Identifying borders

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Following an outbreak of coronavirus in Melbourne, Australia’s government announced yesterday that it was closing the border between New South Wales and Victoria. They obviously need Boris Johnson out there to explain to them that what they have done is quite impossible. (I’m sure we could spare him for a year or two. Or longer. Preferably longer.) Australia is one country and there can be no borders within a single country. Only recognised international borders can be controlled - Johnson was very clear on that point last week when he said that the line separating England from Scotland is not such a border so it cannot be policed or closed. Of course, if he’s otherwise engaged making models of buses out of wine boxes, we could always send his father instead to show Australians how to render the ban ineffective by travelling between the two states via some other country. (Do they have flights to both via Bulgaria?) Alternatively we could send Boris’ fellow Etonian Jake to explain to the Australians that New South Wales and Victoria are merely districts or areas within a single country, and that means that there is simply no way to impose travel restrictions between them. It just can’t be done, as anyone with an expensive education knows. If only they hadn’t been so foolish as to leave the Empire, the Australians might understand these things too.

Perhaps it really is down to the school which they both attended. I wonder if their parents have ever regretted spending so much on an education which has taught their offspring so little about how things work in the real world that they believe that merely stating something makes it a fact. On the other hand, their parents seem to think the same way, judging by the actions of Johnson père. Perhaps suffering from delusions is an inherited trait.

Searching for a rational explanation

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It could, of course, be the case that reducing the self-styled ‘mother of parliaments’ to complete farce is an accidental by-product of the madness of the author of the new system of voting. Clinical insanity is certainly the simplest and most obvious explanation of the thought process which would lead anyone to conclude that the most suitable way of voting in any parliament is one which excludes many MPs completely and requires the rest to spend 45 minutes shuffling along a 1km long queue every time they hold a vote. And Rees-Mogg certainly looks less than 100% compos as well as having a history of expressing strange views. The problem with that explanation is that it doesn’t explain why a majority of those taking part in the farce concluded that it was, indeed, such a brilliant idea that it should become the new norm. There could be something in the water in Westminster – but if that were to be the explanation, the Tory MPs would need to be imbibing from a different water supply than that used by members of other parties. Some of them, of course, just do whatever they’re told, either because they’re part of the government or because they want to be, but they surely can’t all be blind to the sheer idiocy of what they’ve agreed. I know that they wanted the UK to become a ‘world leader’ but I assumed they meant in terms of respect not mockery and derision.

There is however an alternative and much more sinister possibility. Deliberately excluding some members from participation in decision-taking might suit the government rather well on the whole, particularly if it differentially affects its political opponents. Excluding those MPs from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who choose to abide by the advice of their respective governments instead of returning to London would certainly have the not insignificant side-effect of boosting the Tory majority. At a time when the PM’s actions over Cummings are causing huge disquiet on his own side, reducing the opportunities for a combination of opposition MPs and disgruntled Tories to conspire against him could be quite handy. And the derision with which the rest of the world views the system, coupled with the reluctance of MPs to be seen participating in such a farce might help in another way as well: it could make MPs less keen to call for divisions at all. If they know not only that every vote is going to cost them valuable time, but also that they’re all going to look like complete fools every time a vote is held, that might just encourage some to call for votes less frequently. (Although that could backfire if the public blamed the government rather than those calling for votes.)

It’s certainly a negation of democracy, but whether that’s due to a serious outbreak of madness in the governing party or a deliberate action to avoid scrutiny and challenge is open to interpretation. As a rule, I always tend to favour the simpler explanation, but there is something of a pattern to the avoidance of scrutiny and debate in the case of the current PM.

Not a proper letter

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In ordinary times, the letter to the future ex-Prime Minister signed by the former Chancellor and 20 other Tory MPs, including a number who were in the cabinet until very recently and others of a senior stature in his party, would be seriously bad news.  Given that he has a theoretical majority of only 1, and is leading what is already, in relation to the most pressing issue of the day, a minority government, a list of 21 from his own side making threatening noises ought to be terminal for the policy if not for the individual pursuing it.

