Destination oblivion

When the Brexit Party set about opposing the withdrawal agreement, they took to Twitter to post selective screengrabs of it, entirely out of context. Anyone can play that game. It's cynical and dishonest. It's also not how to read a treaty. Any tract in isolation of its context is meaningless and words don't always mean what you might think.

Then, as remarked yesterday, no agreement can be taken in isolation either. An FTA is the product of a long negotiation, consolidating the prior bilateral relationship, but not entirely replacing it. There are a myriad of supporting documents, annexes, letters, MoUs and offshoots which form their own acquis, so the whether an agreement adopts EU rules or not, over time these relationships, taken as a whole, become a legal system in their own right. With that in mind, it is a brave man who wades in to pronounce what's in CETA. It is of onion layer complexity and there's enough there to study for months and years. 

That knowledge, though, is not present anywhere in the debate. Certainly there is no hint of it in the government's negotiating position paper. It would appear that those who confidently assert what is in CETA appear not to have read it, much less understood it, with claims about regulatory equivalence which simply does not exist. The position paper is what happens when a government self-isolates from expertise and replaces experienced diplomats and civil servants with know-nothing pliant SpAds from vacuous second rate think tanks. The EU will shred these people.

Cummings's centralisation of everything ("maoism of the right") has gutted the institutional knowledge of government. Groupthink is even worse now. Expertise is now threadbare and there's no leadership - just a paranoid cabal doubling down on crazed misapprehension, self-deception and ignorance. There was already a knowledge and experience gap between EU and UK negotiators but Johnson/Cummings have made it a magnitude worse. The EU is not in the mood for cleverdick toryboy games either. When it comes to details the EU has them totally outclassed.

That is ultimately why the likelihood of a deal looks minimal. Confronting the reality of our predicament is something this government simply cannot do. Rather than admitting the EU is the power in this equation it will simply turn to its allies in the media to spin the yarn that the EU is an intransigent bully as ground cover - most likely using fishing as a decoy - which is just enough to manufacture consent for a walk out. Politically it's hard to see how the Tories could u-turn on the garden path they've led themselves up.

But then we have been here before. For all the bluster and bloviation Johnson caved on the withdrawal agreement. It's just a question of how they spin it. There are enough people willing to believe whatever the Telegraph and Spectator tells them, so a surrender could be on the cards. Mercifully we have less than a year of the tedious drama and speculation to see which way this goes.

Either way, this period will leave a lasting legacy. Very probably the greatest benefit of Brexit is to highlight precisely how badly governed we are. It was bad before but Brexit removed all doubt. All your worst suspicions were underpriced. Cronyism, nepotism and narcissism running rampant and arrogant as it gets. Without the EU underpinning a base level of economic order, the consequences will become tangible. From there on in, no amount of spin can save the Tories from a much deserved oblivion.