Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

Personally, my money has been on a no-deal outcome since the publication of the pretty ridiculous (and now forgotten) Chequers proposal. Since then I haven’t seen anything yet that made me change this prognosis.

The European Medicines Agency, one of the biggest EU regulators and one of the first casualties of Brexit, has closed its doors in the UK for the last time with the loss of 900 jobs.

Staff lowered and folded up the 28 national flags that adorned the lobby in London’s Canary Wharf headquarters on Friday night and bid farewell before moving to their new offices in Amsterdam.

The EMA evaluates medicines throughout the EU but was forced to relocate to the Dutch capital because pharmaceuticals regulation should be done in a member state. Amsterdam won the bid to host the agency in 2017.

Its departure from London was widely lamented as it marks not just the loss of highly skilled jobs but the UK’s central place in pharmaceutical evaluation and monitoring.

In a tweet on Friday evening, the agency said its executive director thanked staff for their contribution over the past 24 years.
[...]
The decision made by the EU to move the EMA was a body blow to those who have spent a lifetime charting the progress of medicines through evaluation and testing cycles.

In September it emerged that Britain’s leading role in evaluating new medicines for sale to patients across the EU had collapsed with no more work coming from Europe because of Brexit.

The head of the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry, Mike Thompson, said at the time it was akin to watching a “British success story” being broken up.

[...]
The reason why politicians are now stumbling towards disaster like prisoners marching to the scaffold ought to have been clear from that moment. Obviously, Britain can leave the EU, but only if it is willing to pay an extortionate price. Yet first the institute’s judges, led by Nigel Lawson and Gisela Stuart, then the Leave campaigns of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Dominic Cummings and, finally, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, who even now cannot speak plainly, have refused to acknowledge the harsh truth.

As if to anticipate their failings, the winning entry came from a minor functionary in the British embassy in Manila by the name of Iain Mansfield. He brushed away the difficulties of leaving the EU and offered us our first helping of unicorn cake. Britain, he declared, could enjoy the free movement of capital and goods in the single market, he announced, but stop the free movement of labour.

His triumph marked an ominous moment. Until 2013, even rightwing politicians accepted that they could not have the best of all possible worlds. Britain was tied into an integrated European economy. No government could wrench it away in a couple of years. Britain would have to stay in the customs union, as Liam Fox said in 2012. The most significant thinker in the Brexit movement went further. Richard North, the advocate of “Flexcit”, warned that, as a sudden departure would wreck people’s lives, Britain would have to be like Norway and stay in the single market, “at least in the medium term”, as it dedicated many years, maybe more than a decade, to flexible negotiations about a future arrangement.

Rationally, a flexible approach made sense. But by the winter of 2013 the market for rational politics was faltering. North described how Lawson and his fellow judges excluded from the shortlist entries that said the only way to leave the EU was to follow the Norwegian example. Until that point, he had had regular meetings with Arron Banks, Owen Patterson and Cummings. “But something then happened – I don’t know what. Cummings went dark on me and I was ‘no platformed’.”

You don’t need to be a detective to work out why the darkness fell. How could the Brexit campaign inspire nationalist passions, how could Fox, Lawson, Johnson, Farage and Banks inspire even themselves, if they were to say that the only rational way to leave the EU was to carry on paying money, accepting freedom of movement and receiving laws that Britain had no say in making, while an orderly retreat was organised? Who would vote for that? What would the point of leaving at all?

Better to take the road to Narnia and promise everything while committing to nothing. After the prize was awarded to a political fantasy, Cummings gave fair warning of what was coming next. Writing in 2015, he admitted that the campaign would offer no exit plan: hard Brexit, soft Brexit or any Brexit in between. “There is much to be gained from swerving the whole issue,” he explained. Opponents of the EU “have been divided for years”. In any case, “the sheer complexity of leaving would involve endless questions of detail that cannot be answered”.

An honourable man, and an honourable political movement, would have found these excellent reasons to think again. Not Cummings and not the Brexit movement. Intellectually, their Brexit was an empty idea. But electorally, allowing millions to believe that the impossible was possible was perfect post-rational politics. As Roland Smith of the Adam Smith Institute, another rightwing thinktank, said last week, the “dirty secret” of the Leave campaign was that it “didn’t have a well-formed idea of how to leave the EU or indeed whether any alternative was really palatable”.

It is easy to portray Cummings, Johnson and Farage as grand villains. Indeed, if we crash out with no deal, we will be hard pressed to find so much misery brought to so many by so few. But the Cameron government, every MP who voted for the referendum, the supposedly ferocious interviewers at the BBC and hard-nosed journalists in the press let them get away with it. None insisted that the voters be told what form of Brexit they were voting for.

As a point of contrast, consider that in 2018 Ireland discussed removing its constitutional ban on abortion. There was an exhaustive debate at a citizens’ assembly on the proposed measures and the government published a policy paper outlining in what circumstances abortion would be legal if the reform were approved in a referendum, so that no one could argue about the result. As a matter of deliberate policy by Brexit’s supporters, and as a consequence of unforgivable negligence by politicians and journalists, Britain’s referendum offered no such clarity.

