Category: Photography

TODAY is Brexit day at the Conservative Party conference and Theresa May has opened proceedings with two chunky announcements about Britain’s next steps towards the exit door. First, she intends to include a Great Repeal Act in next year’s Queen’s Speech. This will revoke the 1972 European Communities Act (ECA), the legislation that took Britain into the club and which channels European laws onto British statute books, from the point of Brexit. Second, she will trigger Article 50 (the two-year process by which Britain will negotiate its exit terms) by the end of March 2017. This is earlier than some had expected, as it comes before French and German elections in May and September respectively, and before the next Queen’s Speech. The prime minister is under pressure from die-hard Brexiteers—a gang led by Iain Duncan Smith has just published a package of demands amounting to a recklessly fast and complete break from the European Union—and is offering these two pledges as proof that the wheels of the process are finally starting to turn.

The sequencing of these two milestones is curious and points to a broader truth of the upcoming talks. It would be more natural for Parliament to debate and vote on repealing the ECA before the government invokes Article 50. After all, the latter (moving to leave the EU) is inconsistent with the former (the codification of Britain’s ongoing membership). Moreover, the binary result of the June referendum leaves many important questions unanswered; about the fashion in which the country will leave the club, for example, and the sort of new relationship to which it should aspire. As she begins negotiations next year Mrs May will have no mandate more nuanced than that conferred, informally, by the referendum: take Britain out of the EU. It would make sense for Parliament to deliberate on the next steps before the talks have begun, rather than afterwards, as the prime minister’s proposed timetable implies. After all, Article 50 requires a country leaving the union to issue notification of its intent “in accordance with its constitutional requirements”. Is parliamentary approval not the essence of Britain’s constitutional order?

The point would not be to block Brexit. Though the referendum was not binding, moves by MPs to overrule its result would be a political travesty in the absence of a dramatic shift in public opinion (of which there is no sign, yet). No, the point would be to involve MPs—who, remember, are paid to hold the government to account—in a process that will define not just Britain’s relations with the wider world but the character of its economy and society for the foreseeable future. Different sorts of Brexit lay the foundations for different national futures: open or closed, free-market or protectionist, individualist or paternalist. If MPs have time to chunter about the Great British Bake-Off, a televised baking contest, they have time to weigh in on Brexit. Plenty of authorities agree—last week the constitution committee of the House of Lords ruled that it would be “constitutionally inappropriate” for Article 50 to be triggered without a parliamentary vote. Still, few expect the legal challenges being mounted in support of this argument to succeed.

This is worrying. Repealing the ECA will, for example, give ministers vast discretionary power to amend European laws through statutory instruments. Even if Britain does not initially want to change such laws, many make reference to EU institutions and protocols, so they will need rewriting to make sense; a “Draft Brexit Act” published by Allen & Overy, a law firm, suggests that “deletions, simplifications, shortenings and removal of red-tape” as well as clarification of the “status of guidelines” will all be up for grabs. This will provide plenty of opportunity for ministers to water down or otherwise fiddle with legislation they do not like. Consider the breeziness with which Bernard Jenkin, one of Mr Duncan Smith’s co-authors, insists that how Britain fills the “lacuna in our regulatory landscape…need not be set out in detail” when Parliament overturns the ECA. He even points to the hardly uncontentious field of pharmaceutical regulation as an example. No surprise, then, that lobbyists and lawyers are rubbing their hands at all the business this deluge of barely scrutinised ambiguities will generate.

Moreover, that is just the job of unwinding Britain’s existing relationship with the EU. Simultaneously the country will be negotiating a new settlement, probably including some interim arrangement to kick in after Britain formally leaves the union in early 2019. The possibilities of ongoing membership of the single market, or a free-trade deal and curbs on free movement, will open up myriad questions about the country’s future. And assuming Britain leaves the customs union, it will eventually launch formal trade talks with countries outside the EU.

The sheer quantity of scrutiny will severely test Parliament’s capacity (as well as offering yet more rich pickings for lawyers and lobbyists). That MPs are being marginalised at this crucial early stage is thus a concern: so much of what is to come turns on Mrs May’s initial negotiating strategy. Quizzed on the matter by Andrew Marr on his BBC politics show this morning, she left little room for MPs to hope for a more substantive role as talks advance. Parliament will “have its say” by voting for the Great Repeal Act, she said, and would be informed about non-sensitive details “at various stages” thereafter. She thus echoed David Davis, the Brexit secretary, who last month warned a parliamentary committee that MPs should not expect total transparency.

