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Starmer’s Story Must Be Labour’s Story

29th March 2021 by newtjoh

Christened by working class parents to commemorate the Labour founder, Keir Hardie, the young Starmer trod an upward mobile professional journey through grammar school, redbrick university, and Oxbridge into select Bar Chambers. Becoming a doughty legal defender of organised strikers, anti-capitalist campaigners and death row inmates, he then ‘took silk’ as a QC, providing a pathway to his appointment Director of Public Prosecutions in 2008 – an establishment role he excelled in, exhibiting rationality and competence tinged with radicalism.

Succeeding Frank Dobson – a former Health Secretary but unsuccessful first Labour London Mayoralty candidate – to the inner city, and still largely working class, safe seat of St.Pancras, Starmer quickly but quietly learnt his Westminster ropes. In October 2016, Jeremy Corbyn appointed him Shadow Brexit Secretary – an appointment based not on political affinity, but on a recognition that his skill profile best matched the requirements of the post, surmounting concerns within Corbyn’s inner circle that it would simply provide Starmer with a stage for a continuing audition for the top job.

Which it did. By far the most effective Shadow performer in the Commons, Starmer effectively critiqued the Brexit position of both May and Johnson governments. Elected Labour leader in April 2020 at the height of the first Covid wave, he soon established himself as a measured but effective leader of the opposition, whose gravitas contrasted sharply and favourably with both a Prime Minister almost habitually reliant on bluster and boosterism and with a predecessor invariably out of his depth at the dispatch box.

But doubts began to surface that Labour’s new leader, while brilliant at discharging a brief and in forensically unpicking an opponent’s case, lacked the ability to create and personify a political counter narrative that could resonate within, yet alone beyond, Westminster. It was also noted that his six Brexit tests and espousal of a ‘People’s Vote’ had proved counter-productive in political and economic outcome terms. After a honeymoon period, apart from taking the whip away from Corbyn, his leadership style was characterised by caution and indecision with a proclivity to tack to the prevailing wind of the day in a way that often smacked more of tactical opportunism than strategic vision.

Since 1945 only three Labour leaders, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, and Tony Blair have won electoral power at Westminster – all following a long hiatus for Labour in Opposition. The first two did so not by dint of their personalities but rather by their ability to manage and to link a desire for change within the population, the last by a more presidential project that personified ‘New’ Labour’s colonisation of the centreground.

The December 2019 Tory capture of ‘Red Wall’ seats won with an enlarged working-class support base, along with the party’s practical collapse in Scotland, means that to become the fourth, Starmer  – discounting a return of a substantial number of SNP seats in Scotland back to Labour – must secure the largest ever electoral swing that Labour has ever achieved in England of over 12% compared to 10.7% in 1945.

Has Starmer really got what it must take to overcome not only that unprecedented electoral challenge – likely to be compounded by boundary changes favouring the Conservatives – but also concurrently the immense structural social democratic wider political challenge of reconciling necessary fiscal and political responsibility with the accommodation of ever-rising rising demand and need for increased health, social care, and education social expenditure, on top of equitable social security reform – the true underlying fiscal crisis of the state – as well as the secular tendency for education and age rather than social class associational factors to determine voting behaviour, requiring the cultural and the economic to be ever finely balanced in political calculation.

In the short term, policy reviews and prescriptions can wait. Starmer must first build a sustainable value base that can support and illuminate a coherent overarching political strategy chiming with majority concerns covering affordable housing, quality neighbourhood schools, and the building safe and secure communities endowed with well-paid jobs, that some of the more thoughtful members of his Shadow Cabinet, like Rachel Reeves, have begun to build.

Starmer cannot recreate Blair’s presentational elan, but he can mesh such a strategic framework to his personal back story: the son of a disabled mother and toolmaker father who forged a successful career by hard work and application, subsequently marked by public service. He should dare the Mail and Telegraph to sneer at such an epitome of Middle England endeavour and aspiration for honest and in the scheme of things modest material reward.

Starmer as a person and Starmerism as a political project should be joined and projected, linking, by way of contrast, the entitlement and real elitism of the Prime Minister’s back story to his opportunistic and hollow ‘chancer’ policies.

A case in point is the Johnson’s government’s Levelling Up agenda. It relies upon a mix of big ticket and local bus depot-type infrastructural projects with thinly spread centrally determined funding-streams, themselves subject to manipulation for party political advantage.  Starmer must seize as Labour’s own, the emerging overlapping consensus, manifested recently by Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane speaking on behalf of the soon to be defunct Industrial strategy council, that sustained local growth needs to be rooted in local strategies, covering not only infrastructure, but skills, sectors, education and culture, measured by defined understandable transformational outcomes: improved educational attainment and opportunity, the generation of new and well-paying jobs, and the spread and mainstreaming of affordable housing.

He will also need to tap an enlarged fiscal space for government borrowing, evidenced by Biden’s Stimulus and Climate Change Package, taking the opportunity to be both bold and lucky, as Johnson did to combine ‘ getting Brexit done’ with electoral success.  Unlike Johnson, he also must be honest and straight-talking about linking future social benefit and justice to contribution. It is not just about the economy, but also about values and vision. The policies will follow.

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Filed Under: Economic policy, Welfare State and social policy Tagged With: Starmer

Covid: When Muddling Through Won’t Do

26th July 2020 by newtjoh

Summary (added 29th July)

This is a detailed but personal narrative of the UK’s public policy response to Covid to the decision to lockdown on 23rd March.

Minutes and papers of the government’s main scientific advisory group (SAGE) are used along with subsequent parliamentary committees to investigate and analyse the claim made by some members of SAGE and other informed commentators that up to 25,000 of the 45,000-plus hitherto recorded deaths were avoidable.

It concludes that undue retrospective focus on the one week or more delay in the imposition of lockdown diverts from understanding , and acting to remedy the underlying causes of the UK’s (and England’s) high per capita Covid death rate: lack of government preparedness; of foresight; and of focused flexibility, manifested in the concentration of Covid-deaths within its care homes for the elderly as result of negligent acts of both commission and omission.

The last section uses international comparisons to highlight lessons to be learnt that simply put are: learn, learn, and learn; test, test, and test.

Introduction

The first worldwide Covid case was confirmed on 31 December in Wuhan, a large inland Chinese provincial city, home to 11 million people. An animal-based virus had switched across to humans, probably via its under-regulated live food markets.

Dribs and drabs of information concerning its emergence and spread circulated but elicited little focused concern within the policy-making citadels of Europe and America.  Many stockmarkets, apparently unperturbed that a pandemic might soon be unleashed and wreak economic havoc, continued to climb to near-record highs. Aviation traffic continued unabated.

Personally, I travelled from Kolkata in India – my wife’s family home – back to my London home on the 14th January to return to work, without a thought about Covid, then still known by the generic label, Coranavirus.  Before long, like most of us, I was to learn much more.

The first public awareness watershed was Wuhan’s lockdown on January 23. This was imposed by the Chinese government to prevent the further propagation of the virus by city residents travelling for their Lunar New year celebrations. Many already had. Pictures percolated within mainstream media of deserted Wuhan streets. The opening of a 1000 bed pop-up hospital built in short scratch to relieve pressure on its locally overwhelmed health system briefly made the headlines in early February.

Yet all that was still over there; for most people still a distant and unknown continent: there was no suggestion, nor did it cross my mind, that London would begin to endure an even longer lockdown before March was out.

On 31 January – the same day that the UK exited the EU – Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer (and principal medical adviser to the UK government) confirmed the first Covid cases in England.

A few days earlier the World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared Covid a public health emergency of international concern.

Cobr(a) – the inter-departmental group named after the cabinet briefing room where it met – convened usually to plan government responses to terrorist threats and to emergencies, such as flooding, had already assembled the first time to consider the threat from Covid.

It was, however, an emerging threat still very much overshadowed by the wider political backdrop, most particularly the continuing Brexit saga.

A 3 February a keynote speech in which the new prime minister predicted a ‘supercharged’ free trading future for a UK now freshly freed from its EU shackles grabbed the headlines. Covid was not going to be allowed to get in the way of that.

The same day, the UK-registered Diamond Princess cruise ship returned to Yokohama port in Japan. 3,711 passengers and crew were quarantined there on board for 14 days.  Some were repatriated by the US and other governments prior to the completion of that initial quarantine period. Others, testing positive but not hospitalized, remained on board throughout much of February, even into March.

711 people (19%) on that ship ultimately tested positive for Covid, many of whom were transferred to over-stretched local health facilities. 13 died, including the first UK national to suffer a reported Covid-related death.

The propensity of the virus to spread quickly but unevenly among an elderly passenger demographic sharing common facilities had been demonstrated: the World Health Organization (WHO) advised that Diamond Princess accounted for half of all Covid cases then reported outside China.

The lesson that was there to be learnt concerning the protection of their respective resident care home populations was not learnt either by the UK government or its devolved administrations or many other European governments.

The initial UK public health policy response was one of containment: detect early cases, follow up close contacts, to prevent the disease taking hold, for as long as possible.

In line with that international travelers from infected areas were taken under police escort to requisitioned hotels for 14 days quarantine. Identified actual cases in the UK were few – fingers on one hand. International airlines withdrew their Chinese flights.

Half-hearted efforts were also made to introduce contact tracing. This identified that a middle-aged Hove man, after apparently contracting Covid in Singapore on a business trip before interrupted his journey home to take a short break in a French ski-chalet, had apparently infected at least five people – a high proportion of the total hitherto recorded as Covid-infected – at least in England.

The part-time scout master was later interviewed in magazine-style format as a bit of curiosity, in rude health following his period of quarantine in a London hospital, reflecting the prevailing media noise, which then seemed as likely to recede than to intensify.

The European response to Covid continued to be muted, restrained, and, in retrospect, blasé throughout much of February; to the point of negligence, even.

Across the Channel in newly liberated Blighty, the political and public policy response to Covid was likewise lacklustre, not ‘supercharged’. In mid-February, Boris Johnson enjoyed an extended period of ‘down time’ at his Kent ‘grace and favour’ historic mansion, apparently basking in the glow of having got both a 80 seat majority for his party – its largest since 1987 – and ‘Brexit Done’. It later transpired that his new partner was pregnant.

And as the days gradually got longer the attention of the wider population drifted rather to the future joys of spring replacing the partial and chosen hibernation encouraged by a dull and wet winter.

The last week of February was half-term. The more affluent jetted-off for skiing holidays in alpine Europe; greater numbers headed to packed domestic attractions. I, myself, organized a short break to Bavaria for the end of March, looking forward to crossing much of the region by public transport, sampling the local sights and amenities.

Poignantly, later, in May, Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK’s chief scientific adviser, was to tell MPs that a wave of imported Covid-19 infections had flowed into the UK in early March – a flow quite possibly accounted for by returning half-term vacationers. Hindsight is both a wonderful and cruel thing.

Although Cobra continued to meet and consider Covid in the prime minister’s absence, the emerging pandemic persisted in media portrayal as primarily a Chinese problem producing incidental issues elsewhere that threatened to become larger.

Nearly all the c.3,000 deaths recorded as Covid-related by the end of February had been recorded in China, save for less than 100 elsewhere in the world.

By the end of March, however, as we will shortly see, the picture had already both burst its frame and inverted: China accounted for c3,300 of a worldwide total of c39,000 deaths.

Boris Johnson finally attended his first Cobra meeting on Covid on the 2 March.

Science, SAGE, and public policy to lockdown

The Scientific Group for Emergencies (SAGE) remit is to provide timely and coordinated scientific advice to decision makers within Cobra, Cabinet, and right across government.

Co-chaired by the government’s chief scientific and medical advisers, mainly comprising independent academics within specialist supporting expert groups, such as the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M): a key group focused on infectious disease modelling and epidemiology. Another was NERVTAG, the novel and emerging respiratory infections group.

From January onwards SAGE met regularly – usually twice-weekly – on Covid. Its operations and deliberations and feeder groups were initially opaque and mysterious, but following accusations of non-transparency, minutes of its meetings, consensual statements, with some supporting papers, were belatedly published, albeit weeks in arrears.

These show that its meetings and papers were marked by uncertainty and tentativeness, practically until lockdown was announced.

There was a reliance, well into February, upon models predicated on assumptions derived from the experience of previous influenza epidemics. Undue weight was placed on transmission by children. The exceptional exposure risk to the very elderly – in care home settings especially – that Covid posed was an absent parameter (not factored-in) in the models assembled for, and considered by, SAGE.

These models therefore missed a key real-world determinant of Covid outcomes across the UK: an omission later explained by Sir Patrick Vallance and other key SAGE members as due to lack of data.

A 3 February statement concluded that without a better evidence base concerning the transmissibility of the virus, the impact of potential interventions and their interaction on Covid spread would be hard to determine, noting, for example, that little direct evidence was available on the effects of cancelling large public events.

And, a 25 February supporting paper considering the impacts of various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI’s), concluded that, excepting for school closure, reliable estimates of their impact were lacking, even for influenza. That meant, in turn, that there was “insufficient data to parameterise the simulation model (used here) accurately enough to give a high level of confidence in model predictions of individual policies”.

The ‘science’ was flying mainly blind as the coming Covid storm gathered strength and speed.

What was better understood, however, within SAGE, was that without action a future pandemic would overwhelm the NHS before its peak was reached, but that a sustained application of NPI’s, especially if combined and introduced early, should help to delay and flatten that peak.

Such NPI’s included the:

  • closure of schools and universities;
  • home isolation of symptomatic cases;
  • voluntary household quarantine on occurrence of a symptomatic case in a household; and,
  • social distancing, where all non-household social contact ceased, bar ‘essentials’ and attending school and work.

A 26 February paper extended that conclusion and made explicit an assumption: an alternative strategy focused on the household isolation of over 65’s and other vulnerable groups  and on special measures around care homes, would mean that ‘‘the majority of the population would then develop immunity, hopefully preventing any second wave, while reducing pressure on the NHS”.

It went on to note that it “was a political decision to consider whether it is preferable to enact stricter measures at first, lifting them gradually as required or to start with fewer measures and add further measures if required”.

27 February SAGE minutes recorded (minute 6) that ‘extended mitigations’ could be expected to change the shape of the epidemic curve or the timing of a first or second peak, but it was unlikely they would reduce the overall number of total infections (the attack rate). In other words, such mitigations would re-distribute infections and deaths temporally (over time) but not reduce them.

An action was also recorded for UK academic modelling groups (Imperial, Oxford, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) with NHS planners to organise a working group (starting week 2 March 2020) to analyse key clinical variables for a reasonable worst case planning scenario for the NHS, which could then be reviewed by SPI-M for subsequent discussion at SAGE.

In the public arena, the government’s first forward-looking Coronavirus Action Plan, published on 3 March, reflected the underlying scientific ambivalence and uncertainty swirling within and emanating from SAGE.

The plan’s declared primary public policy aim was to flatten the peak of the epidemic to provide more time for the NHS to prepare for it. This was hopefully to buy time for a vaccine and/or therapies to be developed. Meanwhile measures to first delay and then mitigate the onset and impact of Covid were to be introduced as part of the plan; but only when assessed “as necessary”, following consideration of their social costs and impacts.

By February it was already known that Covid disproportionately impacted upon the very elderly. Chinese case fatality data reported a c15% death rate for over 80’s, compared to 0.32% for people in the 20-49  bracket, (see, for example: https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/).

Later datasets have continued to confirm the proclivity of the virus to affect the very elderly people, especially those suffering other respiratory-based and other co-morbidities.

Epidemiological and modelling data, according to the 5 March SAGE minutes,  was by then available to support delay and mitigation measures to modify the epidemic peak and to reduce mortality rates (author note: presumably short-term ones in line with its 27 February minute 6).

In that light, minute two recommended the implementation – within 1-2 weeks (author emphasis) – of:

  • individual home isolation (symptomatic individuals to stay at home for 14 days);
  • whole family isolation (fellow household members of symptomatic individuals to stay at home for 14 days after last family member becomes unwell).

Minute three further advised that scientific data was also available to support implementation – roughly two weeks later (author emphasis) – of the social isolation (cocooning) for those over 65 or with underlying medical conditions, for the same purpose.

Consistent with such advice, on 7 March, the government asked people exhibiting Covid symptoms to self-isolate for seven days.

Both the science and the politics, however, were soon to be swamped by events in Italy.

