Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Valmy]

It is hardly holding steady there Zanza. It seems to ebb and flow based on events. Should the Tories ever lose again I suspect Unionism would get a big boost.

[Barrister]

The cursed percentage returns:


Other point though is I feel it's going to constantly bob around 50/50 and this will probably just be a bit of a neverendum. Possibly not enough support to get another referendum and/or independence, but enough to cripple Scottish politics on constitutional issues.

Maybe the Catalnisation of Scotland?

So look - it's probably going to be an issue for a generation, but it is possible to move past it.

25 years after Quebec narrowly voter 50.5% no to 49.5% yes, support for Quebec independence is down to 36% in the most recent poll I could find.  Most encouragingly support for independence is lowest amongst young voters.

Not that it happens automatically, and the central government will have to do some hard work, but it can happen.

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/25-years-later-a-sovereign-quebec-seems-even-less-likely-survey-1.5160071

[Sheilbh]

52-48 Is enough to leave a union. So why would this go on forever?

Agreed - 50%+1 is enough in my view.

But if support's only around that level I'm not sure that'll get you a big enough majority in Scottish Parliament to actually force the issue. But it's probably close enough that all politics in Scotland splits on a unionist v indy lines to the exclusion of everything else.

[Valmy]

The Scots hate the Tories...well ok probably about 70% or so hate the Tories. That is the big issue driving this now. Granted the prospects of the Tories ever losing again look bad...

[Zanza]

It is hardly holding steady there Zanza. It seems to ebb and flow based on events. Should the Tories ever lose again I suspect Unionism would get a big boost.

As recent precedent in the UK shows, you have to just win once, even if polls before and after are not in favour. Winning once gives you a mandate to implement the hardest possible variety of your chosen policy with no regard to the 48%, historical conflicts, or economic wisdom. The English nationalists showed the Scottish nationalists how to do it.

[Sheilbh]

The Scots hate the Tories...well ok probably about 70% or so hate the Tories. That is the big issue driving this now. Granted the prospects of the Tories ever losing again look bad...

Sort of - I think that gets slightly overplayed, not least by Scots who don't like the Tories which is a real presence online. The key shift to me seems to be the collapse of Scottish Labour as a major political force.

In 2000 the Tories had zero MPs in Scotland and won 18 seats/15% of the vote in the Scottish Parliament. Now they have six MPs to Labour's one (and won 13 in 2017) and have about 35 MSPs/30% of the vote.

However Scots do hate Boris Johnson - his style works in England but it just doesn't translate into Scottish political culture.

I think things will become increasingly difficult for the SNP. There's already pressure from the fall-out of the Salmond investigation and cover-up, there's increasing splits between independence ultras v moderates (i.e. whether or not go for a unilateral declaration of independence) and there are some ideological splits starting to emerge. At the minute they are a very broad church that basically positions it as progressive populist technocrats - it reminds me of New Labour: "not interested in ideology, we're interested in what works." But historically there's always been a social democratic wing and a tartan Tory wing. That's not to say they'll necessarily split, but I think those internal divisions might come to the fore more and divided parties don't do well in elections.

That's why I wonder if we may end up with a Catalan situation where you have the entire spectrum of left to right nationalists and unionists, instead of fractured unionists v the SNP (and their, very strong supporters in the Greens).

[Tamas]

The cursed percentage returns:


Other point though is I feel it's going to constantly bob around 50/50 and this will probably just be a bit of a neverendum. Possibly not enough support to get another referendum and/or independence, but enough to cripple Scottish politics on constitutional issues.

Maybe the Catalnisation of Scotland?

It is just a matter of time before Scotland gets independence. At some point of the 5-year referendum cycle, the independence vote will get the slim majority it needs.

[Sheilbh]

Incidentally interesting piece by Philip Collins - which is, I think, a very helpful counterpart to Zanza's Rafael Behr piece:

Boris Johnson's "have cake, eat cake" strategy is yielding results, leaving Labour to pick up crumbs
Labour is learning that it is wrong to write off this oddly formidable Prime Minister.
BY
PHILIP COLLINS

It is highly disconcerting, for those of us who don't like him, that the political victor of the pandemic will be Boris Johnson. Though the political class regards the pandemic as a political event, the public disagrees. A one-way road to freedom, even if it is a little bumpy, will leave the government in a strong position. And that strength derives, almost entirely, from the oddly formidable, consistently underrated Prime Minister.

It is only when we acknowledge a politician's virtues that their weaknesses come into full view. No one who becomes prime minister is entirely without virtues, yet most opposition starts out from that false and easy assumption. In the case of Johnson, he has the rare political quality of being elusive. He is simultaneously a definite character and yet hard to define. What does he really think? He seems somehow to be the very embodiment of having your cake and eating it.