Fortunately, Jacob Rees-Mogg has given him a ‘get-out-of-jail’ card by issuing a style guide for letters and reports.  The silly would-be rebels have forgotten to put ‘Esq.’ after the names of those male MPs who are not Privy Councillors, which means that Rees-Mogg can legitimately advise the PM that it’s not a proper letter and can safely be ignored.  That’s a better explanation than anything we’ll get from Johnson.

Give him an inch and he'll take a metre

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Mocking Jacob Rees-Mogg for his style guide to staff in his new office is fun, and very easy to do, but probably only encourages him.  It’s almost as though he is inviting people to continue to refer to him as the member for the eighteenth century; for him, living in the past is a badge of honour rather than a criticism.  His insistence on the use of imperial measures, though, is more than mere eccentricity – it is potentially dangerous.

The UK formally adopted metric measures in 1965 (pre-dating, and nothing to do with, membership of the EEC/EU), which means that those of us educated during the 1950s and 1960s were initially taught in imperial and subsequently in metric.  It also means that any child receiving the majority of his or her education after 1965 – so born after around 1960, and therefore currently sixty years old or younger – would have been largely or even exclusively taught to measure distances, weights and volumes in metric units.  I don’t know what the age profile of the staff is in his new office, but given the demographic in the population and the traditional ability of civil servants to retire before state pension age, I’d bet that there are very few for whom use of imperial measures will be entirely natural.  He is effectively asking anyone writing a report for his eyes to ‘translate’ all measurements to a system which has barely been taught in schools (although perhaps Eton is an exception?) for the best part of half a century.

The potential consequences for the Leader of the House of Commons are probably not as significant as the loss of a Mars probe by NASA, but it’s almost guaranteed that the enforced translation of quantities into an antiquated system of measures with which most people are no longer familiar will lead to a misunderstanding sooner or later.  There are good reasons for standardising on a single system of measurement, and none at all for insisting on a different one.  Unless, that is, you consider that the determination of an individual to live 300 years in the past constitutes good reason for anything.

Checking the assumptions

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Yesterday, there was an exchange of views in the media between the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, and the member of parliament for the eighteenth century, Jacob Rees-Mogg about the impact of a no-deal Brexit on the economy.  The former stated a negative impact of £90 billion, whilst the latter claimed a positive impact of £80 billion.  Clearly, both of those things can’t be true, but that doesn’t mean that either of them is ‘right’ either.  The problem with making projections is that they’re always going to be based on mathematical models, and those models are always going to be based on a series of assumptions; the difference between the two positions is based on the differences in the assumptions that they make.  The fact that the consensus of economists is closer to the position of Hammond than Rees-Mogg doesn’t make the consensus right; there could be an element of groupthink at work.  But the obvious reality that the Brexiteer position is an outlier should give some cause for detailed scrutiny to say the least.

At the heart of the difference in positions is the question of the value of new vs existing trade deals.  One thing both sides appear to be agreed on is that ‘free trade’ is a good thing which generates economic prosperity, although there is a question in my mind about whether it is always the good thing that it’s presented as being; that’s a question for another day.  If we start from a position of accepting that free trade can and does boost economies, then the difference between the two positions comes down to an assessment of which route offers the greatest amount of free trade.  Part of the Brexiteer argument has always been that the freedom to strike trade deals with a much wider market than that offered by the EU will lead to more free trade than the restrictions placed on us by membership.  And if some free trade is good, and a lot of free trade is better, then the logical conclusion is that completely free and open trade globally is best of all.  At a superficial level, that is the ‘attraction’ of Brexit.  There are two not insignificant problems with it, though.

