Brexit

Thursday

The Spectator

The real value of the Australia trade deal

From our UK edition

If Britain had been unable to agree a trade deal with Australia, then Brexit really would have been pointless. The country is one of our greatest allies and we have no rational reason to fear its beef, its sugar or its people. A free trade deal, aligned with visa-free travel, ought to have been the easiest deal to do. A deal is now done, phasing in these freedoms over 15 years. But even this sluggish pace is too fast for the protectionists who are popping up. Some have predicted that our beef farmers will be ruined and the countryside laid to waste as our markets are opened to competition. Many of the claims revolve around the fact that just under half of the beef produced in Australia comes from animals treated with growth hormones — a practice banned within the EU.

Alexander Downer

The UK-Australia free trade agreement is a triumph

From our UK edition

How significant is the UK-Australia trade deal announced this week during Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s visit to Britain? Well, Australia already has 17 genuine free trade agreements, including with the United States, Japan and China. But the free trade agreement with the UK is undoubtedly one of the highest quality agreements Australia has ever reached. In terms of the liberalisation of markets, it is only exceeded by the free trade agreement Australia has with New Zealand. This demonstrates something very important: that the UK, having left the European Union, is going to be a genuine champion of global trade liberalisation.

Wednesday

Patrick O’Flynn

Brexit, lockdown and the fracturing of British politics

From our UK edition

Is our society becoming less tolerant and more viscerally tribal? Or is our politics provoking people into committing more angry and desperate acts? The harassment of BBC Newsnight political editor Nick Watt in Whitehall this week by a group of anti-lockdown protestors recalled the ugly mood that descended on the environs of the Palace of Westminster during the Brexit stalemate of 2016-20. Back then, it was Remainer MP Anna Soubry who suffered the worst incident of intimidation, while the Leaver Jacob Rees-Mogg was also horribly abused by a pro-EU crowd as he walked home from a key vote with one of his children. Many of us might have hoped that such a level of polarisation was a peculiarity of how Brexit played out and would by now be securely in the political rear view mirror.

Roderick Crawford

The protocol may be Boris’s greatest masterstroke

From our UK edition

The jibes thrown at Boris Johnson over his unhappiness with the Northern Ireland protocol — based on the obvious observation that he was the one who signed it — have been based on the assumption that he is either a liar or a fool. A liar because he knew full well what he was signing up to, or a fool for not knowing what he was agreeing to. Does anyone think that officials told him that the protocol would prevent Northern Ireland having access to some cancer drugs? Or guide dogs being unable to move between GB and NI? Keir Starmer has repeated the jibe about Johnson. A further version is that Johnson did not care if Northern Ireland paid the price so long as the UK left the EU.

Tuesday

Nick Tyrone

Keir Starmer is alienating both sides in the Brexit debate

From our UK edition

What is it with Labour and Brexit? An issue that during Theresa May’s premiership looked like it could rip the Conservative party apart has instead made them electorally invincible – and caused huge problems for the Labour party.  For that reason, Keir Starmer tends to avoid the topic these days, seeking to show that he and his party have 'moved on'. But some days, he can’t help himself. Yesterday was one of those days. Speaking about the Northern Ireland protocol on the radio, Starmer said: 'We do need to remind the Prime Minister that he signed on the dotted line: this is what he negotiated. If he’s saying it doesn’t work he should look in the mirror and say, well, did I sign something then that wasn’t very sensible?...

Matthew Lynn

We don’t have to swap sovereignty for trade

From our UK edition

A new court will be established with powers over both countries. Labour and product laws will be harmonised. Flags with kangaroos and crowns will flutter over buildings, there will be a special parliament moving weekly from Cairns to Coventry and an anthem that mashes up Rolf Harris and The Beatles will be played at every opportunity.  For years, we have been lectured by europhiles that free trade requires a pooling of sovereignty There were lots of things that could have been in the Australian-UK trade deal that was finally agreed today but which aren’t. In truth, the most significant point about the deal is not what it includes, but what it doesn’t. It liberalises trade, reduces tariffs and at the margin will help the economies of both countries.

Sunday

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson’s Northern Ireland problem

From our UK edition

In an at times grouchy press conference, Boris Johnson tried to calm the row over the Northern Ireland protocol. The Prime Minister declined to comment on what Emmanuel Macron is supposed to have said about Northern Ireland’s position in the UK. He said that the whole issue of the protocol had taken up a ‘vestigial’ amount of time at the summit. (Interestingly, Mujtaba Rahman of Eurasia Group, who is particularly well connected in EU capitals, says that he has been told it took up two-thirds of the conversations in the margins of the summit).  Instead, Johnson wanted to emphasise the vaccine commitments that the summit had made and how these would help ‘demonstrate the benefits of democracy and freedom and human rights’ to the rest of the world.