The irony is that Brexit was sold to British voters as a means to take back parliamentary sovereignty from an undemocratic Brussels, but the European Parliament will probably play a more proactive role in the coming negotiations than will Westminster. Though the Council will in practice lead the talks, MEPs have been assured of extensive briefing during the process (Article 218 of the Lisbon Treaty requires that the Parliament be kept “immediately and fully informed at all stages” of an exit negotiation); they have already appointed a point of contact for the talks, Guy Verhofstadt; and most crucially they have a veto on the final deal that will give them huge informal influence over the European institutions’ negotiating posture. Their ability to lobby and shape the process is certainly greater than that of British MPs, whose political freedom of manoeuvre and collective stock of relevant knowledge and experience are both much smaller. The chaotic state of Britain’s opposition Labour Party—which bafflingly opted not to debate Brexit at its conference last week—and the secessionist orientation of its second opposition force, the Scottish National Party, do not help matters.

All of which is not just a shame. It is disturbing. It speaks of a risky centralisation of control over a process whose outcome will shape Britain for generations. Mrs May is essentially competent and cool-headed, more so than any of her three Brexit ministers (Mr Davis plus Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, and Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary). But her time at the Home Office before becoming prime minister also hints at a tendency towards control-freakery and perhaps even a resistance to scrutiny. For her sake and that of Britain, MPs should push back against this. They have probably lost the battle for a vote on triggering Article 50, the ongoing legal challenges notwithstanding. But they should demand proper briefings and opportunities for scrutiny going beyond the pantomime of regular ministerial questions. For example, the new Brexit select committee should enjoy privileged access to sensitive information about the negotiations, just as the Intelligence and Security Committee does about Britain’s spies. Tomorrow, Brexit day over, the Tory conference will turn its attentions to social reform. For Mrs May is determined that her premiership be about more than Brexit. Fair enough. But even the most contentious social reforms come and go, whereas Brexit is permanent and all-encompassing. MPs must ruminate on that distinction and assert themselves accordingly.

DELEGATES and journalists arriving in Glasgow today for the Scottish National Party (SNP) conference had one big subject on their minds: the political puzzle that has been hanging over Nicola Sturgeon since June 23rd. In Britain’s referendum on leaving the EU, every single area of Scotland voted to remain in the union. The country is thus being dragged out of the club by England. What was the first minister—herself a prominent face of the Remain campaign—going to do about that?

For keen pro-independence campaigners, some of whom have been clamouring for a new vote on quitting the United Kingdom since they lost the one in 2014, this is the SNP’s golden chance. Time to crack on with a new vote: time to untether Scotland from a right-wing, inward-looking England heading fast for a hard Brexit. It is not hard to sympathise with that argument. An ugly isolationism is taking hold in England and seems likely to impoverish Britain as a whole.

The problem is that while Brexit may strengthen the political arguments for Scoxit, it weakens the (already flimsy) economic ones. Just as a hard border will now go down across the Channel (and possibly between Northern Ireland and the Republic), so it would between an independent Scotland still in the EU and the rest of the United Kingdom. And Scotland does far more trade with the rest of the UK than it does with the rest of the EU. Polls have reflected that: by some measure fewer Scots want independence now than did before June 23rd.

Mrs Sturgeon, then, must respond to the enthusiastic calls for a new referendum, especially in her own party, while buying time. She is pro-independence, but also temperamentally cautious—more so than her predecessor Alex Salmond, now a signed-up supporter of a prompt second referendum—and reads the polls. But recent weeks have brought growing tensions between fellow gradualists and secessionist radicals in the SNP: this morning Angus Robertson, her ally, was announced as the winner of the party’s deputy leadership contest. That was expected, but the strong showing (in a highly loyal, centralised party) for Tommy Sheppard, an outspoken Edinburgh MP and one of the flag bearers for the radical tendency, was striking. So as she strode onto the stage in Glasgow this morning, Mrs Sturgeon needed to establish a holding position.

She did so—with a characteristic canniness. To tremendous applause in the hall she announced: “I am determined that Scotland will have the ability to reconsider the question of independence and to do so before the UK leaves the EU…So I can confirm today that the Independence Referendum Bill will be published for consultation next week.” This is not another formal bid for independence. Mrs Sturgeon said nothing about securing approval in Westminster for such a referendum, or even putting the bill before legislators in Holyrood. But it does provide a sense of momentum and unifies the party, still extremely popular in Scotland, ahead of local elections next year.

That has ramifications for Brexit as a whole. It strengthens Mrs Sturgeon’s hand vis-a-vis London. The first minister has grumbled about Scotland being shut out by Theresa May’s already markedly controlling and centralising operation in Downing Street. She has insisted that Scotland remain inside the single market and threatened to put legislative and legal road blocks in the way of a Brexit deal. By dangling over Britain’s firmly unionist prime minister the prospect of a new independence referendum north of the border, she makes herself a bigger player in both London—and Brussels, where plenty (including Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s point man for Brexit) sympathise with her.

