Locking down too late but ending lockdown too early

The major reason we have one of the highest death rates as a result of the coronavirus pandemic is that Johnson/Cummings had an intense aversion to imposing a lockdown, and an unusual disregard for human life. Any decent politician, after being told at the end of February that 500,000 of their citizens might die, would have moved heaven and earth to stop that happening. Anyone watching the recent Despatches documentary would have heard about scientists worrying about how to stop the pandemic, with little pressure from politicians to do so. It may have been an ultimatum from French president Macron that finally forced Johnson/Cummings to enact a full lockdown on March 23rd.

Unfortunately the same factors that delayed a lockdown have led Johnson/Cummings to relax the lockdown too early, when the number of infections was still pretty high. This is partly because in the circles that Johnson/Cummings move, the recession that the pandemic has created is associated with the lockdown rather than the pandemic. Free the economy by ending the lockdown, they cry. Some practice what they preach, in the sense that they ignore the lockdown rules. One of these people was Cummings himself, which is the second reason why the UK lockdown is being relaxed too quickly.

This is a tragic error, not just because it will lead to yet more deaths but also because it will delay any economic recovery. As I explained in a Guardian article, any recovery will be severely limited if new infections per day remain high. While we often focus on the irresponsible minority, the majority of people are cautious, and do not want to risk catching the virus. They are going to stay away from shops as much as possible, and will certainly not go back to pubs and restaurants, or public transport if they are able to avoid it.

The idea that there is a trade-off between protecting the economy and protecting people’s health is not only wrong, it is also dangerous. It encourages politicians to relax the lockdown too early, which risks reducing the speed at which the number of new infections fall, or even stabilising infection rates at too high a level. Below is data for the number of COVID-19 admissions to hospital, that is shown in the government’s daily briefing.

It is probably the best indirect measure we have for the path of new infections over time, with a lag of 2-3 weeks. (The problem with data on the number of people tested is that it depends on how easy it is to get tested, which has varied greatly over time.) This seems reasonably consistent with the Cambridge/PHE Joint Modelling Team’s estimates that currently there are around 17,000 new infections every day.

The worrying aspect of this data is that it seems to be levelling off, which is another way of saying that R is getting close to 1. This also accords with Cambridge/PHE Joint Modelling Team’s estimates of regional R values. They note “There is some evidence that Rt has risen in all regions and we believe that this is probably due to increasing mobility and mixing between households and in public and workplace settings”.

All this is important not because we might see ‘a second peak’. It is important because it means that the number of new infections is declining very slowly, which in turn means that most people will not return to previous patterns of ‘social consumption’. That in turn means that there cannot be a complete recovery. We do not know at what level of daily infections people will be happy to resume social consumption, but it is bound to be well below 17,000. The difference between R=0.8 and R=0.9 in getting to that much lower number of infections is measured in months, as is the difference between R=0.9 and R=0.95. We are relaxing lockdown at much higher levels for daily new infections compared to Italy, France and Germany.

Relaxing the lockdown might (I stress might) be justified if there was a tried and tested alternative mechanism to suppress R. That mechanism does exist: a well functioning and comprehensive track, trace and isolate (TTI) infrastructure. Yet the government still attempts to gaslight journalists with a launch of the new Serco led, “world beating” TTI regime at the beginning of June, that we now learn will not be fully operational until September or October. Quite how Serco sold that to ministers/Cummings we can only guess. Scaling up existing local authority teams would have been both quicker and more effective, but is contrary to this government’s ideology and the interests of those who fund it.

It seems clear that many/most of the scientists advising the government also think lockdown is ending too quickly. The alert level remains at 4, despite Johnson/Cummings’ wishes. As Rafael Behr put it, “Johnson's relationship with science has gone the way of most of his relationships.” Yet this divergence does not seem to worry him and those around him at all, which is a bit odd for a government that kept claiming they were following the science.

I should resist the temptation to suggest that all this is obvious. When I modeled the economic impact of a pandemic I was surprised at how much of aggregate consumption was social. It isn’t just pubs, restaurants and tourism, but large parts of recreation, culture and transport. These sectors make up over a third of consumption. Even the demand for clothing may decline if there are no parties to go to. The pandemic creates a huge demand shock even without any lockdown measures like school closures.