Friday

James Forsyth

How to fix the protocol

From our UK edition

The blame game between London and Brussels over the Northern Ireland protocol obscures the fact that there are solutions waiting to be found. There are, as I say in the Times today, ways to reform the protocol and better protect the Good Friday Agreement while not threatening the integrity of the single market. Three changes would render the protocol far more acceptable Three changes would render the protocol far more acceptable and would better position it to withstand the undoubted pressures it will come under when the EU and UK start to diverge their regulations.  The first of these is a trusted trader scheme for food. This would allow registered suppliers to move goods — including, yes, sausages — from Great Britain to Northern Ireland without checks.

Thursday

Lee Cohen

Biden proves that Trump was a true British ally

From our UK edition

Now that Joe Biden has landed in the UK, many Brits may be realising what a stalwart friend they had in Trump. Within minutes of arriving on UK shores, Biden was denouncing Britannia, Boris, Brexit — you name it. Far from hailing the UK, America’s most cherished ally, BIden was showing Britain a bullying disdain that should be reserved only for China or Iran. It is difficult to conceive of two stranger bedfellows than the golden-tongued Old Etonian and the awkward, plain-spoken 'blue collar' Joe Biden. But rhetoric, style and acuity aside, the two heads of government face divergent motivations when it comes to policy — these are likely to challenge the British-American partnership.

Henry Hill

Joe Biden doesn’t understand Northern Ireland

From our UK edition

Even a pessimist could be forgiven for being surprised by Joe ‘I’m Irish’ Biden’s ham-fisted intervention in the ongoing row over the Northern Ireland protocol. If Boris Johnson’s remark that the phrase ‘special relationship’ didn’t ring true before, they certainly must after the President opened his visit by quoting Y.B. Yeats on the Easter Rising… while visiting a Royal Air Force base. It will also be a wearisomely familiar routine for Ulster unionists, who have been scorning American pressure to abandon Britain since at least the days of Woodrow Wilson. How will the government respond? There remain many on the right bewitched by yesterday’s Atlanticism.

James Forsyth

Why this G7 summit matters more than most

From our UK edition

It’s risky planning a trip to the British seaside at any time of year. But if the weather forecast is to be believed, Boris Johnson will get away with this gamble at the weekend’s meeting of the G7 at Carbis Bay in Cornwall. Brexit’s critics were always going to seize on any evidence that Britain was being sidelined by the rest of the world after we left the EU. So it is fortunate for the government that the UK is the host of this year’s summit because it has placed this country at the centre of things. This G7 is unusually consequential. It is the first time that these leaders have met in person for well over a year. This will give the meeting momentum; it would be hard to think of a worse format for diplomacy than group video calls.

The Spectator

It’s time to revisit the Northern Ireland protocol

From our UK edition

Britain has already seen two ‘Brexit days’ — when it formally left the EU on 31 January 2020 and the end of the transition period 11 months later. But given that it has taken less than six months for the Northern Ireland protocol to unravel, it’s horribly clear that our future relationship with the EU is anything but settled. The transport of sausages and other chilled meats from Britain to Northern Irish supermarkets may seem a trivial matter. But the attempt by the EU to enforce a ban on this trade demonstrates what so many people found problematic about the idea of an internal UK border down the Irish Sea. And it is surely a harbinger of battles to come.

Saturday

Nick Tyrone

Ed Miliband’s Brexit ‘embrace’ isn’t fooling anyone

From our UK edition

Ed Miliband gave an interview this week in which he decided it would be a good idea to bring up the topic of Brexit. The interviewer spotted an opportunity and asked Miliband if he had ‘embraced’ our departure from the EU. ‘You’ve got to embrace it because that argument is over,’ was the former Labour leader’s response. That one sentence was a perfect demonstration of the way Labour’s top figures keep getting Brexit wrong, and continue to fail to understand why the issue hurts them as it did in Hartlepool a month ago. Labour now have two basic ways to go on Brexit. One is to become the soft anti-Brexit party they were before the last election – and that a lot of voters still see them as, deep down.

