Brexit

Sajid Javid is losing no time establishing his personal authority as Home Secretary and making the case for change. I wrote in my Daily Telegraphcolumn two weeks ago that the test of his independence would be whether he’d pick a fight with Theresa May on Tier 2 visas: doctors, engineers and other skilled workers coming from outside the EU. That fight has now begun. Andrew Marr asked him why thousands of tier-2 skilled workers had been rejected recently, usually because they're not earning £50k. Marr quoted one NHS manager saying it was “completely barmy”. It seems that the new Home Secretary agrees “When that policy was put in place, there was a cap that was established: 20,700 a year of these highly-skilled immigrants.

The New York Times has taken a drubbing in the British press (not least here on Coffee House) for its downbeat assessment of Brexit Britain. However the full page opinion piece it ran last Thursday, by political researcher David Adler, will be music to the ears of many Brexiteers, both left and right. ‘Centrists are the most hostile to democracy,’ declares the New York Times, in the headline and standfirst for Adler’s article. ‘Research shows that it’s not the far right or the far left that is the least supportive of democracy and the most supportive of authoritarianism. It’s the centre.

Ruth Davidson’s Glasgow speech is making headlines about the NHS because that’s where most political village attention is right now. We all know that a big government announcement on health funding is coming and Davidson knows it too. As a former hack, she also knows how to hijack someone else’s story, so her speech is deftly done. (In the trade, this would be known as byline banditry, and it’s Jeremy Hunt’s byline she’s attempting to bandit, or at least share.) But I’m more interested in what she said about immigration. Yes, she repeated a previous call to scrap the stupid “tens of thousands” target because it’s, well, stupid. That’s not news because she’s said it before and the target has been stupid before.

The wags of the right have been chuckling since the Irish electorate voted to legalise abortion. Ha, ha, ha, they cry, look at all those liberals. They deplore the Brexit referendum result and seek to have it overturned but are whooping with delight at the – wait for it – referendum result in Ireland. Here is Mark Littlewood of an Institute of Economic Affairs that is blocking its ears to the economic consequences of Brexit. https://twitter.com/MarkJLittlewood/status/1000363740603273216?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw And here is Matthew Goodwin, an academic whose attention seeking has become so desperate, I should call the Daily Mail comment desk and beg it to put the poor chap out of his misery by giving him a fill-in column. https://twitter.

Andrew Marr returned to our screens this week after recovering from his kidney operation. His first interview was with Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Chairman of the European Research Group and currently the bookies' favourite to be the next Prime Minister. Marr inquired as to how Rees-Mogg felt the government's negotiations with the EU were progressing, particularly regarding the present stalemate over potential customs arrangements post-Brexit and the knock-on impact for the Irish border: AM: [The Prime Minister] thinks this idea of 'We're not putting up a hard border, let someone else do it if they dare'... is irresponsible, and she's said so much to you. JRM: ...I think that is a mistake. I think that's the obvious negotiating position for us to have...

In recent years the British public have been bombarded with allegations about our alleged bigotry. When we failed to follow the advice of the ‘Remain’ campaign in the EU referendum this ramped up several gears. Since then there has been a seemingly endless parade of pseudo-scientific claims that ‘hate crime has soared’ and the like. This has encouraged politicians and pundits to spend the last two years insisting that while the UK had long been a cauldron, it is now one whose lid is off and where racists are allowed to roam the land, attacking foreigners at will. Some of us – certainly a majority – knew all this to be nonsense.

This week, Theresa May got her Brexit inner Cabinet to agree that, in the event of no trade deal being in place by December 2020, the UK would continue to apply the EU’s common external tariff. In The Sun this morning, I try and explain why Brexiteers aren’t kicking off about this and the other concessions May is making, or preparing to make. One influential figure puts it to me like this, ‘it is all very unsatisfactory, but it is what it is’. In other words, given the mistakes that have been made—with the lack of proper no deal planning and the backstop--there isn’t really an alternative.