‘Badge engineering’ is a
long-standing practice in both the car industry and the IT industry, and
basically amounts to selling identical products with different labels or badges
on them. It never really fooled anyone, and wasn’t usually intended to; it was more about appearing to sell products
targeted at specific markets by using brand names familiar to the relevant
audience.
Today’s so-called
crunch meeting at Chequers looks like an attempt at something similar, except that
in this case, there is indeed a deliberate attempt to mislead. From what has been revealed so far, it seems
that the Prime Minister’s latest composite proposal is an attempt at rebadging
something very close to membership of the single market á la Norway in such a way that the Brexiteers will think that it
amounts to non-membership whilst those who think otherwise get a nudge and a
wink to say that nothing much will change at all. The deviations from the Norway model will
still cause problems and are likely to be rejected by the EU, but this proposal
isn’t really aimed at the EU27 at all.
The only aim of the proposal is to get the cabinet united around a
proposal from which the PM and her team can then negotiate a route to a form of
membership of the single market, called something different. And as long as, at the end of those
negotiations, the only difference is what it’s called, the EU27 are likely to
agree. A rose by any other name,
etcetera…
It’s almost a
wizard wheeze, except for the simple fact that it’s so obviously a ruse that no
self-respecting Brexiteer would be able to swallow it. Richard Murphy suggested yesterday
that the main question to be asked is “Who
will have quite the Cabinet by Monday?”.
It’s a reasonable question; the gulf between the two sides in the Tory
party is so large that there is no chance of any substantive agreement being
reached on anything which is remotely likely to be acceptable to the EU27. If they do manage to reach agreement today
with no resignations, it will be because they’re continuing to demand that the
EU27 gives them that unicorn but they have solemnly agreed to call it something different. In short, another fudge which kicks the can
even further down the road.
The Prime
Minister said
today that the Cabinet have a ‘duty’ to come to an agreement on what they
want. For once, I agree with her – but that
duty didn’t suddenly come into being today.
They’ve been under the same duty for the last two years, ever since the
referendum vote, but it’s a duty about which they have signally failed to do anything. It’s not clear why that is
suddenly going to change. And whatever
she says, she certainly doesn’t trust the people whom she has appointed to the
cabinet further than she can see them.
Telling Ministers that ‘they will
have to hand in their phones and any smartwatches on arrival at Chequers on
Friday’ (as the BBC report) doesn’t strike me as the action of someone who
has any confidence that she can rely on the people around her. And if even she doesn’t trust them why on
earth should the rest of us?
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