In Swift's farce Polite Conversation, Lady Answerall says: "She cannot eat her cake and have her cake." In politics, Boris Answerall replies that she can. This remark is widely regarded as a clue to Johnson's shiftiness, rather than the compliment that it is. Politics is full of dilemmas that have no obvious answers. How to reconcile the interests of the urban poor and the rural rich?

The political answer is that a good leader makes the question seem less important. Successful political leadership is the art, as the Danes say, of blowing while you have flour in your mouth. Many languages have a similar expression, of which the most vivid is the Tamil proverb about wanting to wear a moustache and drink porridge, too. It is a tribute to Johnson that you can imagine him saying that. In fact, you can also imagine him doing it.

Watch Johnson, when he was the shadow spokesman for higher education, on a Question Time panel in 2007. The programme contains an impassioned plea from Johnson for a referendum on Britain's place in the European Union, but the most telling of his contributions to the debate is his first one. Salman Rushdie had just been awarded a knighthood and the panel was asked if this honour seemed appropriate. Shirley Williams gave a weaselly answer about the timing being wrong, for which she was sharply upbraided by a magisterial Christopher Hitchens.

Then Johnson gave an unedifying master class in manipulation. He opened by posing as a philistine, enlisting the audience in his claim that, based on literary merit, Dick Francis or George MacDonald Fraser would make better knights. Having brought the audience along with him, he then proceeded to draw the same conclusion as Hitchens (and with which Hitchens had silenced the crowd). It was cheap and it was a bit grubby. It was politics.

This capacity to gloss over contradictions enables Johnson to be so redoubtable. He was sacked from the front bench for lying; he collapsed in a heap when Michael Gove declared him unfit to lead and close observers asserted the Tory party would never trust him. Yet here he still is.

There is a Clive James poem about a Weeble toy that captures this quality: "An Aufstehpuppe is a stand-up guy./You knock him over, he gets up again:/Constantly smiling, never asking why/The world went sideways for a while back then." Perhaps Johnson's survival instinct is just vaulting ambition in another guise. Whatever its source, it is worth taking seriously. Among the political classes, he gets written off too quickly and too often.

But the electorate is slower to write him off. Johnson comes back because he is welcomed back. He reaches voters that no Tory since Margaret Thatcher has touched. Tony Blair expanded his range by appearing, like a member of the royal family, to be both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. Johnson does it by floating on a zip-wire above politics. It might be a shtick, but rhetorical play is part of politics and Johnson's is too sincere to be dismissed as fake.

There are signs, too, that the character known as Boris Johnson might be trying to expand his repertoire. His weakness was always his apparent lack of seriousness. It is one thing to like a joke but quite another to be one, and Johnson failed to use his apprenticeship as mayor of London to become more serious. High office, though, confers gravity on politicians, and it is working its magic even on a would-be clown.

The pandemic has forced Johnson to become sombre. As he presented his path out of lockdown to the nation on 22 February, the Prime Minister became a reasonable man charting a course between extremists. Optimism rooted in the facts – it's the balance he should have been seeking all along.

Then there is something else, something more strategic, which makes him hard for Labour to oppose. Though nobody wants to put it starkly, Labour agrees with him. Johnson has adopted the ambitious slogan of "levelling up" because it contains the implied insult that the left wants to "level down". The Labour response is always that this is not true: equality is, in point of fact, levelling up. And so it is hard to oppose your own idea, no matter how irritating it is that a Tory has stolen it.

This is the leader Labour faces. A character who is hard to characterise. A tough politician who makes people who will never meet him think they would enjoy his company. An intellectually erratic man who has landed on Labour's square. Johnson will try levelling up and he will fail, but that verdict will take time to settle. In a profoundly impatient political culture, Keir Starmer must find ways to keep us happy while we wait. For a period now, Boris Johnson is going to swim without getting wet, as the Albanians say.

Philip Collins is a New Statesman columnist and contributing writer.

I still don't get it on a gut level. I've never "got" Johnson whether he was a liberal Tory mayor in a pink ten gallon hat at London Pride, or at the Olympics. I never got him as a Brexit campaigner, a Foreign Secretary or a Prime Minister. But I think there's something to this.

The comparison with the last two PMs who won as big a majority (Blair and Thatcher) is kind of useful to think about because in a way they both almost removed politics, or as Stephens put it "makes the [intractable] questions less important". Thatcher did it through her whole "there is no alternative" style - alternatives to Thatcher were removed from the realm of the possible until they removed her from office. Similarly Blair was a populist technocrat - the British people weren't interested in arcane ideological debates, they were interested in "what works". Again opposition or actually engaging with the political issue was pushed aside as "ideological" rather than practical, or engaging with reality. I almost feel like Merkel has a similar skill and sits somewhere between Thatcher and Blair.

