A full Brexit?
By Pete North - December 30, 2020
“The deal struck between London and Brussels does not represent a decisive breakthrough for popular sovereignty. But it does eliminate some of the worst aspects of EU membership, and create space for the emergence of a real alternative to the neoliberal order” says The Full Brexit. (Theresa May’s weak Conservative governments, dominated by Remainers, had ostensibly accepted the result but, lacking the experience and enthusiasm for representing the popular will, struggled to develop a coherent and forceful Brexit policy, preferring to maintain many of the trappings of member-statehood.)
The article is worth a read but from that particular shop I always get the feeling that they write very much from a political philosphy perspective and they don’t really get how the system works or why, and in particular they seem to have a Spiked inspired juvenile politics where anyone trying to stop Brexit belongs to a democracy despising establishment elite. Some in the public eye like AC Grayling perhaps fit that description, but quite a lot of brainy people oppose Brexit for seriously good reasons.
Starting with TFB’s critique of the EU as the entrenched neoliberal order, I first want to junk the word neoliberal. It is a loaded term to describe what is commonly described as a rules based order. The entire intellectual effort behind these rules is to create free and fair trade, to eliminate unfair practices and to protect consumers, workers and the environment.
Creating trade treaties based on these rules places limits on the exercise of sovereingty – something nations do of their own volition to reap the trade benefits. Though this does place limits on expressions of democracy, most trade thinkers are agreed that the only thing worse than a rules based system is trade without rules.
These ideas were behind the attempt to create the International Trade Organisation in 1944, followed by GATT and the WTO. The ideas have gradually become baked into the EU single market over time and EU trade agreements are built on them.
In this, the EU is something of a success story. It has been instrumental in designing and exporting rules worldwide to become a global regulatory superpower. The single market is the broadest and deepest system of trade rules in the world and one that undoubtedly has created enormous wealth and freedom.
In this, many remainers can and do accept that the system has an inherent “democratic deficit”. There are plenty of angles of attack there. The structure of the EU conforms to a bureaucrats idea of democracy, which elides voting rituals with people power. They accept this inherent deficit as within tolerance on the balance of the wealth and freedoms it creates.
The essential problem with this is that much of politics then becomes redundant and economic policy falls into the domain of experts and lawyers. Governments can do anything they like within the parameters provided. If they step out of bounds they are put back in place by supranational authority. The ECJ/Commission. Policy innovation is stifled and philosophical/political debate is largely toothless since the economic model is “settled science”.
A reasonable minded remainer can accept there are good reasons for leaving the EU. But the first question arising is what the alternative is. The fact that leavers could neither specify nor agree an alternative is a large part of why Brexit was resisted in 2016 and has been resisted ever since.
When asked what Brexiteers would do with the constraints removed the Tory prospectus did not present itself to anyone as a better alternative. Radical deregulation, unilateral tariff disarmament and a pivot away from the EU’s precautionary principle to a more American model is not only undesirable, it is also based on obsolete thinking, and if put to the electorate as a specific manifesto proposition it would never gain popular consent. And they know it. The intent was to use Brexit as a Trojan horse for these ideas.
The other question, wasn’t so much one of what we would do outside the EU, rather how we would do it. The brains behind Brexit (and indeed The Full Brexit) imagined it was as simple as repealing the European Communities Act with no negotiations. A suthre fire way to blow up the economy and smash our international credibility. Half a century of technical and legal integration is not undone at the push of a button.
With such reckless ideas based on poor research, with no intention of securing an explicit mandate for a libertarian economic experiment, one cannot say the Tory right were remotely interested in resolving the democratic deficit of the EU, nor was their prospectus likely to leave anybody better off but for the already very rich.
Thankfully, the radical Brexiteers were prevented from touching the levers of power, leaving it to Theresa May to initiate the process. With the suicide option off the table, it was a matter of choosing from two or three suboptimal modes of departure, which largely satisfied nobody.
We are all well aware of the politics that happened in between then and now, resulting in an agreement that closes down economic and social freedoms, hits exporters of goods with delays and red tape, and excludes UK services from their nearest and most important market. Jobs will be lost while there is nothing convincing in the offing to reassure remainers that any of this is worth it.