The first is about what is the best route to opening up more trading freedom between countries.  Is it by taking the large trading blocs which currently exist and negotiating comprehensive deals between them, such as that recently signed by the EU and Mercosur, or is it by doing away with trading blocs like the EU and Mercosur and starting again at the level of individual states?  Asking the question is almost enough to answer it; a negotiation involving only two parties acting on behalf of 28 and 4 member states respectively is almost invariably going to be easier than having 32 countries each trying to negotiate individual agreements with the other 31.

And the second is about depth rather than breadth; ‘free trade’ is about more than tariffs and quotas; it’s also about standards, rules and regulations.  The ‘depth’ of the free trade arrangement between the 28 EU member states is much greater than that between the EU and, say, Canada (which increasingly seems to be the model put forward by the Brexiteers), but increasing depth necessarily requires increasing alignment in a whole range of areas.  Rules end up being made jointly rather than unilaterally, and it is precisely that to which Brexiteers object.

In the light of those two factors, the claim by Rees-Mogg that no-deal produces more economic benefits than continued membership depends on an assumption that increased breadth with countries further away more than compensates for reduced depth with countries on our doorstep.  One of the things that I learned in Maths many years ago is that any result which fails the ‘reasonableness’ test (never mind what the numbers say, does it look or feel credible?) probably contains an error in the workings somewhere.  The Rees-Mogg claim seriously fails the reasonableness test, making it look like a number generated to try and ‘prove’ a point rather than one which owes anything to the normal rules of mathematics.

For all their talk about the glorious benefits of the trade deals which the UK will be able to negotiate in the future, I’m not convinced that free trade is actually of much importance to the Brexiteers at all.  If it really was the driving force that they claim, they would be pushing for more deals like the EU-Mercosur deal, and for those deals to be deeper, rather than seeking to walk away from them and start again with a clean sheet (which is more or less what WTO terms means).  Prioritising breadth globally over depth regionally is a characteristic more associated with wanting to secure an advantage by working to looser rules than those binding other countries than with wanting to increase trade.  It makes eminent sense to a country which is – or believes that it is – in a position to impose its will and its trading terms on weaker countries.  That is, of course, exactly the trade model on which the British Empire was built (and the one which Trump is attempting to pursue using America’s might).  That’s at the heart of the Anglo-British not-nationalists-at-all Brexit fantasy – a yearning for the past ‘glories’ of empire, and an unwillingness to accept the realities of the twenty-first century.  But believing really hard doesn’t create a power and influence which no longer exist and producing numbers which are simply unbelievable doesn’t turn fantasy into reality.

Rees-Mogg's little helper

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I can think of no good reason in principle for opposing Corbyn’s call for a return to ‘making things’ in the UK rather than depending on cheap labour elsewhere.  He’s not alone in believing that the UK economy has become over-dependent on what are loosely called financial services.  But linking it to Brexit rather than to under-regulated capitalism is playing into the hands of those who want to use Brexit for a completely different vision of the future.  And some of his proposals fly in the face of reason.

There is nothing that prevents EU members from having a healthy manufacturing sector.  As a percentage of national output, Germany, for instance, manages 23% compared to only 10% in the UK (UK Parliamentary research briefing).  The chart on page 7 of the same source shows how the UK has declined from being in the top 20 in terms of manufacturing output as a proportion of GDP in 1970 to the 118^th position by 2015.  The cause of the decline in manufacturing in the UK has more to do with a long-term productivity issue (largely down to a lack of investment) and the economic policies pursued by successive governments – Labour and Tory alike.  The capitalist mechanisms which led to globalisation and the ‘offshoring’ of manufacturing don’t operate in a vacuum, they operate in the context of policies followed by governments. Being a member of the EU is no obstacle to a successful manufacturing economy, and it follows that ceasing to be a member isn’t the solution. 

There are many on ‘the left’ who believe that part of the solution to the decline in manufacturing is to give more state aid to industry, and that membership of the EU prevents that.  The idea that the EU ‘prevents’ state aid is not new, despite having been debunked many times over.  (Here’s an example of one response on that issue.)   What EU state rules do prevent is ‘unfair’ state aid; the sort of state aid to industry which distorts the market and gives companies or countries an unfair advantage.  There are plenty of examples of nationalised companies and state-aided companies within the EU; there’s nothing that prevents the UK from following the same route as long as it’s done in a way which does not tilt the playing field.

