Brexit

A few months ago, Britain’s most senior ambassadors gathered in the Foreign Office to compare notes on Brexit. There was one problem in particular that they did not know how to confront. As one ambassador put it, the English--language publications in their cities (it would be rude to name them) had become rabidly anti-Brexit: keen to portray a country having a nervous and economic breakdown. Their boss, the Foreign Secretary, later summed it up: many believe that Brexit was the whole country flicking a V-sign from the white cliffs of Dover. The job of his ambassadors is to correct this awful image. But how? Their plight has not been made much easier by the Prime Minister.

We are now just two months away from the second anniversary of the Brexit vote and therefore in a position to judge the apocalyptic forecast made by the Treasury in May 2016 in the run-up to the vote. In a paper signed off by George Osborne, which neither the former chancellor nor anyone else who has made a grim prognosis for Britain’s departure from the EU should be allowed to forget, the finest minds in the Treasury came up with two scenarios for the aftermath of a vote to leave the EU. In the ‘shock’ scenario, GDP would be 3.6 per cent lower after two years (compared with if the country had voted to remain), the pound would fall by 12 per cent and unemployment would rise by 520,000.

Recently, The Spectator, in association with NatWest, brought together leading entrepreneurs, MPs and technology writers to discuss where Artificial Intelligence (AI) – or the fourth industrial revolution as it is often termed – is taking us.

Although politicians and pundits have learnt the hard way not to take polls as gospel, the latest Opinium/Independent poll on free trade ought to give the government some cause for alarm. New polling has found that when asked whether ditching current food standards would be a price worth paying for a deal, 82 per cent of those surveyed said keeping current regulations in place should take priority – even if that meant no deal. Meanwhile, just 8 per cent said a free trade agreement with the US should take priority. Of course this is just one poll and the stark findings could in part be down to the phrasing of the question. But regardless, it touches on what the next big Brexit debate will be: the battle between the protectionists and the free marketeers.

The former director of research at Cambridge Analytica, the data-mining firm notoriously suspended by Facebook for harvesting details of up to 87 million Facebook accounts without their consent, has told Andrew Marr that the 2016 referendum on the UK's membership of the EU should be re-contested. Wylie's suggestion comes after it was highlighted that Vote Leave - the official Leave campaign - had employed the services of AggregateIQ (AIQ), a company which Wylie claims to have founded in order to support Cambridge Analytica. AIQ was also suspended from Facebook on Saturday for improperly receiving users' data, charges which AIQ denies.

Obscured by the hubbub of rolling news and the cacophony of Twitter, an important anniversary has passed by virtually unnoticed. The Berlin Wall has now been down for longer than it was up. Berlin’s ‘Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier’ (as the Communists used to call it) stood for 28 years and three months, from August 1961 to November 1989. It’s now been down for 28 years and four months. Its fall reunited the two Germanies, and changed the course of history. So, 28 years on, what can Brits learn from German Reunification? What lessons does the Wiedervereinigung hold for us today? I filed my first report from Berlin in the first year of Reunification. Since then, I’ve returned to eastern Germany more times than I can count.

Why is it that whenever some organisation comes up with some half-baked prediction of doom for the UK economy post-Brexit it is splashed all over the news, yet real data on the economy gets ignored? Yesterday, the ONS quietly released the latest figures for Gross Fixed Capital Formation (GFCF) which covers investment across the whole economy, public and private sectors, manufacturing, construction, services and extractive industries. They showed that contrary to the received wisdom that investors have fled the UK following the Brexit vote, investment grew by 1.1 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2017, to a total of £84.1 billion. Over the course of 2017 it grew by 4 per cent compared with 2016. This was higher than for any other G7 country – with Italy following on 3.

On Wednesday evening, David Davis left his sick bucket at home and made his way to the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster for an hour long grilling courtesy of Andrew Neil. At the Spectator event, the Brexit Secretary spoke of his supreme confidence that the final deal would be voted through - and that the makings of a trade deal would be know by this time next year. However, it was Davis's comment about Michel Barnier – the Chief EU negotiator that caught Steerpike's attention. The Cabinet minister joked that Barnier had said it was not 'too hard' to get Davis to give in: AN: The £37bn divorce bill agreed last November, is that the final bill? DD: Umm... yeah.. I think so. The thing I'd say to you is this... AN: Shouldn't we know so?

With a year and a day to go to Brexit, David Davis sat down for an interview with Andrew Neil this evening. Davis was clear that there wouldn’t be a deal, and thus a £37bn payment to the EU, unless there was an agreement on the future relationship too. Contrary to the received wisdom, David Davis told this special Spectator event that the UK and the EU will ‘get pretty substantively close’ to a free trade agreement by October. He argued that this meant that the withdrawal agreement would have a lot of detail on what the future trading relationship would be. He said that he thought that this would be necessary to get it – and permission to pay the EU £37bn – through parliament.

Moves by the EU to try to stop British armed forces from accessing the Galileo satellite system, and to prevent British companies from bidding for work on it, are, as one senior UK official told the FT, ‘outrageous’. Britain has contributed 12 per cent of the costs. The EU’s argument that to allow British involvement would be a security risk are perverse, given that China, Israel, Ukraine and Morocco are participating in the project. Does anyone really think that relations between post-Brexit Britain and EU will sink so low that European governments will consider us more of a security risk than China? Galileo isn’t principally a military system at all.

Theresa May has had by far her most successful EU Council this week. The terms of the transition deal were signed off and, in a genuine diplomatic achievement, she got the EU to collectively recognise that no one other than Russia could have been responsible for the Salisbury attack. But as I say in The Sun today, that doesn’t mean the government should ease off on ‘no deal’ planning. There is a sense in Whitehall that with the negotiations progressing well, there’s not much point in rocking the boat by preparing for a no deal scenario or spending money on things that might not ultimately be needed. One of those intimately involved in no deal planning complains that ‘there is an institutional reluctance to continue working on contingency in Whitehall’.