“Freedom” is high up on Brexiters’ priorities list – at least in terms of discourse. “Unshackling” the UK, liberating it from the European yoke was, after all, the whole point of the exercise. ‘Taking back control’ and using the new-found freedom to make ‘our own laws’ have become part of the Brexiter narrative about getting ‘our country back.’ The central position of ‘freedom’ in Brexiter discourse comes as no surprise, of course, now that we know that the entire Brexit project is driven by pseudo-libertarian ‘Think Tanks’ and groupuscules including the Cato Institute and the Atlas Network. Johnson himself regularly jumps on the freedom bandwagon, e.g. when declaring Freedom Day after abolishing Covid restrictions back in July 2021.
Yet, this week has exposed with brutal clarity that the idea of ‘freedom’ in the pseudo-libertarian playbook has one purpose and one purpose only: Giving those in power absolute and unrestrained freedom, while denying the rest of us even the most basic, hard-fought political liberties of a democracy.
The reading of the Policing Bill in the House of Lords on Monday and early Tuesday quickly got drowned out by the renewed uproar around ‘Partygate’ and the very vocal challenge that some Tory MPs directed at the PM (most conspicuously perhaps David Davis with his indirect Cromwell reference). Yet, Monday’s debate in the House of Lords of Priti Patel’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill was arguably a key moment in the Johnson government’s increasingly egregious attacks on key pillars of British democracy. Debating and voting well into the early hours of Tuesday, the Lords defeated the government 14 times, thus reversing some – but not all – of the most anti-democratic elements of the bill (such as police power to impose noise-based restrictions on protests). Whatever happens next to the bill when it is debated in the Commons in February, the debate in the Lords has thrown into sharp relief the fact that behind the libertarian façade, Brexit is an assault on our freedoms and rights at an unprecedented scale in recent times. The direct attacks on the British democratic institutions and judicial system are the most egregious illustration of that fact; but this week’s Brexit-related news provided several other, less conspicuous ways in which Brexit has restrained our freedoms.
The end of freedom: Queues and music tours
The build-up of long queues of lorries on the approach roads to the port of Dover – and at Calais – has made headlines in quite a few news outlets. The way in which different outlets report on the issues and the question of what factors are to blame are revealing in the sense that they illustrate that when it comes to Brexit, even the most basic facts become subject to politically tainted struggles over interpretation and causality. Thus, LBC reported that the queues can be seen from space, while they cannot be seen on Highways England’s traffic cameras on the A20. Highway England denies accusations that it deliberately switched off the traffic cameras on that stretch of motorway, but does not deny that they are not currently working. The CEO of Dover Port Doug Bannister, on the other hand, was eager to blame unusual hikes in freight traffic rather than Brexit for the delays. A statement that was contradicted by drivers and a European haulier who squarely blame the queues on Brexit red tape, which reportedly takes 10-20min to clear for each vehicle, while ferries leave the port reportedly half empty. The BBC reported on the queues matter-of-factly without mentioning Brexit. While LBC turned to eye witnesses’ social media posts and the Express focussed on social media users’ reactions to Guy Verhofstadt’s tweet about the British’s penchant for queuing. GB News, in turn, blamed - in an at first glance perhaps surprising way - ‘terrible Brexit red tape’ for the queues. At second glance, however, this may very well be a further sign that the government is increasingly facing a two-front war on Brexit: On the one hand it faces increasing pressures from businesses to move towards a softer version of Brexit and towards less fraught relationships with the EU, on the other hand radical Brexiters are increasingly unhappy with the too moderate version of hard Brexit that the government is implementing. This was clearly illustrated by Lord Frost’s departure and subsequent commentary from Brexit ultras. GBNews reporting on the lorry queues seems to further illustrate this.
Yet, reality did rear its ugly head when Doug Bannister urged the government to negotiated with the EU the streamlining of customs procedures to avoid further chaos when the EU introduces new biometric checks in September 2022. These checks may mean that lorry drivers must leave their vehicles to go through face scanning and similar checks, adding to processing times and possibly generating massive queues and delays. Overall, it seems hard to deny that the removal of the freedom to move goods across borders starts having a considerable impact on businesses.
