Brexit: a veritable chorus of muddled thinking

Some people were upset with me when I recently mentioned that the Brexit movement seemed dominated by muddled thinking. ‘Condescending’, they found my comments, not to say snobbish, prejudiced and dismissive.

Well, let me confess that I’m as muddled as anyone.

It seems to me that the entire subject is dogged by, shot through with, submerged under muddled thinking. That’s for a simple reason: no one has any idea of what the implications of Brexit are.

It’s easy to say “Brexit means Brexit” but what could possibly be more dismissive than that? When it comes down to it, we in Britain are going to have to tackle the details behind such a casual slogan. On that detail, there’s nothing but muddle.

A recent report by Gavin Shuker, our MP in Luton South, opened my eyes to some of the issues I’d lost sight of but which we shall need to address in leaving the EU. 

The United Kingdom has devolved much political authority from the centre to its constituent nations, most of all to Scotland. But when that happened, certain areas of responsibility weren’t even discussed because they had already been delegated to Brussels, to the EU. An example would be agricultural matters, covered by the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

After Brexit, those powers will be repatriated to the UK. But where will they go? Will they be handled by the central government in London? Or will they be transferred to the devolved governments in the constituent nations? Has given anyone even given thought to the matter?

Agriculture: when “we” take back control, who will that “we” be?
Westminster – or Westminster, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast?

In any case, what’s going to replace the Common Agricultural Policy? Farmers are already getting organised. They want to see all the CAP’s subsidies maintained. In other words, they want the British government to go on paying them once they stop receiving them from the EU. That’s not to say that they’re not prepared to adapt to Brexit. They’d be prepared, you  may not be surprised to learn, to accept a lot less regulation than the EU tended to impose.

Those subsidies are paid for out of taxes. So there might be some outside the farming community who would take a rather different view. For my part, I’d be happy to see the subsidies continued, but I’d like the health and environmental regulations at least maintained. 

Things are no easier in the industrial or service sectors. Luton depends heavily for employment on the car industry (Vauxhall) and the airport. Can we count on similar guarantees for Vauxhall as were offered by the government to Nissan? Those guarantees persuaded the company to keep to its plan of producing a new model in Sunderland, North East England. It’s clear that other car manufacturers would like similar treatment. But can everyone be offered the same sweeteners? And if they were, wouldn't companies in other industrial sectors demand them too? 

So will Nissan turn out to be a one-off?

And what about aviation? Britain is currently covered by the European Common Aviation Area agreement. Other non-EU countries are signatories to it, such as Norway or Serbia. Nothing stops us coming to an arrangement with it too, though that would mean continuing to accept EU rules in the area. But is anyone making this a priority? 

Shuker didn’t mention this problem, but one that strikes me as important is fisheries. That’s principally because there has been real EU success in that area: fish stocks that were seriously threatened before are now recovering. But British fishermen are frustrated with the constraints EU regulation put on them. Do we want more cod wars? Do we want to go back to over-fishing again? Do we want to roll back that significant achievement?

There are huge numbers of other measures that need to be agreed and taken.

Only last week, the British representative to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers resigned. He had warned the government that negotiating all the details associated with Brexit could take as long as ten years. That wasn’t information the government wanted to hear, so he went.

However, when we think about just the issues I mentioned above – who gets the powers repatriated from Brussels, how do we deal with farmers’ subsidies and regulation, how do we agree a fisheries policy, what do we do with the auto industry, how do we sort out aviation – and add that these are just a few of the myriad matters to deal with, ten years doesn’t sound like an exaggeration.

It’s been reported since that there is serious disquiet among the civil servants handling the negotiations with the EU. They feel there are too few of them and, as Rogers’ case demonstrates, their advice isn’t listened to attentively enough.

Too few people. A government that believes it can forge ahead without listening to expert advice. Far more extensive and far more complex issues than we or the government seem to be allowing for.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like muddled thinking to me.

And again: just what does 'Brexit means Brexit' mean?

“Brexit means Brexit,” Theresa May and the backers of Britain leaving the European Union keep assuring us.

Like a lot of slogans, it’s pretty meaningless. Does it mean leaving the Single Market and Customs Union too? Or just the EU institutions themselves? A hard Brexit in other words, or a soft one? 

No one’s saying, least of all May.

Well, if she isn’t saying, she’s certainly been hinting of late. People voted to get control of immigration, she tells us, and I suspect she’s right. You can’t tell from the referendum results, because it wasn’t mentioned in the question, but listening to the conversations in the media or simply in the streets, it’s clear a great many people voted Leave to put an end to free movement of people into Britain. A great many of them are worried that Poles are taking their jobs, or they simply don’t like hearing Polish on the streets – “this is England and people should speak English”.

They forget that at one time a lot of Celts must have resented hearing Anglo-Saxon spoken in this same green and pleasant land. But then they probably wouldn’t care even if they did remember.

May has been playing to this particular group, with promises about control of immigration. That’s not possible without a hard Brexit including departure from the single market, since membership of market requires acceptance of freedom of movement of EU citizens. So, though she hasn’t made it completely explicit, for May it seems that “Brexit means hard Brexit”. That would leave Britain having to deal with the EU on the same terms as any other member of the World Trade Organisation, except for any more favourable terms it could extract by negotiation. Tough, considering that the EU is the world’s biggest trading bloc, and right on Britain’s doorstep.

Business isn’t keen on this option.

Still, the uncertainty continues. May isn’t committing herself to hard Brexit. She claims she’s playing her cards close to her chest and doesn’t want to reveal her negotiating stance to other EU leaders. Many of us have wondered whether it might be because she doesn’t have much of an idea what her stance is. Basically, she can’t get off the fence.

Well, yesterday we had the excellent news that car manufacturer Nissan would be building two more models at its plant in Sunderland, in North East England. That secures 7000 jobs in the plant itself and many others in the supply chain. It doesn’t just protect jobs in a region that desperately needs them, it provides new ones.

A matter for nothing but celebration.

However, it’s odd. The Nissan Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn made it clear this summer that Nissan wouldn’t be investing any further in its UK operations if it couldn’t guarantee continued easy access to the European Single Market.

Carlos Ghosn leaving Downing Street after meeting Theresa May

The British government has let it be known that it gave ‘assurances’ to Nissan before the new investments were announced. But, in typical May economical-with-information style, no one’s saying what those assurances were. Was it a guarantee that Britain would remain in the Single Market? A soft Brexit, in other words? That seems to contradict the position she’s been taking for several weeks. And does it depend on her? Doesn’t it require the agreement of the other EU states?

Alternatively, has May assured Nissan that Britain would either remain in the Single Market or compensate the car manufacturer for any financial loss it incurs as a result of leaving? That would be costly. She can’t offer such a deal to Nissan and not to other car makers. She can’t offer it to car makers and not to other exporters.

We continue to live in interesting times. There are a great many more questions than answers. And one of the more intriguing is still what on Earth does “Brexit means Brexit” really mean?