Of course, that may be exactly what Corbyn and his acolytes want to do – provide state aid in ways which enable UK companies to gain a competitive advantage over those in countries like Germany - and to the extent that those companies can find an adequate domestic market in the UK, it’s an approach which can work.  It would be naïve, however, to believe that companies receiving such aid would be able to trade freely with countries whose companies do not receive such aid.  Any trade agreement with the EU will inevitable make it clear that subsidised companies in the UK will not have access to the EU market; and any other country entering a trade agreement with the UK will almost certainly impose similar conditions – it would be economic suicide for them to do otherwise.  Corbyn’s policy is a recipe for the sort of economic isolationism which Trump is pursuing in the US.

Perhaps most alarming of all was Corbyn’s suggestion (reported by the BBC) that Labour ‘would opt out of parts of world trade rules if necessary’ to ensure jobs went to local people.  I can see how the promise might be attractive to those whose votes he wants to win but given that we already know that a trading relationship based on WTO rules is the worst possible outcome of Brexit, suggesting unilaterally opting out even of those rules is taking things to a whole new level, and is in danger of making Corbyn look even more like an extreme Brexiteer than Rees-Mogg.

There is much about the trend to globalisation which I dislike.  On that I’m with Corbyn but where we part company is when the proposed solution is to try and pretend that it all never happened, turn back the clock, and go back to where we were before.  That really is Brexitism writ large and, as we are in serious danger of discovering, the past was not the nirvana as which some seem to see it.  Any viable solution has to come from working with others, not pretending that the UK can simply go it alone.  It’s not only the Tories who are suffering from Anglo-British nationalism and exceptionalism, and an idealised memory of the past.

Avoiding the argument

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Being a fair-minded soul, I’ll accept that the MP for the 18^th Century didn’t actually say, as he has been accused of doing, that we would have to wait 50 years for the benefits of Brexit to be realised.  What he did say was that it will take 50 years for the full economic consequences to be clear, which is not quite the same thing.  Either way, though, it’s a refreshingly honest statement from a Brexiteer, most of whom have been claiming all along that the economic benefits would be more or less immediate.

In strictly economic terms, Brexit, no matter how it’s dressed up, is the first instance in history of a country deliberately seeking to weaken trade ties with one group of countries, and there is an economic cost to doing that.  That cost might or might not be offset in due course by strengthened trade ties with other countries; for the true believers it’s an article of faith that it will, whereas the rest of us can only hope.  But those new deals will take many years to negotiate and agree, during which period the EU itself will also be negotiating stronger ties with the same countries – and they have rather more bargaining power at their disposal.  Any deals which the UK cuts need to be significantly better and/or operational for a very long time if they are to stand any chance of leaving the UK better off than it would otherwise be.  50 years sounds to me like a not unreasonable period over which to judge whether the gamble – for that’s what it is – will have been successful or not, and Rees-Mogg is making a fair point in saying so.

What he didn’t say, however, is that, for people who think like he does, it simply doesn’t matter how long it takes to arrive at a judgement, or whether the overall economic outcome at the end of that 50 years is favourable or not, because they start from a position of seeing Brexit as a good thing in itself for entirely non-economic reasons.  Those are partly about clinging to an outdated notion of absolute sovereignty and independence, partly about hankering after an idealised past where Britannia ruled the waves, and partly about Anglo-British nationalist exceptionalism which insists that ‘we’ are not like ‘them’ and are very special.  It’s about a world view, not economics.