And this leverage can also be applied to Scotland’s place within the United Kingdom. Ramping up the case for independence—the argument that Scots have too little say over how they are governed—also ramps up the case for further devolution. Only last month Alex Neil, a former SNP minister, urged her to grab powers coming back from Brussels—over things like employment rights, farming and transport policy—for Holyrood and thus achieve what he calls “neo independence”. Leaving the EU will also exempt Britain from certain rules on tax harmonisation, he points out, potentially giving Scotland more freedom to set its own rates (of VAT, for example).

Indeed, this may be Mrs Sturgeon’s central goal. Read between the lines of her speech this morning and you see an argument for a post-Brexit Britain to go much farther down the road to internal federalism. “If you think for one second I’m not serious about doing what it takes to protect Scotland’s interests, then think again”, she warned. This is, in other words, probably a clever bluff that responds to strong feelings within the SNP. Quite how successfully it will do so will become clear over the rest of the conference (early reactions have been extremely enthusiastic).

Funnily enough, it also illustrates similarities between the SNP and the two main UK-wide parties. Both the Labour and Conservative conferences saw activists and their sensibilities extensively indulged: Jeremy Corbyn reeling out favourite left-wing tunes in Liverpool and Theresa May delighting her party by committing to a hard Brexit, and a crackdown on immigration, in Birmingham last week. The same activist-driven politics is on show in Glasgow now. North and south of Hadrian’s Wall, this seems to be the age of the coddled, unconfronted party member.

Still, the party is right to take some solace from the result. Firstly because the 19-point swing in its favour is the first solid sign that the party’s long slump, during and after its unpopular participation in the last coalition government, is bottoming out and perhaps easing off. A “comeback” in itself it is not, but it might herald the tentative beginnings of one.

Secondly—and more significantly—the result represents the first fruits of the party’s new strategy. When Labour was in Downing Street, the Lib Dems found a role as a pacifist, civil libertarian and slightly more left-wing alternative to the government. Under Nick Clegg, in power with the Tories, they often seemed like a split-the-difference party; offering merely to curb the excesses of the Conservatives to their right and Labour to their left (as he acknowledges in his recent memoirs). But the election of Mr Corbyn as Labour leader, the Brexit vote and Theresa May’s statist, sometimes authoritarian tone in her first months as prime minister have delivered the Lib Dems a three-fold opportunity to sharpen their liberal, centrist identity.

The thinking behind this is set out in a paper published last year by Mark Pack and David Howarth, two party strategists. They argue that the Lib Dems did so badly in last year’s general election, tumbling to eight parliamentary seats, partly because they lack an irreducible core of voters who identify with the party, whose allegiance is such that it can be mobilised even in tough electoral times. Labour, they point out, has the remains of the industrial working class to fall back on; the Tories have their own deep institutional network: churches, golf clubs and the like. The Lib Dems did not, so plunged through their previous electoral floor and kept on falling.

The task before the party, argue the two, is to build that sort of base: a core of perhaps 20% of voters—socially liberal, internationalist, pro-European, tech-savvy and well-educated—who identify with the party’s pro-openness reformism. Accordingly the Lib Dems should focus their research, campaigning and recruitment efforts more rigorously than in the past and in particular search out issues that appeal to and interest this group of voters (however little they rouse other parts of the electorate). Under Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, this approach provides opportunities for the Lib Dems, in their reduced state, to concentrate resources on certain metropolitan constituencies where they could conceivably come first: prosperous enclaves of southern England, university towns and the more comfortable corners of the big cities. Mr Farron’s speech at his party’s main annual gathering last month, pledging to stand up for Britain’s role in Europe, was a sort of love letter to these places.

Hence the relevance of Witney, a rolling, well-to-do archipelago of smart villages and hi-tech business parks just outside Oxford; a place where most people voted to Remain in the EU on June 23rd. While the Lib Dems have been doing well in council by-elections in such places in recent months, this was the first parliamentary test. Their campaign focused heavily on Brexit. Residents were urged to reject Mrs May’s nativist overtures at her party’s conference and to send the government a message about the need to keep Britain in the single market and avoid a “hard” break with the European club. And while these messages did not propel Liz Leffman (pictured above, right), the local candidate, across the winning line yesterday, she obtained a larger-than-expected vote share (the Tories had warned it could reach 30%, which discounting the usual expectations management suggested they anticipated something nearer 20%). A similar swing in a general election would see the Lib Dems take 26 seats from the Conservatives.