That is why many better-off households have been saving much more during the pandemic. The certain way to get a recovery is to release those savings, by creating the conditions for social consumption to resume. That in turn means getting daily infections down substantially by not relaxing the lockdown too soon. As the Faculty of Public Health writes “Like everyone else we are longing for restrictions on our lives to be lifted. But evidence from around the globe shows that the way to achieve this is not to merely suppress covid-19, but to systematically reduce its incidence.”

In other words there is no trade-off between public health and the economy: better public health (less COVID-19 infections) is the sure way to a substantial recovery. The idea that we have to lift the lockdown for the sake of the economy is the new austerity. With austerity it was about how we had to get the deficit down, in order to have a sound economy. Now it is that we have to end the lockdown, in order to free the economy. In both cases it was the opposite of the truth. In both cases lives were unnecessarily lost. In both cases the recovery was blunted.

Could we get a similar recovery by some other means, such as a large fiscal stimulus? The short answer is no. Because social consumption is such a large proportion of the total, you would need a ridiculously large increase in spending in other sectors even to come close to substituting for that loss. The only reason why you would contemplate not doing the first best option, getting infections down, is because your ideology is screwing your common sense. Which is a pretty good description of how this government has dealt with this pandemic so far.

Who to blame for Johnson winning?

When I wrote this in July I desperately wanted to be wrong. (Of course I was wrong about a lot of the details but alas not the main point.) But it soon became clear that, compared to 2017, the press had had two more years to paint Corbyn as marxist, unpatriotic and racist, and for enough people that would be a reason not to vote Labour. Among others who supported Brexit, they really did believe that Johnson was the man to get Brexit done.

Many will say that Labour lost badly because they had a left wing manifesto. They always do after each election defeat. I doubt that has much to do with this defeat, although the large amount of giveaways to the wrong people was probably a factor. The problem was Corbyn, not Labour’s manifesto. And while many voted against the media image of Corbyn more than anything else, it has to be said that Corbyn’s past and his failures over the last three years made the media’s job very easy.

We should of course blame the media. The right wing press became part of the Tories propaganda war. The Tories lied like never before, just as some of them did in 2016. The BBC was even more careful not to do anything that might upset the government, and it has a real problem when ‘accidents’ keep advantaging one side. But the moment the BBC played a key role in electing Boris Johnson was very specific, and it goes back to the day Johnson got his deal with the EU.

What the media should have asked at that moment is why Johnson had accepted a deal that was essentially the first the EU had proposed, but which he and other ERG members had said at the time was unacceptable. Why had he capitulated? Was it all just a ruse so he could become Prime Minister?

Nobody thought a deal was possible, gushed Laura Kuenssberg, repeating one of CCHQ’s lines to take. No sense from her of what had actually happened. As I noted here, the BBC’s Brussels correspondent got it about right, but the tone of the reporting was set by Kuenssberg. Whether this misrepresentation of Johnson’s deal was deliberate or the result of ignorance I don’t know, but it was critical.

Of course the Tory and Brexit press also took CCHQ’s lines to take. The BBC is the only chance most voters have to get a check on what their newspapers say. It did not provide any such check on this occasion. And it is critical because it allows Johnson to say, as he has, that it was his unique abilities that helped him achieve a deal that everyone said was impossible. No doubt he will say the same when he refuses an extension in July next year because the EU have refused to give him the deal he wants.

Voters who still believe in leaving the EU were left with the impression, thanks to the BBC (and of course the Brexit press), that Johnson was the person who could deal with the EU and get Brexit done. They were not told the truth that he was the person who had helped waste almost a year in squabbling in part so he could get to be Prime Minister. So Leavers are left with an image of competence rather than the reality, which is that Johnson is quite prepared to damage the economy and the workings of democracy just for his own personal gain.

But there is little that Labour or the Liberal Democrats can do about media bias while they are out of power. Undoubtedly a key reason Johnson won was because the Remain/anti-Johnson vote was split. It is depressing and very worrying how many people voted for Johnson, our own Donald Trump, but while the Electoral College gifted Trump his victory despite losing the popular vote, so First Past The Post (FPTP) gave Johnson his victory. A lot of people voted tactically, but not enough.

Both Labour and Liberal Democrats are to blame for not cooperating. While Labour’s failure was not a surprise, I had hoped the Liberal Democrats would take the opportunity to seize the moral high ground and not put up candidates in Labour marginals like Canterbury. It didn’t, and instead it spent too much of its time attacking Labour in the futile belief that this would win over some Tory voters. I suspect they would have been much more successful if they had been honest that the best way to stop Brexit was through a minority Labour government dependent on LibDem votes.

