Brexit: supporting the narratives

By Richard North - February 5, 2021

I had absolutely no expectations that it would be different, but it is still worth recording yet another example of the “tyranny of the narrative”.

To add to the fiction that David Cameron “vetoed” a treaty, that Farage supported the EU referendum and, more recently, that von der Leyen “invoked” Article 16 of the Irish Protocol, we now have locked into the public consciousness the “fact” that the EU has “banned” the export of live shellfish from the UK.

The truth doesn’t matter, much less anything as unimportant as nuance. The “ban” is now an article of faith, trotted out by drive-by journalists every time they need a space filler to add spice to a “botched Brexit” story.

Sadly, some of the victims don’t have the first idea of what’s hit them, and they’re not going to get any solace from the media, which just wants to milk the grief for its own ends.

On the other hand, it’s quite easy to see journalists don’t put in the effort to smoke out the real story. If you depart from the narrative, the likelihood is that you will linger on the margins. Stick to the script, occasionally adding a tweak to keep the story fresh, and the “likes” and “retweets” will pour in – the means by which journalists measure their own worth.

To that extent, the readers, listeners and viewers are as complicit in the creation of the narratives as the journalists who feed them. People like the comfortable certainty of a story that feeds their prejudices, as long as it is shorn of detail, complications and nuance which might present a challenge and demand effort from the receiver.

Thus, while there are people in the industry who do know what is going on, the media don’t want to hear their message. And government certainly doesn’t want to be presented with a soluble problem, when it is far more convenient politically to have an obdurate, heartless Commission than it is a solution going begging for want of timely intervention by a minister on top of his brief.

As a result, I suspect that the Commission will get away with its non-ban, retrospectively fixing it in new legislation, to ensure that its own inadequacies are not exposed. But when that happens – as Booker so often used to say – the media will have missed a far more interesting story.

Expressed in simple terms, it’s action is akin to requiring people to pass a test before they can hold a licence to drive on public highways, and then refusing to give successful candidates a form with which to apply for a license – thereby “banning” them from driving.

Unaware of this dynamic, we are left with the ineffectual Elaine Whyte, executive secretary of the Clyde Fisherman’s Association. She says that the EU “ban” on live shellfish is a “massive issue” as it could mean “losing live markets entirely and permanently”. But, in her unknowing state, she merely demands a “political intervention” to save UK businesses, without being able to specify what she wants done.

Ignorance is also the policy driver with the growing cacophony over the applying the Article 16 “safeguards” in the Irish Protocol, in a bid to relieve the escalating supply problems in Northern Ireland.

According to Sir Jonathan Jones, the government’s former chief legal officer, people in Northern Ireland were misled by ministers to believe that Johnson’s Withdrawal Agreement would not create a border in the Irish Sea. Yet, a process of simple logic – based on not very complicated facts – would readily have disabused all but the most casual of observers of any such illusion.

After all, it could hardly come as a surprise that, with Brexit, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic would also become the external border of the European Union. Then, given the determination of all parties not to turn this into a “hard” border, it was self-evident that special measures would be needed to prevent it becoming a “back door” into the Union.

With that, there were only two realistic options. One was keeping the UK in its entirely within the EU’s regulatory framework, with RoW controls implemented at the UK’s external borders. The other was to opt for a regulatory free-for-all in Great Britain and to impose a “wet” border down the Irish Sea, with Northern Ireland.

Given Johnson’s version of the Withdrawal Agreement, Jones – whose department gave advice to the government on the agreement – says: “It always seemed obvious, at least to me, that there was going to be a border in the Irish Sea”.

He also adds: “There has been a problem with people not being honest, or people [not] understanding what the consequence of the new agreements was going to be”. This, he observes, is “obviously feeding this public and political concern with the agreement”.

In the forefront of those expressing those “concerns” is the DUP’s Arlene Foster, who used her party vote to block Mrs May’s version of the Withdrawal Agreement – which sought to avoid the “wet” border. Now complaining that the Irish government is “tone deaf to the concerns of unionism”, it is she who wants Johnson to invoke Article 16.

Jones, who resigned from his post over Johnson’s introduction of the Internal Market Bill – despite the Northern Ireland secretary confirming that the Bill “does break international law in a very specific and limited way” – doesn’t come well out of this.

He now says that ministers should not make the same mistake again. “The idea that as soon as the going gets tough we threatened to tear up the agreement that we’ve only just recently reached or endorsed would be wrong in principle and a breach of international law”, he says.

“It would seem to me”, he adds, “to completely undermine any notion of trust and confidence in the UK as a trading partner, whether with the EU or with anybody else. So I really hope that’s not what anybody means”.

But to apply the safeguards, written into the Protocol, is a perfectly legitimate action – provided that the conditions are honoured. But where any such ploy might fall apart is in the detail of the Paragraph 2 of the Article.

Should the UK application of the safeguards, create “an imbalance” – which inevitably it will – the EU is entitled to “take such proportionate rebalancing measures as are strictly necessary to remedy the imbalance”. In the context, this would doubtless involve the imposition of controls at the land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, the very thing that the Protocol was designed to prevent.

On that basis, applying the safeguards would be no real solution, creating more problems than it solves. One wonders, though, whether Arlene Foster is aware of this.

Without going this far, there are nevertheless measures which could be taken to relieve some of the problems of carrying out border checks in Northern Ireland – not least carrying out some of the checks in GB ports – once the infrastructure is in place and trained staff are available.

However, Richard Burnett, Chief Executive of the Road Haulage Association, doesn’t seem to be getting any sense out of government, which seems reluctant to address the issues raised.

Part of the problem, it seems is that the government is in denial, unwilling to acknowledge the scale of the problems.

But the Independent points to a more sinister cause, suggesting that Ministers are refusing to open talks to solve some of the problems, until the EU feels “some of the pain”, when UK border controls are fully introduced.

For the moment, the government – predictably – is focussed mainly on Covid-19 and the vaccination programme, with little “bandwidth” available for other matters. And there is a sense that Johnson will be relying on the “bounce” from the success of the largest vaccination programme ever undertaken by the NHS.

Buoyed by the “feelgood” and renewed political support, expected to come from a drop in Covid figures and a partial return to normal life, the prime minister might be better prepared to take on the vexed question left by his botched implementation of Brexit.

Until then, the stresses and trade problems can be largely attributed to EU action, from which Johnson could actually benefit politically, as he is seen by his fanbase to be standing up to the “bullies from Brussels”.

And, as long as we have a media narrative to support that, the prime minister will be able to outdo “Teflon Tony” in evading the shambles for which he is responsible.