Mrs May: Deadline or Deadbeat?

Theresa May has announced her intention to confirm March 2019 as the date on which the UK will leave the European Union; and has indicated an intention somehow to establish that date in law.

On the same day, a spokesperson for the European Union has said that unless there is to be a 'hard border' in Northern Ireland [which no party in Ireland will accept; and which the British state cannot afford to enforce] Northern Ireland must remain under EU jurisdiction permanently: regardless of what arrangement will apply to the rest of the UK. The Democratic Unionist Party, whose votes in the Commons keep Mrs May in power, thus faces a huge dilemma. The one thing that can deprive them of their majority mandate in Ulster would be for them to be seen on the island of Ireland as the group who  would vote to enforce a hard frontier. However the DUP may decide that dilemma, there is a bigger one facing the UK government.

Can any UK government [Tory, Labour, fragile coalition - LibLab - or 'grand' coalition of three or more parties] contemplate bearing the cost or the odium of renewed conflict in Northern Ireland? This is an intractable question, to which I have drawn attention on previous occasions. The headbanging Brexiteers have put Ireland into the 'too difficult' file, as they busily fantasize about trade deals with countries that have no particular interest in doing Britain a good turn. Ireland has been a determining factor in British politics for centuries: and it is worth remembering that whenever the British think they have found an answer to 'the Irish question' the Irish change the question.

By a vote of 52% to 48% the UK population voted in favour of ceasing to be a member of the European Union: without any deep understanding of the implications of that question. Now that the ramifications of just a few of the implications are becoming clear, the proportion of the literate classes [especially of the civil service, which would have to administer Brexit Britain] that favours Brexit has declined rapidly.

Millions of people - including me - voted 'out' in genuine opposition to the ever-closer union of a corrupt political dictatorship [masquerading behind a facade of democratic institutions]; we also wanted to cock a snook at the British political class [represented by Cameron, Clegg and Osborne] who were the principal advocates of Remain and of austerity. None of us wanted to ruin the country economically. Some 'out' voters accepted assurances that that the world was open for free-trade deals on WTO terms. Some - me included - believed that, in the unlikely event of the 'outs' winning the vote, a continuance of the [Liberal-supported] government that had given us the referendum would negotiate terms that enabled stable economic life to continue. Nobody expected David Cameron to be such an utter coward as he proved to be. Nobody much minded what happened to Osborne: as he has demonstrated, he could move on to adopt half a dozen lucrative careers at once. On the day of the referendum nobody contemplated Mrs May being the prime minister; and we could not have conceived that she would place herself in thrall to people who actually would be prepared to see the British economy dismembered: starting with the crown jewels in the City of London.

Today, in the Silent Ceremony at Guildhall, a new Lord Mayor of the City will be installed. By the end of his year, the die will have been cast as to whether Britain will survive [and thrive] as an economy in association with the European Union, though with greater facilities for trade with the rest of the world.

Yesterday's two announcements - Mrs May's 'firm deadline' for leaving the EU, and the EU's comments on Ireland - are incompatible and will almost certainly ensure that no kind of Brexit happens in March 2019. Meanwhile, Mrs May's government looks increasingly unlikely to survive even to March 2018. The Tories will implode, even if the DUP do not simply repudiate their voting pact. Mrs May's chances of winning a by-election, even in the leafy home counties, are vanishingly small. Politics has become far too exciting; and that is before the inevitable mass movement against economic suicide begins to capture the headlines.

Bombardier Bombarded: A Lesson for Brexiteers

The Canadian aircraft manufacturer, Bombardier, has suffered a huge blow at the hands of the US regulatory system: a tariff of 220% has been imposed on imports of its new aircraft to the USA: one of whose airlines has ordered 75 of the planes, with a further order pending. Both the British and Canadian governments have made grants to the company, to maintain its technological capabilities and to protect employment in Canada and in Northern Ireland; and Boeing, the US aircraft builder has cried 'foul' even though the new planes will not compete directly with any of their products.

Boeing has massive contracts with the US military and with NASA. The prices set on such products are necessarily sufficient to support the research and development that is necessary to design and build the craft and devices: thus giving Boeing a comfortable profit base that exempts the firm from any need openly to seek subsidies for its civil aviation sections. Bombardier - the former Short Brothers in Northern Ireland - now has little demand from the British defence sector, which is so strapped for funds that the national defences have been excessively depleted and the country only manages to present figures showing that it meets the NATO target of 2% of GNP on defence by cooking the books rather brazenly. It is absolutely essential that a country purporting to be any sort of power invests hugely in defence technologies, which are expensive. The more innovative the defences are, the more they are likely to cost: and the more effective they are likely to be. It is a quaint paradox that some of Corbyn's 'loony-left' colleagues are more likely to see this than are Tory Brexiteers, because they can see the linkage between economic development and military might in Russia, China and the USA.

