suddenly, the EU became the Source Of All Ills? That’s one large pile of bullshit right there.

Now that the EU is off to one side, and no longer directly involved in the stewardship of the UK economy, the utter irrelevance of any argument based on sovereignty is going to be shown up. Although, distressingly for the hardcore Brexit supporters, who really wanted a WTO-only Brexit, the need to interact with the EU on any aspect of the trade agreement will continue to be seen as a Bad Thing and a reason for letting the current agreement expire after 2025, when it will expire unless renewed by mutual agreement. So, the idea that Brexit is a done deal that leaves the UK able to do what it likes without reference to the EU is a pile of caca. The UK is going to be negotiating with the EU, whether it likes it or not, for ever and a day.

Regions in the UK such as Cornwall, who benefited from EU funding, which bypassed UK government decision makers, will now discover that the promised “Brexit dividend” was and is a mirage, like those “sunlit uplands”, and other glib slogans, some recycled from the Glorious Days of Empire, that were put into the media and on the sides of buses. The fishing industry is going to discover that the Brexit bonanza is illusory, and farmers will soon discover the downside of being outside the EU when it comes to exporting livestock and produce.

Having watched this shit-show from afar, I have no current intention of returning to live in England. The country lost my respect when the citizens voted three times in 9 years in a way that showed that they know next to nothing about Civics and how to select useful politicians. I may buy a property in Ireland or Scotland, but not England.

I expect Scotland to become an independent country within 10 years and to re-join the EU shortly after independence. I also expect the move for Irish unification to be unstoppable within 5 years, once the reality of being outside the EU with a bizarre border hits home in Northern Ireland.

Back in 1965, when I was less than 10 years old, the UK spent several weeks engaging in a death watch, as Winston Churchill, the UK’s war time leader, was terminally ill. Day after day we heard sombre bulletins of his condition, which seemed to point in a downwards direction, and sure enough, eventually it was announced that he had passed away. The period was, to some extent, the end of an era, and it was a sombre moment.

Now, we seem to be re-enacting the same “Death watch” process with Brexit. Deadline after deadline has come and gone, and there is still no definitive direction (Yes! A Deal? No! No Deal?) despite continual talks between negotiators and occasional talks between Boris Johnson and EU senior leaders.

What is clear is that any deal, should one be agreed, will (a) be a very “bare bones” deal, with a whole host of other agreements still to be finalized, and (b) it will most probably not be formally ratified by the EU Parliament in time for the beginning of 2021, which will oblige the EU and the UK to agree on yet another collection of interim arrangements.

As I write this, nobody seems to know if a deal will be agreed. The UK government has made some concessions, most notably over the Internal Market Bill, which was a “red line” for the EU because it conflicted with the EU Withdrawal Agreement and threatened the legal basis of the Good Friday Agreement. The UK government, having been forced to withdraw the offending clauses, is desperately attempting to claim that they were only included as part of a negotiating tactic. However, if you introduce something in the middle of a negotiation that causes your negotiating partners to inform you that you will not get any kind of deal if you persist in that course of action, that does not seem to me, in any way, to be a useful tactic. Sending a signal that you regard treaties as optional does not play well in geopolitics.

Chris Grey does his usual excellent job of summarizing the state of the current mess.  As usual, he throws in a money quote:

The Brexiters have spent decades saying that the EU is akin to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, totalitarian and dictatorial, and a ‘protectionist racket’. Yet they seem to have predicated Brexit on the starry-eyed belief that it would be cuddly and nice, and a pushover in the negotiations.

While all of this talking and to-ing-and-fro-ing is happening, businesses in the UK have taken action, by attempting to forward buy and stockpile. This in turn is overloading current distribution paths, leading to traffic chaos. In the meantime, more and more consequences of the UK leaving the EU are becoming obvious, ranging from insurance cost increases, through pet restrictions, to severe restrictions on the transport of foodstuffs.

Brexit is going to be a shit-show. The only question now, is how big a shit-show it will turn out to be.