The ultimate responsibility for the split vote must nevertheless rest with Jeremy Corbyn.

The big surge in the Liberal Democrat vote from below 10% to over 20% at its peak began in the Spring of this year, and it coincided with a collapse in Labour’s vote. This quite remarkable change in fortunes cannot be put down to a biased media, but is obviously a Brexit effect.

Throughout 2018 Labour had managed to stay the obvious choice for Remainers, as it had been in the 2017 election. But as soon as May finalised her Withdrawal Agreement it was clear triangulating would no longer work, and Labour would have to take a position. The polls suggested Labour would lose votes by not supporting Remain, but as I noted in December last year too many within Labour were in denial.

Labour entering into talks with May to get Brexit done was I suspect the final straw for many Remainers. They didn’t go to the new and short lived Remain party but the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. The European election was a disaster, but shifting Labour’s policy seemed like trying to get blood out of a stone. I really think if they had moved at the beginning of 2019 to where they ended up things would have been rather different. Instead the Labour leadership single-handedly created the revival of the Liberal Democrats. That, as well as his failure to deal with antisemitism and some of his intolerant supporters, are major factors behind this defeat.

Easy to say in hindsight? Not really. I said these things in 2016 in the second Labour leadership election that Corbyn won. I said it throughout late 2018 and early 2019 was the Remain vote became disenchanted with Corbyn. But the behaviour of Labour MPs made an alternative to Corbyn impossible in 2016 then, as it had been in 2015, and after the 2017 general election result he was never going to be removed.

Could we have stopped Johnson if Labour had not allowed the Remain vote to split. To be honest I don’t know. That is how negative the media’s image of Corbyn has been. Some Lexiters will say it is all Remainers’ fault, but that is a nonsense position. As a result of this defeat we have reached the end of the line for the Remain cause. It has been three years of experts and people who made themselves experts trying to explain why Brexit was such a bad idea, but nothing we could do was able to counteract the propaganda of the Brexit press and the knowledge as opinion attitude of the broadcast media, and particularly the BBC. The really striking finding after three years when the truth about Brexit became crystal clear to anyone wanting or able to see it is that the number of people wanting Brexit changed only a little, and that is what gave Johnson his majority.

Now that we have elected our own Donald Trump, I’m reminded of a talk Paul Krugman gave after Trump won. At the time I wrote a post about it, and I ended it like this:

“We can, and should, continue to rage against the dying of the light. What is difficult, in this time of crazy, is being able to put that rage aside, and engage in a form of quietism, a retreat from the here and now of political discourse. Not a retreat into any kind of acceptance of where we now are, but instead into asking what and why, and from the answers to those questions to planning for the time when facts get back into fashion. But more than that. Using the answers to the what and why to prevent us lapsing back into our current post-truth world.”

I will continue to rage, but not quite as often as I have done since the blog began almost exactly eight years ago. It is time for deeper thought about how we get back to the light and ensure that we never again lapse into a post-truth world.

The othering of Jeremy Corbyn

By othering I mean treating Corbyn (or more generally the Labour left) as beyond the pale in terms of conventional politics. Othering implies that because of his past or current beliefs, associations and actions Corbyn should not be even considered as fit to be an MP, let alone a Prime Minister. Other politicians can be evaluated in conventional ways, but this does not apply to those who are othered. Othering has a number of distinctive, and potentially useful, features. Let me list two.

First, those who associate in any way with those othered are themselves regarded as questionable. I discovered this myself when I joined Labour’s short-lived Economic Advisory Committee, as I discuss here. This can be a potent threat. Second, those who are othered can be discussed in terms that would not normally be used to discuss politicians. After Johnson compared Corbyn to Stalin, Andrew Neill asked a Tory MP if he thought Corbyn would have the wealthy shot. “I do not know”, the MP replied.

Sometimes othering may be a valid position to take. I still remember the days when the far right was othered by the mainstream media, rather than being invited on Newsnight to discuss the latest bit of far right terrorism. I think that othering was helpful in ostracising racism, and its absence today is reflected in the rise of hate crime. But no such justification applies to the leader of the opposition, elected by hundreds of thousands of people, who is the only alternative to our current Prime Minister.

For othering to be justified those being othered have to have some attribute, or have done some things that are uniquely bad compared to their fellow citizens. The BNP were racist, and it is quite right that racism is ostracised. If we are talking about politicians, the same has to be applied to individuals. Is there something these politicians have done that is uniquely bad compared to other politicians.