On the same day as the US decision was taken on the new tariff, the British train building section of Bombardier also received very bad news. A long-planned consortium arrangement with Siemens to build a new generation of trains for the world market was abandoned by the German firm in favour of an alliance with the French firm, Alstom. This has, allegedly, been engineered at the behest of President Macron, whose government is reviewing all major sectors of the economy with a view to ensuring that the French presence in each, within a European context, is the best that it can be from a chauvinistic French viewpoint. Brexit Britain can expect many more similar snubs from the Macron regime.

Both these stories teach the lesson that an isolated Britain depending on free trade agreements under WTO rules cannot succeed. WTO rules do not prevent the US paying Boeing top prices for research of incalculable value. WTO rules will not stop President Macron's chauvinistic plans from coming into effect. Cash tariffs are trivial obstacles to trade, compared with regulations on product standards and safety that can be manipulated in to assist favoured products, and the 'needs of national defence'. The naive optimism of 'hard' Brexiteers is a form of idiocy. Unless the UK remains within the European Economic Area, with all its common standards and definitions, British firms and their products will be picked off [by being deemed not to meet standards] one by one, as their European competitors develop their capacity to supply the equivalent of their former exports.

British airlines and train companies are under no pressure to buy British: so the demise of the bombardier plant in Belfast and Derby is threatened. British jobs can be lost, and with them generations of accumulated knowledge: and the dimmer Tories won't even weep into their whiskies. Of course, there are intelligent people of conservative cast of mind: but few of them are content with the present deeply-riven government, and even fewer are comfortable about the prospect of a 'hard Brexit'. Despite his Marxist blinkers, John McDonnell shows some awareness of these issues. As the parties stand at the end of the Labour Conference today, Labour has the best of the bad arguments. I do not expect the Tories to gain any ground when they meet in conference next week.

Brexit and Ireland

At least since the time when the only English pope 'asked' King Henry II of England to take full possession of his Lordship of Ireland, there has been an endless and fascinating sequence of tense relations between the rulers based in Westminster and the people of Ireland. Several times, kings and the Cromwellian republic tried to settle conformable populations of Scots and English in Ireland, and between 1670 and 1690 the great Sir William Petty wrote extensively about his plan to resettle half the Irish population on the island of Britain and/or in British colonies elsewhere, replacing them in Ireland with Brits, so that a short period of interbreeding could eradicate the difficult characteristics of the native Irish. Often, British policy in Ireland has been highly revealing about the actual character of British government and the real intentions of British policy.

Thus the publication yesterday of a less-than-half-baked paper on the future of the Irish border under Brexit is in that revealing context. As I have commented previously in this blog, the present UK government can not possibly give effect to any sort of Brexit that involves leaving the European Economic Area whilst retaining the policy of austerity. Actually to erect realistic customs borders and controls on the passage of people all around the UK - which would be necessary before Britain could begin to trade with anybody under the rules of the World Trade Organisation, outside the EU - is totally incompatible with austerity.

Yesterday's UK government paper on the Irish border rejects any hegemonic physical line, either on the land border between the Republic and Northern Ireland or enforced by frigates in the middle of the Irish Sea. One radio commentator summed up the potential control methods as "an iPad in every truck's cab". Interestingly, this looks as if it would put the primary cost of compliance with any new system of "technological" border and customs control onto the private sector; but, of course, billions of pounds would have to be spent for the government to acquire the equipment and train up and pay the skilled people [who probably do not exist anyway] who would be needed to create and maintain the records that would be needed of the passage of people and goods over the borders. The notion implicit in yesterday's paper is simply potty.

Both the British and Irish government are adamant that there cannot be a hard border in Ireland: not just prosperity, but also peace is dependent on free movement of people, goods and arguments.

Ireland will prove to be a sticking-point: the first - and probably the most fundamental - of all. Any genuine Brexit is not affordable to the British state, even if Osbornian austerity were relaxed. Corbyn will not understand this; but, more importantly the headbanging Tory Brexiteers - on whom Mrs May relies for her parliamentary survival - will not understand it: some because they do not want to, and some because their intellectual capabilities do not stretch that far.

The Irish Question will again be a determining factor in British history: and [as Sellars and Yeatman said, in their inimitable 1066 and All that] the English will never solve the Irish Question because whenever they come up with an answer, the Irish change the question. This is certainly the present situation, where the new Irish Prime Minister has set new terms for the discussion of the border: and we can be sure that the great bulk of the European Union will back him to the hilt. Nigel Farage and the 'hard Brexiteers' will claim that the electorate is being betrayed as a 'transition period' mutates into continuing membership of the European Economic Area [but without membership of the Brussels political set-up]. The 'betrayal' will come from the incomprehension and incompetence of the political class: against which a majority of the nation voted on 23 June 2016. Hence, the political class - the very people who are least trusted by the nation - froth and posture about 'taking back control'. They don't know how to do it, because there is no affordable way to achieve it within their mental universe.

Interesting times indeed.