There – on the back of an earlier exponential spread of infections – an uncontrolled demand surge in admissions and demand for intensive-bed care support had by early March clearly overwhelmed local health systems. Lombardy was the worst hit.  Much of Italy, where deaths rose exponentially in days, was put into severe lockdown.  Spain soon followed suit.

As the empirical situation across Europe and the UK became both clearer and more concerning, unease grew across SAGE and wider scientific community.

Surveillance data, including Covid patients in intensive care units without a travel history, showed that community transmission of the virus within UK communities had begun: the 10 March SAGE minutes  highlighted that the UK was likely harbouring thousands of Covid cases – as many as 5,000 to 10,000 – geographically spread nationally (minute five),  and that transmission was already underway across both community and nosocomial (i.e. hospital) settings (minute six).

The genie was already out of the bottle.

An accordant action was recorded by SAGE that day for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and the Cabinet Secretariat to develop policy around implementation of: case isolation, household isolation, social distancing for elderly and vulnerable) interventions; data clarifying eligibility, numbers affected, and essential symptoms, was then to be shared with SAGE and its advisory groups.

Minute 14 endorsed the advice of a sub-group that individual case self-isolation should last for seven days from onset of symptoms. Minute 20 recommended that all members of a household should isolate for 14 days from the time that its first member exbibits symptoms. It went on to add that in the event of the first symptomatic person becoming well after seven days, that person can exit isolation but not the other member(s).

Minute 18 reported modelling that suggested, however, that the UK was still 10-14 weeks (author emphasis) from the epidemic peak (not attached with estimates of deaths) if no mitigations were introduced.

Insofar the actual peak was experienced less than one month later, on 8 April to mid-month despite the introduction of mitigation and then suppression measures, this proved over-optimistic.

Minute 30 noted again that special policy consideration should be given to care homes and various types of retirement communities where residents were more independent. No related action or monitoring process was attached to that minute, however.

Its lack of application was to greatly increase the Covid-related death toll over the next couple of months, with care home residents accounting for nearly half of such deaths.

On March 12 efforts to introduce contact tracing evaporated and finally ended. This the 3 March government plan had predicted, noting that as Covid becomes established,  large-scale preventative measures, such as intensive contact tracing, ‘‘may lose their effectiveness’’, which would mean that ‘’resources would be more effectively used elsewhere’’.

In short, the existing UK testing and tracing infrastructure could only cope with a limited number of cases, which no longer was the case: confirmed Covid cases had risen from four on March 3 to 76 by March 9.

Chris Whitty, in a subsequent and rather fraught 21 July attendance before the Health and Social Care parliamentary select committee, justified that decision as “correct given the (then) current capacity”, as  he did the related one to concentrate on providing swab tests to hospital patients.

Beyond SAGE, bars and pubs were still sometimes packed. The young Italian owners of one Chiswick bar were incredulous that no lockdown restrictions had yet been introduced, as Covid ‘’was sure to spread here.’’

In turn, I ventured surprise, on one hand, that the Italian government had demonstrated the wherewithal to implement a comprehensive lockdown; and, on the other, doubt that the economic impact of such a lockdown, on young people especially, would be tolerated in the capital where all of us worked, whereas the youth unemployment rate in Italy constituted a constant and accommodating endemic societal fact of life that the very presence of my hosts partly evidenced.

They got it right; I got it wrong. More to the point, they correctly predicted the need for quicker more concerted action from the government (against their own short-term economic interests) than was forthcoming.

Others had also by then made more evidenced warnings that Covid was sure to spread exponentially soon in countries such as the UK, most notably a 10 March Medium post: Coranavirus: Act today or People will Die that was viewed by 40 million people. The author, Tomas Pueyo, a Californian software engineer made the point that the true number of Covid cases is likely to exceed many times the official recorded number of diagnosed Covid cases. Applying a few assumptions, namely, an average time from onset of infection to death of  17.3 days, a case fatality ratio of 1%, and a doubling time of 6.2 days, he estimated, for instance, after ignoring cases apparently clustered,  that given a figure of 22 Covid-deaths recorded across Washington state on the western seaboard of the United States (US) that the true number cases in that state was c3,000.

His message was simple but stark: The coronavirus is coming to you; it’s coming at an exponential speed: gradually, and then suddenly; it’s a matter of days; maybe a week or two; when it does, your healthcare system will be overwhelmed. It was largely dismissed as in the ‘amateur armchair epidemiologist’ category.

Some schools in the UK, however, by then had already shut their doors by local decision. Responding to the threat of the virus, public behaviour had also begun to change in late February, causing both car and public transport movements to fall. More people began to work from home and to stop unnecessary shopping and leisure trips.

Social distancing and homeworking continued to be encouraged by the government but, however, were not yet made subject to centrally imposed regulation or enforcement.

In that light, the  13 March SAGE minutes highlighted the “risk that current proposed measures (individual and household isolation and social distancing) will not reduce demand (for health care) enough: they may need to be coupled with more intensive actions to enable the NHS to cope, whether regionally or nationally” (minute nine).

Yet minute 21 also recorded that SAGE was unanimous “that measures seeking to completely suppress spread of Covid will cause a second peak”  and “it is a near certainty that countries such as China, where heavy suppression is underway, will experience a second peak once measures are relaxed”: a conclusion in line with the analytic thrust of its earlier published background February papers and minutes.

And, in the public arena that morning , the chair of SAGE, Sir Patrick Vallance, told the BBC Today programme that “if you suppress something very, very hard, when you release those measures it bounces back and it bounces back at the wrong time”; the aim, therefore, was “to try to reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely”, so as “to build up some kind of herd immunity”.

That very same Friday 13th March, 70,000 people, including some of my work colleagues, herded together to watch the Cheltenham Gold Cup, returning to work next week to tell of their luck with the bookies.

Two evenings previously, 52,000 watched Liverpool play Atletico Madrid, including thousands traveling from a country and a city where cases were rising at one of the highest European rates.

Both events provided a swansong for life as until then we had known it. That very evening, the government announced that mass gatherings would be banned from the following weekend.

Matt Hancock, the Health secretary, in a televised interview on Sunday 15 March, denied that herd immunity was government policy. He advised instead that “our goal is to protect life, and our policy is to fight the virus and protect the vulnerable and protect the NHS…(and to do that) … we need to bring the (rising) infection rate down” (and this might involve) “some quite extraordinary interventions that you don’t normally have in peacetime”.

Hours earlier, the preceding Saturday evening, measures to close restaurants, shops, other than  pharmacies and supermarkets, and to shield the vulnerable over 70 age group by means of strict quarantining within their own home or are homes for an extended period, had been trailed through the media  as comprising “part of a ‘wartime-style mobilisation effort” that would likely to be enforced within the next 20 days”. Hancock refused to rule out that their introduction was imminent.

Also leaked to the press that weekend were dramatic claims that without radical action the Covid death toll could reach 512,000 deaths in Great Britain and of 2.2m in the US.

That Imperial College Study, when released, on 16 March, was not ambiguous. According to the modelling assumptions that it applied, even the most effective mitigation strategy (case isolation; household quarantine; and social distancing of the elderly), would see general ward and ICU beds surge limits exceeded by at least 8-fold, resulting in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and of 1.1-1.2m in the US.

It concluded that epidemic suppression, where the rate of Covid-transmission or reproduction (the R-rate) was reduced to below one (each infected person on average goes on to infect less than one person: R<1) and then, crucially, was kept below that level, provided the only current viable strategy, and that there was an imminent need for UK to implement it.

Such effective suppression of the epidemic, as a minimum, rather than the more limited mitigation measures (author note: as the SAGE 13 March minutes recommended) would need instead to comprise a ‘”combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their family members”, supplemented by school and university closures, even though ”such closures may have negative impacts on health systems due to increased absenteeism”. Population-wide social distancing was modelled within the report to have the largest impact.

It further noted that these measures could need to last for 18 months or more – or even indefinitely – until a vaccine(s) was readily available, though with some likely periods of alternating relaxation and re-imposition of individual measures, where and when the emergent data justified, that could vary geographically.

The Imperial modelling chimed with the unravelling Italian experience. It served to highlight the prospect that without a radical change in approach that the UK’s lower per capita intensive bed capacity would cause our NHS to be even more overwhelmed than had proved the case in Italy. UK deaths at the time were beginning to double exponentially across days.

The  published 16 March Consensus view  of SPI-M concluded that a combination of general social distancing and school closures (author note: that is suppression) with case isolation, household isolation and the concerted social distancing of vulnerable groups would be likely to control the epidemic, subject to them being kept in place for a long period.

It noted that SPI-M agreed that this strategy should be followed “as soon as practical”, at least in the first instance.

Sir Patrick Vallance later, when the sole witness to the 16 July Science and Techology Select Committee, appeared to claim that this was when SAGE provided clear advice to government, in effect, to lockdown –  done on the back of emergent data (presumably the Imperial report) that Covid infections were doubling every three days.

Foe the record his precise answer was (Q1041):  “When the SAGE sub-group on modelling, SPI-M, saw that the doubling time had gone down to three days, which was in the middle of March, that was when the advice SAGE issued was that the remainder of the measures should be introduced as soon as possible. I think that advice was given on 16 or 18 March, and that was when those data became available. Looking back, you can see that the data may have preceded that, but the data were not available before that. Knowledge of the three-day doubling rate became evident during the week before” (that is week beginning 9 March).

His chief medical adviser counterpart, Chris Whitty, was later to highlight,  during his appearance at the 21 July Health and Social Care Committee that following consultation with Vallance that “there was an intention on the 16th very strongly to say that more measures were needed, and that is indeed what happened. If you look at the minutes of SAGE, it is clear that there was a package of things that were strongly recommended on the 16th, and those happened then. There was subsequently clear advice to close schools, which previously had not been advised. That happened subsequently”, and that the ‘operational’ difficulties involved in imposing a full lockdown immediately should be recognized.

The Secretary of State, Matt Hancock, himself advised the 21 July Science and Technology Select Committee  that, “If you take 16 March, for instance, on that day we received advice from SAGE advising that the virus was accelerating. By that evening, I was in the Chamber announcing that there should be no social contact unless absolutely necessary and no travel unless necessary. In my eight years in Government, I have never seen faster decision-making on such big issues than happened then, translating scientific advice into Government action with unbelievable urgency”.

By July, however, the ‘science’ and the politics was becoming blurred. So back to the narrative.

On March 17, Sir Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the NHS, wrote a letter to local acute care providers asking them to be ready to postpone all non-urgent elective operations from 15th April at the latest, for at least three months to provide an additional 30,000 acute care beds across England on top of the existing 100,000.

He also urged them to potentially provide half of that new addition (15,000) by ensuring the urgent discharge of patients awaiting discharge or with lengths of stay over 21 days, while community health providers and social care providers were likewise asked to free up community hospital and intermediate care beds “that could be used flexibly within the next fortnight” so as to possibly release up to another 10,000 beds for acute Covid care cases.

Many of the discharged patients were very elderly people who returned to, or were allocated a place in, residential and nursing care homes. They did not begin to get tested for Covid (testing capacity was inadequate even for NHS staff) until 15 April, after when the transfers had begun.

Unsurprisingly an unknown proportion of the elderly and frail were incubating the virus for onward transmission to their fellow residents – in age and morbidity, the group most vulnerable and exposed to it.

That St. Patrick’s Day no parades took place in Ireland as these and other public events had already been banned by the Irish government. The UK government now did likewise. Shielding was also introduced for the most vulnerable. The British public were exhorted to cease non-essential contact and travel.

The closure of schools was announced next day. Exceptions covered the children of critical health workers and vulnerable children when they needed to attend in person – about 2% of the total school population.

That Friday March 20, one week after the Cheltenham Gold Cup, I joined most of the working population in homeworking; much of the working office-based population had begun to do so earlier that week, when I cancelled my planned forthcoming trip to Bavaria.

Pubs, restaurants, and indoor leisure venues were shuttered across the UK from midnight 20 March. The closure of non-essential shops was announced on the following Monday 23 March.

That evening, the Prime Minister, in a  nationwide television address  confirmed the essential components of the UK lockdown that we were to experience well into May: that people should stay at home, save to shop for basic necessities, and then infrequently as possible; to take one form of exercise a day – for example, to run, walk, or cycle – but alone or only with members of your household; to access any medical need; to provide care or to help a vulnerable person; and to travel to and from work, but only where absolutely necessary, where homeworking was not possible.

Non-essential movement was duly restricted from Wednesday March 24. The emergency Coranavirus Act 2020 was passed with regulations enacted on 26 March prohibiting all gatherings of more than two people in public, other than those living in the same household.

The closure of all shops selling non-essential goods​ including clothing and electronics was enforced.

Premises, including libraries, playgrounds and outdoor gyms, and places of worship, were likewise compulsorily shut by statutory requirement.

Similar regulations were enacted by the devolved administrations. The constituent nations of the UK, initially at least, were united in their Covid public policy response.
‍A State-imposed Lockdown unprecedented in scale and reach since the world wars of the last century had been imposed in just one momentous week across the UK, tagged with the public health slogan: Stay at Home – Protect the NHS – Save Lives.

 We were not alone. Across ’every state, every district, every lane, every village’ of India, an even more stringent and remarkable lockdown had begun for its c1.4bn population. The Hindu-nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, announced the lockdown likewise on television on March 23, giving Indians less than four hours’ notice before it took full effect that midnight.

The largest urban centres, such as Delhi and Kolkata, had already seen shop closures and scaled down public transport.

The phenomenal and previously unimaginable impact that lockdown had on the previous sheer cacophony of crowded cities like Kolkata can be glimpsed on this video, showing a city of a solitude, quietness, and clear air, never seen before,  an environment that economically and socially could not be sustained.

 India and other low-income countries with limited health systems and high-density urban populations appeared to be the most exposed to Covid. Initially, at least, however the Indian lockdown was successful in securing adherence and stunting community transmission of the virus.

It did attach accompanying grave hardship however on the poorest segments of the community. For example, migrant wage labourers stripped of their source of employment income were forced to trudge back to their family homes often hundreds of miles away in rural India, risking the transmission of the virus there.

Unfortunately, across recent weeks India has experienced a concerning steady rise in infections and deaths (quite possibly under-reported), resulting in the intermittent re-imposition of national, state, and local lockdowns, amid with officially reported cases of Covid, approaching one million, with true cases likely – given limited testing incidence –  likely to be much higher.

My wife whom I had left in her Kolkata family home back in January was unable to fly back to London as planned. As I write, she is still waiting for international flights to be reinstated, and local spikes of Covid cases in my wife’s neighbourhood have become common with police enforcing their transfer to state isolation facilities.

Individual US states in March progressively applied their own lockdown versions, subject also to local variation. States neighboring NY City, and California, led the way.

Their governors sidestepped a reluctant and sceptical president, whom appeared more concerned about avoiding an economic hit that could undermine his November re-election pitch:  that is, essentially, he had improved the employment and income of his blue-collar supporters at the same time as giving the elite political and cultural establishment a bloody nose.

Trump’s blandishments to inject bleach and to take an anti-malarial drug as effective antidotes to Covid, however, were scientifically rebuffed, and generally attracted ridicule across much of the mainstream media.

By the end of March, according to the invaluable open access  OurWorldinData website, the UK accounted for approximately 2,000 of the worldwide cumulative total of c39,000 Covid-related deaths.

Italy reported the largest number at c12,000 due to its early epidemic curve (author rounding of figures due to their uncertainty, variation of definition and reporting process, etc).

But by the end of the next month,  the highest world-total of Covid-related deaths were recorded in the world’s richest large nation: the United States (US) with 61,000 deaths, with New York City particularly hard hit with some other hotspots, such as California.

The north European countries of Italy, France, Spain, and the UK reported cumulative deaths in the c24,000 to 28,000 range. The UK figure was c26,000.

These four advanced economies with the US accounted for something like three quarters of the world total of c228,000 Covid-related deaths at the end of April.

Covid may have started in China, but its initial spread was now concentrated in some of the high-income countries of Europe, and in the US. China and most of its close East Asia neighbours seemed to have escaped much of worst effects of Covid.

Shortly some of the societal systemic and public policy reasons for that will be explored, but first the question has to be posed:  did up to 20,000-25,000 too many avoidable UK Covid-related deaths occur during the spring lockdown period; and, if so, why.

Late lockdown: cause or symptom?

With the benefit of hindsight viewed through a backward-looking lens amok a rising toll of 45,000-plus recorded UK Covid-related deaths (leaving aside for the purpose of this post definitional issues, including that excess deaths will prove ultimately best measure), it seems clear that the government clearly took the decision to lockdown in mid-March too late, with resulting tragic consequences.

