Belated truths

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When I was working for an IT company, which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, there was a long-standing lack of empathy between the sales force and those of us charged with delivering what had been sold. One of my colleagues explained it with a joke of sorts about a delivery manager and a sales manager trapped in a hut in the arctic. The delivery manager – the practical guy, of course – said that the first thing needed was food. “Right,” said the salesman, and ran out of the house in the direction of a passing polar bear whose attention he proceeded to attract. He then ran back to the hut and in through the door pursued by the bear, before running out of the back door shutting it tight behind him. “What are you doing?”, wailed the delivery guy through the window, now trapped indoors with a very angry, not to say hungry, polar bear. “I’ve caught it, it’s your job to cook it,” came the reply.

Leaving aside the obvious comment that it helps to explain why so many IT contracts – particularly in the public sector – go so badly wrong, it’s also an analogy for Brexit, as we saw today from staunch Brexiteer, Andrea Leadsom. She is, for once, absolutely right – breaking out of a trading block with a common set of rules in order to set a different set of rules will inevitably lead to greater trading friction, which will cause difficulties for those doing the trading. It was obvious to anyone who gave the matter more than a nanosecond of thought at the time, but is only happening now as all the temporary exclusions and exceptions come to an end. It's a trade-off between economics and the mysterious concept of 'sovereignty' which was always going to have to be made. It’s just that, in order to make the sale, they denied it vehemently at the time. It was always going to be someone else’s problem.

The meaning of words

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“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”  That seems to make Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty something of a role model for the average Tory politician these days.  When Gove, Leadsom et al proclaim their loyalty to the Prime Minister, what they mean is that they will do everything in their power to undermine the agreement which she has reached with the EU.  Only a badly-weakened Prime Minister would tolerate that sort of ‘loyalty’ and ‘support’ within her own cabinet; effectively, the ‘gang of five’ have become unsackable, in the short term at least.

There is something very surreal about a Prime Minister trying so hard to sell a deal which her cabinet has ‘agreed’ (another word whose meaning is somewhat flexible) which a group of people who were party to the ‘agreement’ are busy rubbishing, and which all involved know full well stands no chance of getting through the House of Commons, even if she’s still around to promote it.  In parallel with all this is the attempt by some Tory MPs to unseat her by persuading enough of her own MPs to demand a vote of no confidence.  What better at a critical juncture than to put everything on hold for a few weeks whilst they hold an internal party election to determine who gets the ‘opportunity’ to make an even bigger hash of things?

It was only a few weeks ago that her internal critics were regularly telling the media that they already had over 40 letters delivered and just needed a few more, but we seem to have had at least 20 more in the last few days without ever getting to the magic number.  This probably simply means that Tory MPs have been lying to each other for months about whether they have or have not submitted their letters and/or subsequently withdrawn them.  But then there’s no reason why lies and duplicity should be restricted to those of cabinet rank.  Who knows what Humpty Dumpty might have meant if he said he’d submitted a letter?

At the heart of all this dissension lies the great fantasy.  Gove, Raab, Johnson, (yes, and Corbyn too) – a parcel of rogues if ever there were one – all essentially claim that if only they were doing the negotiating, the EU would immediately cave in and give them more of the benefits of membership with fewer of the obligations.  Even Humpty Dumpty might have struggled to make sense of that one.

Boris, Tinkerbell and Brexit

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The way in which politicians use words is often less about communicating a message than it is about framing the terms of a debate and trying to present things in a different light.  There were two classic examples from the UK government last week.

Firstly, we had Andrea Leadsom telling us that the EU should be told that the White Paper on Brexit was the UK’s ‘final offer’, and there was no scope for negotiating any changes to it.  Those two words, ‘final’, and ‘offer’ are doing a lot of work here.  In the first place, it’s not really an ‘offer’ at all, more of a request.  It sets out what the UK would like to get from the negotiation, and offers the EU little, other than the ‘opportunity’ to water down the rules around the single market.  And secondly, this so-called ‘final’ offer is the first time that the UK Government has managed to spell out what it wants; it’s more akin to a first proposal than a last one.  And an opening bid which is also a final bid, which is what she wants this to be seen as, ends up looking more like a set of demands than a basis for discussion.  Faced with that, the fact that the EU27 are even bothering to discuss it formally shows a great deal of patience and goodwill on their side, rather than the intransigence as which it’s being painted.

Secondly, we had Theresa May claiming that to date all the proposals put forward by the EU have been ‘unworkable’.  In the first place, I’m not convinced that the EU has put any proposals forward to date; it’s been more a question of them waiting for a proposal – any proposal – from the UK.  What they have done is to set out the options as they see them, based on the set of rules under which they operate and experience of deals with other countries.  In the second place, when the Prime Minister says that they’re unworkable, what she seems to mean is that they don’t accommodate her own red lines.  In fairness to the EU27, that really isn’t their problem; the problem stems from the UK’s continuing adherence to cakeism.

The common thread in both statements, however, is that they look like an attempt to present the situation as one in which the UK is being reasonable whilst the EU is being intransigent – setting up a position in which the ‘blame’ for any failure in the negotiations can be attributed to someone else.  And for as long as the UK sticks by its insistence that the EU must change its single market rules and undermine the integrity of that market to suit the departing member, then failure looks inevitable.  By now, it’s obvious that failure is the desired outcome of the Brexiteers, but they know that they need to be able to blame anybody other than themselves for the resulting damage.  And the EU will do for starters.

It’s not the only scapegoat being lined up, however.  As the former Foreign Secretary made clear last week, there’s an alternative scapegoat available as well.  It is all those who refuse to believe in Britain and the glories that await us after Brexit.  The sheer force of belief, if strongly shared by enough people, will be enough to make it happen, apparently, whereas failure to believe will lead to the death of the dream.  It provoked a childhood memory of going to watch Peter Pan in the theatre; if we didn’t all believe in fairies Tinkerbell would die.  But I suppose that a Tinkerbell Brexit is just what we might expect from a pantomime government.