The Prime Minister’s handling of several important issues this week could mean that we are approaching a tipping point in the Johnson Premiership. For many of us living in Johnson’s Brexit Britain has felt like being a passenger on a hijacked airplane. The reactions to this week’s events may indicate that the number of people feeling that way is increasing rapidly and includes influential Tories. With his sever shortcomings as a politician on public display and the negative impact of his government’s inaptitude increasingly difficult to deny, we see signs emerging that important pro-Tory institutions – including the Telegraph and Spectator – are losing faith if not in the idea of Brexit itself, at least in the actual existing Brexit that Johnson is delivering. This could be the most significant political development since the 2019 General Election.
Channel drownings
The first – and most horrific – salient issue on which Johnson has displayed a breath-taking level of recklessness and inaptitude is the issue of refugees crossing the English Channel from France into England. The tragedy of twenty-seven people drowning earlier in the week led the Home Secretary Priti Patel to defend her immigration system by reducing the problem to one of criminal gangs engaging in trafficking and by blaming the French and European side for not doing enough to crack down on crossings. The Home Secretary, of course, completely ignores the fact that the crossings are largely a result of legal ways to ask asylum in the UK having been cut off almost completely by successive Tory governments, as Lord Kerr of Kinlochard pointed out in the Lords this week.
The Home Secretary is said to be under great pressure from Number 10 to bring down immigration figures to cater to far-right Tory voters’ number one concern. Yet, the PM’s own attempts to contribute to the solution have gone horribly wrong this week. The PM himself made public his letter to French President Macron on twitter, which the French considered unserious and inappropriate leading them to disinvite Home Secretary Patel from a meeting on Sunday to discuss the issue. Whatever one thinks of the ‘five-point plan’ Johnson set out in the letter, the fact that he thought tweeting it would in any way help the UK and French governments to move towards an agreement and a solution speaks volumes of his inaptitude in handling the UK’s international relations. The disinvitation of the UK Home Secretary from a multi-lateral meeting that directly concerns the management of the UK’s border indicates that the UK is increasingly becoming a problem to deal with, rather than a reliable partner that contributes to solving the region’s common problems.
Fishing row
The channel crossings have shifted the media attention away from other unresolved problems that are simmering under the surface, but can easily erupt into full-blown crises. One of them is the row with France over fishing quotas. A reminder that despite several weeks of relative calm the issue is still not resolved came this week. On Friday French fishermen staged a warning blockade of the port of Calais and the Channel tunnel on Friday. Despite the reignition of the conflict there are no signs that the issue will be resolved any time soon. The new low UK-French relations have reached over the refugee issue makes it even more unlikely that this will change any time soon.
Northern Ireland Protocol
Yet another policy area in which Johnson’s government is unable to provide any solutions is the Northern Ireland Protocol. After Friday’s meeting between EU Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič and David Frost both sides confirmed that the difference between the two sides’ positions remained ‘significant.’ Talks will continue next week and may very well drag into the new year. So, no sight of any solutions to the problems caused by Brexit on that front either.
The PM’s Peppa Pig speech
These are all very significant and salient political issues resulting from Johnson’s Brexit, which would require a lot of skill and competence to solve. The stakes are high not just in terms of economic impact but potentially also in terms of human lives.
In this context the PM’s speech at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) conference should set off all alarm bells. While we have gotten used to Johnson’s rambling, incoherent, and often inappropriate speeches, the speech at the CBI conference was on a whole different level. Not only was the PM clearly not prepared and lost the thread leading to long awkward silences and shuffling of papers, but also was the speech completely vacuous and ultimately only remembered for the PM’s imitation of car noises, comparing himself to Moses, and telling a weekend anecdote about a visit to Peppa Pig world.
The performance was so bad and bizarre that I received messages from friends from various European countries with articles in local media commenting on the PM’s mental state [GER] and ability to rebound [FR] from the ‘sleaze scandal.’
After the embarrassingly shambolic ‘Peppa Pig speech’ following weeks of turmoil around the ‘sleaze scandal,’ it looks like parts of the Tory party start to have some doubts about his leadership.
The only plan is optimism
The cavalier and seemingly reckless handling of the important issues of channel crossings, NIP, and fishing licences all remind us of one thing: Brexiters like Johnson had absolutely no plan for post-Brexit Britain, but were simply banking on an unshakable optimism which is in turn rooted in a blief in some sort of natural tendency for Britain to end up on top of the new international order that Brexit has created. This sort of wishful thinking based on imperturbable ‘oomph and optimism’ – as David Gauke put it this week – was evidenced in a video by Daniel Hannan from the 2016 Referendum Campaign that remerged on social media this week. A classic case of the ‘sunlit uplands’ narrative, the video is remarkable for its completely evidence free claims about the UK being held back by EU membership and could thrive once freed from the EU’s shackles. Five years later, these promises seem to have debunked themselves. Yet, the fundamental belief motivating much of what the hard right of the Tory party do has not changed, namely the conviction that Britannia will somehow naturally rise to the top of the post-Brexit world order to reclaim its rightful place as the dominant world power. That optimism was successfully sold to the British public in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 General Election. However, contrary to Tory politicians like Jacob Rees-Mogg who can afford to live in the past – as illustrated by his absurd remarks about the impact of long-past battles on today’s politics in Europe – voters cannot live on unshakable optimism alone. Some observers think the byelection this coming Thursday in Bexley – a constituency that has been held by the Conservatives since its creation in 1983 and has voted 64% ‘leave’ – could turn into a close race and hence a major test for the Tory’s ability to win elections based on fantasies alone.
