Anniversaries matter, both in our personal lives and in the way that societies and nations define themselves. What we do and don’t celebrate or commemorate, and how, and what we feel about it are all part of collective identity and history.
Brexit is replete with anniversaries – of the referendum in 2016, of the triggering of Article 50 in 2017, of the end of the transition period in December 2020 and, most obviously, of the day the UK left the EU on 31 January 2020. The second anniversary of the latter fell this week.
One possibility would be to leave that day unmarked and unremarked. So far as I know, there was never any notice taken of the anniversaries of having joined the EU, nor of the 1975 referendum vote to stay in. Perhaps that is a sign that EU membership was never seen as being of much interest, or perhaps that it was insufficiently appreciated. In retrospect, had it been celebrated more we might not be in the situation we are now.
Brexit is replete with anniversaries – of the referendum in 2016, of the triggering of Article 50 in 2017, of the end of the transition period in December 2020 and, most obviously, of the day the UK left the EU on 31 January 2020. The second anniversary of the latter fell this week.
One possibility would be to leave that day unmarked and unremarked. So far as I know, there was never any notice taken of the anniversaries of having joined the EU, nor of the 1975 referendum vote to stay in. Perhaps that is a sign that EU membership was never seen as being of much interest, or perhaps that it was insufficiently appreciated. In retrospect, had it been celebrated more we might not be in the situation we are now.
We 'got Brexit done'?
At all events, this week Boris Johnson and his Brexit-corrupted party, deeply immured in scandal and multiple crises, have been keen to spray (or should that be spaff?) around anniversary images of a beaming Prime Minister signing the Withdrawal Agreement with the brag ‘Got Brexit Done’. As ever, there is no care about the fact that half or more of the country sees this as nothing to rejoice about. Indeed about the only real pleasure Brexiters now seem to take in their project is the upset it has caused their compatriots. In this sense, to celebrate ‘getting Brexit done’ is also to wound, rather like inviting people you loathe to celebrate your birthday when it falls on the date that their child died.
Even in its own terms it is a claim that invites some obvious objections. One is that there are still several parts of Brexit which have yet to be implemented, most obviously the full UK import controls regime. Another is that almost since the moment he signed the agreement, Johnson has been trying, as he still is, to re-negotiate some of its core provisions as regards the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). Moreover, these provisions are the part of the agreement most directly associated with Johnson himself, since they are what he triumphantly negotiated as the way to ‘ditch Theresa May’s hated backstop’.
As if on cue, alongside the ongoing and fractious UK-EU negotiations, this week saw a serious new and still evolving crisis over the Protocol. Very likely I’ll write more about this in next week’s post but in essence it arises from the DUP’s attempt to unilaterally halt key parts of the NIP, specifically Sanitary and Phyto-sanitary checks on the GB-NI border. This has potentially major implications for the negotiations, for the UK-EU relationship generally, for UK-US relations and, of course, for the fragile politics of Northern Ireland.
It’s the latest consequence of the way that, having totally refused to understand the implications of Brexit for Northern Ireland, Johnson and the Brexiters hastily cobbled together an agreement which they apparently neither understood nor intended to implement, and in the full knowledge that it was bitterly opposed by many unionists. That it should flare up again in this way and at this time underlines the hollowness and dishonesty of Johnson’s anniversary boast to have ‘got Brexit done’.
The ‘Benefits of Brexit’ report
The more substantive marking of the anniversary was the government’s publication of its lengthy report on the ‘The Benefits of Brexit. How the UK is taking advantage of leaving the EU’. I’ve already reviewed this in some detail for Byline Times and so won’t repeat that analysis here. In short, it’s a shoddy amalgam of false or misleading claims about things which Brexit has enabled Britain to do, vague and unrealistic aspirations, and heavy dollops of irrelevant waffle. David Smith, Economics Editor of The Sunday Times, reached a similar conclusion, describing it as “desperately thin gruel, a mixture of aspirations so far undelivered and things we could perfectly well have done while remaining members of the EU”. Even those supportive of its general ‘direction of travel’ have had to admit that it lacks convincing detail.
As with the ‘Got Brexit Done’ slogan, the report shows how the case for Brexit is still having to be made and that the process of Brexit is very far from over. I mention in my review that the political purpose of the document is partly to generate a few good headlines in the pro-Brexit press, and partly a response to the growing discontent from Brexiter MPs and commentators, and perhaps most notably from David Frost (£). For quite some time now they have been asking, in particular, to see the de-regulatory agenda that so many of them associate with Brexit.
