Brexit

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.

There are three areas on which the EU insists that the Brexit negotiations must make progress on, before proper trade talks can start: the so-called divorce bill, the rights of EU citizens in the UK and the Irish border. Today, the Irish PM said that no progress had been made on this issue, that the Brexiteers had had 14 months to devise a plan and hadn’t come up with anything adequate. Implicit in the Taoiseach’s speech is a threat to block the start of trade talks this autumn. If Dublin doesn’t think any progress had been made on the border question, the European Commission is highly unlikely to recommend to the Council that the EU moves on to the next stage of the negotiations.

We used to think it was noble when people made sacrifices for their beliefs, when they were happy to endure hardship in the service of a political goal or moral cause. Now we call it 'extremism'. Now anyone who is so devoted to an ideal that he's willing to see his own daily comforts diminished to make that ideal a reality is likely to be branded a nutter. I mean, what kind of loon puts his beliefs ahead of his bank balance? Consider the mouths-agape response to new YouGov research published yesterday, showing that many Leave voters are willing to pay a high price for Brexit.

Writing about judicial appointments, I incautiously compared a silly interview question asking a judge to cite an example of when he had acted with integrity, to asking a farmer, ‘How many times a day do you milk your cows?’ Jamie Blackett, a farmer, writes to say that, in the 21st century, it is a question to which the answer reveals much. He explains. Farmer One milks his 50 cows only once a day. He follows the Norwegian system and makes a marketable green virtue of leaving the calf on the cow. He lives near rich people and sells them his artisan cheese and yoghurt. He voted Remain. Farmer Two milks 120 cows twice a day in the time-honoured way. Even when the price is good he earns less than the minimum wage. He scrapes extra money as a delivery driver.

Leaving Philip Hammond in charge of the government was always going to be a risk because of his habit of putting his foot in it. There was the debacle of his first budget, then his saying in Cabinet that driving a train was so easy that even a woman could do it, and his comments that public sector workers are “overpaid”. Now, with the Prime Minister walking in the Alps, Hammond is in charge and has goofed again – this time in an interview with Le Monde. “I often hear it said that the UK is considering participating in unfair competition in regulation and tax. That is neither our plan nor our vision for the future. The amount of tax we raise as a percentage of our GDP puts us right in the middle of the pack.

Writing about judicial appointments, I incautiously compared a silly interview question asking a judge to cite an example of when he had acted with integrity, to asking a farmer, ‘How many times a day do you milk your cows?’ Jamie Blackett, a farmer, writes to say that, in the 21st century, it is a question to which the answer reveals much. He explains. Farmer One milks his 50 cows only once a day. He follows the Norwegian system and makes a marketable green virtue of leaving the calf on the cow. He lives near rich people and sells them his artisan cheese and yoghurt. He voted Remain. Farmer Two milks 120 cows twice a day in the time-honoured way. Even when the price is good he earns less than the minimum wage. He scrapes extra money as a delivery driver.

Dublin and London had been fairly tight since December 1993 and the Downing Street Declaration—until yesterday morning. The Times led with 'Irish want sea border with UK after Brexit'. The DUP's Sir Jeffrey Donaldson rushed breathlessly on to the Today programme to say there was 'no way' his party would accept it. The notion isn't new.  The idea is that the customs and immigration checks move away from the land border, and are done on ports or planes reaching either island. It pours cold seawater on Downing Street's preferred idea that a 'frictionless border' can just rely on nifty cameras. 'We do not want to pretend ... we can solve the problems of the border on the island of Ireland through technical solutions like cameras and pre-registration and so on.

It was only a year ago that ‘Brexit means Brexit, and we’re going to make a success of it’ seemed like a reasonably fresh phrase which could actually mean something. Now, we don’t hear so much about making a success of the thing as we do about getting through it in one piece, hopefully with Theresa May’s Cabinet agreeing on a few things along the way too. The Cabinet is slowly starting to realise that a little pragmatism on both sides wouldn’t hurt as the government burrows into the detailed negotiations with the European Union. A bit of agreement on transitional periods, if not immigration, is handy, but this is just the Cabinet we’re talking about, not other EU countries.