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Good morning. Almost everyone thought that yesterday’s newsletter was nonsense from soup to nuts. Come to think of it, so do I. Some thoughts on this and the UK Government’s Brexit strategy below. Tell me what I did wrong today in the email below.
Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Kuach. Follow Stephen on Twitter @stephenkb and please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com.
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Beyond the horizon
The UK government will shout and shout until it gets sick: new legislation to abolish the Northern Ireland Protocol will be tabled in Parliament on Monday. Yesterday, Tory Eurosceptics fired a warning shot at Boris Johnson, telling him they could postpone it if it did not “neutralize” the Brexit text completely.
As I have written several times before, I do not think we should take the position of the United Kingdom Government on this issue so seriously. Over and over again, Johnson’s government is stamping its feet, informing friendly newspapers of its intentions to break the protocol before capitulating. As FT Public Policy Editor Peter Foster writes in his excellent weekly newsletter Britain after Brexit, the new legislation will be the beginning, not the end:
Even if we imagine for a moment that such a bill has become a law (far away) and that Johnson’s ministers have used the powers contained in it, it has never been clear why Johnson or the DUP believe this will resolve the protocol dispute.
What, according to Johnson, will happen after this unilateral action to overturn the protocol? How do his supporters think Sinn Fein would react to such a move? Not to mention the European Commission and the capitals of the EU?
Pulling the trigger only poses the threat of a trade war with Europe during the worst cost-of-living crisis of the 1970s and further polarizes the peace process in Northern Ireland, which the Johnson government says it seeks to defends and defends.
The UK’s annual surrender in the Brexit negotiations has been going on continuously since 2018 (as readers of the main trade secret briefing will know) and I see no reason to think that this sequence will be broken.
But I wonder if we might underestimate the political cost of what you would call “action without a trade war.” If, because of the protocol scandal, the EU is blocking British universities’ access to the € 95 billion Horizon Europe research program – the largest in the world – is this a “trade war”? If future cooperation on new technologies or other projects is hampered by the bad air created by the UK government briefing, is this a “trade war”?
I still believe that, given the economic costs of the trade war with the EU, the UK Government will do what it has always done and find a way out of full confrontation with the EU. But I think we need to be less preoccupied with whether there will be a full-fledged trade war with the EU (no, because the UK government will always step down) and focus more on which parts of the UK economy will experience its own private trade war.
It hurts, but it works
Yesterday I wrote that bad economy is bad news for the conservative government, but good news for Boris Johnson, because no one else will want the job given the difficult economic background. By email, text message, and phone, you became one to ask Stephen, “Are you on glue?” As one reader wrote:
I do not completely agree with you on the potential successors of Boris Johnson, who are repulsed by the current state of the British economy and its even gloomier prospects. In 21 years of working for successive British governments, I have not met a single minister whose ambition to rise to a higher post would be significantly overshadowed by even more difficult economic circumstances than the OECD predicts.
Furthermore, the ego nature of most politicians is such that no more than a handful of those I have dealt with would have serious doubts about her / his ability to make things right if given the chance. In short, I think you underestimate the power of both ambition and ego among the political class.
In my defense, several Conservatives on the back bench thought that while I was wrong to think that Johnson’s potential successors could be repelled by the OECD’s horrific figures, it did help the Prime Minister that MPs looking for a better alternative, they can look at the terrible economic picture and conclude that there is no better alternative. But I accept that not every future candidate will be overwhelmed by bad economic news.
Another person who was unconvinced by yesterday’s email is Robert Shrimley. But he made a good point about one way the bad economic picture helped Johnson and the Conservatives. The painful measures that UK politicians tend to resort to in order to tackle inflation are those that Conservative governments are distributing more conveniently than the Labor Party.
I think that’s right. If the next election becomes a question “who is more likely to cause pain in households?” Which is in favor of the Tories. But if the prime minister is not able to state the need for this in advance, it will not help him.
Now try this
I really enjoy the new TV series “Star Wars”. Here is this man Robert Shrimley again for some other creations worthy of their own cinematic universes, from When Harry Met Sally to The Godfather.
This week’s column looks at the trend of “capturing fans”: when mission-oriented organizations end up talking to themselves and harming their own goals. Have a nice weekend.
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