Summary: If Brexit does go ahead a vast array of powers will be repatriated to the UK. Major government functions would have to be established from virtually nothing in short order. In reality this would be almost impossible to manage given how overloaded our civil service is at present. Inevitably much of this work will be contracted to large commercial organisations who will no doubt be delighted to make a generous profit from running things like agriculture or fisheries or aviation. The will be virtually no oversight from an overloaded Parliament that will not be involved in the selection of these companies nor in setting their performance goals. This will end up by being an extraordinary power grab orchestrated by an increasingly authoritarian right-wing government.

It is nearly 20 months since the referendum and the decision to Leave the EU. It is generally agreed that not very much progress is being made. Politicians and civil servants realise that what is on offer from the EU is essentially the status quo, take it or leave it. Had there been any significant progress we would have heard about it given how reliably Whitehall leaks rumours. They seem to be waiting for Godot, or perhaps hoping that Baldrick might turn up with a cunning plan.

No one can have any doubt about the complexity of what has to be managed following any kind of Brexit. A vast range of powers would be repatriated to the UK. The harder the Brexit the more that will have to be handled within the UK. Who will manage these devolved powers? Not the civil service as they currently are, with numbers reduced to lower than any time before the second war. The reduction is particularly acute if numbers working in the NHS and education are excluded.

The only solution will be to contract out major parts of the economy to private contractors. We all know how wonderfully well they work, and we can look to the way that the prisons (Serco and G4S) and the benefit system (formerly ASOS, now Maximus) are run. These companies will be given the job to run major parts of the economy at a significant profit to themselves. However, the terms of reference as to how each sector should be run and what policies are to be pursued as well as the selection of the companies themselves will be done by an increasingly right-wing government. The lack of civil servants will make it almost impossible to monitor what is going on in these areas. Think about one of these large companies looking after British agriculture, or the fisheries, or aviation. Altogether seriously scary for a government unable to articulate how it will get through the next few months before they trigger Article 50.

This provides potentially the opportunity for an extraordinary power grab, orchestrated by an authoritarian right-wing government without significant parliamentary oversight. Nothing like this has happened since the war. This is the consequence of seizing back “sovereignty”. Hand it to the private sector and all will be well!

     https://www.canburypress.com/…/Brexit-What-the-hell-happens…

Please note that this book review has been provided by Colin Gordon.

David Davis’s civil servants now routinely instruct business leaders coming to Whitehall to lobby or advise the Brexit Secretary that they are to speak about our coming exit from the EU only in upbeat terms, saying they are “very excited about the possibilities”. The Prime Minister, after all, has made it clear that “Brexit is Brexit and we will make a success of it”: suggesting that we won’t make a success of Brexit is now almost as much a heresy as querying what Brexit is or why it is a good idea – and may, in addition, not be good for the increasingly fragile morale of Mr Davis.

We learn this from journalist Ian Dunt’s book “Brexit: what the hell happens now” – a timely, compact and punchy new book which richly delivers on its title’s promise. Its core is a quite detailed map of the various economic hells into which the “people’s will”, as expressed on June 23rd 2016, has the potential to propel us. It offers a costed menu of the options, with their respective challenges, downsides and (relative) bonuses. It explains the Norway option, the Swiss option, the Canadian option, the Turkish option: in or out of the Single Market, in or out of the Customs Union, and (if we end up out of both) the fiendish pitfalls of the so-called WTO option.

None of these options, Dunt shows, promises us any net gain in our sovereignty in dealing with the outside world. It is much more likely to be the reverse: we will get to have rules imposed on us, through grinding attrition and outmanoeuvring by other, stronger and smarter economic players. (Norway used to get its trade regulations sent from Brussels by fax; nowadays it downloads them from the Brussels website.) And as things stand, the UK state doesn’t actually have more than a handful of trained people who know how to negotiate, over period of years, such colossally complicated trade deals.

The book is written for the general public, not officials or academics, but it takes the reader some way into the depths of devilish detail and fiendishly tangled process which lie in store. It looks at the complexity and hazards of some specific challenges, like the future of animal welfare and veterinary safety standards in our abattoirs. Dunt makes the point that we will not only stand to pay a massive economic price (via exclusion from the Single Market) to regain our coveted, unrestricted power to keep out EU migrants: we will also pay a further price – in growth, jobs, tax revenues, services – as soon as we start using that power to indulge our taste for greater ethnic uniformity.

It’s scary to realise, as one quickly does, that anyone who has read Ian Dunt’s book is likely to have a much better grasp of Brexit than any of our current Brexit ministers.