Greg Clark, the chair of the 10 June House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee,  after referring Professor Neil Ferguson, the lead author of the Imperial study, to evidence made to an earlier 25 March meeting that Covid deaths would be unlikely to exceed 20,000, asked him why that proved to be such an under-estimate.

Ferguson replied: “that the epidemic was doubling every three to four days before lockdown interventions were introduced, and so, had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half”, a statement that captured the news headlines for the rest of that day.

Two other members of SPI-M giving evidence with Ferguson that day, Professor Matt Keeling and Dr. Nicholas Davies, made the less dramatic, but still stark point that an earlier imposed lockdown would have “significantly reduced the death toll” – a conclusion echoed by other SAGE members across different mediums, and now embedded within the mainstream consensus.

Sir Patrick Vallance, back in March, had also indicated then that 20,000 deaths would be a ‘good outcome’ but in July conceded that the subsequent UK outcome was “not good”.

A late lockdown provides one explanation. Ferguson suggested to the committee two others.

The first one is consistent with a late lockdown, considered below. The second one relates to the concentration of Covid deaths in care homes, which will be considered in the next section alongside the stream of evidence on that, which came on stream in June and July.

A heavier seeding of infections from foreign visitors – 1,500-2,000 cases from Italy and Spain, but only picked up in subsequent surveillance data and reported in early June – was taking place in early March. Ferguson confirmed that this was neither known nor factored into models at the time.

An exponentially rising tide of Covid infections from late February onwards certainly over-ran the analytic capacity of both the SAGE and Whitehall to respond in a stepped, calibrated, and planned way, with catastrophic consequences.

The first UK Covid-related death had been recorded at the beginning of March. Such deaths, however, lag three weeks or so from the time of causative infection. The models used to project future deaths, hence require accurate information on infection levels that was not available.

That lack of accurate information on the actual infection curve meant that the true incidence of the virus and its likely propensity to spread was not identified by the epidemiological models that SAGE relied heavily upon to inform its wider assessments and recommendations.

The UK simply did not have in place a fit-for-purpose comprehensive fit-for-purpose track, test, and isolate infrastructure, including serological (blood or plasma-based) antibody testing data – denoting current infection levels, whatever the degree of symptoms infected individuals exhibited, to the timely degree of accuracy that the occasion then demanded.

Even when fast forwarding to July, data reported from the dedicated and latest ONS Covid Infection Survey is still attached with wide ranges of uncertainty (confidence intervals). During the 14-day period from 22 June to 5 July 2020, it reported an estimated two new Covid infections for every 10,000 individuals per week in the community population in England, equating to an estimated 1,700 new cases per day at a 95% confidence interval of 700 to 3,700.

Public Health England (PHE) also publishes daily positive cases confirmed by lab tests. These, however, because of the continuing limited coverage of the track and testing regime that has been progressively rolled-out in recent months, still provide only a partial picture of numbers of people infected.

Lack of accurate and comprehensive testing thus provides the underlying reason why the ‘science’ – as was marshalled and offered by SAGE and its supporting scientific community – was simply too ambiguous and uncertain to provide a clear public policy route-map to combat Covid, at least in real-time.

No clear backing or steer was given to government to introduce a comprehensive lockdown to suppress the spread of the epidemic until the 16 March, when it was already too late. Even then that advice, as we have seen, was added with the rider, “as soon as practicable”; hardly a ringing call for urgent immediate action on a ‘clear the decks’ basis.

Even graduated mitigation measures to delay and flatten its peak were only definitely recommended by SAGE in early March (see minutes of March 5 and 13 meetings, reproduced in the previous section).

Instead the mortality figures that the Imperial study modelled were used as a banner cover by the responsible politicians to justify the abrupt policy shift from mitigation to lockdown.

Published on the 16 March, it claimed to have “informed policymaking in the UK and other countries in the last weeks”. Professor Ferguson, more specifically claimed in a BBC Panorama programme broadcast on the 20 July that he had advised SAGE of its main results and implications as early as on the 5 March, but these were not fully accepted by his peers at the time. Perhaps the pessimism bias of epidemiologists in modeling determining variables of morbidity and fatality incidence, did not help.

That be as that it may, but the published study itself acknowledged, however, that its modelling assumptions were only updated in the week prior to the weekend of March 14-15; and that its conclusions had only been reached “in the last few days following  the refinement of estimates of likely Intensive Care Unit (ICU) demand due to Covid based on experience in Italy and the UK”.

Professor Mark Woolhouse, who sits on SPI-M and on the Scottish Government’s Covid-19 Advisory Group, when giving evidence to the same June Science and Technology Committee that Ferguson gave evidence to, (noting that Woolhouse is sympathetic to alternative Swedish approach of partial and voluntary lockdown) asserted that the UK lockdown was a short-term panic measure taken here and elsewhere because “we could not think of anything better to do given the information we had available”, adding that its application should have adjusted quickly in step with emerging outcomes and evidence (Q. 808).

On the available evidence, lockdown – based on a ‘suppression strategy’ reliant on near-confinement of most of UK population (except for prescribed health and other key-workers) – does appear to have been introduced by political decision makers apparently suddenly panicked by a rushing Covid tide that threatened to turn into a tsunami.

Their previously preferred ‘mitigation strategy’ based on two-week quarantines of infected households was swept away, practically before it had even started in earnest.

The argument now made – with hindsight – by many commentators, mirroring Ferguson and some other members of SAGE, is that the UK government, in effect, has blood on its hands, due to it locking down too late, dithering indecisively when the overwhelming of local Italian health systems by Covid, especially in Lombardy, was known, and when the government was beginning at last to receive more assertive prompts from SAGE to quickly introduce some form of restrictions, if not yet full lockdown, to counter its spread.

Perhaps. Italy, Spain, and France, in that order, imposed a full lockdown by or during the period beginning March 9 and ending 16 March, while the UK did so between 16 and 24 March, a period little more than a week in duration.

If the metric taken to measure responsiveness is rather the time period taken to impose a full lockdown after the third or a similar low number of Covid-related death, then the delay, when Italy is taken as the comparator, increases to two weeks,  and to over a week when France and Spain are so taken, along with Belgium and Germany.

These last two countries locked-down about the same time or just before UK did, even though they were slightly behind the epidemic curve in terms of Covid-deaths reported. Germany shut down its land borders on the 16 March.

Such metrics, however, are somewhat abstract, and hindsight-based; prone, in any case, to cross-national and intrinsic ‘like-for like’ data measurement and definitional issues.

That said, once it was decided that lockdown was necessary, the conclusion that then at the very least it should have been done with a very minimum of delay and with concerted urgency and effectiveness appears difficult to argue with.

According to an 16 July FT magazine review Cobra at its 16 March meeting  – with its members presumably by then cognisant of the Imperial modelling and the 16 March SAGE injunction to introduce measures of suppression –  that required sense of urgency was palpably lacking; instead, according to one participant, discussion took place about how the bell-curve of the disease might still be flattened and how people ‘might feel fatigued’ if restrictions were introduced too early.

Was lockdown necessary in the first place?

The author remains reluctant to rush to pass damning judgment on the government’s lateness to lockdown. In part, that is because of the uncertainty of the science.

Also, as might be gleaned from this narrative, it is because I was blasé about the risk that Covid posed myself.

I took the view during February that it would not be sensible to over-react and cause actual economic and indirect social/health damage to counter a potential risk that might or might not arise.

Also by then I had begun to articulate in my mind, if hazily and only in part, that if the purpose of lockdown was to continually suppress the incidence of the virus until its demise, in contrast to delay and flatten its initial peak, in logic, any such  lockdown would need to be both prolonged and combined with measures of strict border control and/or effective entry testing, until a workable vaccine or treatments became available.

Any intermittent lifting and re-imposition of the lockdown, however, at a national level would risk intolerable economic uncertainty and damage.

The other alternative, save for the availability of a safe, effective, vaccine a scale and/or effective treatments remains the acquisition of national herd immunity was acquired through infection (60-70% of population infected), or that the virus becomes otherwise neutered or less virulent over time.

That, essentially, remains the case.

The government at the time of writing is betting that the current state of relaxed national lockdown (re-opened businesses, pubs and businesses, internal and international travel, renewed household contact, but maintenance of social distancing, combined with other adjustments, such as increased use of face masks) can be maintained indefinitely, until a vaccine(s) and/or treatments come to the rescue.

Across the world lifting of lockdown restrictions has largely followed, and been allowed by, a sufficiently reduced level of infection, but with such lifting made conditional on the maintenance of a low and steady infection level, with some notable exceptions, such as some US states, which then have suffered a resurgence of the virus to the point where it again threatens to spread exponentially.

The UK cannot be sure that another national lockdown may prove once again to be the only option left to stem a second peak of deaths – the prime minister declared hope that ‘it may be over by Christmas’ is simply that, irresponsible, as well as unevidenced.

In the autumn and winter, when the schools re-open and office working resumes in earnest, climatic conditions considered more conducive to the spread of the virus will be present. A 14 July Academy of Medical Sciences government commissioned report, in that vein, warned of a reoccurrence of Covid, which combining with the winter influenza peak,  could  on a realistic worst case scenario” – without effective mitigation  measures focused on health and care home settings – surpass by far that of the spring 2020 peak.

The government hopes that the national testing and track infrastructure by then will be sufficiently robust and comprehensive to identify local outbreaks in time for local customized interventions to effectively snuff them out. Leicester has been in local lockdown since June, with some considerable damage to its local economy.

Avoiding another national lockdown does rather assume that  that the current worldwide exponential growth in infections – that even with under-reporting is likely to exceed 15 million by the end of July – does not translate again into another national rising tide of infections that washes over the capacity of localized responses.

Seasonal flu in a bad year can cause excess deaths, when measured against a five-year rolling average. As recently as in 2017-18, according to the AMS report referenced above, England and Wales experienced approximately 50,000 excess winter deaths (seasonal concentration of deaths, not total excess deaths recorded during a period relative to five year average of the same previous period, as is reported by the ONS).

Yet the government does not disrupt the economy to prevent and reduce the flu death toll. To persuade myself that I was not being callous on that score, back in February  I consoled myself with the thought that if Covid proved such an event,  it would enforce attention on the need to take more effective measures to counter the impact of flu on the elderly and vulnerable as well, reducing its future perennial toll, perhaps contributing thus to the net saving of life and morbidity outcomes over time.

Of course, I did not possess the responsibility of, and collective resources and knowledge available to, government; yet it is difficult to conceive that a responsible government would have locked-down in late February, or even very early March, and prevented international travel: such a reaction according to the then available evidence, including from what we now know was coming out of SAGE at the time, would have been an over-reaction in the eyes of most, remembering that the UK is an international air hub: one that is crucial to the functioning of its economy at activity and employment levels consistent with expected real income growth and public financing requirements.

In the aftermath of the initial Covid wave and its consequences, international movements remain very constrained. That, if unchanged, threatens to bankrupt many airlines with resulting impacts on national economies and employment levels. If movements, however, recover they will provide increased opportunities for the spread of the virus back into Europe and UK.

The government, in that light, unexpectedly announced during the last weekend of July an imminent re-imposition of quarantine requirements for travelers from Spain, instantly disrupting the holiday plans of those lulled into booking their usual summer holiday, when the original blanket quarantine requirement was lifted for most European holiday destinations.

The UK remains an international air hub. It is not like Taiwan or New Zealand that can relatively easily impose a shutdown of its airports to ensure in tandem with other effective measures a low or negligible Covid incidence.

The UK with its stake and dependence on the international economy coupled with the high propensity of its population to travel to myriad destinations, is especially exposed to seeding of a second Covid wave through international transmission.

In that light, it is telling that some major airlines, such as British Airways, are now taking the initiative to campaign for a more coherent and international coordinated approach to testing international travelers.

There is also a school of argument that concerted measures of mitigation and voluntary social distancing, as employed by Sweden, would have achieved much the same result with less economic disruption. Proponents point to evidence that the R-value was decreasing before full lockdown was imposed.

Others, such as the leader of an Oxford University research group, have gone further.  In  a May interview  she advised that “I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in this country so I think it would be definitely less than 1 in 1000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000”, making the UK Infection Fatality Rate (IPF) – mortality rate of population truly infected –  somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%., before going on to cast doubt on whether the government back in March should have acted on a ‘reasonable’ worst case scenario.

Professor Johan Giesecke, an advisor to the Swedish Government, and whose protégé, Anders Tegnel, has directed it,  have consistently argued that the Covid IPR is of the region of 0.1%, compared to the 1% modelled by Imperial – a figure consistent with around 50% of the UK and Swedish population having already been infected, mirroring that for seasonal flu.

He further ventured in an UnHerd summary piece contentiously (and inaccurately) that ‘‘Covid-19 is a mild disease and similar to the flu, and it was the novelty of the disease that scared people’’, before concluding that subsequent flattening of the curve in the UK, is due to the most vulnerable dying first, as much as to the effect of our lockdown, and  that ‘’the ultimate result will eventually be similar for all countries”. According to him, the UK public policy ‘’180 degree U-turn’’ in favour of suppression in March was therefore wrong, as the previous approach was ‘‘better’’, noting that the change was based on an unpublished non-peer-reviewed paper (the Imperial Study) that applied too pessimistic modelling assumptions, according to a mathematical modelling methodology that was unsuited ”in any case” for public policy development.

Well, again, perhaps, at least in some respects. Professor Ferguson, the lead author of the Imperial study, himself has taken a more nuanced and less categorical stance in favour of the suppression strategy, suggesting even that up to two-thirds of excess deaths attributable to Covid could turn out to come from the collateral fall out from lockdown, including cancelled and delayed appointments for acute conditions, and the reluctance of people needing such intervention to seek medical help.

Evidence that the stock level of Covid infection – whether displayed or asymptomatic – is anything like approaching 50% in any country, is certainly lacking. Ongoing serological (antibody) studies have reported an incidence of generally below 10% across various population samples, although some counter that future population resistance to Covid will depend upon the prior and innate genetical and other propensities of individuals rather than rely on an increased stock of infected individuals with Covid antibodies.

Such claims, however, come across as reliant more on faith-based assertion or belief, than on scientific-based conclusion secured from supportive evidence that can be validated – well, it well may be true, but it may equally well be wrong, when no-one really knows.  A bit like both epidemiological modelling and politics, then.

Certainly not to shift to strict suppression during that week March 16-23 would have been a very brave, but dangerous course of action for the government to take on the information then available given the then close and present danger that the NHS would be overwhelmed without drastic steps.

Comparing the UK and Swedish approaches using imperfect and uncertain information that can’t be determined with more certainty until the pattern of excess deaths attributable both directly to Covid and  indirectly from the impacts of lockdown is known (and after taking account of factors such as age structure and population density), is a red herring, as is a fruitless retrospective focus on what precise date the UK should have fully locked-down that Professor Ferguson, regrettably, for whatever reason(s), seems to want to fan.

Why the UK lockdown was late 

The key point that has to be learnt and applied in the here and now is that government room to maneuver had by March been lost by lack of preparedness; of foresight; and, of related focused but flexible planning arrangements for, and then in responding to, Covid.

It is these connected failures that can truly and fairly be laid at the door of the UK government, and which need to be understood to allow the lessons to be drawn, necessary to maximise the prospect that a future combined Covid- and Jobocalypse is avoided.

  • Lack of preparedness, in terms of stockpiling and then procuring adequate PPE in both and quality terms, and in providing a fit for purpose test and track infrastructure in waiting for a pandemic previously identified as the biggest future risk to UK national security. Two fundamental and crucial failures.

At the start of the outbreak, the only central stockpile – held by PHE – was designed for a flu pandemic, lacking items such as gowns and visors. Since then money (c£14bn for 2020-21) has been thrown at its procurement but the belated response has meant both unnecessary deaths and likely poor value-for-money.

Swab-based antigen testing, which determines whether a person currently has the virus, with antibody testing, which shows whether a person has previously had it, still needs to be scaled up.

  • Lack of focused flexibility, in terms of an absence of effective and creative civil service and special adviser scanning of what was happening across the world in real time and translating the lessons of that experience into effective mechanisms of policy planning and action at the necessary pace.

Cobra itself proved itself as inadequate institutional mechanism to respond to the Covid crisis. Whether that failure was the result of intrinsic and endemic problems in the wider machinery of government is the crucial question.  Cobra seems to have been replaced by two dedicated Cabinet sub-committees focused on strategic and operational matters: Covid-S and Covid-O.