In a way, they have a point. It’s remarkable how much of the document shows how little progress the government has made, so that a great deal of it is about reviews and consultations which will be held in the future. After all, it’s now eight months since the Iain Duncan Smith TIGRR report that was supposed to set the agenda for all this, and only slightly less since the creation of the Brexit Opportunities Unit was announced.
What this reflects is that, when it comes to practical realities, the opportunities for regulatory change are quite limited and also horrendously complex*. It is therefore much easier to contemplate and discuss than to act. This of course was entirely obvious to anyone with any understanding of business, law or public policy from the outset, for reasons I’ve discussed many times on this blog. But since it is impossible, now, for the government to respond to the question ‘what is Brexit for?’ by saying ‘nothing, it’s a total waste of time’, it’s necessary to keep holding out the promise of great reforms.
Two varieties of ‘performative Brexit’
At a deeper level, this shows how Brexit continues to operate as a set of campaign promises rather than as a programme of government. Thus the report might be taken as another example of ‘performative Brexit’, giving an impression of great activity without actually doing anything. If so, this is still damaging because it means that the government isn’t focussing on the many pressing things it can and should be doing.
In any case, it’s unclear that this situation can satisfy the Brexiters for long since eventually even the dullest of them – admittedly a crown with many pretenders - will presumably realise that nothing much is happening. Joe Marshall of the Institute of Government, whose assessment of the report is very similar to mine and to David Smith’s, remarks that it “may briefly lift the spirits of Conservative MPs”, and it has proved to be very brief. For within hours of its publication it was reported (£) that some of them, including ERG stalwart David Jones, were attacking the report for “watering down” deregulatory plans, especially the ‘one in, one out’ rule on regulations, in favour of meeting net-zero carbon targets.
Certainly arch-Brexiter Daniel Hannan isn’t happy with the report, correctly identifying not just its aspirational vagueness but also that it does not really articulate what scorched earth economic liberals would call a de-regulatory agenda at all, something also recognized by Annabel Denham of Institute of Economic Affairs, who is very much from that ideological stable. In a similar vein and from a similar position, Sunday Telegraph Editor Allister Heath thinks (£) Johnson is delivering a “Remainers’ Brexit” which, with the usual tropes of Brexiter victimhood and paranoia, is a “betrayal” (£). Never do they pause to consider that the reason their fantasies are undelivered is because they are undeliverable.
Hannan – who, like Heath, has no real understanding of either public policy delivery or running a business – ascribes this to the civil service ‘blob’ and businesses attached to the status quo. Again it’s the familiar Brexiter lament that there is some wonderful Brexit which ‘the Establishment’ has thwarted. In fact what seems to have happened was that Whitehall departments were asked to submit lists of things that the UK could now do independently of the EU. At the same time, civil servants will have understood that the scorched earth deregulatory approach is totally unworkable and, by the way, not voted for, or even voted on, in either the referendum or the last election. The outcome is what is in effect a re-regulatory agenda.
The real danger of this is that the performative Brexit of promising future reforms but doing nothing will give way to a different kind of performative Brexit where, as with trade policy (and, as suggested in my last post, foreign policy), widescale re-regulatory reforms actually begin to be enacted on the basis that an ‘independent’ system of regulation is a good thing in and of itself, even if in practice it results in costly duplications for exporters and significant new barriers to importers (nor is the issue just trade – the same dynamic holds for all kinds of international cooperation or competition that take place within regulatory frameworks)**.
A never-ending campaign
The sense that Brexit continues to be a campaign is also reflected in the way that this second anniversary has been marked not so much by celebration as by assessing and questioning, with surveys and reviews of survey trends such as that provided by Professor Sir John Curtice this week. His analysis shows, amongst other things, both a significant continuing division of opinion (52-48% in favour of being in/out) but also a steady shift amongst both remain voters (27%, up 10% over the year) and leave voters (26%, up 12% over the year) towards the view that Brexit has gone worse than expected. Of course what these voters mean by the latter may vary wildly.
The overall conclusion Curtice draws from these and the other poll findings he discusses is that any idea that Brexit is no longer a divisive issue “is far from the truth”. It is also the case, as Professor Anand Menon’s anniversary analysis concludes, that the political effects of Brexit are unpredictable. In this way, as with the questions posed by the ‘got Brexit done’ line and the government’s Brexit benefits report, what we can see at this anniversary point is a sense that Brexit is still an open and ongoing debate, as if there were indeed still a campaign underway.