Another freedom we have lost with Brexit is our right to freely travel and work in 28 different European countries. This lost freedom starts hitting artists and musicians increasingly hard as countries are preparing for the end of the pandemic. Elton John has been campaigning for the reestablishment of touring musicians’ rights for some time. He has been quoted again this week as criticising the government’s misleading claims that 21 EU countries offer visa and work permit-free access to UK musicians. A House of Lords inquiry has confirmed Elton John’s view. Lord Kinnoull summarised the inquiry, which found that government websites are not accurate and that much of the information about the processes that artists need to comply with before a tour is misleading.
Overall, pressure on the government seems to be building from various quarters to sort out the additional red tape Brexit has created for businesses. The British Chamber of Commerce (BCC) published a new report that documents the negative impact of Brexit on businesses ability to secure worker visas and the continuing disruption and higher costs due to customs procedures. The BCC urges the government to solve these issues. The issues seem all the more urgent as CityAM reported results from a new survey that draws a very bleak picture of business sentiment after Brexit. According to the paper, one in three businesses fear they may not survive beyond 2022 due to Brexit-related impediments on business and trade.
Fisheries and Finance: More dark clouds
This week also brought us some news from industries whose fortunes after Brexit remain strongly disputed…and they suggest that those disputes will not be settled any time soon.
I blogged about a ‘silver lining story’ in the Daily Mail related to Brixham fish market a couple of weeks ago. This week, Devon Live ran a story that painted a very different picture of how the fish industry in Brixham is faring after Brexit and what people working in the industry think of Johnson’s promises to the fishing industry. Contrary to the Mail’s upbeat story, Devon Live interviewed members of the fishing community who talk about their sense of betrayal and resentment against Johnson and Brexit.
The impact of Brexit on financial services too continues to be a controversially discussed topic. By now, it is well-known that the impact of Brexit on jobs in the City of London has not been as catastrophic as some pre-Referendum worst-case scenarios predicted. A piece in the FT this week confirmed that once again. The job market in the City of London is buoyant and salaries and bonuses are increasing. However, we are only just at the beginning of Brexit’s impact on UK financial services, and the FT notes that much now depends on the EU’s own policy in this respect. This week, the EU announced the extension of the permission for EU banks to continue using clearing houses in London for a further three years to June 2025. The extension may provide some further hope that the impact of Brexit on the UK financial service industry will be more limited than feared. However, the announcement also made it clear that the EU’s long-term goal remains to build up capacity inside the block to reduce its dependence on the City of London. What we are seeing may hence simply be an indication that the impact of Brexit will take longer to materialise than what many thought. As Chris Grey put it at one stage: Brexit is a slow puncture, rather than a dramatic tyre blow-out. A new report by the Federation of International Banks in Ireland (FIBI) shows that there is no reason for complacency. The report found a €200bn increase in financial assets in the Irish banking sector since the UK voted to leave the EU six years ago. While the Irish banking sector was expanding even before Brexit and presumably would have continued to expand without it, there can be no doubt that with the UK’s departure from the single market, Ireland has become an even more attractive location for foreign banks to service EU clients. So, part of this increase certainly is due to companies moving assets from the UK to the Republic of Ireland or deciding not to place them in London in the first place. This sort of evolution will not mean the end of London as an important financial centre. There are ways in which London can remain internationally competitive – e.g. by establishing an attractive regulatory regime for Green Finance and Fintech as Joël Reland argued this week.
What these news items from key industries illustrate once again is the subtlety of the impact of Brexit on the UK economy. While polls show a clear trend towards waning support for Brexit (a recent Statista poll for instance shows 49% of people surveyed consider it was ‘wrong to leave’ with only 38% considering it was ‘right to leave’). Yet, the impact of Brexit will always have to be measure against the counterfactual of the UK not having voted for it in June 2016 and not having actually exited the EU in January 2021. That counterfactual is hard to establish empirically and even harder to present to the general public – especially in a public discourse that is dominated by deliberate obscurantism, anti-expertism, and nationalist delusion. It seems therefore unlikely that we will be moving beyond the politically-tainted interpretations of the figures any time soon.
