Brexit

Theresa May says ‘a positive and constructive partnership’ with the EU after Brexit is the target. Beneath the jargon, the message to Brussels in the government’s latest position paper is simple: a trade deal is in your interests too. Ministers are at pains to point out that a messy Brexit won't just do damage to the UK. It’s true there are some in Brussels who will be keen to teach Britain a lesson for having the temerity to leave. The government’s pamphlet is a warning to that method of thinking.

To the Business School at the University of Edinburgh to be interviewed on the theme of ‘Great Political Disasters’. Main criteria for inclusion: decisions, often taken for short-term reasons, whose unforeseen consequences have echoed down the ages. Everyone will have their own little list, but mine included the Balfour declaration, Partition, Suez, Wilson’s failure to devalue in 1964 (which haunted subsequent Labour governments), Denis Healey’s IMF loan in 1976 (which he later admitted had been unnecessary and which led to the Winter of Discontent and the election of Margaret Thatcher), the poll tax, Iraq and the Brexit referendum (yes, I realise that the jury is still out on that last one).

As Brexit continues to dominate the headlines there is, understandably, a great deal of anxiety surrounding the UK's future prosperity, and our ability to protect and grow Britain's reputation as a major business centre. What is agreed almost across the board is that we must ensure we make post-Brexit Britain an attractive business environment. The referendum was a largely political event, but its economic consequences are enormous and will be felt for years to come. If we want a positive economic outcome from the vote, then UK business needs to flourish.

‘Here we go again’, says the Sun, which criticises the ‘chorus of doom-mongers’ who pop up whenever the government proposes a ‘sensible, serious suggestion for moving towards Brexit’. On Tuesday, this reaction was sparked by details setting out plans for a customs union after Brexit. Now, a fresh wave of cynicism has greeted the idea of a ‘frictionless’ border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. “It can’t be done,” they groan,’ says the Sun - expect, according to the paper, it already is. Take the border between Norway and Sweden, for example, which has ‘almost exactly the same arrangement that is being proposed for Ireland’.

Avoiding a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland is the government’s top aim in Brexit talks. Brussels wants much the same: the EU Parliament’s chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt has insisted that there should be no return to a fixed border. This is an aspiration shared by the EU, which makes the issue one of its three priorities before Brexit talks can proceed to the next stage. The Tories' new friends-in-government are also agreed - and so, too, is the Irish government. Rarely does Brexit generate such unanimity. So if all sides are agreed, you’d be forgiven for thinking things should be straightforward. Unfortunately not.

Writing in the Times today, Hugo Rifkind charges that centrists do not want to smash up the existing order and start again. As someone who runs a centrist think tank, I can only say: guilty as charged, your honour. And if it please the court, I’d like a further crime to be taken into consideration: I like Britain. By that I mean I don’t recognise the bleak caricatures of this country offered by many people who define themselves as Right or Left.   The Right’s description of a country enfeebled by regulation and tax and divided by migration is a nonsense that ignores the necessary role of the state in making markets work fairly and in providing essential services.

Theresa May is back from holiday and the Brexit work continues in earnest. Over the next few days, two key papers - spelling out detail on the customs union and the Irish border - will be published. There’s no doubt, says the Times, that this ‘is a crucial week for Brexit’. ‘After more than a year of disagreement and drift’, there are now some ‘encouraging signs’ that things are slowly being put in order: the joint article written by Philip Hammond and Liam Fox and which was published yesterday advocating a transition period, is one such sign. The publication of reports ‘to flesh out the banal slogans’ touted so frequently so far, will also help matters, suggests the Times.

In widely reported remarks earlier this week, Lord Neuberger, the outgoing President of the Supreme Court, called for Parliament to tell our judges very clearly how rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) are to be dealt with after Brexit. Lord Neuberger’s concern is to avoid judges being left without guidance, required simply to do as they see best, which might invite the unfair charge that they are choosing to make law, whereas in fact they would have been left with no alternative. This concern to leave political questions to the political authorities, echoed in a recent speech by the outgoing Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, is welcome.

Home British negotiators are prepared to pay up to £36 billion to the EU to settle the so-called divorce bill for Brexit, according to the Sunday Telegraph. By voting for Brexit, ‘the old have comprehensively shafted the young’, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Vince Cable, aged 74, wrote in the Mail on Sunday, ‘imposing a world view coloured by nostalgia for an imperial past on a younger generation much more comfortable with modern Europe.’ Lord Neuberger, who will retire as president of the Supreme Court next month, said that the government should ‘express clearly what the judges should do about decisions of the European Court of Justice after Brexit.

Ruth Davidson has called into question the government's pledge to bring net migration down to the 'tens of thousands'. The Sun welcomes her comments and says that it is ‘good to hear a senior Tory…talk sense on immigration’. The migration target, according to the paper, is a ‘random, nonsense figure’ and achieving it would probably entail doing damage to the economy. It’s vital, of course, that immigration does come down, given that ‘some communities’ are struggling to cope with the influx of people. This shouldn’t mean doing damage to Britain’s businesses though, and the paper says it is high time for a ‘serious debate’ about the right level.

The furore surrounding the Brexit divorce bill is hotting up. The weekend’s papers saw speculation that Britain would cough up £36bn as part of a settlement package for its departure from the EU. Nonsense, says Downing Street, with the Prime Minister’s spokesman saying this morning: ‘I don’t recognise the figure’. It’s not only the government hitting back; Tory eurosceptics are also turning up the volume. Yet while the government is eager to talk down the size of the bill, the criticism coming from the backbenches is less nuanced. Instead of quibbling over the amount, the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and John Redwood dismiss the bill out of hand. Rees-Mogg wrote on Twitter: ‘There is no logic to this figure. Legally we owe nothing’.

Next month, Iraq’s Kurds head to the polls in an eagerly-awaited independence referendum. Ahead of the vote, on September 25th, the country’s Kurdistan Regional Government is searching for inspiration from abroad. Brexit, unsurprisingly, is an obvious pick; many Kurds are hoping that Kurdexit could – as with Britain’s shock departure from the EU – finally become a reality. Yet for all the parallels between the two movements, the champions of Brexit are lukewarm in their support for the Kurdish cause. Boris Johnson said that Brexit was ‘about the right of the people of this country to settle their own destiny’. He was somewhat colder on the issue of Kurdish independence.