As a leaver I have written countless critiques of EU policies and for all the headline advantages of EU and single market membership, there are also costs that EU advocates prefer not to talk about, downplay or completely ignore. But even if they were to fully confront those issues, such as the asymmetry of freedom of movement, and the inequality of opportunity it entrenches, and the exploitation upon which cheap food is predicated, it is still for leavers to outline why Brexit improves anything.
I have certainly advanced my own arguments, but I have no platform as such. The public case for Brexit is made by the public figures who campaigned for it – and I have yet to hear a single coherent or credible case fall from their lips – only the classic mantras about sovereignty and deflections about unaccountable elites.
Thus, remainers continue to demand evidence of “tangible benefits”. The intangibles seem largely symbolic while the tangible benefits don’t compete. It would be far easier for them to swallow Brexit if they could see something beyond a notional advantage based on vague philosphy with zero material gain – delivered by a band of issue illiterate ideologues whose commitment to democracy does not extend as far as minding the other half of the country who didn’t vote for Brexit.
This explains the overall lack of “enthusiasm for representing the popular will”. May’s government “struggled to develop a coherent and forceful Brexit policy, preferring to maintain many of the trappings of member-statehood” largely because any objective analysis shows the alternatives to be suboptimal – ironically, for all the reasons pointed out by the leave campaigns. They only thing the brexiteers would accept at this point was a no-deal Brexit calling on a vague interpretation of WTO rules for which nobody serious can make a credible case.
For all that The Full Brexit, dresses up Brexit as a working class revolt, nobody from that shop has ever explained why hitting factories with tariffs, rules of origin, customs checks and VAT red tape and travel restrictions was going to improve the lot of Red Wall man. By my own estimations, the only mode of Brexit that doesn’t kick Red Wall man squarely in the balls would be the Norway option, which retains the “neoliberal” member-statism that TFB rails against.
Ultimately a careful operator like May tired her best to reconcile the demands of Brexiteers with the cold, hard reality of modern trade and found it could not be done. In the belief to the contrary, the Tories removed her and replaced her with a man who would do their bidding.
In this it seems that the ERG are quite pleased with the result while TFB tells us it “creates space for the emergence of a real alternative to the neoliberal order”. They say “Arguably, the arrangements secured by the UK may be considerably more attractive to other European member-states than those prevailing elsewhere, particularly for non-Eurozone countries. Why remain a member of the European Economic Area or European Free Trade Association, directly subject to around a quarter of EU law and the jurisdiction of the ECJ, when you can secure many of the benefits of market access with greater sovereignty?”
This I do not see. Before unpacking that, it’s worth pointing out that EEA is not under ECJ jurisdiction. The EEA is system of negotiated adoption through Efta where rules are evaluated, shaped and then formally incorporated. In that regard the TCA agreed this week is not entirely dissimilar, only far less advanced, granting no particular preferential access to the single market. What it does do, is bind us to ISO, ILO, UNEP, WIPO, WCO, UNECE, OECD, Codex and the WTO along with rules separate to EU rules but designed for the same effect, to the same philosphy. It could be developed to rival the EEA over the next decade or so, but it does not mark a departure from the “neoliberal order”. It is merely a return to the source.
One will, therefore, not be at all surprised to see a system of dynamic alignment built into the agreement over the next decade amounting to much the same as Switzerland at the very least. Thus, with no discernible economic advantage to this minimalist approach, no philosophical departure in any meaningful sense from the global rules based order, from where is this alternative to arise, and why would Efta states trade good access for no access only to be bound by the same array of global regulations and standards?
Until the self-regarding Brexit blob can outline something more tangible – or even convincing intangibles, Brexit will continue to face implacable opposition, and when Labour returns to power, that member-statism, opting back in a piece at a time, will reassert itself.
Railing against neoliberalism is really just railing against a capitalist dominated system of global rules, where perhaps Brexit gives us some greater flexibility, but the EU is not alone in baking in WTO and ILO rules into its FTAs. Replicating WTO tract verbatim is standard practice, as is the adoption of global standards. A nation state rejecting this reality is one that stands alone and isolates itself. Since that is not an option, and the global consensus is that a rules based order is better than trade anarchy or a global order dominated by China, the UK needs to get real – and learn to live with technocracy. It’s a question of how to tame technocracy and to apply it in the service of democracy, rather than as its master.