FTAs and the NIP
The week also brought some good news for the government, most importantly that the US government has finally agreed to start negotiating a deal on steel and aluminium tariffs imposed on UK exports to the US. Sorting out this issue is of outmost urgency for the UK, with some UK steel producers already working on plans to move production from the UK to the EU to avoid these tariffs (see my previous post).
Whether or not these negotiations will be successful will most likely depend on the outcome of the ongoing discussions between the UK and the EU about the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). There have been various reports that the US has refused to remove the tariffs on UK steel and aluminium imports in order to use them as a means of pressuring the UK to refrain from triggering Art. 16 of the NIP, suspending parts of it unilaterally. The chances of the UK government making that dramatic move seem more remote now that Lord Frost has removed himself from the equation and Liz Truss is in charge. Moreover, as long as Boris Johnson remains embattled about ‘Partygate’ his appetite for a trade war with the EU is considered more limited. The chances of Truss finding an agreement with the EU are deemed to be intact even thought that may affect her chances of succeeding Johnson as next PM. The crisis in Ukraine over the risk of a Russian invasion may further increase the chances of a deal being reached, because the issue of gas supplies and a common stance against Russia is becoming more pressing, possibly allowing the UK and EU to overcome their differences over Brexit.
The UK Australia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) also got some news coverage this week. What was sold to the country as a ‘world-class deal’ and a great victory for Brexit Britain and Liz Truss personally, starts to be subject to some scrutiny and it turns out that not everything that glitters is gold. Referring to the potential impact of the agreement on UK farmers, one Tory MP is on record for saying that the deal was as one-sided as the recent Ashes cricket series. The Independent, in turn, reported the Australian wine producers’ discontent over UK government plans for an alcohol tax reform, which would increase tax on highly alcoholic (above 11.5%) wines and thus more than wipe out the expected reduction in tariffs on Australian wine exports to the UK. This episode illustrates another now well-known fact related to Brexit, i.e. that the government has no coherent strategy in delivering its much lauded ‘Brexit dividends.’ Without any coherent plan or strategy, what one minister does one day, another one may undo the next. Yet, this way of approaching policy-making relates to a more fundamental element of Brexiter ideology, namely its view of freedom as something that liberates us not just from rules and laws, but from reason itself. Brexiters seem to genuinely believe that it is possible to defy reason, which is what makes them so dangerous.
Absolute freedom: Freedom from rules, freedom from reason
Chris Grey’s Beyond Brexit blog this week contains a fascinating discussion Johnson’s personal disregard for rules and the Brexit project’s ‘anti-ruelism’ – a term coined to capture the fact that Brexiter’s approach to freedom ‘ isn’t some coherent or principled anarchism, but a rag-bag of inchoate impulses’. This week exposed the incoherence of the Brexit project’s approach to freedom better than any other one so far. The blatant contrast between the government’s disregard for any rules restraining its own actions and its willingness to impose draconian restrictions on anyone else’s basic civil liberties reveals the fundamental dishonesty of the Brexit project. Just like the pseudo-philosophical ramblings of an Ayan Rand, or Cumming’s ‘pseudo-intellectual disruptor philosophy,’ Brexiters’ approach to freedom is incoherent, contradictory, and ultimately dangerous. Indeed, one is reminded of the historical example of the Jacobines during the French Revolution.
G. W. F. Hegel famously criticised the Jacobins for seeking to rebuild society entirely according to the prescription of human will – rather than reason – and thus to realise an unrestricted, unconditioned kind of freedom. According to Hegel, such a project of ‘absolute freedom’ is bound to lead to disastrous and destructive results – such as the Terror during the reign of Robespierre -, because its hubris puts the ‘will of the people’ not just above any existing laws and rules, but above reason itself. It is a claim to freedom not just from rules, but freedom from reason. In this respect, likening Brexiters to the Jacobins of the French Revolution seems indeed appropriate and captures a fundamental truth about Brexit. Like the Jacobins, Brexiters promise freedom. But their freedom is fundamentally an impossible claim to unrestrained, unconditioned, and unlimited power. Hegel warned us against politicians who – in pursuit of an unachievable purist ideal – defy not just the established rules of society, but reason itself. They promise that it is possible to escape from reason, but they orchestrate an escape from freedom instead, dragging society into the abyss as a result. It is to be hoped that history will not repeat itself in this respect.