  • Lack of foresight, in terms of its failure to identify the need and act upon it to protect the care home population against an epidemic, which, even by early February, was identified as mainly a killer of the very elderly and the otherwise medically vulnerable. The care home population given its characteristics and setting was clearly a group likely to be the most susceptible and exposed to the virus.

That last dreadful and shameful failure, in large part, appears to explain the UK’s relatively poor per capita Covid death rate comparative to its close neighbour European peers.

The care home scandal

The second reason that Ferguson gave to the Science and Technology Committee in June as to why actual Covid-related deaths exceeded his and other estimates of 20,000 was the concentration of infections and deaths in residential care homes, related to the disease risk profile of their residents and the tendency of care workers to work within and to hop between close clusters of such homes.

Recently published evidence is depressingly compelling.  ONS  data released on 12 June reviewing deaths occurring in the UK across the entire March and April 2020 period, registered up to 15 May, reported 45,000 excess deaths for that period, 43% more than the average for the same time period over the last five years, 2015 to 2019.

44,628 deaths of care home residents were reported for the period, compared to the five-year average of 22,587, (figure 6 of the linked ONS publication), indicating that they accounted for half of the total excess deaths reported for the period.

England reported the highest percentage of deaths above average within care homes, with 102.0% more deaths than the five-year average for deaths within this group. 44.4% of these recorded deaths mentioned Covid on the applicable death certificate.

In total, as of 12 June 2020, 30% of Covid fatalities in England, 28% in Wales, 46% in Scotland and 42.4% in Northern Ireland were in care homes, according to an even more recent government report.

ONS survey data and analysis of 9,801 care homes in England and their resident population and staff for the period 26 May to 19 June (the Vivaldi Study) also provides supporting evidence of, and possible reasons for, the concentration of the impact of Covid on care home residents.

Across the 56% of the surveyed homes that reported at least one case of coronavirus, 20% of their residents, as reported by care home managers, were estimated as testing positive for Covid (95% confidence interval: 19% to 21%), during that period.

In such homes 7% of staff were similarly estimated to have tested positive (95% confidence interval: 6% to 8%).

Common factors identified in care homes with higher levels of infections amongst residents included the prevalence of infection in staff, especially those making more frequent use of agency nurses or carers.

An association was also found between care homes where staff receive sick pay and lower levels of infection in residents, but, conversely, higher levels of infection cases where care homes employ staff working across multiple sites.

In June, a  National Audit Office (NAO) report pointed out that prior to the Covid outbreak, no process was in place to collect a wide range of daily data from care providers.

DHSC was ignorant on how many people were receiving care in each area. Local authorities generally only kept records on residents whose care they paid for.

It was only from early April that data at a national level was collated on workforce absences, and on PPE levels and overall risks from nursing and residential homes registered with the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

The supply of masks, aprons, gloves, and visors and other (PPE) suitable for use in residential care home settings remained slow and inadequate, only meeting some of the modelled requirements received from health and social care providers, according to the NAO (para 20), until mid-May.

The resident care and nursing home population was the most Covid-vulnerable group, but, in terms of effective public policy attention, it was the most neglected.

From a social policy perspective, it is an outcome that is difficult to divorce from the client group’s lack of possession of political ‘voice’ power.

The needs of mentally ill  patients discharged from asylums built in the Victorian era – often ear-marked for future lucrative redevelopment – into illusory ‘community care’  lacking replacement residential care facilities or adequate personal social work support, provides an example from earlier decades, continued into the present day by the relative neglect of the mentally ill by fragmented health and social services.

Yet the negligence was not one solely of omission, but also of commission.

The NAO in its report (para 6) advised that around 25,000 people were discharged from hospitals into care homes, without testing for Covid,  as part of the expected measures to free up hospital acute bed capacity that the 17 March Simon Stevens letter to NHS bosses set out – a practice that continued to 15 April.

This central failure in the UK Covid response was not an aberration, but was instead intrinsically related to, and a product of, the long-standing fragmentation of its health and social care systems.

This is with respect to the planning, funding, provision, and oversight, of social care and its separation from the nationally funded and coordinated health system.

That core structural problem has been compounded by systemic under-funding that got far worse during the post-2010 austerity years, with funding for local authority support for adult social care reduced by 50% or greater in some cases between 2010 and 2018, or, as Ian Birrell in a Tortoise Media piece reported: over the past decade, government spending fell in real terms on social care by about £300m, despite a 21 per cent rise in the number of citizens aged over 65, compared to  rise in national health spending  of £26bn: what one part of the system taketh, it has taken away from another.

Since 1980 there has been a shift from direct local authority funded care to a ‘mixed economy’ or out-sourced system, where independent for-profit and not-for-profit providers have grown share, with the largest independent providers consolidating the ‘market’, using private equity to provide larger purpose built homes often in the more affluent parts of the country, where self-funding residents are more likely to be located.  Independent providers now account for 243,000 residential care beds compared to 76,811 in the 1980s.

If there is to be only one positive legacy of the Covid-crisis, it is that core structural problem that must finally be addressed in concerted and comprehensive manner.

The UK – England, especially, high per capita Covid death rates cannot be divorced from our societal value-base and patterned inequalities, as well as from functional government sub-performance.

A national health and care system funded in a sustainable and equitable manner is the required legacy.

A related recasting of the working conditions across the catering, cleaning, and care sectors, whose workers tend to have insecure working conditions reliant on the minimum wage and zero hour contracts,  and where BAME groups, especially foreign-born workers, are over-represented (also making them susceptible to Covid, and then, because of their disproportionate dependence on a low wage and their lack of eligibility for sick pay, generated pressure on them to continue working despite displaying Covid symptoms), is also long overdue.

Easy to say, of course, given such a recasting would require substantial additional public spending,  whether funded from national or local sources, during a period of public finance pressure. It is a case of you get what you pay for, while change requires cross-party support for a new settlement, not tinkering at the edges.

International lessons to be learnt

The future Covid landscape is shrouded in the fog of uncertainty.

The tension between a mitigation-based strategy more costly in terms of lives immediately lost and a more draconian suppression strategy that, in turn, has more direct and immediate impacts on the wider economy, which themselves engender longer-term indirect and real health and social future impacts (with any final total apportionment unquantifiable to any precise degree remains. It threatens to continue to bedevil UK policy.

The aim is to navigate away away from the worst of both worlds we inherited in May of high relative per capita death rates and massive macro-economic damage to a ‘new normal’  where low infection rates are maintained, avoiding the need for a any new national lockdown.

The prime minister in characteristically optimistic and swashbuckling style has confirmed that is the UK government objective. In effect, he is relying on hope.

A hope that the above tension can be reconciled by a more empirical evidence-based data-driven approach that can avoid the dire and likely unsustainable economic consequences of another full lockdown based on suppression of the virus.

The genesis of that hope was first set out in the government’s 11 May Recovery Plan.   This heralded a second ‘smarter control’ phase of the public policy response to the epidemic, involving the application of effective testing, tracing, and tracking of the infection.

Public health interventions could then be aligned better to risk, allowing the timely detection of infection outbreaks at a more localised level, and a more tailored, targeted, and effective public response at that level.

The problem remains one of implementation. The debacle of Matt Hancock’s hoisting his 100,000 daily tests to the mast of an end of April target that relegated purpose and effectiveness to supposed and sometimes spurious target figure was followed by a subsequent pattern of patchy and slow development of testing capacity.

A continuing example of the lack of sufficient government focused flexibility: the core cause of the UK’s poor and inadequate Covid performance.

Realization of the hope that we combine a continuing relaxation of lockdown with a containment of Covid, in an international context where reported Covid infections are mounting, and which threaten to rise exponentially, requires that shortcoming to be overturned.

Otherwise we are simply relying on an effective vaccine(s) or treatments to ride quickly to the rescue.

The reluctance and, perhaps, systemic tendency to learn from and to apply international lessons, as summarized below, in a considered and evidence-driven way in a way that works for Britain, will also have to reverse.

The strategies adopted by most east Asian countries have proved invariably and overwhelmingly more effective than the UK’s, when measured against per capita infection and death rates.

This is almost beyond comparison, as starkly conveyed by the Covid-caused deaths per one million people (rounded up to nearest whole number) data, reported below and  extracted from  the Our World in Data  website on 14 July for the following countries.

Japan:                    8;                                                  Thailand:    1;

South Korea:        5;                                                  Myanmar:   0;

Singapore:            4;                                                  Vietnam:      0.

The UK ratio is 660. The disparity speaks for itself.

Although variations exist between these countries in relation to the strictness or otherwise of the lockdowns they imposed, and with respect to their political systems, their strategies  to combat Covid, were, and are, marked by focused and systemic regimes of testing and contact tracing and the quarantine of affected individuals combined usually with effective immigration control.

Both sets of interventions were effectively imposed and implemented at a timely and early enough point in the infection curve.

Vietnam, a low-income country of 93 million with a population of an average per capita income of less than $4,000 has reported no deaths at all and negligible infections attributable to Covid. This almost breath-taking outcome was achieved through the use of comprehensive testing and then quarantining of infected individuals.

Its communist government is now preparing for growth and recovery through the fast tracking of public infrastructure projects, including a north-south highway, two metro lines and a new Ho Chi Minh City (its capital: formerly Hanoi, when the country was divided into southern and northern segments) airport.

A striking portend of the touted coming ‘Asian century’, if ever one can be comprehended. Near neighbours, Laos and Cambodia, have also reported nil Covid deaths.

Although most of these societies possess young age structures, 20% of Japan’s population is over 75, compared to c12-13%, in the case of Sweden and the UK. The success of the E.Asian model to combat Covid cannot possibly be explained away by the relative youth of their populations, therefore.

Institutional factors based on their history and melding of societal value-base and culture with public policy design and implementation systems do appear relevant to their success.

Previous experience of responding to the 2003 SARS or to the MERS outbreak also provided their policy makers with a workable template, and an awareness of the task in hand with the associated imperative for timely and concerted policy response to an emerging epidemic.

In short, their governments  were able to impose in some cases draconian directive measures of control, including quarantining, with ready public consent and acquiescence,  while possessing the wherewithal (and the foresight) to marshal and direct resources to ensure effective and comprehensive implementation of testing and quarantining systems – all  in co-operation with their wider populations and across particular community-settings.

Although the lessons to be learnt are not always precisely replicable to the UK context given their own distinctive political and social cultures and socio-economic realities, the theme of public policy planning and implementation systems that combine focus with flexibility, and that put a higher weighting on effective action and results, not short-term noise, cannot, and should not, be ignored.

The UK per capita 660 per one million death rate is the highest in Europe, save for Belgium; higher than that of Italy, which has the highest proportion of very elderly people susceptible to Covid, and nearly six times higher than that of Germany, which also has an aging population structure.

The figures reported below are less mind-boggling than the Asian comparison, but still revealing, nevertheless.

UK:                         660;                                        Netherlands:                     353;

Spain:                    607;                                       Ireland:                                 354;

Sweden:                475;                                        Germany:                            108;

France;                 460;                                        Denmark:                            105.

Germany  through the application of a timely and proportionate lockdown in March, effective testing infrastructure, and, perhaps, most significantly at all, effective protection of its elderly and vulnerable population especially those residing in care homes (helped by spare capacity within its health system), has succeeded in contained Covid-related deaths to a fraction of the UK’s, despite its elderly age distribution – an achievement that  demonstrates that an European democratic culture is no bar to success.

Test, test more, and test more, again, while infections are low, is the overriding message.

 

 

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Filed Under: Covid

Winning the Final Straight

7th December 2019 by newtjoh

The polls, although tightening with the squeezing of  the Liberal Democrat and Brexit party vote share, continue to project a comfortable working majority for Boris Johnson on 12 December.

Labour itself seems resigned to limiting losses of seats in Brexit-voting areas in the Midlands and North, the same areas, as Brexit and Lies that Matter pointed out,  which will suffer the most from a bad-Johnson Brexit.

The 2017 Corbyn effect has not materialized this time round. His lamentable  failure to lance the anti-semitism boil, and his similar – but different – inability or unwillingness to relate to ‘Middle England’ in a way that his electorally successful predecessors – Attlee, Wilson, and Blair – did in varying ways, continues to dog his party’s prospects.

The actual result on Thursday, of course, cannot be predicted precisely in today’s uncertain political environment.

The young and undecided could still tilt towards Labour on the day.

Local circumstances and issues could intervene and disrupt the national pattern given the vagaries of our current electoral system.

The parties’ respective manifesto commitments, or, rather, lack of substantive ones that can be trusted, could still induce an unexpected decisive and late electoral effect.

Significant electoral shifts, however, invariably follow a wider groundswell of the popular mood. Yet that remains stubbornly stuck in muted cynical mode.

The Conservative’s resurrection of their ‘triple-lock’ commitment not to increase income, national insurance, and VAT rates compares with Labour’s to fund additional expenditure from increased taxes on companies and income-tax payers earning over 80k.

Although clear blue water, accordingly, has opened-up between Labour and Conservative on tax and spending, neither party have articulated a future economic and social vision that engages and resonates with the wider electorate.

It will be tragic if the lies of an entitlement-laden and amoral former Etonian prime minister allows him to win the day because Labour neglected to engage and enthuse Middle England voters, at a time when the intellectual tide has turned in favour of, and national need calls out for, a radical but feasible socialist or social democratic – call it what you will – programme in government.

To deny Johnson a working majority Labour must continue re-orient and its Prioritise its message, but with much more Focus, Consistency and Honesty.

It should mesh its vision and Brexit policy much more clearly, highlighting how a bad-Johnson Brexit will sunder the UK, undermine peace in Northern Ireland (NI), and generate unnecessary economic costs, acting as a deadweight drag or worse on growth and  hence the public finances across the UK.

This when the maintenance, let alone the improvement, of public services to an aging population in reality, will require increased borrowing to fund rising real current expenditures and/or higher taxes, which, if not direct, will be of the less transparent stealth variety, difficult to limit in incidence to higher income groups, even when intended. Funding social care is a case in point; honesty on that score is needed.

To be successful, both in electoral and sustainable strategic policy template terms, ‘Goody-bag’ giveaways and unattainable maximalist gestures should to be downplayed. Measures that interlock economic justice and efficiency should instead be prioritised.

Institutional reform to secure demonstrable efficiency in the selection, planning and delivery of infrastructural investment must be integral, and not subsidiary, to the design and operation of fiscal rule reform: greater fiscal latitude for productive public investment must go hand-in-hand with greater demonstrable efficiency in its selection and execution, as set out in  Making Public Investment Smart.

Individuals are empowered, in practice, to take control over their future by having pathways to suitable, available, and improved education, housing and job opportunities, forged and opened-up across the country, pushing up productivity and expanding economic opportunity to lower income households.

That, in turn, will depend upon high quality transport, digital, and social infrastructure in housing, education, and, to a degree, cultural services within existing high-productivity cities and areas – the London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle is a case in point – to maximise their potential to generate more growth through the further complementary agglomeration of productive firms and people.

At the same time, coastal and smaller cities and towns, especially in sub-regions located north of a line drawn between the Humber and Wash and in Cornwall, that have borne the brunt of decades of de-industrialisation, losing jobs not replaced by relatively stagnant or declining service sectors – the same areas that tend to the most exposed to the loss of EU Structural Funds – will also rely upon targeted and efficient productive investment in economic and social infrastructure.

Is the answer then, growth-friendly general or ‘place-blind’ policies to improve education, healthcare, infrastructure, and affordable housing?

Or more place-based policies to tackle regional inequality, where subsidies, grants, and public infrastructural investment are targeted to individuals and firms, according to location?

Both, according to International Monetary Fund (IMF) researchers in a recent world-wide survey of regional inequality, pointing out that the high cost of housing in high income regions and cities restricts domestic migration, while the rejuvenation of declining areas requires an expanded supply of locally available better paid jobs, supported both by an improved local skills base on the supply side and by rising demand for locally-produced goods and services.

A conclusion echoed in another recent paper on innovation policy, endorsed no less by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s  human lodestar: an example of  the flow of the intellectual tide mentioned above, but all much more in accord with the Labour manifesto than the Conservative one .

In the UK context, that means partnerships between Whitehall, devolved, and local government to attract and sustain private investment to lagging sub-regions and areas com, where possible linked to university and other sources of expertise that can lead best to the cluster development of productive enterprises, combined with targeted and efficient productive public investment in site preparation, affordable housing, education and skills, and above all in improved connectivity allowing people to access quality employment opportunities within reach of their existing homes.