Nick Cohen

Labour is in last chance saloon

From our UK edition

If they have any sense – a proposition I will test later – officials from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru will be beginning meetings to work out a pact for the 2023/24 election. If they do not agree to a joint programme, there’s a good chance that Conservatives will be in power until a sizeable portion of this article’s readership is dead. The next redrawing of constituency boundaries in 2023 is almost certain to favour the Conservatives, adding ten seats to the already unhittable target of 123 constituencies Labour needs to win to govern on its own. There’s a possibility that Scotland could be independent by the end of the decade, and that ought to terrify anyone who wants to stop the rest of the country becoming a one-party Tory state.

Wednesday

Matthew Lynn

Tim Martin isn’t a Brexit hypocrite

From our UK edition

Heinz is expanding a huge factory in the UK. Tesla is reportedly scouting the north for locations for a new car or battery plant. Even the pound is bouncing to three-year highs.  It has been a difficult few weeks for some hardcore Remainers. Still, at least there is finally something to cheer them up. Tim Martin, the pugnacious founder of the pub chain JD Wetherspoon argued today that the government should relax immigration rules to ease a shortage of labour.  For the dwindling band of believers in the EU, it was a gotcha moment. At last, one of the leading backers of our departure from the EU was experiencing some ‘Bre-mourse’. 'Brexit fantasies succumb to Brexit reality,' tweeted the former editor of the Financial Times Lionel Barber.

Monday

Andrew McQuillan

The DUP has been broken by Brexit

From our UK edition

Are we witnessing the end of the DUP as the dominant unionist party in Northern Ireland? Tumultuous events in Belfast in recent days suggest as much. The DUP gathered on Thursday night to ratify the appointment of Edwin Poots and Paula Bradley as the party’s new leader and deputy leader. A dull rubber-stamping it was not; the meeting turned into the most public display of discord and factionalism in the party’s 50-year history. Rather than listen to Poots make his acceptance speech, Jeffrey Donaldson, the MP Gavin Robinson and both Nigel and Diane Dodds stood up and left. Dissatisfaction with how Arlene Foster was treated was given as the reason for the walk-out, with some party activists also resigning from their positions.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

A brilliant, tense, ragged slice of drama: Waiting for Lefty reviewed

From our UK edition

A Russian Doll is a monologue about Putin’s campaign to swing the Brexit vote in his favour. It stars Rachel Redford whose Borat accent becomes grating after a little. She plays Masha, a computer wizard and language expert, who works for a firm of hackers appointed to spread fake news ahead of the referendum. Masha uses two techniques. She poses as a British Facebook subscriber and drops scary comments on to her timeline. ‘If we don’t leave the EU, Muslim extremists will flood the country.’ Her other ploy is to share a quiz about bikinis with her female correspondents. If the offer is taken up, the bots can harvest data from the correspondents and from their followers too. These methods seem rather time-consuming and haphazard.

Martin Vander Weyer

Who cares who runs the railways? We just want them to run on time

From our UK edition

The long-awaited review of the railways by former British Airways executive Keith Williams chugged past the platform of public debate without creating much stir. Politicos noted that it had become ‘the Williams-Shapps Plan’, indicating an urge on the part of Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, in Tony Blair’s words, to be personally associated with eye-catching initiatives — in this case, especially those that have nothing to do with the issue of whether British holidaymakers will be allowed to fly abroad this summer. But the review’s core proposal — a new public body called Great British Railways that will control tracks, timetables and fares, and contract with private operators to run trains — provoked little controversy.

Tuesday

Matthew Lynn

The EU is overplaying its hand on Northern Ireland

From our UK edition

The EU's decision to take control of the vaccine programme was hardly a roaring success. The eurozone's economy remains stuck in recession. And the EU's foreign policy is a mess, as events in Belarus have just made clear.  Still, despite the evidence that she isn’t very good at managing anything, no one can argue that the European Union’s president Ursula von der Leyen lacks self-confidence. Last night, she made it clear there could be no possible compromise over the Northern Ireland protocol. The trouble is that she could easily bring the whole trade deal between the EU and the UK crashing down.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Bloc buster: David Frost on Brexit, Barnier and the backstop

From our UK edition

In an eyrie at the top of the Cabinet Office sits David Frost, Boris Johnson’s former Brexit negotiator who is now the cabinet minister responsible for handling the European Union. His office has the genial feel of a don’s study — there’s a book of Anglo-Saxon verse on his table alongside one of Greek poetry — yet mention Frost’s name to even the most mild-mannered EU diplomats and they begin to fume. In an effort to understand the apparent mismatch, I ask Frost if he feels the need to be aggressive in negotiations. ‘I hope not,’ he replies. But he does admit that he did feel that way when he first took on the job.