So treat Witney as a proof-of-concept. A more starkly liberal personality, deftly conveyed through relevant issues and particularly the ongoing battles over Brexit, offers the Lib Dems a way—albeit a long and treacherous one—out of the political wilderness. One by-election does not a trend make and an early general election next year (publicly dismissed by Mrs May but not surely not impossible, given her vast poll leads over Labour) may come much too soon for a widespread revival. But they have made a start.

“BREXIT-plus-plus-plus” was how Donald Trump—who also called himself “Mr Brexit”—termed his pitch to voters during his successful presidential campaign. Sure enough, many Americans will soon be waking up soon to a feeling similar to the one Remainers in Britain experienced on the morning of June 24th: bafflement at the failure of so many polls to predict the result, shock at the electorate’s defiance of expert opinion, concern for liberal values. If Mr Trump relishes the comparisons it is because he identifies with the architects of Britain’s departure from the European Union: like him, privileged demagogues deft at manipulating the public’s worst fears and instincts.

Yet these affinities confer few obvious advantages on Britain. Mr Trump may admire the country’s recent decision, but he will make an unpredictable, unfamiliar partner—especially compared with Hillary Clinton, an instinctive Anglophile. It says something about the immediate future of the “special relationship” so revered in London that the British politicians most experienced in dealing with America’s president-elect are Nigel Farage, a Brexiteering rabble-rouser (who stumped for him and is currently flying to Washington, DC to ingratiate himself further with the incoming administration) and Alex Salmond, a former first minister of Scotland (whom Mr Trump branded “a has-been and totally irrelevant” in a tiff over a Scottish golf resort).

What about the country’s leaders? Theresa May could hardly be more different in temperament from her new counterpart. The foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, though closer to him in style, has said: “The only reason I wouldn't visit some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.” In January British MPs debated banning Mr Trump from the country, calling him a “buffoon”, a “demagogue” and a “joke” (one using the word “idiot” thrice in five minutes). To say the British establishment is unenthusiastic about America’s president-elect would be to put it politely.

Nonetheless, the risks of a Trump presidency—protectionism, geopolitical turmoil, American isolationism—weigh heavy on British interests. And they do so all the more thanks to the decision in June that so animated Mr Trump: Brexit removes many of the shock absorbers that might have helped Britain to ride out the next few years.

Take trade. Mr Trump has long pledged to pursue a tough line in negotiations and seems to fancy a tariff war with China. Protectionism is infectious. If, as seems likely, Britain leaves the EU’s customs union on quitting the organisation, it may well find itself trying to negotiate new trade terms at a time when economies around the world are pulling up the drawbridge.

Meanwhile the British economy was already in a fragile state before last night’s result, with the pound weakened, business uncertainty mounting and some evidence of slowing investment. The economic shock of a Trump presidency may exacerbate these trends (though the pound briefly rose against the dollar as Mr Trump’s victory became clear). It will also harden politics in the mainland European countries with which Britain will shortly start negotiating, where populists emboldened by his win (most notably Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front) will reduce mainstream leaders’ freedom to approve a pragmatic deal with Britain.

Then there is security. A staple of the pro-Brexit campaign was that the existence of NATO made European defence cooperation unnecessary and that quitting the EU would thus not knock Britain’s influence as a military power. That did not reckon with America’s next president being as equivocal about NATO as is Mr Trump, who has pledged an “America first” doctrine requiring countries under its security umbrella to make their own arrangements. Britain could thus find itself falling into the gap between a less effective, more divided NATO on the one side and rapid moves towards EU defence integration on the other.

A single theme unifies these risks. Brexit is a giant shock to Britain’s place in the world. It will sever old links and require new ones to be forged. As some of its keenest proponents concede, this transition will bring painful costs. Most of all it demands lots of good will and flexibility on all sides. In so far as Mr Trump’s win means a meaner, more fractious, more volatile global order, it raises those costs and shrinks that space for compromise and consensus essential for a smooth Brexit.

Limiting the damage of a Trump presidency on a Brexiting Britain demands ambition and perspective from Mrs May. Her approach should be two-sided. First, build a new, closer alliance with Angela Merkel, not just on Brexit but on wider issues: the world economy, security, Russia and China. In Berlin and other European capitals officials complain that June’s referendum result has taken Britain’s mind off all other matters. The prime minister must not allow that to happen and instead work with Mrs Merkel as a bloc capable of countering Mr Trump’s worst traits.

Second, Mrs May should use Britain’s influence in America (which is significant, if not as much as Britons like to imagine) to attempt to moderate the new president, staying his hand when he does wrong and indulging his vanity when he does right. Mrs May already had her hands full with Brexit. Now, for Britain’s sake and that of the world, she must also deal with Mr Brexit himself.