Reducing the friction of travel Trans-Pennine and within the West Midlands are two of the more obvious examples of productive public infrastructural investment contributing to long-term prosperity.

Another practical example of the potential of public investment to raise productivity and growth in a balanced and equitable way is a sustained increased in investment on affordable housing to a broad steady-state level, meshed with the planned expansion of apprentice and training opportunities targeted to indigenous young people.

Besides its social impacts that should help to mitigate and avoid existing and future labour bottlenecks within the industry, while enhancing human capital and productivity outcomes and making them more balanced in income and spatial distributional terms, thus interlocking economic justice and efficiency in practice.

The costs of providing infrastructural investment should be reduced by directly tackling market failure and rent-capture. Speculation in land largely explains the escalating cost of buying a home,  as is increasingly recognized across the political spectrum, most recently by the Conservative-leaning Financial Times journalist,Liam Halligan, in his recent book, ‘Home Truths’.  Another example of the current flow of that tide that Labour is not harnessing.

The land root of the current crisis of housing affordability, indeed, must be overcome for real progress to be made in a way that impacts on the majority of those wishing to buy and rent affordable housing, not just those most likely to qualify for social housing.

It is quite likely that a Johnson Conservative Brexit government will pivot towards variations of such measures – at least in early rhetoric before the inevitable capture and perversion of ends and process by the same vested interests that fund the party, choke them.

Labour should occupy that ground during the last week of the campaign.

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Filed Under: Brexit, Economic policy, Time for a Social Democratic Surge

Brexit and Lies that Matter.

30th November 2019 by newtjoh

The October draft Withdrawal Agreement (WA) will pass parliament and the UK will leave the EU on the 31 January 2020 if the Conservatives do win a working majority on the 12 December.

How hard – and thus economically damaging –  Johnson’s bad-Brexit turns out will then depend upon whether, despite his campaign rhetoric to the contrary, he extends the transition period beyond December of next year. Under the WA, he would need to make such an application next summer.

That crucial decision will overhang the UK’s entire political, economic, and social future.

Jeremy Corbyn  was right therefore to tackle Brexit head-on as he did on Guy Fawkes Day at Harlow – the bellwether ‘Blue-collar Essex’ seat.

Much better to secure the best possible and least economically damaging deal with Brussels and offer that with Remain as a choice to the electorate with minimum fuss, than for the population to be stuck with a bad Johnson hard-Brexit that will sunder the UK, undermine peace in Northern Ireland (NI), and generate unnecessary economic costs, acting as a deadweight drag or worse on growth across the UK.

UK exit from the European Union (EU) Custom Union (CU) and the Single Market (SM) in economic and social consequence will bear disproportionately on the communities that voted to Leave, such as Harlow. Less well-connected places outside the South-east are likely to suffer the most: Sunderland and Dudley, to take two.

Labour must hammer home in an engaging way to the voters of those areas, often Labour marginal seat, the technical economic realities below.

The  rules of origin  requirements imposed as a result of the UK exiting the CU will progressively chip away the time and cost benefits of existing frictionless trade arrangements between the UK and the EU.

British exporters of goods to the EU post-transition will have to certify that a minimum proportion – varies with sector, but generally is around 50-55% – of value is attributable to domestic production.

This will prove a problem for industries now dependent on pan-EU integrated supply chains, namely motor vehicle, and some machine tools, food processing, and chemical sectors.  The domestic -produced value of cars is less than 40%. A Johnson bad-Brexit will leave UK manufacturing to wither on the vine.

For the purposes of meeting rules of origin requirements included in pan-EU trade treaties with third countries, such as Korea and Japan, British manufacturing value-added no longer will contribute to the EU total they define, providing a disincentive for foreign direct investment in UK plant by companies wishing to benefit from tariff-free trade under such treaties.

Such countries are unlikely to prioritise FTA’s with the UK or Great Britain at the expense of their existing or future EU trading arrangements and a far larger potential market.

Crucially, the benefits of such FTA’s, even if realized, in any case, will prove puny, compared to the cumulative loss of GDP attributable to the loss of frictionless trade with our closest European neighbours.

In sum, export and export formalities, including customs and security declarations, risk-based inspections,  tariffs (when goods are not covered by the FTA) and other taxes payable upon import such as VAT and excise duty, as well on physical border checks on products of animal origin: meat, fish and dairy products, will all impose additional cost and time barriers to trade in goods. Exiting the SM likewise will do to trade across services.

Johnson’s European Research Group (ERG) outriders bark back that is a price worth paying for taking back control of our borders (which ones?), money, trade policy, and laws.

But any future free trade agreement (FTA) with the US will inevitably involve loss of  national sovereignty in practice to a government led by a president who avowedly ‘puts America first’.

Continuing EU membership will help the UK to stand up to Donald Trump, and, much more importantly, in the longer term, to address fundamental issues, such as climate change, the activities of increasingly monopolistic multi-nationals, tax evasion and money laundering, organized crime and terrorism, that transcend the UK border: the modern world, in short.

Besides it is doubtful that a wide-ranging trade deal with the US can ever be reached, given that freer access to American food imports will imperil the sustainability of British agriculture, a source of bedrock Tory support, while allowing access to American health corporations to the NHS and liberalising drug pricing controls is likely to prove too unpalatable on the wider domestic political front.

Trump is wedded not only to a neo-liberal and crassly unequal economic and social system, but to an odious and destructive political methodology driven by fake news, straightforward lies, media manipulation, and appeals to prejudice, seemingly copied and adopted by Johnson, at the behest of his main adviser, simply to secure power.

Something  demonstrated in spades during this campaign. A case in point was Johnson’s statement on Twitter that a future Tory government would not extend the post-Brexit transition period and would pursue a “a super Canada-plus arrangement” with the EU not “based on any kind of political alignment.” subsequently reaffirmed, all in short order. That is simply hogwash, or in his own-speak ‘inverted piffle’.

The more comprehensive a FTA with the EU, the more time – years not months – that it will take to negotiate; and the greater the continuing alignment to EU rules, including labour, environmental and state aid rules entailed.

Such delay and alignment risks the ire of any enlarged hard-Brexiteer contingent within the new parliament and would provide oxygen to the Brexit party outside it; on the other hand, not extending the transition beyond December 2020 would simply create a new cliff-edge, and almost certainly induce recession.

A Johnson bad-Brexit may be done, but its consequences lurk in wait around the corner to bite, not least prolonged uncertainty lasting years, not six months or so, as would be the case with Labour.

Taken in the round, Corbyn on the Brexit front has played a difficult hand relatively well, with a sense of feeling for both sides, not always displayed when he pontificates on international issues, such as the Palestinian question.

His position, in many ways, makes more sense than the premature commitment to campaign for Remain displayed by prominent shadow cabinet colleagues. This puts the cart before the horse, insofar that Labour is committing to negotiating a soft Brexit with Brussels as an alternative to Remain in a second referendum.

Of course, the softer the Brexit, the stronger the relative case for Remain becomes: if continuing alignment with EU rules is accepted as economically necessary, why not then just stay and keep a say in their development?

Labour’s position is essentially thus a route to Remain while providing some semblance of respect for the result of the June 2016 referendum and ensuring whatever the result of any second referendum that economic damage is mitigated as far as possible: pretty sensible, really, in the circumstances, even if politically pragmatic more than strictly logical.

Yet it will not be enough.

Labour’s Brexit and domestic policies have not been connected nor linked to an overarching vision and narrative.

The cumulative damage to growth of a hard Brexit will act as a deadweight not only on the personal incomes of ordinary working people, but on the public finances.

The increased investment in health, housing, education, social care, police, and other public services the country needs, the Brexit-leaning communities most of all,  will become increasingly unaffordable.

Labour must make that inter-linkage in the minds of undecided and wavering voters.

A following post will focus on that shortly as Labour necessarily reframes its electoral strategy to at least prevent a Johnson working majority.

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Filed Under: Brexit

A Month Like No Other

30th September 2019 by newtjoh

Johnson concocted his game plan with Dominic Cummings – his Svengali-like adviser – in August: prorogue parliament for five weeks until 14 October, squeeze the time available for MPs to prevent a 31st October No deal EU exit, then a ‘Brexit done’ election before the economic and social impacts of a No deal exit were fully felt or exposed.

If  his opponents in the Commons finally found the wherewithal and unity to legislate for an extension beyond the 31 October, the Plan B was to engineer an October election on a populist platform that parliament, by cutting the ground under the feet of his government’s negotiating position, had ‘surrendered’ to the European Union (EU) and ‘betrayed’ the ‘people’s’  2016 referendum decision.

But before the first week of September was out, six Commons defeats in six days shredded that twin-track strategy.

The opposition parties, contrary to expectation, successfully and effectively combined with 21 resolute Conservative rebel MPs – who lost the party whip for their pains – to take control of the Order Paper to allow parliament to legislate an extension to Johnson’s ‘do or die’ Brexit 31st October exit date, and to reject his motion for an election to take place before the next and crucial 17 October EU Summit.

Unless the House of Commons approves (and the Lords takes note) by the 19 October of either (a) a Withdrawal Agreement (WA) deal with any changes to the accompanying political declaration or (b) a No deal exit, the  European Union (Withdrawal) (No.2) Act 2019 (the Benn Act) requires the government to seek an extension to 31 January 2020 from the EU.

Johnson declared a preference to ‘die in a ditch’ than do that. He continued to proclaim with cabinet colleagues into October that the government would, come what may, exit on 31 October while ‘observing the law’ to ‘get Brexit done’, without explaining how his government could do both without a deal.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on the 23 September that the proroguing of parliament by Johnson was null and void ‘as it never had happened’ on the core constitutional ground that it prevented parliament exercising its central role in our democracy to hold the government executive to account – something likely to recorded as a constitutional landmark for decades, if not centuries, ahead.

By the time his party conference had convened in Manchester, Johnson had unmistakably put a Trumpian-populist stamp on the Conservative Party,  sacrificing and subordinating policy, values, and convention to the single purpose of getting Brexit done, regardless of its consequence or consistency, undermining the same institutions that Brexit was to restore sovereignty to.

Labour united?
Yet polling indications strongly suggest that Johnson’s reckless and divisive actions could still be rewarded with electoral victory, as were Trump’s in the US; one early in September gave Labour a puny 21% share of the vote; almost incomprehensible for an opposition facing such an incompetent and divided government, flouting established constitutional norms and conventions in an unprecedented – even revolutionary – way.

Sure, such polls taken in isolation are to taken with a pinch of salt as a guide to future voting in an actual general election.

Labour is banking on a similar bounce that it achieved in 2017 in the face of unpromising prior polling.

That said, an aggregated Poll of Polls time series produced by Politico starkly shows an unmistakable post-April trend of a Labour party led in opposition by a leader unprecedented in his unpopularity with the wider electorate, losing vote share to the Conservatives and a resurgent Liberal Democrats (LD).

In short, Labour remains stuck between the rock of a majority Remain party membership and the hard place of not alienating Brexit-supporting voters in many marginal constituencies, concentrated in, but not confined to the north and midlands.

Labour campaigning for Remain, attached with a logical commitment to revoke Article 50, risks failing to engage with voters who prefer a negotiated deal in preference to No deal, or to another referendum, or to revocation: quite possibly the silent majority who simply want Brexit washed out of their hair.

That a new Labour government would alternatively negotiate with Brussels to secure the best available Brexit deal for the UK but then campaign for its rejection in a promised subsequent referendum, however, comes across as faintly ludicrous.

A significant segment of the population supporting Brexit is likely to treat any such referendum as rigged, risking future and lasting damaging political and social effect.

Seeking to straddle that divide, Jeremy Corbyn resisted not only demands from his deputy Tom Watson and some erstwhile shadow cabinet supporters for a referendum to take place before the next election, but strong and growing grassroots pressure to morph further into a commitment for the party to campaign to Remain in a soon-expected election.

The party conference began inauspiciously with the architect of the party’s successful 2017 manifesto, Andrew Fisher, announcing his resignation, his letter shedding doubt on Labour’ electoral prospects and the ‘professionalism’ and ‘human decency’ to boot of his leader’s inner team.

But in the end, Corbyn succeeded in securing a narrow (and disputed) Conference decision for Labour electoral neutrality, but only after some old-fashioned backroom machinations and after making it, in effect, a personal confidence vote that alienated some of his bedrock Momentum support-base.

Labour was fortunate that the Supreme Court landmark decision distracted attention from its own Brexit discord and perhaps from some of its more half-formed policy decisions, such as ‘abolishing’ private schools and ‘expropriating’ their assets, that appeared to appeal to the party’s own populist gallery than demonstrating a carefully thought transformative programme – whether ‘socialist’ or ‘social democratic’ in preferred label – in practice capable of commanding the sustainable wider majority support that effective and lasting execution requires.

Most seriously and ominously, in the short-term, the party in general continues to lack a convincing fit-for-purpose unified Brexit narrative that can withstand the heat in and scrutiny of a general election, during which opponents will inevitably highlight previous claims ‘to respect the 2016 referendum’ as hollow and dishonest.

Indeed, the victories won in Parliament won during the first week in September risk proving Pyrrhic in electoral terms for remainers generally and for Labour especially, as indicated by the polling indications outlined above.

What next?

Some greater stirrings are reported of cross-party support to put in place subsequent to an October no confidence vote in Johnson’s government, a Jeremy Corbyn-led caretaker government with the remit simply to ensure an extension, which, once achieved would be followed by a November election with uncertain result.

Although the SNP are reported to have warmed to the prospect, the LD are most unlikely to want to make Corbyn prime minister – even for barely a month – unless it was the only possible – albeit messy and amenable to accident – means to avoid No deal.

Given that the Benn Act – despite Johnson’s bluster – is considered watertight by most experts, and is now underscored by the SC judgement, it is not.

Corbyn would probably be right to continue his cautious and maligned wait and see strategy to leave Johnson to come back empty-handed from the EU or with a negotiated deal that will inevitably be at odds with the ‘clean Brexit’ that the parliamentary Conservative hard-Brexiteers – many of whom act as a party within a party within the European Reform Group (ERG) – and the party members that propelled him to the premiership back in the summer, demanded and expected him to deliver.

Johnson can now safely ignore the party members who voted him into the leadership and effectively the prime ministership, but withdrawing the whip from hardcore ERG members is likely to shatter his party into fragments, providing manna from heaven for a Brexit party waiting in the wings to take votes and even seats off the Conservatives on a single issue Brexit betrayed’ platform.

As The Brexit Swamp Deepens  and previous posts, explained, the EU will not remove the WA backstop unless Johnson reverted to the original EU proposal to create a single island of Ireland economic zone protected by a regulatory and customs border in the Irish Sea between it and Great Britain, once the transitional (implementation) period contained within the WA ended in December 2020.

Johnson appears to have realised the need to persuade the Democratic Union Party (DUP) and the ERG likewise to pivot towards it.

But even if Johnson could bring back a WA sufficiently re-packaged to get some of the Conservative rebels to support him in the lobbies along with DUP and ERG support (an unlikely but possible combination), he is unlikely to secure a parliamentary majority, unless he attracted sufficient Labour MPs representing Leave areas to support, in effect, a deal less close to their party’s requirements than his predecessor’s.

An alternative way to seek a parliamentary majority would be for his government to pivot towards a continuing Customs Union (CU,) and a large measure of regulatory alignment, certainly across environmental and social standards, with the EU.

That would be more in line with the final iteration of the May Deal that she would have likely to have offered had she not been forced out of the leadership, but anathema to the ERG, and contrary to the commitments Johnson has made as prime minister, let alone as leadership candidate. A technical extension at least to Johnson’s ‘do or die’ 31 October deadline would also be required.

Finally, but not least, it would need whipped Labour support to pass the Commons, which would not be forthcoming without a delaying ‘confirmatory’ referendum, whatever that might mean.

Conclusion
Whatever the new twists and turns that October will inevitably bring, the current parliament cannot break the continuing Brexit deadlock, unless MPs agree either a negotiated deal or another referendum. The chances of both appear next to nil.

The Benn Act, especially since the Supreme Court judgment underscored the illegality of the executive attempting to run counter of the expressed intention of an Act, should prevent a No deal exit, although the opposition parties should prepare for every eventuality, including Johnson resigning late into October as a way to secure a No deal exit by ‘accident’.