That is also evident in a very different anniversary piece, by the Lexiter Economics Editor of the Guardian Larry Elliott. His approach is to ridicule the ‘Project Fear’ warnings of some in the literal campaign of 2016 so as to argue that the effects of Brexit over the last two years have not, after all, been “calamitous”. It’s a strange kind of defence, albeit an increasingly common one from Brexiters of all hues, resting not on Brexit having done any good but on it not having had as bad effects as some claimed it would. Yet Brexit was hardly sold to voters on so modest a basis.
It’s true that Elliott ends with the proposition that there could now be “a Labour Brexit in which the state uses its new powers to build a greener, fairer, levelled-up Britain” (a vision which sounds surprisingly like Johnson’s rhetoric, though I do realise that Elliott’s substantive aspirations are genuinely radical). But it’s not clear why leaving the EU was necessary to achieve this. And, crucially, as with the government’s Brexit benefits report, it remains at the level of campaign-like promises of what Brexit could be.
In fact, in a sense, the positions of Lexiters like Elliott and hardcore Thatcherites like Hannan are identical. One sees Brexit as a gateway to a socialist utopia, the other as a route to neo-liberal nirvana – neither of which has any conspicuous appeal to the majority of the electorate or to their parties’ leadership, and both of which massively over-estimate what being out of the EU actually enables. At the same time, their co-existence is part of the fundamental problem that has plagued Brexit all along, and which at this anniversary still persists: it was supported for multiple reasons, which can’t all be satisfied by any actual delivery.
The consequences of this are now being played out. People like Hannan and Heath are realising that ‘independent regulation’ doesn’t automatically mean ‘de-regulation’ - as, too, are those remainers who assumed that de-regulation was ‘the real agenda’ behind Brexit. For there was no single, real, agenda. Much of the nationalist and nativist support for Brexit is hostile to free markets and deregulation, just as its globalist and free-market supporters are hostile to the kind of activist state and protectionism that Lexiters favour. If ‘leave means leave’ was the glue that very temporarily held all this together, what is now ever-clearer is that it doesn’t lead to the suspension of politics, any more than it suspends the realities of geography or economics.
Why does any of this matter?
Last year, David Frost said that “while a proportion of the [British] public may regret Brexit … overwhelmingly we are now looking forward” and, on another occasion, that a test of its success in ten years’ time would be if “nobody is questioning Brexit. It was self-evidently the right thing to do.” It’s clear from the survey evidence that the former statement downplays the scale and the strength of that regret. As for the second, it's still early days but given how things look nearly six years after the referendum I think it is highly unlikely that by 2031 Frost’s definition of success will have been met, not least amongst Brexiters themselves on the present showing.
That is a serious problem for the most committed Brexiters since they claim leaving the EU to have been a national liberation, which is hardly compatible with most of the country thinking it to have been a huge mistake. Nor is it compatible with having been done against the majority vote in Scotland and Northern Ireland, with all the further national division that has brought.
For this reason, the second anniversary of Brexit has not been marked by a national celebration, or even a national commemoration. In every aspect it takes the form of an ongoing conflict, in that there continues to be a campaign-like contestation over whether it is desirable, where it is going, where it should be going, and - most fundamentally of all - what Brexit actually means. So if, as I suggested at the beginning, anniversaries disclose something about collective identity and history, this one tells us, firstly, that Brexit has fractured collective identity and, second, that it is not history but an ongoing political conflict.
One of the more minor but most striking pieces of Brexit news this week was that an MP visiting the now semi-permanent lorry queues at Dover, where stranded drivers have no toilet facilities, trod in a heap of human excrement. Some may be tempted to see this as the perfect metaphor for Brexit. Actually, a better one would be a group of people arguing for years about whether it was really human excrement, whether the MP really trod in it, whether it was a good or bad thing that he did, whether it didn’t matter so long as it was British excrement, whether it didn’t matter so long as it wasn’t British excrement, that although unfortunate it was only a teething problem and all will be well in future, whilst others simply retch in disgust. In this metaphorical – and scatological - scenario I, presumably, would be writing a blog post about the whole sorry spectacle. As, in fact, I am.
*To take a very specific example, consider the outcome of the suggestion in the TIGRR report to explore changing rules on the exhaustion of Intellectual Property Rights. Following a consultation, it has now been decided to retain the temporary post-Brexit arrangements (despite their being in some respects problematic) as the alternatives are worse and far too complicated to implement. It is an illustration of the gap between airy aspirations from generalists and highly technical and complex realities. I suspect a similar outcome may emerge from many of the specific reviews and consultations proposed in the Benefits of Brexit report.