Corbyn fails this test. There is nothing Corbyn has done that is uniquely bad compared to the obvious person to compare him with, his opponent Boris Johnson. Corbyn is not racist, which is not surprising as he has a lifelong history of fighting racism. Yet the media, almost without exception, has done its best to suggest otherwise.

The most obvious example of othering is the way the media have handled antisemitism within Labour. Labour has a real problem with antisemitism, but the media have acted as if Labour are the only party with a racism problem. In contrast Johnson is not constantly asked why he called Muslim women letterboxes and bankrobbers, and whether he will apologise for the increase in hate crime that followed that article.

As a result of this media othering of Corbyn, there are plenty of voters who say they cannot vote tactically because of Labour’s antisemitism, seemingly without any thought that they are therefore keeping in power someone who has actually made racist statements, and was part of a government that instituted some of the most discriminatory pieces of legislation of recent times that goes by the collective term hostile environment. Any outside observer would conclude that for UK society as a whole, including its media, Islamophobia is considered acceptable.

When I make these points some people accuse me of whataboutery, or in trying to minimise the problem of antisemitism in Labour. Both claims are false. The whole point about othering someone is that their alleged behaviour must be unusually bad compared to their comparators, so othering is all about whataboutery. And of course none of this is minimising Labour’s very real problem of antisemitism. Yes antisemitism exists in all parties, but there are reasons (like support for the Palestinians) why antisemitism may be worse in the Labour party, although the evidence is still that this is a problem among a very small proportion of Labour members. But equally there are also good reasons why Islamophobia and racist views will be relatively worse in the Tory party.

Then we come to terrorism. Corbyn is said to be too friendly towards terrorists, and therefore a unique threat to the UK as Prime Minister. I’m not going to defend Corbyn’s foreign policy views, some of which are dubious in my opinion, but are they uniquely bad? To say so is a hard position to defend when the UK participated with its closest ally in a pointless war in Iraq which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, a war which Corbyn opposed.

In terms of current threats, we recently had an act of terrorism in Salisbury committed by Russian agents. You would think, in response, that the Conservative party would be particularly keen to publish a select committee report on Russian interference in UK politics. Why Johnson has decided to delay the report we can only speculate on, but what we do know about is the links, sometimes financial, between the Tory party and Russians with close links to the Kremlin. Or maybe it is because Johnson does not want people to know about the extent of Russian interference in our elections.

Corbyn shares a left view of foreign policy which rarely gets much space in the media, but given the failures of past UK foreign policy and the very dubious situation of the Conservative party on Russia (again, just like their Republican counterparts in the US), there is no case for othering that view or a party leader who proposes it. The idea that a Corbyn minority government would somehow make the UK a less safe place is ludicrous when a former Tory Prime Minister is advocating people vote for just such an outcome.

Of course there is every reason for the Tory press to try and other Corbyn. Once you regard him as a perfectly normal and respectable politician, the arguments against voting for him are slim indeed. The Tory record on the economy is terrible. All they have to trumpet is employment growth, but that just reflects an appallingly (and unprecedentedly) bad record on productivity, and therefore living standards for workers. Labour’s policies for the next five years are mostly popular with the public, and even though it will cost a lot of money the cost is much less than the Brexit that will happen if Johnson sticks to his commitments.

On an individual level Corbyn seems far more preferable to Johnson as a Prime Minister, for the simple reason that Corbyn clearly cares about other people whereas Johnson cares only for himself. Corbyn shows real empathy for others, which we saw clearly after the Grenfell fire, whereas Johnson has the attitudes typical of the worst of his class. The way of hiding all that from people is to other Corbyn and his party, which virtually the entire mainstream media has done.

I understand why our current government and their supporters in the press would do that, and I have respect for those MPs (past and present) who have got out of that boat. I find it much more difficult to respect some of those in the centre, who normally pride themselves in taking a balanced and reasoned view, that are prepared to see the most right wing UK government in living memory continue to destroy the economy through Brexit, continue to cause misery for many decent people and threaten our constitution by proposing to give the executive complete control over parliament.

The othering of Corbyn will probably win the election for Johnson. But we should never give up hope, so please vote tactically on Thursday to keep Johnson out and allow a second referendum on Brexit.

Will UK voters really vote for the Republican party and our own Donald Trump?

There is so much about today’s Conservative party that is very similar to the Republican party in the US. To establish this, there is no better place to start than our future Prime Minister for the next five years, if polls are to be believed.