Post-optimism Brexit
Equally significant – actually probably more significant – than the still fairly faint voices inside the Tory party questioning the PM are not so faint questions raised about Johnson’s Brexit in the pro-Tory publications the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator this week. The Yorkshire Bylines ran an article on two pieces in these publications that seem to indicate that leading Brexiters start having doubts about actually existing Brexit.
The first one was a piece by Fraser Nelson in the Spectator in which he expresses disappointment about what Brexit has delivered so far. He even questioned the often-lauded Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) negotiated – or rather rolled-over – by Liz Truss when she was trade secretary. That is a quite a considerable acknowledgment of failure from an influential Brexiter concerning a policy area where many Brexiters claim a Brexit dividend did actually materialise.
The second one, Allister Heath’s piece in the Sunday Telegraph makes for disturbing reading. Johnson’s post-Brexit travails and policy failures are attributed to a mysterious ‘blob,’ of civil servants and Remainer elite who still try to defeat the will of the people. The piece – published not on some obscure web page, but in one of Britain’s most influential newspapers – is nothing short of ‘deep state’ conspiracy thinking and further testimony to the nosedive British political culture has taken in the 21st century.
While the move from post-Brexit optimism to post-optimism Brexit is inevitable and indeed to some extent necessary for realism to emerge, it is genuinely worrying that leading Brexiters turn to such genuinely lunatic theories to explain why their promises fail to materialise.
The (lacking) popularity of a hostile environment
A Brexit Britain slowly moves from optimism to post-optimism, the struggles with labour shortages are not abating. This is very largely due to the new post-Brexit immigration systems which fails at both ends and in the middle.
At the lower end, the horrific consequences of the Tories anti-refugee policies are evidenced by the channel crossings. Yet, the system is also not fit for purpose at the top of immigration and skills. A post-Brexit scheme to attract ‘the best and brightest’ scientific talents – namely those having won a Nobel Prize or similarly prestigious awards in several fields of the natural and social sciences – has reportedly attracted zero applicants. One UK-based Nobel Prize winner expressed little surprise at the failure of a scheme he considered the result of the government’s “verbal diarrhoea of optimism.” Indeed, the scheme seems to be based on the above-mentioned blind optimism that can only see Britain as a country that anyone who is given the chance would choose to make their home. The reality of post-optimism Brexit Britain, of course is that “UK scientists’ access to European funding is uncertain, we’re not very attractive to European students as they have to pay international fees, our pensions are being cut and scientific positions in the UK are both rare and precarious.” There is no need for a blob or deep state conspiracy aimed at turning Brexit into a failure to prevent post-Brexit Britain from attracting the talents it needs. With their ‘hostile environment’ policy, the conservative party and Brexiters have made sure of that themselves. As Chris Grey remarked in his Beyond Brexit blog this week: “Building and maintaining a science base, like many other policies, requires long patient slog to build capacity, not gimmicks or endless rhetoric about being ‘world-leading’.”
In between refugees and Nobel Prize winning scientists, are the less highly skilled workers, like lorry drivers. In this segment, the failure of post-Brexit immigration system is evidenced by the failure of the easing of immigration rules aimed at alleviating labour shortages to have much effect. Just like Nobel Prize laureates, Polish lorry drivers do not seem to consider post-Brexit Britain a particularly attractive place to move and work in. s
The pro-Tory pro-Brexit press of course, does not seem to understand the link between anti-foreigner rhetoric and some of our economic struggles and continues to babble about the need to weaken human rights in order to deal with the fake problem of criminal foreigners.
The continuing labour shortages and failure of visa schemes show that the message is received loud and clear around the world and increasingly only the truly desperate – namely refugees fleeing violence and prosecution – will consider making post-Brexit Britain their home.
There is little hope that the broken immigration system will change for the better und the current government. Not just due to inaptitude, but also because of the same fundamental belief in the superiority of Britain as an immutable fact of life, which prevents any realism about what needs to be done to meet the country’s real economic and immigration needs from emerging.
In a disturbing piece in the Byline Times, Nafeez Ahmed, quite credibly establishes very disturbing links between high-level Tory policy makers and the questionable intellectual fundaments of some Tory advisors, including theories that can be linked back to Nazi and racist pseudoscientific theories. The article is particularly disturbing, because such intellectual influences seem to dovetail with the believe Britain’s superiority and would actually explain the shape of the current immigration system quite well.
As long as the Tories’ supremacist optimism does not subside for good, it is to be feared that for most of us post-Brexit Britain will remain a very hostile environment indeed.