Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Zanza]

So tomorrow Truss' bill to scrap the NIP (and consequentially the TCA) is supposed to be passed in the HoC. I guess it will be held up a bit in the HoL, but this is rather disappointing. I guess after two years, they somehow now want to go for no deal Brexit after all. They could have had that in 2016 and saved everybody time and grief...

[Sheilbh]

So tomorrow Truss' bill to scrap the NIP (and consequentially the TCA) is supposed to be passed in the HoC. I guess it will be held up a bit in the HoL, but this is rather disappointing. I guess after two years, they somehow now want to go for no deal Brexit after all. They could have had that in 2016 and saved everybody time and grief...

It's going to be published on Monday. It's a very long way from being passed (on a technical note it will pass the first reading - probably unanimously - which is just a procedural/technical step that allows a bill to be formally published). It'll struggle in the Commons. It will really struggle in the Lords - and I don't think the government can force it through the Lords because it's not a manifesto pledge. Interestingly Starmer has already said Labour would repeal it.

There's a fair amount of speculation they will struggle to pass it in the Commons at least without blowing up the government and taking the Tory party back to 2016-9 style internal divisions, which I can see. Of course the difference with then is that Johnson has no political capital now and every day will be a fight for survival (the rebels are already looking at a vote of no confidence from constituency party chairpeople over the summer). Politically I think it's still very difficult to see how announcing that Brexit is not, in fact, done is going to cause anything but anger from voters.

It sounds like Truss is also using it to boost her leadership prospects and Johnson is letting her - either because he's too weak to stop her or because he thinks it'll fail and end her prospects (a bit like Sunak's implosion).

There is a core of legislation that's probably necessary under Johnson because he's caught on sort of scissors of distrust - which he created. Unionists (understandably) don't trust him when he says he'll fix the issues so they've demanded legislation is passed so there is a "fix" from their perspective their perspective - and the latest polling is that 75-80% of unionists support the Stormont boycott until the Protocol is fixed. The EU (understandably) don't trust him when he says he still wants to make it work and reach a mutual solution. Everything Johnson needs to do to build trust with unionists undermines it with the EU and vice versa. Which is probably where you inevitably end up if you go around making promises to everyone telling them what they want to hear - as Rory Stewart put it, Johnson swings left and he swings right but he always swings in the direction of his self-interest.

[Tamas]

The main thing is to create conflict and chaos to keep Johnson in power. How wise this is to be done at all, let alone as a big economic crisis develops, is irrelevant.

[Sheilbh]

And today in Thick of It news a minister went to launch the government's digital strategy, was caught on a hot mic saying that Birmingham and Blackpool are "Godawful" and kept on referring to the wrong website through her entire speech

Edit: Separately absolutely cray story today.

There's an ongoing scandal about the Unite union building a £100 million conference and hotel centre. The pitch was it was supposed to be a long term asset while also providing steady income for the union and was a pet project of the last general secretary. Since he left, the new general secretary has ordered an inquiry into the project after it was valued and discovered to be worth less than £30 million so made a huge loss for the union and was, almost certainly, a vast waste of members' fees.

Anyway the company that oversaw health and safety on the construction site was owned by the son of the then mayor of Liverpool. Both have since been arrested for corruption - there's a lot of building in Liverpool and there seem to have been lots of kickbacks or hints to appoint the mayor's son's company. It all started to come out with the New Chinatown Project - which sounds like something from a TV drama about corruption.

The managing director of that health and safety consultancy was today jailed for 14 years for conspiracy to supply pot, amphetamines, cocain and heroin "on a wholesale scale". He has a previous conviction for slashing a man's face and was actually appointed managing director while he was still in prison.

Just so many layers of corruption toughing unions, local government, police and presumably organised crime - it's amazing it's not become a bigger story.

[Tamas]

And today in Thick of It news a minister went to launch the government's digital strategy, was caught on a hot mic saying that Birmingham and Blackpool are "Godawful"

Are they wrong, though? Judging by how often it shows up in crime news, Birmingham sounds like a cesspool.

[Sheilbh]

The main thing is to create conflict and chaos to keep Johnson in power. How wise this is to be done at all, let alone as a big economic crisis develops, is irrelevant.

There's an amount of that but I think it can be over-emphasised and turn him into an evil genius creating chaos and throwing dead cats on tables for his own political purposes.

I don't think that's right I think a lot more is to do with dealing with the natural chaos of Downing Street and his incompetence. There is chaos around Johnson because he's lazy, not great at attention to detail and doesn't really have any grip plus he's now very weak politically - in general he isn't very competent. It's not a strategy.