Trump and Johnson are both inveterate liars. They lie when they have no need to, just for effect. To take some recent examples. He told Andrew Marr that the Tories don't do deals with other parties, when everyone can remember the Coalition government and the DUP. (Marr, as so often with interviewers, let that pass.) Johnson has said that the extra money he has allowed for the health service is the biggest boost for a generation. In fact it is smaller than the increase in spending from Labour from 2004 onwards. There are many like this. He has lied all his life, and been sacked from jobs twice for doing so. He lies about lying! No UK politician in living memory has lied like this.

A consequence of that is you cannot trust a word he says. When he and his ministers say that the NHS will not be part of any trade negotiations with the US, it means nothing. Brexit puts the UK in a very weak position because the political costs of walking away, while the costs for the US are zero. So of course the NHS and things that affect the NHS will be part of any trade deal.

When he says that he will get a trade deal with the EU in just a year he is lying. It is just not possible given the reasons the Conservatives want to leave the EU. So voters will have to decide which lie he will choose: to break his undertaking not to extend the transition period or to leave with no deal.

Like Trump, Johnson treats the economy, and the consequent wellbeing of everyone in it, as a plaything for his own ends. With Trump this involves imposing tariffs because of his 15th century understanding of economics. With Johnson he chose Brexit on a toss up about what would advance his own ambitions. He then championed the hardest of Brexits because it appealed to those who would vote him leader of his party. But there is a difference: Brexit is far more harmful than anything Trump has managed.

Where Trump wants to increase coal production in the US, Johnson wants to stop any increases in fuel duty. Johnson didn’t attend a leaders debate on climate change.

Johnson, like Trump, is totally lacking in empathy for others, and is only interested in himself. Johnson thought nothing of helping a friend beat up a journalist. His personal life matters because it reflects the kind of person he is.

Like Trump, he has no time or respect for people who disagree with him. He shut down parliament because it was getting in his way. In his manifesto he now threatens to curtail the ability of the law to stop him doing what he and his party want. Johnson and the Conservatives, like Trump and the Republicans, are a threat to democracy.

Like Trump, he and his party want a totally compliant media. They have put so much pressure on the BBC that parts of it now do what they can to flatter Johnson and the Conservative cause. They have threatened Channel4 because they put a block of ice in his place when he failed to turn up to that leaders debate on climate change.

Like Trump, Johnson hates scrutiny. They both would much rather talk to an adoring party faithful than take part in critical questioning. In this election, Johnson has avoided questions from the press as much as he can, has avoided debates, and is avoiding an interview with one of the best interviewers around.

One reason they both hate scrutiny is their inability to concentrate on the details, the kind of details he got wrong such that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe remains in jail. This is one reason they sent Gove rather than Johnson to do the climate change debate. Johnson is as mentally unsuitable to be Prime Minister as Trump is to be President.

Republicans in Congress with few exceptions defend Trump. Conservative MPs do the same for Johnson without exception, now that the few Conservatives with some attachment to One Nation Conservatism have been driven out of the party. The Republicans never pretend to govern for the whole country, but just for what some of them call Real America. The Conservatives with Brexit have adopted the same policy. A narrow victory for Leave, obtained in the most dubious referendum ever, has become a mandate for the hardest of Brexits, and with a referendum on the final deal ruled out.

Both parties adopt divide and rule tactics, yet play the nationalist card for all its worth. To conceal and distract from far right economic policies designed to help the 1% wealthiest in the population, by a party financed by the even wealthier, they focus on attracting votes from the xenophobic and racist. The Conservatives have seen off the threat from the Brexit party by adopting the Brexit party. It was probably the votes of ex-Brexit party members that helped secure Johnson his leadership.

The Republicans play the race card and the Tories play the immigration card, something they have done since the turn of this century. Once you do that, it is inevitable that you end up with a party leaders who are themselves racist. Whatever you think about Corbyn, it is Johnson who has expressed racial slurs like calling Muslim women letterboxes, talked about black people as 'piccaninnies' with 'watermelon smiles', Nigerians as money obsessed. (Not to mention his homophobic and sexist comments, and his description of working class men as drunk, criminal and feckless, and what he originally wrote about Hillsborough victims and single mothers.)

