The Danny Kruger effect

Danny Kruger of Reform UK has published his speech to the DUP conference. The clearest indication yet, assuming Kruger has any authority to speak on behalf of Reform, that they intend to scrap the Northern Ireland Protocol, Windsor Framework and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

He said “Reform UK will undo the scandal of the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Windsor Framework, and restore the single, indivisible internal market of the whole United Kingdom”.

That said, it wouldn’t the the first time a Tory has gone to Northern Ireland to make promises to the DUP that he cannot keep.

Whatever your view on this, it requires a detailed and comprehensive explanation of how cross border trade will function, the future basis for UK-EU technical cooperation, and the economic mitigations they have in mind. The lack of a credible plan is how we ended up in this mess to begin with. This something Kruger clearly doesn’t understand. He asserts:

There was always a path available to us in which no deal was the best option for the United Kingdom — the whole United Kingdom — exiting cleanly and completely, and then negotiating with the EU on trade from a position of independence. But that path was closed off to us — mainly because the Benn Act, the Surrender Act as we called it, took it off the table. And the path we did take had one terrible demerit: the Protocol. It was bad. But we hoped it wasn’t permanent.

A no deal Brexit was never an option for Britain. Severing all formal legal and technical links with the EU overnight simply wasn’t a serious proposition. The EU’s Article 50 negotiating position would have been the same - that there would be no negotiations on trade without first resolving the NI border problem.

Moreover, the Benn Act did not prevent a no deal Brexit. There is a lot parliament can do but it cannot suspend the passage of time. Had the deadline been reached without a conclusion, we would indeed have left without a deal. Parliament, though, recognised the truth of the matter; that if they did not agree to the terms then there would be no deal at all. The no dealers were just outvoted.

It’s actually quite remarkable how after all this time, the people at the centre of that particular debacle still have no better grasp of the mechanics of it than they did at the time.

What we ended up with is a dog’s dinner of a deal, but the deal represented the only possible configuration after all other options had been thrown out by parliament - including the EEA Efta option that would have side-stepped the NI issue (for the most part). It was always for the Brexiteers to spell out a viable and workable alternative, which they never did.

They did attempt it, calling on the “genius” of Shanker Singham, writing for (If memory serves) Legatum Institute (now Prosperity) to concoct an amalgam of half-understood concepts along the lines of trusted trader schemes and “mutual recognition of standards - neither of which have any basis in reality.

While Brexiteers have bitterly complained about the NI Protocol, these technical questions have never been satisfactorily answered. As such, If Reform is intent on deleting the existing treaty framework, it is them to spell out how the UK internal market functions, how the EU Single Market is protected, and how the land border stays politically acceptable.

That, though, is probably far beyond the abilities of anyone in Reform because they never understood the trade and regulatory mechanics of Brexit in the first place. As good a reason as any to give them a hard swerve at the ballot box.

I imagine there are some avenues available to them. There are certain temporary safeguard measures that could be leveraged towards a more permanent fix, and there are certain unilateral amendments they could make in domestic law that would trigger a reciprocal response from the EU, but I can’t see any marginal tinkering addressing the core concerns of the DUP et al.

We should recall, though, that Reform also intends to withdraw from the ECHR which brings its own legal and political challenges. If this is happening concurrently, the the chances of agreeing a rights protocol to uphold the GFA are nil. If Reform dismantles the Protocol, necessitating border controls, then it likely means checks on Irish goods going to and from the continent, which will be taken as a hostile British posture towards the RoI. This could end up collapsing the GFA, along with the whole UK-EU-RoI relationship. Kruger is away with the fairies.

Worse still, on the basis of his current understanding, he will dust off much of the Legatum Institute slop from 2017 for inspiration, only to find it has even less chance of working now. Not forgetting that absolutely nobody sane wants to spend a parliamentary term relitigating achingly tedious Brexit politics when we have so many more important things to be getting on with.

Whether or not this is Reform’s official position remains to be seen. In its early days, with Ben Habib as chairman, the party has alluded to this agenda before, but I’ve seen nothing that suggests it has official standing. While Kruger is (notionally) going through the motions of giving the party some “intellectual heft”, he appears to be ploughing his own furrow, and nobody senior in the party has publicly endorsed his writings. Kruger is expendable and so is his work, especially if he loses his seat at the next election.

What’s clear is the Reform is still no closer to having anything approaching serious policy, or serious people doing the work necessary to form a capable government. Following James Orr’s fall from grace, it seems like the professionalisation agenda (if it existed at all) has stalled. While the party’s recent injection of cash goes a long way towards professionalising its electioneering, the intellectual life of the party is still based on the whims of its leader - who has a habit of repelling anyone who is remotely serious.