The other thing he didn’t talk about was who in society would suffer the economic consequences as the economy adjusts over the next 50 years, because in any adjustment on such a scale there will inevitably be winners and losers.  There is, in short, a price to be paid, and the question is about who gets to pay it.  We can be certain that Rees-Mogg, and people like him, will not be among the losers.  Arguing that the price of taking this huge gamble is worth paying is easy enough if you’re not the one paying it, but the big dishonesty from the outset has been the failure of those taking that view to spell out that there is a price and to be clear about who will pay it.  Had they done that, they would have had to campaign for Brexit solely on the basis of the ideological rationale; that they did not do so underlines that they never thought that they would be able to persuade enough people to support their world view.

Even now, some of them are still arguing that there will be a Brexit dividend, despite the government’s own advisers having well and truly rubbished such an idea.  Their simplistic claim that if we’re no longer paying £x to Brussels (and we can argue about the value of x, but the precise sum is irrelevant here) we will be able to spend that £x on other things is easy to latch on to.  What’s missing of course is the unstated assumption that ‘nothing else changes’; and if that assumption were true, then of course there’d be a dividend.  But that’s a bit like assuming that if I stop spending money on food, I can spend it on other things, which simply assumes that the food keeps coming.  The point is that Brexit changes a whole host of other things; the assumption that it doesn’t is patently and obviously wrong and is being exposed as erroneous on a daily basis.

That leaves the Brexiteers in a desperate situation.  They ‘won’ the referendum but can see that victory slipping away from them as their lies and half-truths become increasingly clear, and as people come to realise who is going to be paying the cost of the Brexiteers’ dream.  Their only hope is to get on with it, to exit quickly before the process can be stopped or reversed, and deal with the consequences later.  Whether the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition are complicit or merely useful idiots is open to debate, but ultimately irrelevant.  At the moment, the Brexit ideologues are winning the battle without ever needing to win the argument.

Agreement and reality

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On Saturday, Jacob Rees-Mogg told the world, in all seriousness, that the civil servants who had prepared the document showing that all credible types of Brexit were likely to be be worse, in economic terms, than remaining in the EU, were guilty of ‘fiddling the figures’.  It’s a very serious accusation, but the only ‘evidence’ that he seems to have produced is that he disagrees with the answers.  Personally, I very much doubt whether they have fiddled any figures; but what they have done is to look at a limited range of potential scenarios.  Very specifically, they appear not to have looked at the government’s own preferred scenario – that is, of course, the one that the government have so far found it impossible to articulate.

Yesterday, the Home Secretary told us that the Cabinet was more united on Brexit than people outside understood.  They are, she claimed, completely united on ‘on the need for "frictionless trade", the ability to strike international trade deals and avoid a hard border in Ireland’.  I suspect that she’s right about the degree of unity around those simple objectives; if that’s the level of detail to which they’re working, getting agreement looks like an easy task.  I suspect that it would also be fairly easy to secure cross-party agreement and wide public support for a demand that all taxes be abolished and the NHS budget be doubled.  The question is not whether they can agree about the desirability of the objectives, but about how useful an agreement to demand the impossible is likely to be.

I’m certain that the civil servants could indeed produce a model for Brexit based on the assumption that the EU27 will allow frictionless trade on terms unavailable to members let alone to any other non-member.  And if they did produce such a model, there’s a good chance that it would show that such a scenario would be no worse than remaining a member, and maybe even better.  Even Rees-Mogg would probably be happy to brandish the figures.  But how meaningful would they be?  Making the numbers add up to a total which provides the ‘right’ answer doesn’t make those numbers useful or relevant.

The agreement which the Home Secretary is so sure can be achieved within the Cabinet is based on a convenient suspension of reality, just like her boss’ declaration this morning that we will both have a different customs regime to the EU and avoid having any sort of border with that part of the EU which happens to be to the west of us rather than the east or south.  But who needs reality, when fantasy is so much more comforting?

What's the question?

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Someone once said that if the answer is ‘more politicians’, then the question must be a very strange one indeed.  A similar feeling struck me over the past few days as I read about the speculation over the next Tory leader and Prime Minister.  If Jacob Rees-Mogg is the answer, then what on earth is the question?