Brexit Unfolded: How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to)

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Crucially, Freeports have no ‘charter’ given to the operators to set their own laws and regulations. So claims that within the Freeports workers’ rights, the minimum wage, unionisation, immigration laws, environmental regulation, access to the NHS and benefits system, and public policing can be changed or abolished are wholly untrue. Diana is especially well-handled in this respect. Whilst being overtly pro-Brexit, it is made scrupulously clear that she is neither a racist, nor stupid, nor ignorant, nor insensitive, nor unreflective. If anything, she comes across as having a kind of sentimental and delicate sense of England and its history. She is arguably more sympathetically drawn than the other main characters, with Cecily sometimes coming across as somewhat priggish and hectoring and Victoria as rather shallow, snobbish and materialistic. In what is clearly an anti-Brexit book by an anti-Brexit author, that is an achievement.

What both Brexit and coronavirus reveal are some fundamental flaws in the way we are governed and the political discourse around it. The populist explosion of this decade, of which Brexit was a prime example, has bequeathed a way of governing which is impervious to reason, and incapable of engaging with complexity. It isn’t just chance that we have a woefully incompetent Prime Minister , a dud stand in [i.e. Dominic Raab], and a cabinet of mediocrities, propped up by a cadre of special advisors with few skills beyond contrarian posturing. It is certainly important to be vigilant. No doubt there are some powerful actors who would like to see something like Charter Cities created in the UK, or indeed wholesale national deregulation. However, crying wolf about what is actually happening with Freeports isn’t helpful, and is actually unhelpful, in resisting that. In practice, it isn’t actually clear that these new Freeports will differ in any significant way from those allowed under EU law. The Government claims the UK Freeports will allow more subsidies to business than as an EU member, but the evidence for that is disputed. Apart from that, the new Freeports differ from those the UK used to have in two main ways, but neither of them required Brexit.

Fact Articles predominantly based on historical research, official reports, court documents and open source intelligence. Brexit, too, explains the uselessness of the Cabinet which, as Rawnsley says, the Inquiry is showing to have “failed to act as a collective decision-making body and a restraint on a dangerously dysfunctional Prime Minister”. How could it have been otherwise given that, as Martin Kettle wrote when Johnson appointed his first Cabinet, it consisted of “mostly second-rate ideologues, many of them with negligible records of ministerial achievement and several of them with very dubious political ethics. All the positions of power are held by Brexit extremists. The rest are political hostages to the hard Brexiters.” Yet the omnipresent Rees-Mogg was at pains to represent the hearing as the work of “the haters of Brexit”, despite the Committee containing four Tory MPs of whom at least one, Bernard Jenkin, is one of the most Ultra of Brexit Ultras. Indeed it turned out, as Martin Kettle noted, that “the unexpected star turn here was Sir Bernard Jenkin, a Conservative MP whose Brexit credentials are unchallengeable, who quietly carved Johnson’s evidence into pieces, leaving him spluttering and humiliated”. Perhaps Jenkin will now join Baker in the ranks of ‘crypto-remainers’, Jacobins turned Girondins. Even before the week’s later events, I felt that this was a questionable reading. Sunak came to power on the basis of being competent and offering stability after the Truss meltdown, and he has sometimes kept to that script. That’s especially so as regards Brexit, where agreeing the Windsor Framework and effectively dropping the scrapping of Retained EU Law were pragmatic, sensible steps which, of course, infuriated the Brexiters. The same goes for re-joining Horizon, effectively scrapping UKCA marking, and other decisions. However, he has consistently been inconsistent, if that is not a contradiction in terms, in that in other ways, especially in his prioritization of ‘stopping the boats’ and his de-prioritization of net-zero policies, he has embraced Brexitist populism. This book confirms Chris Grey’s status as one of the most acute and authoritative analysts of Brexit. Forensically detailed yet approachably written, this fully updated edition provides invaluable perspective on what looks destined to become one of the greatest public policy disasters of the twenty-first century. If you want to understand why, there really is no better guide to the whole sorry mess.” Tim Bale, Professor of Politics, Queen Mary University of London

Similarly, the Inquiry is revealing how during Covid Johnson was flip-flopping daily, or even hourly, on both the overall strategy and the detailed measures for dealing with the pandemic. So it is surely reasonable to assume that he behaved in the same way on detailed issues in relation to the Withdrawal Agreement and the TCA, and also on the big questions about them, most especially whether to allow there to be one or both versions of no-deal Brexit. If all that comes to pass, then it will be the prelude to the next chapter in which it will be possible for a future government, and political culture generally, to take the logical next step and ask the question: why doesn’t the UK join the EU? All this is part of a wider mystery about Sunak and what motivates him. That is especially obvious in relation to Brexit. He has, apparently, always been in favour of it, although I don’t recall him taking any part in the referendum campaign, and he has never given any real explanation of what it is about Brexit that he supports. For that matter, as the Brexiters have observed, the impression he gives – his whole ‘vibe’– is far more ‘remainerish’, if there is such a thing. And it’s the same with other things that he is supposedly motivated by, such as the possibilities of technology on which, for all that he is endlessly described as a ‘tech bro’, he never says anything except bland platitudes, such as that AI presents opportunities and dangers. This is not exactly evidence of a deep interest, still less of deep thinking. Cummings’ own self-serving and obscenity-strewn testimony to the Inquiry, in both its written and, especially, its oral form, showed his utter contempt for ministers and civil servants, whilst in itself giving a glimpse of the bullying and misogynistic culture which, as confirmed by Helen MacNamara’s evidence, permeated the inner workings of the administration. MacNamara, the most senior female civil servant at the time, makes it clear that this culture was not just morally grotesque, but substantively and substantially impaired the quality of decision-making.

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There are many good reasons to criticise Brexit, and one thing that its critics can take pride in is that, largely speaking, their case is based on facts, evidence and logical argument. But that is not always so – and a recent explosion of false claims about Freeports and Charter Cities provides a cautionary tale.