**It’s important to recognize that the extent of potential re-regulatory change associated with Brexit is huge, so whilst some general points can be made about it there are significant sectoral specificities. See, for some example, discussion of the Benefits of Brexit report in relation to environmental regulation by Dr Viviane Gravey of Queen’s University Belfast or space by Dr Bleddyn Bowen of Leicester University. No doubt there are, or will be, others. Again, this relates to the point that it’s not until the complex technical realities are engaged with that the prognostications of Brexiter fanatics and de-regulatory ideologues can be evaluated and, typically, be found wanting.
At all events, this week Boris Johnson and his Brexit-corrupted party, deeply immured in scandal and multiple crises, have been keen to spray (or should that be spaff?) around anniversary images of a beaming Prime Minister signing the Withdrawal Agreement with the brag ‘Got Brexit Done’. As ever, there is no care about the fact that half or more of the country sees this as nothing to rejoice about. Indeed about the only real pleasure Brexiters now seem to take in their project is the upset it has caused their compatriots. In this sense, to celebrate ‘getting Brexit done’ is also to wound, rather like inviting people you loathe to celebrate your birthday when it falls on the date that their child died.
Even in its own terms it is a claim that invites some obvious objections. One is that there are still several parts of Brexit which have yet to be implemented, most obviously the full UK import controls regime. Another is that almost since the moment he signed the agreement, Johnson has been trying, as he still is, to re-negotiate some of its core provisions as regards the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). Moreover, these provisions are the part of the agreement most directly associated with Johnson himself, since they are what he triumphantly negotiated as the way to ‘ditch Theresa May’s hated backstop’.
As if on cue, alongside the ongoing and fractious UK-EU negotiations, this week saw a serious new and still evolving crisis over the Protocol. Very likely I’ll write more about this in next week’s post but in essence it arises from the DUP’s attempt to unilaterally halt key parts of the NIP, specifically Sanitary and Phyto-sanitary checks on the GB-NI border. This has potentially major implications for the negotiations, for the UK-EU relationship generally, for UK-US relations and, of course, for the fragile politics of Northern Ireland.
It’s the latest consequence of the way that, having totally refused to understand the implications of Brexit for Northern Ireland, Johnson and the Brexiters hastily cobbled together an agreement which they apparently neither understood nor intended to implement, and in the full knowledge that it was bitterly opposed by many unionists. That it should flare up again in this way and at this time underlines the hollowness and dishonesty of Johnson’s anniversary boast to have ‘got Brexit done’.
The ‘Benefits of Brexit’ report
The more substantive marking of the anniversary was the government’s publication of its lengthy report on the ‘The Benefits of Brexit. How the UK is taking advantage of leaving the EU’. I’ve already reviewed this in some detail for Byline Times and so won’t repeat that analysis here. In short, it’s a shoddy amalgam of false or misleading claims about things which Brexit has enabled Britain to do, vague and unrealistic aspirations, and heavy dollops of irrelevant waffle. David Smith, Economics Editor of The Sunday Times, reached a similar conclusion, describing it as “desperately thin gruel, a mixture of aspirations so far undelivered and things we could perfectly well have done while remaining members of the EU”. Even those supportive of its general ‘direction of travel’ have had to admit that it lacks convincing detail.
As with the ‘Got Brexit Done’ slogan, the report shows how the case for Brexit is still having to be made and that the process of Brexit is very far from over. I mention in my review that the political purpose of the document is partly to generate a few good headlines in the pro-Brexit press, and partly a response to the growing discontent from Brexiter MPs and commentators, and perhaps most notably from David Frost (£). For quite some time now they have been asking, in particular, to see the de-regulatory agenda that so many of them associate with Brexit.
In a way, they have a point. It’s remarkable how much of the document shows how little progress the government has made, so that a great deal of it is about reviews and consultations which will be held in the future. After all, it’s now eight months since the Iain Duncan Smith TIGRR report that was supposed to set the agenda for all this, and only slightly less since the creation of the Brexit Opportunities Unit was announced.
What this reflects is that, when it comes to practical realities, the opportunities for regulatory change are quite limited and also horrendously complex*. It is therefore much easier to contemplate and discuss than to act. This of course was entirely obvious to anyone with any understanding of business, law or public policy from the outset, for reasons I’ve discussed many times on this blog. But since it is impossible, now, for the government to respond to the question ‘what is Brexit for?’ by saying ‘nothing, it’s a total waste of time’, it’s necessary to keep holding out the promise of great reforms.