It cannot and does not, however, lay out a roadmap to a negotiated deal or, indeed, any way out of the Brexit deadlock.

Parliament is not in accord with the government executive; unless both compromise, a new Commons has to be elected to produce a government with an effective working majority to implement its chosen Brexit path – but that is an outcome far from certain with a 2019/2020 election.

Another hung parliament appears a more likely scenario than either an outright Conservative or Labour victory, but who knows.

What is more certain, however, is that for Labour to maximise its electoral chances, it needs to unite around what was decided, if not agreed, at its conference, and focus attention that a Labour negotiated exit would best protect the Union, the continuing frictionless trade with its largest trading partner and thus the manufacturing supply chains that many northern and midland towns rely on, pointing out that the future economic and social prospects of the families of ‘the many’, as well as their patriotic instincts, are best served by continuing close links with Europe, not the chimera of trade deals requiring the UK to shed much more sovereignty for much less economic benefit.

It should also integrate that Brexit message to its domestic policy agenda, exposing the superficiality and dishonesty of the Conservative slogans on investing more in infrastructure, and core public services, by linking a coherent and inclusive vision to radical, but prioritised and thought-through supporting policy programmes, not ‘goody-bag’ giveaways that the electorate is likely to view in a similar cynical and opportunistic light to that of its opponents.

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Filed Under: Brexit

Speeding towards the Cliff Edge

17th July 2019 by newtjoh

Since the publication of The Brexit Swamp Deepens last week, Jeremy Corbyn has confirmed that Labour will require a second referendum and will back Remain against either a ‘Tory deal’ or ‘No deal’.

Meanwhile Boris Johnson – almost certainly the next leader of the Conservative Party – has stated that he will not tolerate the N.Ireland backstop staying within the Withdrawal Agreement(WA) , even if it was time-limited: a new hardline position endorsed also by Jeremy Hunt.

His position, taken at face value, effectively rules out a negotiated alternative to No Deal: the EU is not going to cave-in during September to rip out the heart of a WA that it has consistently confirmed as the only deal on offer; in contrast to revising the accompanying Political Declaration (PD).

The prospect of No deal has increased; and, if the UK does exit on the 31 October, Labour’s position will become irrelevant overnight.

Committed Conservative opponents of No deal if they are to prevent a No deal outcome will have to agree a common course of action themselves and with Labour, and vice versa.

Whether that is requiring a referendum, or an amendment to a no confidence vote ruling out No deal, or even a successful no confidence vote, to provide EU leaders with some unanimous and compelling cause to grant the UK a new extension, it really needs activation prior to their Summit on the 17/18 October.

It is unlikely that a referendum, which would be opposed in any case by some Lexiteer Labour MP’s, especially if designed to simply produce a Remain result, would prove that unifying factor.

A straight-forward referenda binary choice between Remain and No deal might have more chance of securing parliamentary support if the cliff-edge was all but reached, but then possibly too late, and still unlikely.

Parliament, even if given the means,  and it did vote to prevent No deal, without a referendum, would still need to agree an alternative; it, however, appears irretrievably split between members seeking a negotiated deal and others wanting both a second referendum and to Remain.

Possibly, Johnson aims to increase the negotiating pressure on Brussels during September while also playing to the Tory membership and the European Reform Group (ERG) gallery; and, when his stance proves unsuccessful (while hoping that the EU will blink or splinter), he could change tack, just as the sand runs out.

Well, lets hope so, for the sake of the UK Union and its economy. In which case, as Andrew Duff of the European Policy Centre  recently proposed, extending the transition period to December 2022 or beyond, so allowing time for a Canada-style free trade deal to be progressed in line with a revised PD, while in the meantime retaining the benefits of frictionless trade with the EU making the backstop unnecessary, could offer him a way out, at least within Parliament.

Johnson could well – given his party backing – instead go for broke: exit with No deal, seek a fresh mandate, say, in Spring 2020, and bank on Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity with the wider electorate to carry him home.

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Filed Under: Brexit

The Brexit Swamp Deepens

7th July 2019 by newtjoh

The political environment becomes ever more unedifying and inauspicious. Last week Boris Johnson confirmed his intention for the UK to leave the EU on 31 October: “do or die”.

So did Jeremy Hunt: that is, unless a deal was in sight at the start of October, in which case he would allow ‘a few days grace’ beyond the 31st, before pulling the plug on UK membership. Earlier, he had, when pitching to Conservative MPs rather than to the membership, advocated the pursuit of a negotiated deal, unbound by such a fixed unrealistic deadline.

Both these contenders not only for the leadership of the Conservative party but for the Prime Minister-ship of the United Kingdom, also confirmed that they were willing for people working in the trading sector of the economy to lose their jobs and livelihoods as a result of such a No deal exit.

Why? Ostensibly to discharge the democratic mandate of the 2016 vote, but in practice to win the most votes from a rump electorate of around 160,000 mainly elderly and well-off Conservative party members, in the process normalising and sanitising No deal outcome within not only the Conservative Party, but much of the mainstream media.

The capacity and willingness of this Parliament to prevent No deal appears to have receded in step.

According to John McDonnell, the remaining “mechanisms in terms of formal procedure” to do so have become ‘difficult to spot’, while Nick Boles, who last spring resigned the Conservative whip over Brexit, at an Institute of Government seminar early this month advised that the means and the numbers ‘might not be there’, going on to warn that the country might have to ‘eat the pudding’ of a No deal Brexit to understand its consequences, before pivoting towards EEA membership.

Although Conservative MPs, such as Sam Gyimah, suggest that around 30 MP’s like them will vote to prevent No deal, and  current Cabinet heavyweights, Philip Hammond and David Gauke, argue that ‘ a way will be found’ to do so, by what parliamentary mechanism remains unclear, however. Gauke, himself, conceded on this week’s Andrew Marr Show that it will rely upon the Speaker innovating such an historic opportunity to block legislation coming into force at the last moment, against the wishes of the executive.

Although both Johnson and Hunt have said that they would prefer a negotiated deal in preference to No deal, the EU will not agree to remove the NI backstop from the November 2018 Withdrawal Agreement (May Deal), or to time-limit it, or to render it redundant through the agreement of ‘alternative arrangements’, at least in a legally certain way by the beginning of October.

Slightly more conceivable is a fudged last moment deal made with an EU anxious to avoid the economic consequences of No deal impacting on their side of the Channel. It would be one largely dependent on semantics to cloak the Brexit Trilemma: May deal re-wrapped with, perhaps, some baubles added.

But even if the new Conservative leader – almost certain Johnson – flipped-flopped on their avowed campaign rejection of any iteration of May deal, losing their credibility in the processand right at the beginning of their premiership, a May Mark 2 or Johnson deal could not win the combination of ERG hardcore support and Labour whipped support for it to pass this Parliament.

A pared-down May deal would not attract whipped Labour support. It would need to include an equivalent Customs Union(CU); continuing regulatory alignment for goods;  workers’ and environmental standards; and came attached with a commitment to a ‘confirmatory vote’ – anathema to most Conservative and some Labour MPs.

What about the official Opposition? Its current position that it ‘respects the 2016 referendum decision’ with any deal subject to another ‘confirmatory vote’, will remain meaningless: unless this Parliament votes for both a deal and a ‘confirmatory vote’ on it, which, as noted above, is unlikely in the extreme.

Even hard-headed Labour Remainer MPs, such as Hilary Benn, who indicated in a Newsnight I July interview that not only would Parliament not allow a No deal exit, but could require a public vote between a revised May deal and Remain, at the end of October, seem now to rely on wishful, not considered, thinking.

The Labour leadership will almost certainly bend to irresistible pressure at its forthcoming September conference to adopt a ‘Referendum and Remain’ position, if not before.

But that would allow the new Conservative PM to paint Labour as the party that all along wanted to reverse the ‘will of the people’, as expressed in the 2016 referendum, and risk alienating its Brexit-supporting voters as well as a segment of its own MPs representing Brexit-voting constituencies; given the lack of a majority for a second referendum in this Parliament, it could make a UK no deal exit more likely than less, making its prevention reliant on a general election (GE) interruption.

The electorate would probably recoil from the prospect of a referendum coming hot on the heels of a GE. It also would make little or no sense for the party to campaign on a Remain and Referendum (with the latter the means to secure the former) platform, and subsequently securing a working majority, then attempt to negotiate a revised deal with Brussels, simply to present that as the alternative choice to Remain.

Any change in its Brexit position really needs hitching to a political narrative that emphasises Labour’s efforts to secure a parliamentary compromise, the absolute priority now to avoid No deal in the here and now, and not a belated conversion to the Remain cause in pure principle.

Revocation of Article 50 offers a more consistent Brexit policy platform, but comes attached with even more political and electoral risk.

How likely is an autumn general election? The current parliamentary session is due to end on 25th July, assuming that the newly elected Conservative leader, following his election by his party’s membership, is invited to form a government by the Queen on the recommendation of Mrs May, and that Labour immediately does not table and win a no confidence motion in the new government.

Such a vote, before the new PM is given a chance to put their campaign words into action by negotiating and bringing back a revised deal to Parliament in October, is less likely to succeed than one tabled when No deal is imminent without parliamentary intervention.

On the other hand, leaving it to the wire well into October, will prolong uncertainty and wasteful expenditures on No deal preparations with its attendant high cost to economy and society, and, as  above, would risk the UK falling over the No deal cliff at the end of that month.

Only a handful of Conservatives need to vote with Corbyn to precipitate a government defeat; three have already joined Change UK, and Nick Boles has resigned the whip and become independent: others, including former Cabinet Ministers, Kenneth Clark and Dominic Grieve, when confirming their commitment to oppose No deal, have not ruled that possibility out.

Yet it would be a huge step, however, for them to sign-off their long careers by torpedoing their own party out of government. In truth, estimating the numbers is simply staring into a contingent crystal ball.

A more likely scenario is that a group of current Cabinet Ministers, including David Gauke, Philip Hammond, and David Lidlington – all of whom have been consistently steadfast in their opposition to No deal – pitched out of power by the new PM, and, perhaps, supported by ex.PM Theresa May, will add their not inconsiderable heft to Conservative MP pressure on the new PM to pivot towards a negotiated deal.

Of these, David Gauke has already confirmed that he would not vote against his own government (in a confidence vote), and there is little or no reason to suppose that either Lidlington or Hammond would do either. Some former junior ministers, such as Sam Gyimah and Dr Phillip Lee, might take up the threat on their behalf, even if for only tactical reasons, noting that a Labour no confidence motion, even if passed, under the Fixed Term Act would not immediately result in a GE, but only after a 14 day grace period if no alternative government was approved by the Commons.

This could give some possible scope for the new PM to backtrack from his commitment to No deal, on the basis that it had been adopted to primarily to ’stare down’ Brussels and to get the ‘best deal for Britain’ in response to democratic pressure within the country.

Both Gyimah and Lee, however, resigned, like Jo Johnson, Boris’s brother, from Mrs May’s government to support a second referendum and against May’s deal. It is that, in a likely diluted form and with a political declaration this time tilted towards a Canada-style free trade agreement , would be on offer, which would not secure whipped Labour support; because it would retain the NI backstop and involve an extended transition period it is also unlikely to carry the Tory ERG faction either. Back round the circle, then.

Even if Parliament was accorded the means to vote against No deal and simply did that alone, that vote would not determine what happened next. A negotiated deal would take us into 2020, if the EU, under its new management, was willing to grant a further extension, without a GE or a referendum called, allowing another circuit of the UK Brexit circle with no necessary end in sight. This, is far from certain, to say the least.

A parliamentary vote in favour of a second referendum on a binary choice between Remain and No deal, or as an amendment to a motion proscribing No deal, if allowed, would offer the most logical – albeit dangerous way, to escape the deadlock, but the means and numbers for that are not currently there, as Conservative and Labour opponents of No deal are deeply divided on how to avoid it.

That will need to change by October. Committed Conservative opponents of No deal will have to agree a common line with themselves and with Labour to succeed; and vice versa.

Otherwise both will be reliant on Boris Johnson seeking and obtaining parliamentary approval of a GE to secure a mandate for No deal, which would not only split the Conservative parliamentary party, but be uncertain in outcome.

The Labour leadership, wishing to rid itself of the Brexit albatross sitting on its socialist transformational agenda, could – at least on a Trotskyist reading – be content for No deal under the watch of Johnson to happen, whatever the official policy might proclaim, and wait – in Nick Boles words – for the pudding to be eaten to its subsequent electoral advantage, but the economic and political consequences on the UK economy and Union can only be expected to prove calamitous.

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Filed Under: Brexit Tagged With: brexit

An Open letter to the 26 Labour MP’s that wrote to Jeremy Corbyn on 19th June stating that Brexit must happen

25th June 2019 by newtjoh

Dear Signatory

On 19 June you wrote to Jeremy Corbyn, demanding that Brexit proceeds without ‘further undue delay, as the UK ‘must leave’, warning that holding out for a ‘perfect deal’ risks rather a No deal exit, and that ‘fighting for a Brexit for the many not the few, is best fought for at Stage 2, after we have left’.

As Labour MPs representing Brexit-voting area, your prime fear appears to the threat posed by the Brexit Party to take Labour working class votes in your own constituency.

The worst of all worlds is, indeed, where we seem to be stuck at present. Continuing uncertainty is damaging the economy, starving it of the investment it needs to escape stagnation,  while the(current) Chancellor is preparing to spend £26bn to mitigate the immediate impact of a No deal exit, the Union with Scotland and Northern Ireland is threatened to the point of impending demise, and political discourse has become polarised and polluted, sometimes to a point where a whiff back to the push to political extremes of the thirties, is discernible, as any middle ground between Remainer and Leave positions is hallowed out.

Think, think, what £26bn could do to transform the housing and education environments in Brexit-voting areas and elsewhere, while relieving the pressure on health and adult social care.

We must escape this mess, but how? The Conservative Party has been captured by the Hard-Brexiteers, eschewing evidence and common-sense, in favour of a reactionary fetish.

Your party’s position is confused and conflicted, only (vaguely) comprehensible – like that of the governing party – if the trouble of studying its internal machinations and perceived electoral calculus is taken. But why should the electorate be required to do that?

It is not surprising that there has been a populist surge.

Yet your intervention is misjudged and follows the same self-interested groove. Most importantly, it is likely to be counter-productive, even when taken on its own terms.

It will strengthen the opportunistic and hubristic hand of Boris Johnson, if he becomes Prime Minister – as it will the ERG faction within the Conservative party regardless – to pursue the threat of a No deal exit.

The idea seems to be that the threat of No deal will induce Brussels to blink and give concessions on the Withdrawal Agreement (WA); linked, perhaps, to a commitment to enter into an interim side (or WA replacement) agreement involving tariff and quota-free EU-UK trade, as a precursor to a long-term Canadian-plus-type free trade (FTA) deal, all done and dusted with parliamentary approval secured before October 31st.

That simply is not going to happen.  The unnecessary hiatus that will follow will only heighten and prolong uncertainty, fuelling the risk that an economically and socially disastrous No deal exit occurs by default.

An event that is likely to let the populist genie out of the bottle in real earnest, probably fragmenting voter behaviour well into the future, quite possibly permanently.

Even taking a longer time-frame, and a further extension beyond 31st October, Brussels will not be induced to make concessions, other than to repackage its earlier iterations on the N.Ireland backstop, set out in the  Joint 24.1 letters of Tusk and Juncker, to make it appear more ‘temporary’ than ‘indefinite’, and/or revert to a NI-specific customs union and regulatory alignment: back round the same circle.

Besides, the Brexit trilemma will not dissolve with any change of the deckchairs in 10 Downing Street:  it is possible to secure two, but not all three, of the following: UK single market and customs union exit; a whole-UK Brexit; and no Irish border.

Or, put another way, without continuing UK-wide customs union and regulatory alignment with the EU, for, at least, goods, either NI will need to be subject to different customs and regulatory arrangements than the rest of the UK, or a border within the island of Ireland will need to be reinstated in some form or other: hence the backstop; and why time-limiting it in a legally certain way constitutes a contradiction in terms.

The retention of an open border in Ireland, without the separate regulatory treatment of NI, requires the UK to continue within an equivalent CU with the EU combined with some measure of continuing dynamic regulatory alignment for the currently foreseeable future.

A future freestanding FTA with the EU that allows the UK to negotiate bespoke trade agreements with the Rest of the World (ROW)  – likely to take at least six years or more to negotiate, taking the Canadian precedent – is inconsistent not only with an open Irish border, but with continuing frictionless trade between the EU and the rest of the UK.