[Sheilbh]

Coming to an end of the, I think, first round of the Grenfell Inquiry and there's finally some attention being paid to it - also an excellent 10 page article in the Times at the weekend.

Between this, the Post Office sub-postmaster scandal and Windrush there are just so many failures in Britain right now - I think across public and private sectors and mainly united by an utter lack of accountability or consequences. It's enraging:

How Grenfell exposed Britain
Both private and public sectors made lethal errors
BY Peter Apps
Peter Apps is the Deputy Editor at Inside Housing. He was the BJA Specialist Journalist of the Year in 2017 and 2018 and featured on the Orwell Prize shortlist in 2019.
June 13, 2022

The Grenfell Inquiry began hearing live evidence four years ago, a year after the fire. This mammoth legal process is now coming to a close. Evidence will conclude in July, in an echo of how the process began, with an examination of the factual circumstances surrounding each death.

The inquiry turned out to be much more than a simple examination of a botched refurbishment on a West London estate. Instead it has given the public a rare glimpse of the various structures whose failures contributed to the fire. None of them ought to escape with reputation intact. Not the housing sector, not the construction industry, nor the fire service or central government.

What has emerged is a profoundly depressing portrait of a private sector with a near psychopathic disregard for human life, and a public sector which exists to do little more than serve or imitate it.

Sadly, though, pandemic, unending political turmoil, and a major war have pushed the revelations about defective building regulations, cost-cutting, and missed warnings away from the public eye. Aside from an excellent BBC podcast, there has barely been a ripple in the national media about these revelations.

The first module of the inquiry focused on the refurbishment work that took place at Grenfell. Architects, sub-contractors and surveyors took to the stand. The most important information regarded the way in which the tower's deadly cladding was selected for use. Original designs had specified a zinc product for the system, which would not have been combustible.

But the council had only set a budget of £8.5 million for the tower's refurbishment — including cladding, new windows, a new communal heating system and the conversion of commercial units to new flats. The original contractor priced the work at closer to £12 million.

The council was advised by its consultants to either increase its budget or abandon the project, warning that it would "fail" if it continued. That advice was ignored. Instead, the council's management company (the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO)) procured a new contractor, Rydon, which agreed to take it on at the knock-down price of £9.2m. This was still above the council's budget — so KCTMO and Rydon held a secret "offline" meeting without minutes to discuss making further cost savings, going outside the normal procurement rules. A big money saver which appears to have been agreed at this meeting was the cladding — switching to a product called "aluminium composite material (ACM)" would save around £300,000.

It would emerge that the savings were actually more substantial than this, but Rydon disguised the true value from KCTMO in order to maximise its own profits. "We will be quids in," wrote one manager in an email.

ACM was widely used in the UK at the time, but its fire risks were no secret: it had been linked to several huge fires globally. The team who refurbished Grenfell all claimed to have no knowledge of this — although one did email internally to note that "the ACM will be gone very quickly in a fire" during a debate about the necessary strength of fire breaks.

Next, the inquiry turned to how the organisations which sold highly combustible cladding and insulation had tested and marketed them in the years before the fire.

We heard that the French arm of the multinational giant Arconic had tested its ACM cladding panels in 2004. These tests revealed that when bent into a "cassette" shape they burned 10 times as quickly and released seven times as much heat, and could not even obtain the minimum European fire classification.

Rather than removing this particular product from the market, they branded the test a "rogue result". They kept on selling it. Internal emails warned of the risks, with technical staff warning "we are in the know" and that the true nature of the panels needed to be kept "very confidential". One senior member of the team even speculated about a tower block fire clad in its panels killing "60 to 70" people.

Changes in fire regulations did start to limit the use of ACM in much of Europe. But due to a defunct fire standard which was never removed from UK guidance, it was able to keep selling the product here. It would be sold for use on Grenfell in the particularly dangerous cassette form. The manufacturers of the insulation boards which sat behind the external cladding — Kingspan and Celotex — also had testing which revealed a potential risk in systems involving their products.

Kingspan drastically failed a large-scale test in 2005, with a system containing its foam insulation described as a "raging inferno" in an internal document. Yet it was able to obtain certification to continue targeting high rise jobs for the next 12 years, without disclosing this test. A small amount of the insulation ended up on Grenfell.

A larger amount was provided by Celotex, which also failed a test in early 2014, before passing a repeat. This second test featured additional fire resisting boards placed around key temperature monitors, which were never disclosed in its marketing. One of its former employees accepted that this behaviour amounted to a "fraud on the market" when questioned.