In the US Trump gets away with his behaviour among many because of his money and fame, and in the UK Johnson gets away with it among many because of his class and jokes. Both are where they are because they were given huge head starts, Trump through inheritance and Johnson through class, and have subsequently had careers which are dotted with failure. But once you see beyond the fame and jokes, they are both authoritarians who see nothing wrong in stoking fears about minorities to get the majority to vote for them, and in abusing the constitution to get their way. You might say that it is Trump not Johnson who is threatened with impeachment, but I have lost count of the legal cases about his actions that have been conveniently postponed for this election.

What too many commentators on this election fail to see is the potential irreversibility of this decline into right wing authoritarian rule. With most newspapers pushing out propaganda for the Conservatives and the BBC successfully tamed, the Conservatives now have a sufficient block to any real scrutiny of their policies or behaviour. In the next five years their manifesto suggests they hope to tame anyone else who gets in their way.

The Conservatives have ensured that enough people in this country see and read want they want them to see and read. Soon we will see attempts to introduce nationwide voter ID simply because it helps the Conservatives. It is wishful thinking to say ‘if only we had another Labour leader they would be miles ahead’ - just remember Ed Miliband who lost an election because the media conveniently decided austerity was good economics. [1]

Next year the people of the United States will have their chance to get rid of the worst US president in living memory. We have the chance to stop our own Trump, Boris Johnson, before he gets five years in which he could do irreversible harm to our economy, our democracy, our union and our civil society. The danger in both countries is that they keep their Trump/Johnson, and get locked into permanent authoritarian right wing rule similar to what we see in Hungary and Poland.

Alarmist? Johnson shut down parliament to get his way! When Brexit fails to be the promised land Johnson has promised and when the UK’s potential fails to be unleashed, who will the Conservatives blame for their own failure? How much will they give away to get a US trade deal? Johnson, like Trump, is in the words of a BBC interviewer in braver times a ‘nasty piece of work’, whose only interest is in helping himself. It says a lot about what the UK has become that he looks like getting elected to be Prime Minister.

[1] Of course there were other reasons Miliband lost. He was unpopular, like every Labour leader over the past 40 years has been unpopular except the one who did a deal with the Tory press. And in the final days he was said to be in the pocket of Alex Salmond, even though the SNP have said they will never put a Tory PM into power so their bargaining strength is zero. The broadcast media went with the Tory's SNP story rather than Labour highlighting the (we now know very real) threat to the NHS. 

How to disguise a really big lie? Put it on a bus.

The Tories, and particularly their leader, lie all the time. It is quite shameless. But there is a corollary to this. If your whole campaign is based on one big huge lie, make it your main slogan. Because, even today, many voters still think you wouldn’t dare lie about something so important. Unfortunately recent history suggests otherwise.

We all remember the £350 million for the NHS lie in the 2016 referendum. It was famously on a bus. Except it seems that a good part of the voting population has forgotten the reason that slogan is notorious. It was a huge lie, the opposite of the truth. The have forgotten because the Tories have a new bus with a new slogan that a lot of voters appear to believe. In reality it is as big a lie as the one made during the referendum.

Also consider the key Tory slogans in the last two elections. In 2015 it was “Strong Leadership, A Clear Economic Plan And A Brighter, More Secure Future”. Within a year the ‘strong leader’ had resigned, businesses were unable to plan and the UK’s future was anything but secure. In 2017 who could forget “Strong and Stable”. May lasted two years but no one would call those years stable.

In 2019 we have “Get Brexit Done”. I can confidently tell you that this is in the true tradition of the earlier slogans. A more truthful slogan would be “If you liked the last three years of Brexit deadlock, vote Tory”. Here is why.

It is true that Johnson will get enough MPs to pass the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) if he wins the General Election. But the truth that much of the media has hidden is that the WA was always going to be easy if the UK government was prepared to put a customs border in the Irish Sea. Johnson got that agreement because he capitulated on a red line that he, his fellow MPs and the DUP had forced on Theresa May. Why did the ERG allow Johnson to get away with that? Because they saw a brand new opportunity for a No Deal exit at the end of 2020.

What the WA does not specify is the nature of the trading arrangement between the EU and the UK excluding Northern Ireland. This relationship has always been the sticking point in getting the WA done, and why it has taken so long. The WA does nothing towards saying what that relationship will be, except that it is unlikely to involve being in the EU’s Customs Union or Single Market. Johnson says he wants a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU, but FTAs normally take over 5 years to negotiate.