We would also have to kow-tow to President Trump and follow US regulatory food standards (disastrous for farmers across the UK) and quite inconsistent with an open Ireland border, and open up the NHS to American health care providers. Protecting patriotism and sovereignty should not be confused with Brexit.

Tariff-free and quota-free UK-EU trade will also not by itself lead to frictionless trade without continuing UK adherence to the EU customs code, the common external tariff, and commercial policy, which then would rule an independent UK trade policy.

The government’s own evidence backs up that of independent economists that the economic benefits of future possible free trade agreements with the ROW will prove puny compared to loss the benefits of such frictionless trade with the EU 27: our closest neighbours.

It is incumbent on you to explain otherwise, with reference to evidence and facts, rather than assertion.

Alternatively, unless you wish to sink to the depths of ERG posturing, blind to facts and arguments, you should recognise that you are prepared to swallow the dismemberment of the Union and the infliction of lasting economic damage to the UK.

You could reply that I accept all of that, but I must respect the June 2016 vote in line with existing party policy, in line with democratic principles, respecting the majority who voted Leave, regardless of consequence.

But three years ago, people did not vote for No deal; and the real economic, political, and social consequences of leaving have become much clearer.

With respect to the interests of your working class constituents, it is difficult to discern how becoming poorer (the impact of disrupted and often sundered previously integrated manufacturing  supply chains, will be most severe on constituencies in Wales, the North and Midlands, dependent on them), weakened public finances, and restricting the migration of young economically active EU workers (urban areas, such as Sunderland, would likely suffer consequent population loss), will improve their lot.

That is not to say The Dangers of a Second Referendum should be under-estimated, or avoided if at all possible.

But, as explained above, your intervention reduces the prospects of a negotiated deal most attuned to the interest of your constituents, while raising the risk of No Deal.

One of you, Caroline Flint, confirmed last Sunday that she would vote for No deal, in preference to revoking article 50 or for a second referendum.

Each of you should make your own position on that clear.

Some of you have already stymied efforts to prevent No deal by voting against the combined Labour, LD, SNP, and Green-supported motion, presented earlier this month to the Commons.

In that light, do you agree with Caroline that it would weaken the government negotiation position to threaten a No Deal exit, or with Jim that we will have opportunities to do that ‘sometime later’?

The best way to avoid both a No deal exit and a second referendum is to work with your Labour colleagues and Conservative One Nationers to legislatively prevent a No deal exit by executive action or default.

If that is not possible, your constituents should be provided with an opportunity to choose between Remaining and No deal, if that is what is left on the table.

Meanwhile campaigning that raising local educational horizons and expectations, inward investment, greater transport connectivity, and housing choice and opportunity (and the means to realise them), as well as improving public safety, is what is needed, not Brexit, would, undoubtedly, best support your local constituents and secure their lasting respect and allegiance.

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Filed Under: Brexit

Making Public Investment Smart

12th June 2019 by newtjoh

The level and quality of public infrastructural investment must meet macro-economic and social requirements and be efficient in selection and execution.

The establishment of the Infrastructure Projects Authority (IPA) in 2016, and the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) in 2017, was a move in the right direction in line with that. It provides potentially a stronger institutional footing for the effective planning, funding, selection, and execution of infrastructural projects, which, hopefully, is associated with a better shared political understanding of the role that productive public infrastructural investment must play in underpinning a future sustainable productivity-driven growth economy.

Yet the fiscal and institutional environment for the funding, selecting, and delivering of infrastructure, remains, unfortunately, unfit for purpose.

The need to change that, and how, provided the tread for the Submission that A Social Democratic Future made this month in response to HM Treasury’s Infrastructure Finance Review, which closed on 5th June, (the Consultation).

The Consultation sought views on securing private finance in support of productive infrastructural provision in such a way that the ‘benefits brought by private finance must outweigh the additional cost to the taxpayer of using private capital’, (para. 1.9), and on the future institutional options for delivering government support for infrastructural finance, including establishing a new operationally independent institution in the expected post-Brexit environment, when the UK will no longer benefit from access to the European Investment Bank (EIB).

Continuing under-investment in both productive economic and social infrastructure will retard the achievement of the step-increase in growth and productivity required to escape continuing stagnation. That is the prime issue.

This means fostering and reaping the potential productivity gains that follow the agglomeration of specialized economic activities in the largest urban areas and other concentrated clusters, including improved matches of jobs and people, the sharing of information, knowledge and innovation, as well as facilitated market access.

Bigger and more people-dense high-productivity cities, in turn, will depend upon high quality transport, digital, and social infrastructure in housing, education, and, to a degree, cultural services.

In the UK context, that means supporting primarily the densification of London, and other high-productivity clusters that could potentially conflict with regional spatial and social equity and cohesion aims, and, certainly, is in tension with them.

The post-Brexit referendum environment has further highlighted that tension, and underscored both an economic and social imperative to support and foster the recovery and rejuvenation of ‘left-behind (or neglected) Britain’  for choice of a better descriptive phrase. Coastal and smaller cities and towns, especially in sub-regions located north of a line drawn between the Humber and Wash and in Cornwall spring to mind. They have borne the brunt of decades of de-industrialisation and/or relatively stagnant or declining service sectors – the same areas that tend to the most exposed to the future loss of EU Structural Funds.

Both these strategic policy drivers put an added premium on moving to a reformed and inter-linked fiscal and institutional environment that can best deliver efficient productive infrastructural investment.

Take a sustained increase in affordable housing investment to a known broad steady-state level, planned and meshed with the targeted and planned expansion of apprentice and training opportunities to indigenous workers: although it should help to secure structural change in the construction industry and a step-change in its productivity, it is presently prevented, however, by the operation of the current public expenditure system, where housing capital allocations are constrained by rigid fiscal limits.

The current unitary cash-based public expenditure system lumps together recurrent revenue and lumpy investment expenditures producing future financial, economic, and social benefits into the future.

The construction and provision costs of providing new dwellings is consequently front-loaded  as public expenditure contributing to the deficit into the short-term, leaving public investment, and the housing programme in particular, disproportionately prone to cuts during periods of fiscal stress or austerity (generally when increased counter-cyclical investment is required, as was the case in the wake of the-GFC, nut when it was by cut by 40% in the 2010 SR), and, more generally, constrained below optimal economic levels by undiscriminating unitary fiscal targets, such as when Parliament in January 2017 committed the government to reducing the cyclically adjusted deficit to below 2% of GDP by 2020-21 and having debt falling as a share of GDP in 2020-21.

In contrast, homebuyers budget to meet their recurrent mortgage costs, not the full value of their mortgage; nor are they double-counted.  Nearly all first-time buyers could not purchase if the same accounting treatment was applied to them.

The Fiscal Remit imposed on the NIC by HM Treasury – itself constrained by that same  discrimination against investment expenditure, intrinsic within the current cash-based unitary public expenditure system – sets a gross public investment funding envelope or limit of between 1.0% and 1.2% of GDP in each year between 2020 and 2050, within which NIC recommendations for economic infrastructure must adhere, after taking account of existing funding commitments, including HS2, CrossRail 2, and Northern Powerhouse Rail. This is even though that existing commitments – combined with expected maintenance spending on existing assets – will consume an estimated 1.1% of GDP between 2020 and 2025, and 0.9% between 2025 and 2030.

Very limited fiscal space, over the short-to-medium term, therefore, will be left for the NIC, by its own reckoning, to recommend new and additional projects, such as the upgradations and new additions to the intra-and inter-urban transport network needed for the posited benefits of HS2 for London and other urban conurbations to be substantively harnessed.

Likewise, projects that could step-up the productivity of under-performing urban agglomerations such as the West Midlands, currently held back by congested and inadequate public transport connectivity, closer to European average levels, will almost certainly be stuck on the drawing board or stillborn.

Its constrained Fiscal Remit will also undermine any effort of the NIC to select, rank, and sequence projects – given their lumpiness and interdependency – efficiently.

For example, it is unlikely that the London transport system could cope with increased HS2 numbers without the prior of completion CrossRail at the London Euston terminal end.

Most HS2 passengers arriving and departing at Birmingham will still also need to get to the terminus station by public transport, unless they can walk to a central destination or get a taxi to a poorly connected destination within the West Midlands conurbation.

Already, productive infrastructural projects have been pared back due to fiscal constraints linked to the achievement of short-term fiscal targets. Trans-Pennine Rail provides a recent example with likely significant sub-optimal economic effect on the Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire economies.

Another problem with the current fiscal rules is that debt raised by Public-Private Partnerships (PPP)’s to construct assets – within the current cash-based public expenditure planning system (if it meets defined accounting tests) – is not recorded as public spending or debt.

Unless public procurement and PPP’s are put firmly on a level playing field, the ‘fiscal illusion’, as the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) in 2017 described the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) programme, which Budget 2018, PF1/2 curtailed, risks repeat.

Private finance will then continue to be used to meet the infrastructural funding gap, even where it involves net higher public costs and hence public debt and borrowing over entire project lifetimes.

Alternatively, private financing of new water and energy assets under the current Regulated Asset Base will rely upon their ultimate funding on hidden subsidies and higher charges on consumers, with resulting regressive incidence on household budgets.

The effective development of the NIC’s proposed analytical framework for comparing the whole life costs and benefits of private financing and traditional procurement on an objective whole-life project basis, accordingly, and in addition, also depends upon inter-linked fiscal and institutional reform.

The Submission recommended integrated reform across three primary areas: the fiscal rule framework; the institutional environment governing the selection, ranking, and delivery of productive economic and social infrastructure projects; and tackling the root causes of the rising relative real cost of providing of such infrastructure.

Fiscal Rule Reform

The 2019 Spending Review (2019SR) should increase the NIC’s current Fiscal Remit funding envelope and disentangle it from unitary cash-based fiscal targets, while the NIC should provide evidenced assessment of the future volume need for public investment, and its sequencing, to the Treasury.

Capital spending on both conventional and PPP’s should be freed from year-to-year financial cash-limits, but their modelled future revenue liabilities included in future government debt projections used to assess future debt sustainability.

And the IPA and NIC should ensure that choice of procurement route for future publicly supported or regulated infrastructural provision should strictly and wholly be determined by relative whole-life project efficiency, taking account of the cost of finance, according to the best-available tools and evidence-base.

The selection, ranking, and delivery of productive economic and social infrastructure projects.

It is not apparent that the impact of future technological change on the economic value attached to shorter journey times between Birmingham and London, nor the actual scope potentially available in the future for existing networks, such as the Chiltern line, to increase capacity and average journey times, were adequately addressed during the original HS2 decision-making process.

At any rate, a fully transparent evidence-base does not seem to be available to convincingly rebut rising doubts, currently raised within and outside Westminster, concerning the vfm and the ultimate economic utility of the project – attached with an expected price-tag of over 55bn – relative to alternatives.

The Thames Tideway project – a 25km tunnel, currently in the process of construction, to upgrade and expand London’s Victorian sewer network will cost an estimated final c4.2bn at 2014 prices. A Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) bears primary construction and execution risk. That feature and an innovative patchwork of public guarantees and retention of high impact but low likelihood risks, designed to avoid expensive and inefficient risk pricing, has led many to tout it as an emerging PPP model, but the business case need for the project relative to cheaper alternatives, such as improved maintenance and repair of the existing network to prevent leakages, has been questioned.

Ultimate project risk will rest upon the consumer and the taxpayer, with its costs mainly met by increased consumer water bills. The construction of the project will both foster and pre-empt engineering and tunneling resources.

All that said, the optimal ranking of the relative macro-economic worth of competing projects is difficult to achieve in practice for many reasons.

These include the complexity of the wider policy environment in which the selection and prioritisation takes place; the related need to balance competing multiple objectives; the existence of contingent political pressures favouring some projects for reasons other than their economic and overall worth, as well as capacity constraints within the public sector to apply effectively project appraisal methodologies, which like all economic tools are also only as robust as their underlying assumptions allow them to be.

It is vital, nevertheless, that the institutional environment in which both economic and social infrastructural projects are planned, selected, and delivered is improved in step and consistent with fiscal reform.

The NIC should, therefore, be empowered to assist each government department to publish a required annual Departmental Investment Plan (DIP).

Each DIP should prioritise projects according to their estimated economic and social return, incorporating auditable information on the methodology applied to rank projects, according to their expected whole project-life return.

The IPA should also be specifically tasked and resourced to expand the pool of personnel skilled and experienced enough to conduct the project appraisals underpinning DIP’s.

Partnerships with universities and the private sector should develop the methodological base and to enlarge and deepen the skill set of appraisers.

Progress towards such an improved fiscal and institutional environment should foster efficient public planning and programming of projects and a greater degree of partnership planning between the public and private sectors.

Improved growth and productivity outcomes, balanced in income and spatial distributional terms, should follow.

But, even with their adoption, the sheer scale of future infrastructural funding requirements requires alternative and innovative public funding mechanisms.

Tackling the root causes of the rising relative real cost of providing of productive economic and social infrastructure.

The costs of providing infrastructural investment have escalated much faster than general inflation: the public investment relative price effect. The escalating cost of land as a component of housing investment since 1955 is a striking instance of its operation and effect.

The true fiscal crisis should also be recognized: the demand and need for productive public expenditures across both current and capital budgets will inevitably outstrip public willingness to pay through efficient and salient sources of taxation, at least within a current competitive political system focused mainly on the electoral short-term.

Overcoming that crisis, therefore, requires further concerted and systematic institutional and policy reform. Lateral, radical thinking across the political spectrum, capable of fostering an overlapping consensus, is required, as much as is incremental reform.

In that light, Sectoral and Departmental infrastructure strategies should identify, address, foster, and integrate joined-up policy efforts to make public investment less costly in net public expenditure terms.

Housing provides a case-in-point example where market failure and rent-capture unnecessarily increases the cost of provision. These should be identified and addressed directly, along and innovative public funding mechanism,  within the DIP process.

The most direct and effective way of reducing the public cost of affordable provision is by deflating its land value component. This could be done by a mixture or combination of measures focused on ensuring that the land value of affordable housing sites are limited to existing use value plus an agreed premium of, say, 30%, backed up by stronger compulsory purchase powers and an affordable housing obligations system that is more robustly, transparently, and uniformly applied than at present.

In parallel, the future long-term rental income and sales of a steady-state affordable housing programme could be securitised to provide collaterised backing for its public funding.
At an overarching level, a dedicated funding intermediary that could take equity stakes in economic and social infrastructure, where long-term returns (for example, linked to revenue streams, such as rents rising with inflation, interest on loans, profit-shares) could be realized and recycled across the lifetime of the project.

Links follow to the  A Social Democratic Future‘s full  Response to Treasury consultation June 2019, its Appendix Table 1, and a summary of the Recommendations.

The major issues that will need to underpin future assessments of the whole-life project efficiency of conventional and PPP projects are outlined in Table 1.

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Filed Under: Macro-economic policy Tagged With: housing, Investing for the Future, NIC

Will Brexit High Noon be settled by a Shootout, or a Nod-and-Wink?

23rd February 2019 by newtjoh

The UK will exit the EU on the 29 March by legal default without a deal (No deal), unless the Commons agrees on one, or a combination, of the following five options.

1. May deal revised by Brady amendment
The Commons by a margin of 16 votes on the 29 January mandated the Prime Minister (PM) to seek ‘alternative arrangements’ to the Northern Ireland (NI) backstop, included in the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) she had negotiated and agreed with the EU back in November.

Only a fortnight earlier MPs had rejected that WA and its accompanying Political Declaration (PD) – The May deal– by a record 230 votes.

Despite the PM’s previous implacable insistence that her deal – backstop included – was the best and only one on offer, her acceptance of the Brady amendment was not totally unexpected.

It had already become clear that May would to continue to court support from the hard-Brexiteer (HB) faction of her party by promising to go back to Brussels to get concessions on that backstop.

She seems to have calculated – on the advice apparently of her husband, Philip, and in accord with her Chief Whip, Julian Smith – that seeking broader cross-party support for a softer Brexit, as was preferred by her chief of staff, Gavin Barwell, would have split her party more certainly and quickly.

She needed something to take back to Brussels with parliamentary backing. Essentially, however, the can was kicked down the road yet again. The notion that the PM could bring back to the Commons a revised deal that eliminated or at least time-limited the backstop in a legally certain way was illusory from the onset.