Two varieties of ‘performative Brexit’
At a deeper level, this shows how Brexit continues to operate as a set of campaign promises rather than as a programme of government. Thus the report might be taken as another example of ‘performative Brexit’, giving an impression of great activity without actually doing anything. If so, this is still damaging because it means that the government isn’t focussing on the many pressing things it can and should be doing.
In any case, it’s unclear that this situation can satisfy the Brexiters for long since eventually even the dullest of them – admittedly a crown with many pretenders - will presumably realise that nothing much is happening. Joe Marshall of the Institute of Government, whose assessment of the report is very similar to mine and to David Smith’s, remarks that it “may briefly lift the spirits of Conservative MPs”, and it has proved to be very brief. For within hours of its publication it was reported (£) that some of them, including ERG stalwart David Jones, were attacking the report for “watering down” deregulatory plans, especially the ‘one in, one out’ rule on regulations, in favour of meeting net-zero carbon targets.
Certainly arch-Brexiter Daniel Hannan isn’t happy with the report, correctly identifying not just its aspirational vagueness but also that it does not really articulate what scorched earth economic liberals would call a de-regulatory agenda at all, something also recognized by Annabel Denham of Institute of Economic Affairs, who is very much from that ideological stable. In a similar vein and from a similar position, Sunday Telegraph Editor Allister Heath thinks (£) Johnson is delivering a “Remainers’ Brexit” which, with the usual tropes of Brexiter victimhood and paranoia, is a “betrayal” (£). Never do they pause to consider that the reason their fantasies are undelivered is because they are undeliverable.
Hannan – who, like Heath, has no real understanding of either public policy delivery or running a business – ascribes this to the civil service ‘blob’ and businesses attached to the status quo. Again it’s the familiar Brexiter lament that there is some wonderful Brexit which ‘the Establishment’ has thwarted. In fact what seems to have happened was that Whitehall departments were asked to submit lists of things that the UK could now do independently of the EU. At the same time, civil servants will have understood that the scorched earth deregulatory approach is totally unworkable and, by the way, not voted for, or even voted on, in either the referendum or the last election. The outcome is what is in effect a re-regulatory agenda.
The real danger of this is that the performative Brexit of promising future reforms but doing nothing will give way to a different kind of performative Brexit where, as with trade policy (and, as suggested in my last post, foreign policy), widescale re-regulatory reforms actually begin to be enacted on the basis that an ‘independent’ system of regulation is a good thing in and of itself, even if in practice it results in costly duplications for exporters and significant new barriers to importers (nor is the issue just trade – the same dynamic holds for all kinds of international cooperation or competition that take place within regulatory frameworks)**.
A never-ending campaign
The sense that Brexit continues to be a campaign is also reflected in the way that this second anniversary has been marked not so much by celebration as by assessing and questioning, with surveys and reviews of survey trends such as that provided by Professor Sir John Curtice this week. His analysis shows, amongst other things, both a significant continuing division of opinion (52-48% in favour of being in/out) but also a steady shift amongst both remain voters (27%, up 10% over the year) and leave voters (26%, up 12% over the year) towards the view that Brexit has gone worse than expected. Of course what these voters mean by the latter may vary wildly.
The overall conclusion Curtice draws from these and the other poll findings he discusses is that any idea that Brexit is no longer a divisive issue “is far from the truth”. It is also the case, as Professor Anand Menon’s anniversary analysis concludes, that the political effects of Brexit are unpredictable. In this way, as with the questions posed by the ‘got Brexit done’ line and the government’s Brexit benefits report, what we can see at this anniversary point is a sense that Brexit is still an open and ongoing debate, as if there were indeed still a campaign underway.
That is also evident in a very different anniversary piece, by the Lexiter Economics Editor of the Guardian Larry Elliott. His approach is to ridicule the ‘Project Fear’ warnings of some in the literal campaign of 2016 so as to argue that the effects of Brexit over the last two years have not, after all, been “calamitous”. It’s a strange kind of defence, albeit an increasingly common one from Brexiters of all hues, resting not on Brexit having done any good but on it not having had as bad effects as some claimed it would. Yet Brexit was hardly sold to voters on so modest a basis.