No less scary is the staggeringly vast, intricate and expensive reconstruction the UK state, law and governance which leaving the EU will require us to execute.

Instead of a bonfire of regulations, we’ll be having to write a whole new set for ourselves (even while exporters still have to comply with the EU’s ones), plus hire and pay for dozens of new regulatory agencies – each one a national replica of a current European agency – to administer and police them.

Implementing Brexit will be the greatest, and probably longest peacetime state project in UK history – as Dunt says, it practically amounts to ‘making a new country’. It may very possibly have to be conducted alongside the dismantling of our Union itself. This is going to demand a level of political and administrative capability well beyond either the depleted resources of our state, or the meagre talents of our current rulers. There will be the cost, and also the opportunity cost – in other words, we won’t have much time or energy to spare for renewing our society or economy while we are kept busy at the task of reinventing its gloriously independent separateness.

If that doesn’t sound he most rewarding project for the nation’s future over the next 10 or 15 years, reading this book is a useful basic training for the challenge of taking back control of our future from the incompetent team now in change.

It might also just help ensure that our people and their MPs will muster the wit and courage to check seriously whether whatever the hell the least-worst Brexit is that’s eventually going to be proposed to us, isn’t a hell of lot worse then what we currently have at the moment… and then, having made that comparison, go on to reconsider (as we most probably could, even to the last minute) stepping off the A50 process and staying alongside our European democratic neighbours to stand together against the tide of fascism.

Colin Gordon

Ian Dunt, Brexit. What the Hell Happens Now? Canbury Press, 2106. 188 pages £7.99

https://www.canburypress.com/…/Brexit-What-the-hell-happens…

Summary: The rules that define the permitted extent of Freedom of Movement within the European Union allow very much more control than the UK currently exercises. Working EU citizens are allowed in but non-economically active EU citizens can only stay longer than three months if they have sufficient finance and take out a comprehensive sickness insurance policy. Benefit/welfare tourism is illegal and EU citizens who have not been working have no rights to benefits. Theresa May was Home Secretary from 2010 yet she did nothing even though it was in her power simply to implement the rules as drawn up when the UK joined the European Union. This is an extraordinary example of massive and shameful negligence by Theresa May and provided much of the momentum leading to the success of the Leave campaign.

One of the key promises of David Cameron’s government was to reduce immigration to a level of tens of thousands. The implementation of immigration policy was the responsibility of Theresa May, the Home Secretary from 2010 until she became Prime Minister in the middle of 2016 the responsibility of and. Around half the net migration into the UK was from countries outside the EU and therefore potentially controllable by the Home Office. The other half comes from the EU and politicians of all shades in the UK have accepted that the unrestricted freedom of movement (FoM) of people from the EU at any time was part of being a member of the European Union. There is presently no attempt to track people coming into the UK with an EU passport or indeed to track them when they leave the UK. Estimates of EU migration are indeed estimates as accurate figures do not exist. In a comment by Colin Gordon in a piece on the leftfootforward.org website by Ian Dunt it is pointed out that, incredibly, the above understanding of EU citizens rights under the FoM provisions are being seriously misrepresented by politicians from all sides and in particular from those of the Leave campaign. This is detailed in: http://tinyurl.com/jjysrx9. A more detailed piece by Prof.Brad K. Blitz may be found at: http://bit.ly/1DG3I4I. For those who really have a lot of time on your hands, the regulations covering free movement of workers within the European Union can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/zl5rw4s (the website of the European Parliament).

What are these rules in reality? Freedom for a citizen of another EU member state to move to the UK applies to (taken from http://tinyurl.com/jjysrx9):

• Economically active EU-citizens (i.e. working)
• Plus their families if EU-citizens
• Non-economically active EU-citizens for up to 3-months
in addition, non-economically active (not working) EU-citizens can stay longer than 3-months provided:
• They can show they have sufficient finance
• They take out a comprehensive sickness insurance policy

Freedom of Movement does not apply to:
• Non-economically active EU-citizens without funds
• Non-economically active EU-citizens without sickness insurance
• EU-citizens who have no realistic chance of working
• Family members of an EU citizen who is not an EU Citizen may reside in the UK but does not have an automatic right to work

Benefits:
• EU-citizens working in the UK acquire rights to benefits after working for a period
• EU-citizens not working do not have rights to Benefits.

In addition, the UK has the right to restrict FoM through:
• Suspension of the FoM for up to 7 years from when a new member country joins by preventing/prohibiting movement or the UK can insist upon work permits for each migrant
• Benefit/Welfare “tourism” is illegal

No-one has been prosecuted to-date under these regulations as the UK is not tracking movement of EU citizens in and out of the UK.