Alternative ways to prevent a hard border in Ireland, such as the technological fixes that the July 2018 Brexit White Paper mooted are not feasibly available, at least within the foreseeable future.

As EU’s deputy Brexit negotiator, Sabine Weyand, put it pithily earlier in February, they simply don’t exist. A time-limited backstop, in turn, is a contradiction in terms.

It simply is not in the interests of the EU, either strategically or tactically, to re-open the WA.

Strategically, it would lose Brussels the agenda-setting control it has exercised over the negotiation process. The UK could press for the adoption of alternative trading arrangements of its own choosing sooner, rather than later (outside a common EU customs territory).

Such premature arrangements could either cause the return of a hard border within Ireland, or through smuggling and the back-door dumping of goods through an open (NI) back door, undermine the EU’s own common customs territory and the single market(SM).

Tactically, the EU possesses no incentive to alter its red lines, at least until the last possible moment, to avoid No deal.

Many HB European Reform Group (ERG) MP’s are wedded to a No deal exit. They voted on tactical grounds for May to do their bidding while the No deal cliff edge becomes ever-closer.

Their – always lent and conditional – support will be withdrawn in the absence of a demonstrable capitulation by the EU to their demands. Given that, any concessions offered by the EU to May to placate them would prove futile and probably counter-productive in outcome: taken by ERG members as a willingness to bend.

Yet a No deal UK exit would itself activate the risk of the re-imposition of a hard border within the island of Ireland – the outcome that the backstop is designed precisely to prevent.

For that reason, Brussels has shown some willingness to offer May something ranging from a letter(s) of comfort to a codicil or supplementary protocol to the main body of the WA, as indicated in the 24 January Letters of Presidents Tusk and Juncker to Prime Minister May<

Their content, subject to sympathetic interpretation, could allow May to claim that the backstop would be ended with reference to some defined process, providing her ERG faction some residual assurance that it would not be permanent.

Such assurances will almost certainly call upon  the beholder to make  a semantic differentiation of temporary and indefinite,  open to future interpretive dispute. Subordinate to the main legal body of the WA , such a protocol or codicil will not be legally certain, but will rather rely on the good will of both parties, as was the case previously.

2. Extension of Article 50 agreed or imposed by Parliament.

The essential dilemma that the PM continues to face is that tilting towards a Brexit soft enough to attract cross party support will split her party, while relying on ERG support to secure a parliamentary majority is a chimera.

Boxed-in a corner of partly her own making, her forlorn hope is that by running the clock down close enough to the 29 March exit date will frighten enough hard-Brexiteers to pass her deal, with or without a last-minute EU concession on the NI backstop.

The stick that she apparently thinks that she can hit them with is that if they do not, an extended, rather than an operational, extension to Article 50, on the EU’s terms as long as one year, will follow.

The Commons would then increasingly likely vote for a softer Brexit, or, if it remained deadlocked, as the only last option left on the table, apart from voting to revoke Article 50 or for a general election, or for a People’s Vote (PV) that could reverse Brexit.

Such a strategy was always an inordinately dangerous, uncertain, and risky one, both economically and politically. That Parliament would allow such brinkmanship with so much at stake, beggars reasoned belief.

Yvette Cooper’s amendment to set out a statutory process for MP’s to require the government to seek an Article 50 extension from Brussels will be re-tabled on the 27 February, this time with Sir Oliver Letwin, a Conservative ‘one nation’ grandee appealing to its middle ground.

A similar amendment fell on the 29 January. This was largely because 14 Labour MP’s, plus the unwhipped Frank Field and Kelvin Hopkins, voted against it, while 12 abstained, including eight members of the current Corbyn-led shadow cabinet: Tracy Brabin, Judith Cummins, Gloria de Piero, Yvonne Fovargue, Mike Kane, Emma Lewell-Buck, Jim McMahon, and Melanie Onn. A full voting inventory is provided here.

Another month has elapsed since then. Barely a month is now left before a default No deal proceeds by default. This time, therefore, the Cooper amendment is more likely to attract increased support from ‘agnostic’ Conservative MP’s who desire Brexit to be delivered through an orderly negotiated deal without further delay.

Consistent with that, the convenors of the Brexit Delivery Group, Simon Hart and Andrew Percy, wrote on 21 February to Julian Smith, the Chief Whip, warning them that its members were inclined to vote in favour of the Cooper amendment to avoid No deal by extending Article 50. If their 50-odd members support the Cooper-Letwin amendment it would likely pass on the back of majority Labour support.

Even more significantly, Remainer Ministers, have put pressure on the PM to rule out No deal before 27 February, some apparently threatening resignation. This weekend three cabinet heavyweights, Amber Rudd, Greg Clark, and David Gauke, expressed, in clear and unambiguous terms, their support for an Article 50 extension.

Others, including the chancellor, Philip Hammond, and the PM’s and hitherto steadfastly loyal deputy, David Lidlington, are probably keeping their powder dry, at least until next month.

If May still does not concede an Article 50 extension, they might well activate that threat, deciding that the time for them to finally bark had come, and by supporting the amendment help to defeat the government they had just left. Such an act of desperation would be to the almost certain likely detriment to their future political careers, which, of course, does raise a question mark over its likely scale and significance.

But to head it off and to prevent a split that potentially could even prove more portentous than that involving the ERG, May could well bow to the inevitable and rule out No deal. A short extension might even suit her as that would tend to concentrate ERG minds on the risks of continuing to reject her deal.

But it is also possible that May will try to persuade her Remainer Ministers and MP’s to give her until 12 March to come back to the Commons with a revised proposal subject then to a meaningful vote: one last kick of the can, before the day of reckoning, when Parliament finally has to decide whether to take control or not of the Brexit process to prevent No deal, finally comes.

3. Second referendum or PV
MP’s are riven into factions, each banking on a result – whether that is No deal, Norway-plus, or a PV – coming to pass as ‘the last one standing’ before the No deal curtain comes down, rather in a bar-room brawl fashion.

Two large segments of MP’s within the Conservative and Labour Party’s demand something that most MPs within the Commons generally, do not want: on the Conservative side, a No Deal exit; and, on the Labour side, a PV.

Without compromise from a substantive number within either or both groups, any alternative to No deal cannot command a stable majority within the Commons.

Apart from only a handful of ‘hard’ Remainers, of which three, Anne Sourby, Sarah Wollaston, and Heidi Allen, have already defected to The Independent Group (TIG) of MPs, most Conservative MM’s oppose a PV.

A larger group of Labour Remainer MP’s do support it as providing a channel to cancel, rather than mitigate, Brexit. The original seven party defectors to TIG, cited Jeremy Corbyn’s failure to support a PV as a catalyst for their decision, accusing him of enabling Brexit, contrary to the expressed wishes of most party members and voters.

Further such defections could follow, if an amendment by Hove MP, Peter Kyle, is not supported and whipped as official party policy. This, intriguingly and tantalizingly, trades acquiescence to May deal for the government allowing a second referendum choice between it and Remain.

But May could not accept it without splitting her party. It appears to be designed to put pressure on Corbyn to accept the principle of a PV, sooner, rather than later.

This website has clearly set out the The Dangers of a Second Referendum, and understands the reluctance of Corbyn and many Remainers including Yvette Cooper – to embrace it.

It very likely would suit Corbyn, and many in the shadow cabinet, for the May deal to pass as the result of Labour abstentions – witness the lack of disciplinary action taken against the eight shadow cabinet ministers who defied the Labour whip to abstain on the 29 January Cooper amendment vote.

Labour could then focus on its domestic transformative agenda, while still blaming any adverse economic consequences on a Tory Brexit.

But if Parliament continues deadlocked, a PV could become the only (but elongated, indeterminate, and quite possibly counter-productive) way to move the log-jam.

An element of chicken and egg, however, is present. A primary reason why there is no parliamentary consensus for an alternative to No deal is the refusal of the proponents of a PV to endorse such an alternative: a going for broke mindset, mirroring that of the ERG on the other pole of the Brexit spectrum.

And Parliament could well still remain deadlocked, this time on determining the, and the order of, the questions, included in the PV ballot paper.

4. Alternative Norway-plus
Norway-plus, involving both an equivalent Customs Union (CU) and continuing UK membership of the Single market (SM), provides the closest possible fit to Labour’s previous six tests, ostensibly designed to secure the same benefits currently obtained by EU membership.

By allowing continuing frictionless trade in goods along with the minimisation of non-tariff barriers for services between the UK and EU, it would best mitigate the economic damage of leaving both long- and short-term, lifting the economic deadweight of uncertainty that currently is depressing business sentiments, investment, and the wider economy. It could be negotiated within the existing WA and transition period timetable.

And, as pointed out in a A Week in December , Norway-plus would meet the requirements of the overarching December 2017 NI backstop, rendering the WA backstop, with its separate regulatory treatment of NI, redundant.

But as also explained, it is unlikely to secure a majority in this Parliament – at least, a sustainable whipped one, in the event that the Commons was allowed to vote on alternatives to May deal.

The Labour leadership can be expected to shy away from whipping its MPs to support Norway-plus, fearing that MPs, at both ends of the party Remainer PV and Brexiteer spectrum, would rebel.

Its official adoption could, and crucially, also allow May to paint Labour as the party of Brexit-in-name-only (Brino) driving a potential parliamentary and electoral wedge between the party’s divergent Brexit constituencies.

Norway-plus, is more likely to muster an unwhipped majority; more so, if MPs had already voted to reject a PV.

Yet, May, as PM, then would be unwilling to progress Norway-plus as head of the government. Not just because of her fixation on migration and ending freedom of movement, but because she could not carry her own party in negotiating it with Brussels.

That could possibly change if she decided to resign, but her potential replacements, even if they willing to tack towards it – would also face heavy internal ERG and party resistance.

A new government with Hunt-Javid-Gove-Rudd at its centre of gravity might at a push take the plunge, but probably only by presenting the option again as a temporary rather than permanent arrangement.

Another general election would appear increasingly unavoidable. If that did come to pass, Labour’s Brexit manifesto stance is likely to be that it would negotiate with Brussels a new deal, broadly in line with its six tests.

If a majority Labour government was subsequently elected, something very close to Norway-plus is most likely what its negotiators would come back from Brussels with to ask the new Parliament to approve.

The burning issue as to whether – and in what form – that agreement should be ratified in a fresh referendum would still need to be settled, if that had not been defined in a fresh 2019 party Brexit manifesto.

5. Revised May deal merging into Jersey

The 6 February Corbyn letter to the PM demanded that the government should change its negotiating red lines within the PD.

This was with reference to five ‘negotiating objectives’ to be enshrined in law before the UK leaves the EU ‘to provide certainty for businesses and a clear framework for our future relationship’, including:

• a permanent and equivalent CU involving UK adherence to the EU customs code, the common external tariff, and commercial policy – subject to the UK having some ‘say’ in the detail of future trade deals; and continuing UK:
• ‘close alignment’ with the Single Market (SM); and,
• ‘dynamic alignment’ with EU worker, environmental, and consumer rights and protections, ensuring that such UK standards, as a minimum, keep pace with evolving standards across Europe, while providing scope for the UK to ‘lead the way’.

The letter fell short, however, of demanding full and continuing UK dynamic alignment with SM rules for goods. That, as a minimum, if full frictionless trade in goods between the UK and EU is to be maintained, would have to be combined with the equivalent CU that it did set out. The combination defines the Jersey option.

Its adoption, if sought within a revised PD, would then depend upon the EU further softening its core red-line on the indivisibility of the four SM freedoms. A very big ask.

Yet, to avoid a No deal exit that would itself would risk the re-imposition of a hard NI border, the EU could possibly bend at the last negotiating moment. It could even offer concessions, providing some prospect an independent UK trade and migration policy sometime in the future. That is far from certain, however.

Downsides of the option for the UK, in any case, include the economic cost of the loss of EU market access for services.

Norway-plus would also achieve frictionless trade in goods, much more surely and seamlessly.

More pertinently at a domestic political level, the adoption of full Jersey would require May, not only to merge with the official Labour Party position on the CU, but to dynamically align with EU regulations concerning goods, splitting her party. Is official adoption does not, accordingly, appear to be a runner, at this stage.

More likely is some government tweaking towards it in substance, if not stated intention. A longer transition period could be agreed that with an Article 50 extension extending beyond a May 2022 election date; keeping the UK, in effect, within a CU and SM until then.

A revised Political Declaration (PD) could also offer some genuflection to Labour’s position, particularly with dynamic alignment on standards.

The PM will need to delimit the precise offer required get enough added Labour abstentions and Conservative votes to offset the official Labour, Scottish Nationalist, and TIG opposition, which will joined by ERG hardcore rebels, numbering in all likelihood between 30-80.

If their number settles closer to 30, she could have a chance. The Private membership lists of the different ‘tribes’ of the Conservative Party, recently obtained by the Financial Times, suggests that if the existing Conservative payroll and existing Brexit group are joined by unaffiliated MP’s, such as Oliver Letwin, the government would harness just short of 220, requiring it still to capture a substantial mix of ERG returnees to the government fold with Labour votes and abstentions.

Even if a majority reliant on cross-party unwhipped votes is secured by a whisper, it would be an unstable one to base the piloting of the Withdrawal Bill and associated legislation through Parliament.

The WA backstop with its separate regulatory treatment of NI would also continue to hang over subsequent negotiations with the EU as a Sword of Damocles, perhaps, ruling out the DUP support.

It is, accordingly, quite possible that if a bare parliamentary majority was obtained for such a tweaked May deal, it could then be offered for ratification either through a general election or a yes/no binary referendum choice.

But if that principle was conceded, pressure would be intense for it to include Remain and No deal options.

Is there a way out?

With Brexit, the only certainty is uncertainty. The 60’s puppet show, Thunderbirds, always began with the clarion call that ‘anything can happen in the next half hour’: true for Brexit also, especially if the period is extended a bit.

Most MPs believe that a disorderly No deal should be avoided, but no majority exists as to how.

At one pole, hard-Brexiteers committed to what to they consider is a ‘clean’ No deal Brexit, are concentrated into the ERG faction within the governing party.

At the other, a similar number of hard-Remainers, wedded to a PV reversing Brexit altogether, are concentrated within the main Labour opposition.

Some MP’s representing often marginal constituencies, concentrated in the North and Midlands, that voted to leave, often by a large margin, will vote against any official backtracking on the 2017 manifesto commitment to respect the 2016 decision.

This polarisation within the parties between No deal and a PV has prevented a convergence towards a soft Brexit compromise that could secure a stable parliamentary majority, sustained by cross-party whipping.

The PM chose not to court cross-party support out of the real fear that would split her party; the Labour opposition, in turn, has resisted actually promoting a soft Brexit alternative to the government position that could best meet its six set tests, for fear that it would be accused both of supporting Brino – with continued EU control over UK migration and trade policy – and of betraying the 48% of who voted to stay, upsetting two key electoral constituencies that it will rely upon to secure power.

Both parties agreed to trigger Article 50 and to ‘respect the decision of the electorate to Leave’ in the 2016 referendum.

Subsequently neither Front bench has been honest about the trade- offs involved between taking ‘back control’ and protecting future UK economic prospects. A failure not unrelated to the fact that many of their respective supporters voted to leave out of ‘gut’ or ‘populist’ instinct, not ‘rational’ economic calculation.

Certainly, the parliamentary and mainstream media debate has seldom focused on evidential realities. The retention of an open border in Ireland, without the separate regulatory treatment of NI, requires the UK to continue within an equivalent CU with the EU combined with some measure of continuing dynamic regulatory alignment for the currently foreseeable future that cannot be time-limited.

Or the limited – at best – prospect of the UK negotiating free trade deals with the rest-of-the world could compensate for the loss of frictionless trade with its nearest trading partners, especially within a globalized world where regionally-based trading bloc agreements  have become predominant.

That failure contributes to continuing deadlock.

This spring, a deal tweaked towards a continuing CU and regulatory alignment in substance, if not stated intention, if combined with a limited Article 50 extension to May, seems to provide the politically most feasible route to secure at least an unwhipped parliamentary majority for a revised PD to be taken back to Brussels for negotiation linked to some tinkering of the wording concerning the NI backstop.

If that majority proved too unstable for the withdrawal legislation to be piloted through Parliament, the cliff edge would return. If Article 50 had to be extended again, a second referendum with all of its attendant dangers as well as opportunities, would appear inevitable.

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Filed Under: Brexit Tagged With: May deal, Norway-Plus, Second referendum

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