And then there's Johnson who doesn't do TINA or what works, but rhetorical sleights of hand, opportunism and shamelessness. He doesn't do this so much when giving serious speeches such as the lockdown lifting plan, or the Munich Security Conference. But his normal approach is to disarm an issue with a joke or rhetorical whimsy, so that anyone who criticises it looks a bit like a political headbanger/obsessive, while Johnson could look at the audience and roll his eyes or gurn for the camera because they take it so seriously. It's weaponising the country's distrust of people who take things (especially themselves) too seriously,

I also wonder if that's why he doesn't play well in Scotland v England - I think of the great Scottish politicians in my lifetime like Brown, Cook, Dewar, and I'd probably add Sturgeon too, and they've all had at core a very serious almost moralist approach to politics which is the opposite of Johnson.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting example of somewhere I think the EU and UK really could and should start cooperating. Apparently the EU is struggling to find a replacement for UK forces in EUFOR in Bosnia. It seems to me like this could be something where it might be worth exploring whether the UK forces could stay (they're still there right now). I believe Turkey, Switzerland and Chile have previously been able to contribute to EUFOR so I don't think there'd be an issue with this in principle.

But more widely I've mentioned it before but the EU and UK are both contributing to Covax which is good - and the UK has provided some vaccines to Serbia - but I really feel like the EU and the UK should be looking at some sort of covax program for the rest of Europe. Especially given that there now seem to be a lot of cases in CEE we should be working out some way of supplying vaccines for the Western Balkans, Moldova, Ukraine etc urgently. Mainly because it's the right thing to do, but also because it will probably reduce the overall risks to the rest of Europe and there's a political angle - China has already supplied a lot of vaccine to Serbia and will probably step in elsewhere, I would not be surprised if Russia tried to use vaccines for leverage with some of their neighbours.

[Sheilbh]

Big shift in Northern Ireland as the DUP move to a slightly nuanced but confrontational stance:

DUP suddenly stops work on building permanent Irish Sea border posts – but doesn't stop checks at existing border posts
A DUP minister tonight precipitated an Executive crisis by halting work on the construction of long-term Irish Sea border infrastructure.
By Sam McBride and David Young
Friday, 26th February 2021, 7:53 pm

At tea time, agriculture minister Gordon Lyons announced that he was halting work on the construction of facilities costing around £40 million and ordering an end to charges levied at ports on traders bringing goods from GB into Northern Ireland.

Mr Lyons told the Press Association that his actions were "reasonable and proportionate" in the circumstances.

However, Mr Lyons has not stopped his officials from operating most border checks and they will continue – as the have done since January 1 – in temporary facilities constructed by civil servants working under the control of his DUP predecessor, Edwin Poots, last year.

Nationalist ministers immediately denounced Mr Lyons' actions, with SDLP infrastructure minister Nichola Mallon, calling for an emergency Executive meeting and arguing that the decision was "controversial, cross-cutting and cannot be put into effect without Executive agreement".

Sinn Féin deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill dismissed Mr Lyons' move as a "stunt" and highlighted that last year when Mr Poots briefly flirted with stopping work on the border, he ultimately backed down and allowed his officials to resume that work.

The decision came as unionist leaders released the text of a joint letter sent to Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday in which they pledged "unified and unalterable" opposition to the Irish Sea border – making it difficult for any of them to recant and accept a scaled-down version of the border.

Mr Lyons, who has also stopped further recruitment of inspection staff for the port facilities, told the Press Association: "I've just let executive colleagues know that today I instructed my department to halt work on a range of issues relating to work at the ports.

"This is in and around a number of areas, first of all further infrastructure, any further infrastructure builds; the additional recruitment of staff; and also the charging at the ports."

The decisions come amid the ongoing controversy over disruption caused by the Northern Ireland Protocol, which governs Irish Sea trade post-Brexit.

Mr Lyons said his move was in response to the "practical difficulties" caused by the Protocol. He cited uncertainty over the movement of goods when grace periods currently limiting protocol bureaucracy end at the start of April.

He said: "We don't know what the movement of retail goods from Great Britain into Northern Ireland is going to look like, we don't have the support in place through the digital assistance scheme yet either, and all of the SPS (sanitary and phytosanitary) issues around the end of the grace period are just so uncertain and it's real nightmare for us and it's going to be causing us an awful lot of problems."

The minister said there was need for the UK and EU to find "permanent solutions" to the issues caused by the protocol: "It's a real concern to us heading towards the end of the grace period, so we need that certainty from the EU and the UK."

He said supply chains into Northern Ireland were also unlikely to be able to hold up when the regulatory red tape increases in April "so there's a lot of practical difficulties with all of this and that's causing us a huge amount of uncertainty."