The piece on: http://tinyurl.com/jjysrx9 also summarises research showing the current levels of benefit tourism (essentially undetectable) and also points out that research clearly demonstrates that migrants do not appear to reduce wages and do not appear to take jobs from the UK natives. Because migrants from the EU are young and healthy and keen to work, the HMRC said that in the year 2013/2014 recently arrived EEA nationals paid £3.1 billion in income tax and took out £0.56 billion in HMRC benefits.

The fact that the British government has completely failed to implement the controls outlined above which already exist and do not require any changes in European Union legislation is utterly shameful. This negligence has contributed very substantially to the pressure that led to the success of the Leave campaign. The fact that Labour and the other political parties have also been unaware of these facts and, if they were, certainly not been prepared to talk about them is further evidence that the political system in the UK is so much poorer than the British public must have.

Summary: the route towards Brexit is much more complicated and fraught than most of the public and much of the media realise. Negotiations are not with the EU but with 27 separate nation states, all with their own views on Brexit and the future of the EU. The political landscape across Europe is changing and the UK will be faced with negotiating with a rapidly changing EU and countries with significant political upheavals internally. The probability is that only a hard-Brexit is possible in the time available. Economic damage caused by the threat of Brexit will become even more obvious to UK citizens as time goes on. Clamours for a second referendum will become irresistible.

The path for the government negotiating Brexit over the next two years or so is fraught with difficulties and uncertainties. We will ignore the fact that the government by all reports simply has no realistic or plausible plan for what it wants to do. There is no shortage of difficulties coming from the other side. The impression given by the Leave campaign is that we deal with a single entity, the European Union, to agree leaving terms. In fact we have to negotiate with each and every one of the 27 other members of the EU. Those negotiations are very complex, covering everything from fisheries, defence, policing, security, financial services, food and agriculture subsidies, scientific research and many other aspects. We do not need 100% agreement of the countries (67% is plenty). However we do need to have the agreement of the European Parliament and in particular the Council with a majority of at least 72% of council members comprising at least 65% of the EU’s population.

Along the way we have parliamentary elections in 2017 for the Czech Republic, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Germany. In 2018 we have Austria Bulgaria, Cyprus, Italy, Romania and Sweden. In 2019, before the end of the two-year negotiating period there are further elections in Belgium, Finland and probably Poland. All the evidence is that the popular mood in the EU is evolving. We can be confident that by the end of the negotiations the political views of MEPs and many European governments will have changed quite significantly. Finally, if the Article 50 notification cannot be given before May 2017 as seems increasingly likely, then just before MEPs are asked for their view on the Brexit arrangements this evolution will be visible following European Parliament elections in May 2019. Each of these elections has the potential to produce significant tremors across Europe. Some may be full blown earthquakes, with a number of European political parties already campaigning on an anti-EU ticket.

The consequence for all this will most likely be that no conclusive agreement can be reached. The choice will then be a hard Brexit or not leaving the EU at all. One recent development is the realisation that leaving the EU is something that does not automatically lead to leaving the European Economic Area. The EEA was set up to provide non-EU countries access to the European single market. At present the non-EU members are Iceland, Lichtenstein and Norway. It provides for free movement of goods, capital, services and PEOPLE between member states. Being in the EEA would not allow the UK to block immigration from other EEA states, even if the UK is no longer a member of the EU. It is increasingly clear that leaving the EEA would also require a formal notification (Article 127 of the EEA agreement requiring 12 months notice of quitting the EEA). Leaving the EEA would inevitably be challenged by the Remain side, in the courts and by the Lords, as being something that was not addressed by the referendum.

What do those who want to Remain in the EU, like the author of this piece, do about all this? Probably sit tight and wait for the inevitable unravelling. Within a couple of years the economic effect of threatening to leave the EU will become more apparent in terms of significantly rising prices probably combined with a small drop in employment. We will also see the substantial cuts to benefits and public services already forced on the government to compensate for the costs of leaving. The great majority of the population will feel a marked tightening of the belt and a realisation that things are going pretty badly for most people. It is unlikely the government could go ahead with a hard-Brexit, resorting to WTO trade rules without a general election.

The Leave campaign are adamant that a second referendum should not be held. They realise the lies they told about the EU-free paradise we were heading towards are already unravelling. They are concerned that if another was held they might well lose it. That risk will increase in the future. However, if there is a significant popular opinion against a hard-Brexit that second referendum might become irresistible.

That would be the final major earthquake in this whole sorry business. A major distraction for the UK (and for the EU), for no productive benefit, delaying the return to real growth in the standard of living for the vast majority of citizens here.