Johnson has given himself just a year, until the end of 2020. On that date the transition agreement, where we stay in the EU in everything except name and voting rights, comes to an end. Johnson has pledged to not seek an extension beyond 2020, even though one is on offer. That pledge was the basis for getting Farage to withdraw his candidates from Tory seats. The problem is that no one will be able to negotiate an FTA within a year.

Here is the ERG’s big hope, and why Farage withdrew. If Johnson keeps to his word, we face a new cliff edge at the end of 2020. Unless he breaks his word, we will drop out of the EU with no FTA at all. (The great Michael Dougan puts it very clearly here, although I’m not sure about the shirt.) This would be disastrous for the UK economy, but it is what the ERG have been trying to get since 2016. If he breaks his word expect all hell to break loose within the Tory party. If he decides on No Deal, all hell will break out in the Tory party, and parliament might well try to force an extension on him. In other words the next year will be just like the last three.

More generally negotiating an FTA is difficult and time consuming stuff, because it involves UK interests of various kinds that will be trying to get the government’s attention. It will mean that Brexit remains constantly in the news and taking up politicians’ time. This is partly because the government has not thought a lot about how to deal with the many difficult problems an FTA presents, preferring as usual to pretend any difficulty does not exist. Once again, as Chris Grey notes, the EU are much better prepared.

I know I go on about the media a lot, but all this should be common knowledge beyond those who research these things. It clearly is not, with plenty of voters prepared to vote Conservative despite all Johnson’s failings because they believe he will end the Brexit turmoil. This is not about journalists taking sides, but stating facts. I have heard plenty of journalists ask Conservatives whether it is credible to get an FTA done in 1 year, but with little or no follow up.

As just one example, I heard a Conservative MP (I think it was Vicky Ford. Chelmsford) defending the FTA in a year nonsense by saying most of the deal was already done, with no follow-up by the interviewer. What she appeared to mean is that we currently trade with no tariffs with the EU so that will be the basis for negotiations. But of course that is nonsense. The negotiations will start as if the UK was a country with No Deal with the EU, and the UK will have to make the case for moving towards our current position as a member of the EU.

That case will involve all kinds of complications which Tory ministers will find it hard to resolve. For example zero tariffs will only be possible if the UK agrees to adopt all the regulations the EU has which could influence competition, which is most EU regulations. The Tory government wants to get rid of many of those regulations. That means the UK cannot have zero tariffs, because the EU cannot allow an outside country to undercut their own producers because of weaker labour or environmental regulations.

Then there are all the specific thorny issues, like fishing. Tony Connelly brilliantly fillets the complexity here, but in essence the UK cannot exclude other countries from its waters (the dream that led many fishermen to vote for Brexit) and still expect to sell most of its fish to the EU tariff free.

So as far as Brexit is concerned passing the WA is the beginning not the end. If you really want the issue over with, Labour are the much better option. The deal Labour are likely to negotiate within 3 months of taking office will be much softer: almost certainly staying in the EU’s customs union and something close to being in the Single Market, if not in the Single Market. That is why it can be negotiated quickly. We then have a new referendum on that deal within six months.

The contrast between Labour and the Conservatives is clear. Under Labour Brexit is settled by the people in the Autumn of 2020. Under the Conservatives we face a new cliff edge at the end of 2020, and possibly negotiations for another five or more years, or alternatively a No Deal Brexit with all the consequences that will bring. If you want to get Brexit done, don’t vote Tory.

Is this good for Johnson, whether he wins or loses?

I have no idea whether Johnson will get his deal through on Saturday. As the broadcast media is obsessed by headcounts I will leave it to them. What I will say is that the idea that MPs will be taking a decision that has a profound influence on everyone in this country (in which will do such serious economic and political damage to the UK) on the basis of only two days of scrutiny with no assessment of its impact is just absurd, and typifies everything that is wrong about Brexit.

Who knows why Johnson changed strategy during or before his meeting with Varadkar. Maybe it was fears about security in Northern Ireland after No Deal created a border. Maybe he always had the idea in mind of going back to the EU’s original plan to keep Northern Ireland in the Customs Union and Single Market. It seemed to be the obvious thing for Johnson to try, as I suggested in August. Maybe the suggestion came from Varadkar. But whatever it was, there is a huge irony in where we are now.

What Johnson has agreed to is basically the first deal the EU proposed. It is a deal that May said no UK Prime Minister could accept, and the deal condemned by Johnson a year ago. The backstop has now become the deal. No wonder Varadkar looked so pleased after his meeting with Johnson, and no wonder European leaders look so pleased when the deal was finally agreed. Of course the EU could agree to something they had already proposed.