The TUV welcomed the move "in so far as it goes", adding: "We continue to believe that having gone this far the Minister needs to follow through on the logic of what he has announced this evening and pull all his department's staff who are conducting checks. No Unionist should play any part in partitioning the United Kingdom."

With Arlene Foster increasingly moving in line with the tactics proposed by TUV leader Jim Allister, former SDLP adviser Brendan Mulgrew wryly observed: "Jim Allister is a busy man, leading two parties at the minute."

It feels like we're moving into a position where either the UK government compels the Northern Irish executive to take certain actions (and I'm not fully sure how that works - but I understand that the UK government can do it), which might allow the DUP to carry on serving in the executive while opposing the NIP because they're not the ones implementing it. Or the DUP collapses Stormont, there's a return of direct rule and London can implement it. I would probably expect the latter because I think that makes for easier politics in Northern Ireland which will be the DUP's focus. I think Peter Robinson's point is still really true here it is almost impossible for the DUP to simultaneously oppose something and campaign against it while being responsible for implementing it. I don't think it'll come to a head until lockdown's more or less been lifted and the vaccine's been rolled out because I think the political blowback of collapsing Stormont during the worst of the pandemic would be enormous.

Also struck by the TUV line. I feel like they know what they're doing when they're throwing around a word like "partition". But the line "no Unionist should play any part in partitioning the UK" makes me think that for now they're focusing on the DUP but I wonder if that could broaden into a campaign of unionists not working in the BCPs, refusing to do checks, possible industrial action or civil disobedience etc. There have been lots of statements among unionists of "political and constitutional" opposition to the NIP (ie not violent) and it seems likely it will broaden from the purely political at some point.

Stormont has a vote on the NIP in 2024, but the key will be the Northern Irish elections in 2022. It's likely that unionists will win a majority again so for the NIP to win majority support it will depend on some unionists supporting it and the "unified and unalterable" line is not particularly promising from the "No Surrender" wing of Northern Irish politics.

[Tamas]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/27/sunak-budget-expected-to-offer-first-time-buyers-mortgage-guarantee

Well there goes my hope of property prices going down this year. They are probably poised to go up now.

What they are planning is extend the "help to buy" scheme from certain newly built properties to all.  This is a state guarantee on your mortgage so the banks can feel safe offering 5% deposit loans instead of the min. 10% they normally do.

The thing is, these help to buy properties I have been consistently seeing 25-50% over average prices when compared to the non-helped similar properties in the same area.

It's infuriating. They keep stoking the demand higher with tax funds as if it is demand we are short on.

At least it proves that I was right and prices were bound to fall, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this. Bloody rigged effin' game.

[Josquius]

You need to get away from London man. Buy yourself a lovely country pile up north.

[Tamas]

You need to get away from London man. Buy yourself a lovely country pile up north.

The wife has a good job and she loves it, and it cant be done remotely.

[Sheilbh]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/27/sunak-budget-expected-to-offer-first-time-buyers-mortgage-guarantee

Well there goes my hope of property prices going down this year. They are probably poised to go up now.

What they are planning is extend the "help to buy" scheme from certain newly built properties to all.  This is a state guarantee on your mortgage so the banks can feel safe offering 5% deposit loans instead of the min. 10% they normally do.

The thing is, these help to buy properties I have been consistently seeing 25-50% over average prices when compared to the non-helped similar properties in the same area.

It's infuriating. They keep stoking the demand higher with tax funds as if it is demand we are short on.

At least it proves that I was right and prices were bound to fall, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this. Bloody rigged effin' game.

The theory of help to buy was that it would increase supply - because it's only available on new build properties there need to be new build properties. Similarly those flats, obviously, aren't available for landlords or buy-to-let and there is a regional price cap. Again the theory is to encourage developers to build properties that are not just for the rental market or luxury flats. Also it is easier to get developments approved if there's a big chunk of help-to-buy for all of those reasons because it's going to be for people to live in as opposed to absentee landlords and it is "affordable" because of the cap.

The issue with it, in my view, isn't that it's demand focused, but rather that I'm not sure it works as hoped from a supply perspective. It has increased the number of new builds but not enough. I feel like all of the policies of Tory governments since 2010 to increase supply have mainly been about avoiding that to fix supply the state needs to be involved in building again and that probably means an end in some way to right to buy.

[Josquius]

Trying to tackle the housing crisis in such a direct manner at all is a fools errand IMO.
A far more efficient use of effort and effort and resources would be putting more into efforts to spread the economy around the country.
The most direct use of money here would be in transport. More abstract various tax incentives for setting up offices elsewhere.
Meanwhile in London more effort to support housing for key workers is more necessary than anything else.
Oh.
And death to new build estates built in random places with no consideration for transport. Let's be having more new towns around already existing stations that have a few thousand passengers a year.