Uk politics

Boris Johnson is in ‘glutinous emollience’ mode today. His opening statement in the debate was not combative but an attempt to cajole and persuade. He said that he would draw on the talents of the whole House in the next stage of the negotiations. In response to Philip Hammond, he accepted the Nandy / Snell amendments which would enable parliament to set the government’s approach to the next stage of the negotiations with the EU. Even when calling on Oliver Letwin not to move his amendment—which threatens to muddy the waters today as Katy explains—he stressed that he thought Letwin was motivated by good intentions. But if the Letwin amendment does pass later, then I think Number 10—if not Johnson’s—tone will change.

There is an understandable desire among some Brexiteers to accept Boris Johnson’s deal. Everyone is battle weary. But it is precisely at this point that Brexiteers must, at the very least, be wary of what is presented to them – and vote down the deal. Why? First, the Withdrawal Agreement has been altered, but only in one substantive way, with respect to Northern Ireland. The backstop is gone and has been replaced with a protocol which theoretically brings NI into the UK’s new customs area but, in all practical aspects, leaves it within the EU’s customs union. The result is that NI would be subject to swathes of EU laws, including full regulatory alignment and with the ECJ as its supreme court. There would, in effect, be a border down the Irish sea.

The Irish backstop and the arrangements to replace it are now the focus of the eleventh-hour Brexit talks. Their importance is not because of Ireland, but because of the battle for the UK’s constitutional freedom to decide the laws that govern this country’s economy and trade. Will the UK’s economic system break free of EU law allowing both an independent trade policy and the UK’s laws to diverge from the EU’s? ‘That is the point of our exit,’ as Boris Johnson told Donald Tusk in August. Or will there be continued subjugation or an eventual UK return to the bloc?

There was a fairytale quality to Nicola Sturgeon’s speech to the SNP conference this afternoon. On the one hand, she demanded a second referendum on independence next year; on the other, almost no-one in Scottish politics really believes there will be a referendum next year. In tandem with this rallying call for national liberation – an emancipation made ever more urgent by the looming Brexit fiasco – there ran another line of argument: conference delegates, like the wider nationalist movement, must be careful and canny and patient. Which is another way of saying that, whatever the headlines suggest, it’s probably not happening. At least not yet.