One of the most shocking moments of the inquiry was within the third area of its investigation. This looked broadly at the many failures in the tower's management. Grenfell housed 37 residents who had disabilities that hindered their ability to escape in an emergency. On the night of the fire, 15 of them died, several alongside friends and relatives who would not leave them in the burning building.

The inquiry heard that the management company had done nothing to identify these residents, or plan for their escape. In fact, when the London Fire Brigade asked if there were any disabled residents in their housing stock, the building's risk assessor advised that KCTMO should "say you have nobody", otherwise "questions like why were they not included in the building's [risk assessment] spring to mind".

KCTMO staff defended not producing plans for the evacuation on the basis that they were following government guidance from 2011 which said doing so was "usually unrealistic". This went against other legal provisions, but does appear to have become standard practice in the housing sector — with thousands of disabled people living in high rises with a similar lack of protection.

Startlingly, the Home Office recently announced it would not implement the inquiry's recommendation that housing providers should be legally obliged to provide such plans.

Westminster has been consistently found out during the inquiry. The UK government department responsible for building regulations knew from cladding tests conducted in 2001 that ACM systems — like the one on Grenfell tower  — were flammable. The result of this testing was delivered to ministers in September 2002, along with a warning that the highly combustible cladding was, perversely, acceptable under standards included in official guidance.

But amid industry resistance to higher standards — which were said to "limit market choice" — the guidance was never altered. The testing which revealed the horrendous fire performance of the cladding was "deliberately covered up" to "avoid triggering a cladding crisis". A former senior civil servant said he could "see why people might think that" but insisted it is not what happened.

Other warnings were missed. Eight years before Grenfell, an extraordinarily similar tragedy killed six people at the Lakanal House block in south London. The ensuing coroner's inquest concluded in spring 2013 and recommended changes to building regulations. But the Government had strict rules preventing the introduction of new regulations (or "burdens on industry" as they were termed) and chose not to tighten the rules.

In July 2014, civil servant Brian Martin — who was responsible for the building regulations guidance — attended an industry seminar which specifically warned the guidance needed to be tightened to rule out the use of ACM on tall buildings. Nothing was done.

And in February 2016, a cladding contractor emailed him to express concern that "there are many such buildings [with ACM] and their numbers are growing". But Martin did not pass this "red alert" warning on to his seniors, despite having personally assured them that an ACM fire could not happen in the UK. He was well aware of the risk of this product writing in one email: "It's very rigid and makes nice shiny buildings. Sadly when it gets exposed to a fire the aluminium melts away and exposes the polyethylene core. Whoosh!" He never checked if the cladding was being used in the UK, or acted to remove the standard from the guidance which permitted its use.

The inquiry was full of bitter of lessons and terrible news. The evidence comes together to weave a tapestry of staggering failure across the public and private sectors. Sitting behind these errors is a story of decay that can be traced back to an absence of state intervention. Inadequate funding, hands-off regulation, and privatisation — all contributed to the deterioration of these sectors. At times, it is difficult to know how the inquiry can even approach making recommendations without telling us to rip up our entire political model and start again.

At the very least, degrees of change are needed. Testing and certification should be removed from the hands of private bodies. Deregulation should always be moderated by the need to protect life. Residents need more power to challenge their landlords (whether social or private), in order to hold them to account. Progress in all of these areas is slow and partial. Hearing ministers boast about the prospect of cutting red tape after Brexit suggests it may be short-lived.

The inquiry itself is still running: final expert evidence is being heard and it will move to what will doubtless be a painful examination of the circumstances of each death, in order to fulfil obligations under the Coroner's Act. Then there will be a pause while we await the final report, and then, finally, the police investigation will take over.

Should anyone be taken to trial, the process will stretch out for years. The inquiry may have given us something approaching the ugly truth about what happened, but five years after the fire, the road to the justice and change that bereaved and survivors are desperate to see is fraught.

I wonder if it will end up like Hillsborough with findings that people were unlawfully killed, but no successful prosecutions of the people responsible

[Sheilbh]

Protocol bill seems even more extreme than expected - estimates on how long to pass it seem to be 12-18 months, so I suspect it won't ever become law. The legal rationale is threadbare at best especially given that they didn't activate Article 16 which is the remedy available in the protocol for this issues - if I was being cynical I'd wonder if the government would rather have a big fight over legislation that will take a long time to pass and be subject to lots of challenges, rather than using a legal remedy that is quicker but carries more immediate consequences.