I hope you can now see the consequences of obscure arguments in political backwaters. Supporters of a “people’s vote” are met with the superficially plausible objection: “But we’ve already had a referendum.” Supporters of May’s deal and the “Norway option” face the objection that the Leave campaign never told them that we would have to accept EU rules once we left. Finally, for the supporters of a hard Brexit and the millions who risk their futures by believing them, crashing out and crying “to hell with it” are the logical consequences of the illogical retreat from reason they began in 2013.

For good or ill, you can guarantee that the arguments that affect us most are the ones that never make it on to evening news. In the case of Brexit Britain, it’s all ill.

In an exclusive interview with the Herald on Sunday, John Kerr – who sits in the Lords as Baron Kerrr of Kinlochard – said: "The muddle we’re in now is one which can’t be sorted by March 29 [the date for Brexit] … I think we’re heading for a pause for thought, an extension of Article 50, and a referendum."

Kerr, who became involved in the independence referendum over the issue of Europe and campaigned for Better Together, says Brexit has nullified one of the key arguments for Scotland staying in the UK.

During 2014, Kerr argued that the Yes campaign was wrong to say Scotland could ‘just pull up another chair at the table’ with the EU if it left the UK. Kerr said at the time that an independent Scotland would have to apply to join as a new member meaning it would not get the UK rebate on contributions, worth £5.6 billion in 2017.

If the UK leaves the EU, however, ‘this argument is irrelevant’, Kerr says. However, he still believes financially Scotland is better off staying in the UK.

‘Being members of the UK multiples Scottish influence,’ he said. ‘If we Scots left the UK, the economic disruption would be even greater than the economic disruption if as members of the UK we leave the EU … Economists say the effect of leaving the single market of the UK, in terms of the damage to the Scottish economy, would be five times as great as the damage to the UK of leaving the EU.’

Kerr is also worried about the effect of English nationalism. ‘It’s the case that in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, that to be dragged out because of an English nationalist vote against the EU would breed resentment unless there was another fair test of what the public as a whole wants.’

Kerr was scathing of how Britain carried out Brexit negotiations, saying it was not a ‘good idea’ to put Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox ‘in charge’. He believes Foreign Office officials should have played a central role but were cut out.

He said Brexiteer ministers ‘didn’t understand that [the 27 EU member states] would stick together, would stick up for Ireland, would defend the integrity of the single market. These were basic mistakes’.

The 76-year-old from Glasgow also criticised Theresa May, saying: ‘She didn’t reach out to Parliament, she’s never tried talking to the opposition to find a common position, she’s never reached out to the country and explained we can’t have our cake and eat it, and she’s never reached out to Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast and tried to form a consensus of the four nations.’

Renegotiation on any deal is unlikely, he believes. ‘I think the EU isn’t going to make many changes to the deal,’ he said.

On the issue of peace in Northern Ireland, Kerr said: ‘We’re in a very dangerous country when we’ve stories like the government thinking of going for some amendment to the Good Friday Agreement as a way of getting around the need for the backstop.’

He questioned whether ‘politicians in London quite understand how fragile the situation is’, and said the confidence and supply arrangement with the DUP made it difficult for a Prime Minister to appear an ‘honest broker, if you’re relying for your political survival on the support of one party which is very sectarian in its support’.

Fear of social unrest should not prevent a second EU referendum, he added. ‘The worst reason for not having a second referendum would be if we were frightened of right-wing populist gangs in the street,’ said Kerr, who believes Conservative austerity policies helped fuel Brexit in ‘left behind’ areas.

The UK will suffer on the global stage after Brexit, Kerr added. ‘If we go ahead and leave the EU I think we’ll pay a price that won’t just be economic - and it’ll be a serious economic price, particularly for poorer people in our society - it would also be political. I think our influence in the world as a whole would shrink.’

The UK will suffer on the global stage after Brexit, Kerr added. ‘If we go ahead and leave the EU I think we’ll pay a price that won’t just be economic - and it’ll be a serious economic price, particularly for poorer people in our society - it would also be political. I think our influence in the world as a whole would shrink.’

Big on fear tactics, and low on facts.

Why would it be bad "particularly for poorer people" ? Homelessness is already at astounding levels, as is joblessness.

I guess it’s possible the spectre of martial law is being used to scare Brexiteers into another referendum...

How do you justify martial law in Britain?!?

Civil Contingencies Act 2004.
Curfews, bans on travel, confiscation of property and, most drastic, the deployment of the armed forces to quell rioting are among the measures available to ministers under the legislation.

They can also amend any act of parliament, except the Human Rights Act, for a maximum of 21 days.

I guess it’s possible the spectre of martial law is being used to scare Brexiteers into another referendum...

Army stocks up for no deal
The UK armed forces have begun stockpiling food, fuel, spare parts and ammunition at bases in the Falklands, Cyprus and Gibraltar in case of a no-deal Brexit, writes Mark Hookham.

Rations and other supplies are being built up to ensure the military does not run short should a chaotic Brexit disrupt imports and exports.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has spent at least £23m on extra supplies, with additional rations recently flown to the Falklands, one of the UK’s most isolated overseas territories. “An army marches on its stomach. If supply lines break down, they struggle,” a source told Sky News.

The MoD said it was working “to ensure essential defence tasks would not be affected by a no-deal Brexit”.

These are just days I didn’t think I’d see.

Why can’t Britain be treated like Switzerland? The EU seems to bully them.

Switzerland has dozens and dozens of bilateral treaties with the EU, is additionally a Schengen country.