It’s true that Elliott ends with the proposition that there could now be “a Labour Brexit in which the state uses its new powers to build a greener, fairer, levelled-up Britain” (a vision which sounds surprisingly like Johnson’s rhetoric, though I do realise that Elliott’s substantive aspirations are genuinely radical). But it’s not clear why leaving the EU was necessary to achieve this. And, crucially, as with the government’s Brexit benefits report, it remains at the level of campaign-like promises of what Brexit could be.
In fact, in a sense, the positions of Lexiters like Elliott and hardcore Thatcherites like Hannan are identical. One sees Brexit as a gateway to a socialist utopia, the other as a route to neo-liberal nirvana – neither of which has any conspicuous appeal to the majority of the electorate or to their parties’ leadership, and both of which massively over-estimate what being out of the EU actually enables. At the same time, their co-existence is part of the fundamental problem that has plagued Brexit all along, and which at this anniversary still persists: it was supported for multiple reasons, which can’t all be satisfied by any actual delivery.
The consequences of this are now being played out. People like Hannan and Heath are realising that ‘independent regulation’ doesn’t automatically mean ‘de-regulation’ - as, too, are those remainers who assumed that de-regulation was ‘the real agenda’ behind Brexit. For there was no single, real, agenda. Much of the nationalist and nativist support for Brexit is hostile to free markets and deregulation, just as its globalist and free-market supporters are hostile to the kind of activist state and protectionism that Lexiters favour. If ‘leave means leave’ was the glue that very temporarily held all this together, what is now ever-clearer is that it doesn’t lead to the suspension of politics, any more than it suspends the realities of geography or economics.
Why does any of this matter?
Last year, David Frost said that “while a proportion of the [British] public may regret Brexit … overwhelmingly we are now looking forward” and, on another occasion, that a test of its success in ten years’ time would be if “nobody is questioning Brexit. It was self-evidently the right thing to do.” It’s clear from the survey evidence that the former statement downplays the scale and the strength of that regret. As for the second, it's still early days but given how things look nearly six years after the referendum I think it is highly unlikely that by 2031 Frost’s definition of success will have been met, not least amongst Brexiters themselves on the present showing.
That is a serious problem for the most committed Brexiters since they claim leaving the EU to have been a national liberation, which is hardly compatible with most of the country thinking it to have been a huge mistake. Nor is it compatible with having been done against the majority vote in Scotland and Northern Ireland, with all the further national division that has brought.
For this reason, the second anniversary of Brexit has not been marked by a national celebration, or even a national commemoration. In every aspect it takes the form of an ongoing conflict, in that there continues to be a campaign-like contestation over whether it is desirable, where it is going, where it should be going, and - most fundamentally of all - what Brexit actually means. So if, as I suggested at the beginning, anniversaries disclose something about collective identity and history, this one tells us, firstly, that Brexit has fractured collective identity and, second, that it is not history but an ongoing political conflict.
One of the more minor but most striking pieces of Brexit news this week was that an MP visiting the now semi-permanent lorry queues at Dover, where stranded drivers have no toilet facilities, trod in a heap of human excrement. Some may be tempted to see this as the perfect metaphor for Brexit. Actually, a better one would be a group of people arguing for years about whether it was really human excrement, whether the MP really trod in it, whether it was a good or bad thing that he did, whether it didn’t matter so long as it was British excrement, whether it didn’t matter so long as it wasn’t British excrement, that although unfortunate it was only a teething problem and all will be well in future, whilst others simply retch in disgust. In this metaphorical – and scatological - scenario I, presumably, would be writing a blog post about the whole sorry spectacle. As, in fact, I am.
*To take a very specific example, consider the outcome of the suggestion in the TIGRR report to explore changing rules on the exhaustion of Intellectual Property Rights. Following a consultation, it has now been decided to retain the temporary post-Brexit arrangements (despite their being in some respects problematic) as the alternatives are worse and far too complicated to implement. It is an illustration of the gap between airy aspirations from generalists and highly technical and complex realities. I suspect a similar outcome may emerge from many of the specific reviews and consultations proposed in the Benefits of Brexit report.
**It’s important to recognize that the extent of potential re-regulatory change associated with Brexit is huge, so whilst some general points can be made about it there are significant sectoral specificities. See, for some example, discussion of the Benefits of Brexit report in relation to environmental regulation by Dr Viviane Gravey of Queen’s University Belfast or space by Dr Bleddyn Bowen of Leicester University. No doubt there are, or will be, others. Again, this relates to the point that it’s not until the complex technical realities are engaged with that the prognostications of Brexiter fanatics and de-regulatory ideologues can be evaluated and, typically, be found wanting.
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