Why has the ERG apparently agreed to this, when they said they could not possibly support it first time round? Unfortunately (or perhaps not) I cannot put myself in ERG shoes and answer that question. What does annoy me is when the BBC’s political editor praises Johnson for having got the EU to drop the backstop, when in reality he has forgotten all ideas of alternative arrangements and made the original backstop the deal. Indeed the BBC in lavishing praise on Johnson, and failing to point out his earlier rejection of almost the same proposal, is doing its bit to get the deal over the line on Saturday.

If Johnson fails on Saturday to get parliament to vote for his deal, he has got himself a very strong Brexit line to take into any General Election. Winning a General Election has always been Johnson’s prime goal. Before that walk among the trees with Leo Varadkar, Johnson’s election strategy had been to formally argue that he could get a deal (to keep Tory MPs on board), but hope a sufficient number of Farage inclined Leavers took this to mean he would leave with no deal.

Johnson's new deal is also a better election strategy. Few English voters care about Northern Ireland, regrettable though that is, and so they will feel no qualms about giving Johnson enough MPs to drop his DUP alliance. For Leavers, the idea of voting to get Brexit over the line will seem irresistible. Of course if Johnson does win and gets his deal through parliament Brexit will continue in the form of negotiating an FTA, but we will be out of the EU.

The risk that Johnson always had in actually finalising but not passing a deal is that Farage would convince enough voters his deal was not true Brexit and that they should therefore vote for him. However I suspect that will be very hard for Farage with this deal. What part of the deal can Farage use to convince Leavers it is not a real Brexit? As I noted above, talking about the EU annexing Northern Ireland is unlikely to impress most voters.

Does it make sense to hold a People’s Vote (PV) on Johnson’s deal vs Remain if Parliament can find the votes for that? Here the calculation is very simple. Unlike the PVs I talked about in earlier posts, which would have almost certainly led to a Johnson boycott, it will be much harder for him to boycott a vote on his own deal. However much he says that a second vote betrays the first, running away from a vote on your own deal just looks bad. So I suspect we would get a proper PV, even if Johnson resists it in many ways beforehand.

The main reason he will eventually agree to it is that he thinks he can win. He may well be right. Remainers should not put too much faith in the small majority in polls of Leave versus Remain. It could well be 2016 all over again.

Alasdair Smith goes through some of the lines that Johnson/Cummings will take. It is classic disinformation of the type that some of us can still remember from 2016. They will claim that the deal ensures that Britain will be free of EU laws and regulations, and now free to strike trade deals of our own. In reality this is true only if the UK does not sign a trade deal with the EU. Trade deals are all about harmonisation of tariffs and regulations, and there is no way the EU is going to harmonise on anything other than their own.

Nor is abandoning a level playing field made real until it comes to negotiating a FTA with the EU. The EU will certainly insist on one if there is tariff alignment, because tariffs are the EUs weapon against a country undercutting the EU by lowering standards. The reality has always been that complete sovereignty, in the sense of having nothing to do with EU laws and regulations, is only true if the UK is prepared to avoid an EU FTA completely. Indeed that possibility remains open to Johnson with this deal. If he does not get any FTA's this deal will morph into No Deal, except that Northern Ireland is safe.  

The alternative to a PV is an election, which parliament is sure to get. If Labour forms a government after that election then it is almost certain Brexit is dead. The Tories will vote against a soft Brexit as not a ‘real’ Brexit, and Remainers will vote for Remain. So the critical variable is the probability of that election outcome. I suspect most people would put the probability of a PV win for Remain as higher than Labour winning the election, simply because in the latter the Remain vote is split by the Liberal Democrats.

If Johnson does get his deal through parliament, or wins a PV, he will enjoy at least a week of media adulation that will be unbearable for Remainers. I had wondered if there might be a sting in the tail for him. With Brexit out of the way, he will have lost his main weapon against his opponents in a General Election. He may suffer the fate of his idol Churchill, and (in leavers eyes) win the war only to lose the peace.

However I can think of countless reasons why winning on Saturday will hand Johnson the election on a plate. There is the adulation from Leavers and the media of course. Remainers will also not quickly forget, and they will be looking for someone to blame, and many will blame Corbyn. That feeling may be intensified if it turns out, as it may well do, that it was Labour MPs who were critical in getting Parliament to approve the deal on Saturady. In short, whether he wins or loses, Johnson is set pretty for the General Election.