Who will spare us from Danny Kruger?
I have slammed both Restore and Reform for a general absence of policy, which of itself is highly problematic, but it’s especially problematic that they all have a tendency to gloss over Northern Ireland, both in terms of how they would handle ECHR withdrawal, and how they would approach the Windsor Framework. If either of these sensitive topics are mishandled then it stands to breach the GFA, the Windsor Framework, and perhaps even collapse the TCA.
If you happen to be of the “No-deal Brexit” or “WTO Brexit” persuasion then this won’t trouble you at all, but it’s the sort of thing you would want to approach with your eyes wide open, entirely alert to the consequences so that you have a contingency plan that will, you know… work.
And this has always been the problem with the Slop Right. They don’t anticipate any negative consequences because they don’t know how the system works, never did know how the system works, and worse still… believe they are experts and cannot be told anything. Ignorance and arrogance in equal measure has never been a winning combination in politics. More besides, while the ultra-brexity ilk don’t really care about the consequences, everyone else definitely does.
To my mind, this is not a can of worms any sane person would wish to open. It’s complicated, highly technical, highly politically charged, and very, very dull. There are no well-adjusted humans anywhere on this planet who want to relive the Article 50 Brexit negotiations era, or open up all those divisions. If given a choice between thinking once again about EU SPS rules and the functioning of regulatory borders, or volunteering for experimental root canal surgery without anaesthetic, then I say drill baby, drill!
Part of the reason for that is that politics is one area of human endeavour where there is no player advantage in knowing what you’re talking about. They’re just not going to listen. The intractable dilemma of how to manage Brexit border issues ended up the way it did because there were so few options and none of them especially optimal, but that never stopped otherwise clever people dreaming fantasy solutions that fatally misunderstood the nature of the problem.
I spotted one such example the other day, in which we had Kate Hoey in Telegraph saying “The solution is, and always was, simple. It is found in mutual enforcement of standards between the EU and UK; put simply, each recognises the other’s standards. This removes any need for a border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, or the constitutionally abominable border down the middle of our own United Kingdom.”
This is one of the tropes that makes me so enthusiastic for experimental dental procedures. We went over this countless times 2016-2020. The EU does not do mutual recognition of standards. It does not allow trade partners to unilaterally decide what standards may be admitted into its own regulatory territory. Michel Brainier said no to this countless times, with the level of exasperation seen in the famous episode of Blackadder where Lord Edmund attempts to teach Baldrick basic arithmetic.
Given, then, how withering this particular subject is for me, you might wonder why I’m even bringing it up. I am sorry to report that Reform’s Danny Kruger has decided to meddle. In his latest video he says:
When the United Kingdom left the European Union, we needed to create a customs border between the UK and the EU. Everybody agreed that we didn’t want to see a hard border across the island of Ireland between the north and the south. The fact is, you don’t need hard infrastructure for a customs border. But the EU wouldn’t accept that. And so what they insisted is that the UK create a customs border within its own borders here across the Irish Sea.
He we get to the first and most common category error. When it comes to the movement of goods, particularly foodstuffs, we are not talking about a “customs border”. The matter of customs administration (payable tariffs) is a different matter to the inspection of goods for compliance.
With modern technology, fuss at the borders to do with customs (rules of origin etc) can be minimised, but when it comes to meat exports, it’s a whole different regime, and to be more precise, it is a veterinary SPS border - necessitating Border Inspection Posts. While you can negotiate as to where these inspections take place, which need not be at the border, the system still demand that they take place.
At this point I’m tapping into dormant knowledge that has long since lapsed because it was only ever useful knowledge for the purposes of Brexit, and there’s been no call or desire to revisit it. I hoped I would never every have to re-tread these arguments for as long as I live, but it seems Danny Kruger wants to drag all that back up.
The point here is that smarter and more qualified people than Danny Kruger did not manage to find a universally pleasing solution because there isn’t one. The Northern Ireland Protocol, formalised and entrenched by the Windsor Framework, was the best available compromise to an otherwise intractable problem. There are only three long term solutions. Either Britain enters a UK-wide SPS deal with the EU (in which the EU makes all the rules), Ireland reunites, or Ireland is somehow bounced out of the EU.
Since the latter clearly isn’t going to happen, that leaves two undesirable and suboptimal solutions, meaning we either have to put up with the system as it is, or unilaterally withdraw from the whole sodding lot.
It is safe to assume that withdrawing from the whole sodding lot is the only option for which there will ever be a consensus on the British right, but that then triggers a three way diplomatic crisis, with unknowable outcomes. At that point, it is safe to assume that it threatens the TCA in entirety.
That essentially reopens all the Brexit politics, and the panic about “no deal” yet again re-asserts itself, and we have to relitigate Brexit all over again - just when all the polls suggest there is zero enthusiasm for creating even greater distance from the EU, when it is not even assured that Reform government will have a working majority without entering a coalition deal with the Tories.
As it happens, on principle, unilateral withdrawal is a supportable position, but only if there’s some sort of contingency plan as to what Britain will do to mitigate the loss of all formal trade ties with the EU. That was always the problem with Brexit. The people pushing for it never had a realistic plan or a vision as to what came next, instead pushing fantasy notions of Singapore on Thames - along with unilateral abolition of tariffs - just at a time when the public is demanding reindustrialisation and greater protectionism.
The problem here is that we are never going to see a sensible proposal from anyone in Reform, especially not from Danny Kruger who simply doesn’t understand the issues - and never will. In the mind of the average lapsed Tory Brexiteer, the EU is just being unreasonable for its own sake. This is invincible stupidity. One can only hope that remainer turned Reformer, Sam Ashworth-Hayes, in on hand to throw a bucket of cold water over him.
Worse still, Reform also intends to leave the ECHR (a sledgehammer to miss the nut if there ever was one) - and, to date, nobody on the right has ever answered the question of how we safeguard the GFA. The withdrawal process absolutely will be sabotaged by somebody just to see what can be leveraged out of an impasse. If they’re also going to meddle with the EU exit settlement, then it threatens to unravel the peace process and the entire Brexit settlement.
While you can argue that there is a principled case for doing this, and you can argue that the existing settlement is unsustainable, witless tinkering in this arena is going to blow up into an international row of Brexit proportions. It will consume the government’s entire bandwidth for its whole time in office, to deal with what most voters consider a side issue, regarding a province of the UK they’ve never even been to - and never will.
This is not what voters are voting Reform for. Of all the battles I would pick to spend limited political capital on, it would not be this, and certainly not in a first term, while holding a fragile coalition together. If Reform attempts this, they will not see a second term to finish the job of fixing Britain. It will all end in ignominious failure - and the right will be out of power for a generation.
To my mind, Reform would do well to bench Danny Kruger (preferably give him the sack) but I’m told he is “by far the most intellectual member of Reform”. The frightening part about this is that they might even be right. If that is the case then nobody should vote Reform under any circumstances.