The current reaction from folks like me will probably help the DUP eventually sell a sea border to their constituents. Similarly the SDLP, Alliance and Sinn Fein have issued a joint letter condemning the move - what's striking is on the substance there is enough common ground for those three, the DUP and UUP to form an executive and issue a joint statement on what Northern Ireland wants the protocol to look like. They won't, of course - at least until there's been a big fight.

The EU is adopting a carrot and stick approach of unfreezing the legal action and publishing a "model for the flexible implementation of the protocol based on durable solutions" which is apparently going to be a more detailed set of proposals from October (though we mustn't say this is "renegotiating"). I still think fundamentally where we'll end up is where we've always been likely to end up which is a fairly expansive interpretation of what is not "at risk" and basically green lanes/red lanes (I think the EU terminology is express lanes/standard lanes). Which is the solution that Enda Kenny's Europe advisor proposed to the Commission in 2016, that May proposed in 2017-19, that Micheal Martin and Doug Beattie have been hinting at since earlier this year and that the EU have been discussing and proposing in some form or other for the last year. As ever in Northern Ireland it'll be, in substance, a solution everyone's talked about for years - but "for slow learners".

Meanwhile the TUV are absolutely furious about it, as Newton Emerson put it, "conclusive proof that the worst thing you can give anyone in NI politics is exactly what they asked for"

[Josquius]

The timing is suspect. I do wonder to what extent they're just trying to reignite the pro brexit rabble.

[Sheilbh]

The timing is suspect. I do wonder to what extent they're just trying to reignite the pro brexit rabble.

I'd say that's most of the reasoning - and I doubt it'll work. Steve Baker, David Davis and Mark Francois all voted no confidence in Johnson - I imagine he is hoping to win back Brexit hardliners. The slight issue is that the reason they voted against him was (at least for Davis and Baker - Francois hasn't explained his vote I don't think) over law-breaking and miseading the house. It was and is a personal issue not a policy row (as with May).

I also think this is being pushed by Truss who wants to bolster her leadership credentials and Johnson is possibly too weak to stop her going forward. A few weeks ago all the reporting was that Truss was pushing for this in cabinet but opposed by Sunak, Johnson and Gove - reportedly Sunak and Gove are still opposed but they're much diminished figures, as is Johnson. More cynically I wonder if Johnson is just going to let Truss do it - if she "succeeds", then he'll claim it as a great personal victory; if she fails, then another leadership challenger has self-destructed just like Sunak did.

There is a genuine issue with unionists to fix but I don't get the sense this is really about that.

[Tamas]

Thanks for the summary Sheilbh. That makes it clear to me that this is just another short-lived part of Operation Save Big Dog.

[Sheilbh]

Thanks for the summary Sheilbh. That makes it clear to me that this is just another short-lived part of Operation Save Big Dog.

I could be wrong. It's a very radical bill from what I've read.

And I'm not sure how much I'd weight Operation Save Big Dog (I love that the rebels named their plan Operation Rinka after the dog murdered by a hired killer for then Liberal leader Jeremy Thrope) v Truss' leadership.

But transactional and controversial big announcements that don't amount to much v an actual plan is very much Johnson's style so...

[Sheilbh]

Just on the Rwanda policy/debacle, from the economics thread.

The other side of it is that actually the numbers of failed claims who are then removed has collapsed in recent years. It's the standard story of a controversial policy designed to provoke the right people and generate headlines in the right-wing press, but that actually hides a collapse in state capacity and competence since 2010.

For example on removals of failed asylum seekers is down to about 100 in 2021, it was almost 7,000 in 2010 (edit: and it was about 20,000 per year in the 2000s). Similarly the percent of cases that get a decision within six months is down from about 90% to under 10% - and this despite actually increasing the number of case workers. Although when decisions are actually made - they're generally successful. Successful claims are at the highest level since 2003.

We've gone from having a cruel but occasionally competent Home Office to one that emphasises and needs the cruelty to cover up the incompetence.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Yeah, discussing the latest Rwanda news with my son, intervention by ECHR, I remarked "the government has got what it wanted again". Lots of nauseating frothing going on over at The Daily Mail needless to say.

[Zanza]

The most disingenuous part of the debate is the supposed danger of crossing the Channel and pretend caring for the victims of such crossings.

Obviously it is perfectly safe to cross the Channel using P&O ferries or EasyJet. It is a deliberate policy choice to make it dangerous by denying these people safe transportation methods.

Same for the Mediterranean Sea of course.