EU Referendum


Brexit: not your property


26/11/2016




An excellent piece by Bruno Waterfield in The Times hides behind the paywall, where it's no business being.

Headed "British politicians can no longer hide behind EU’s veil of secrecy", Bruno tells us that "Brexit has not changed the default position for Whitehall's conduct of European Union negotiations: concealment, obfuscation and control freaky".

His tale starts with a press release from the Department for Exiting the EU, telling the press corps: "Davis travels to Brussels and Strasbourg", sent out just as the train alarm sounded and the TGV's doors closed on the last direct train to Strasbourg.

Unhelpfully for those of us who report here in the capital of the EU, Bruno writes, David Davis was already leaving Brussels, where he had been all morning, and was now on his way to Strasbourg.

Despite many requests for details of the visit, officials from both his department and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had refused to confirm when the secretary of state for Brexit would be in either city.

As press officers and special advisers refused to answer telephones and emails the aim of the operation became clear: to hide details of whom Mr Davis was meeting, where or when he was meeting them.

But, like all such operations, this one ended in farce. As the train left the station, The Times and Daily Mail were also on it; we had not believed the denials or paid heed to refusals to confirm his visit and had made our own plans.

The press release, timed to prevent any coverage on Monday, stated that in Brussels "the secretary of state paid a visit to the UK Representation to the European Union", Britain's embassy to the EU. Mr Davis’s officials stuck to that story but the truth was rather different.

He had in fact met Michel Barnier, the man the Commission likes to call the EU's "lead Brexit negotiator". And although talks had lasted 40 minutes on Monday morning, Mr Davis's officials had no intention of revealing this.

A couple of hours into the train journey Mr Barnier tweeted that he had met Mr Davis. The Whitehall spin doctors were aghast.

They were even more horrified to find that the Brussels correspondents they were trying to avoid were on the train with them. The expressions of horror on the faces of Mr Davis's minders, including a former political editor of the Daily Mail and a former director of Open Europe, were highly satisfying.

Mr Davis, of course, was highly relaxed about it all. The talks had been a "courtesy" and were in terms of substance "banal" – or so he told the insolent press who now confronted him en route to Strasbourg. An experienced politician and parliamentarian, he effortlessly turned the conversation elsewhere before reporters were asked to leave his first-class train carriage.

In Strasbourg it was little different. MEPs, like Mr Barnier, had nothing to hide when it came to meetings. Requests by British officials for the number of journalists to be restricted outside the meeting room to the BBC and two agency reporters were cheerfully ignored.

After the talks Mr Davis restricted himself to more banalities. Manfred Weber, one of Germany's most senior politicians, was less obliging.

Writes Bruno: "There are two morals to this story, which reminded this Brussels correspondent of almost 14 years standing of the most egregious stupidities of Gordon Brown's attempts to conceal or manipulate his EU negotiations".

The first is that other parties will not necessarily share the same desire to conceal or mislead the press (and thus the public), leaving Mr Davis, or any other British minister, looking foolish and, much worse, dishonest.

The second moral is much more important: after the Brexit referendum it cannot be business as usual. EU negotiations are no longer the property of a tiny circle of technocrats and civil service control freaks obsessed with secrecy and keeping the public out of it.

Business as usual is the traditional EU statecraft of taking decisions in a public-free zone, with consensus arrived at through bureaucratic procedures derived from the secretive world of diplomacy. The aim is to avoid the unwelcome introduction of public opinion and judgment into a closed process conducted in secrecy and between officials.

But things have changed. Brexit is now a topic of conversation in every pub and cafe, on every bus and tube, in every workplace and home. One of the most gratifying aspects of the referendum is this: everyone is now an expert on the EU; the public have taken ownership by taking the decision to leave.

Mr Davis and the Whitehall machine, Bruno concludes, need to take note. If they want to take the public with them on Brexit this negotiation can not be a secret diplomatic stitch-up that is business as usual.

And just to prove the point, we have an Irish politician – none other than Enda Kenny, the Republic's Prime Minister, declaring that Brexit is "impossible" within two years. He is thus calling for an extended transition period.

To anyone with more than two brain cells, this is so obvious that it's hardly worth repeating. We've been saying it for more than two years – nearly three now – in the pages of Flexcit and on this blog. It has defined the shape of our exit plan as we have concluded that we'll never get a "big bang" settlement in the time.

But, as well as being sneered at by the bubble dwellers and ignored by the legacy media, we have been confronted by an indifferent Government that, in the manner of David Davis, is practising mushroom management. The silence on the Government's intentions is now deafening.

Initially, we could accept that Mrs May needed some catch-up time, but as the months have progressed, we're not even getting the crumbs from the table. That tiny circle of technocrats and civil service control freaks quite obviously believe that Brexit is their property and they're not about to let us in on it.

The media is just as bad. Together with the Westminster politicians, they comprise that self-referential claque of ignoramuses who believe that they are soooooo superior to us plebs that their shit doesn't stink.

Enda Kenny, though, is just making a statement of the bleedin' obvious and, even though we've being saying it for all those years, that doesn't stop arsewipes such as Simon Nixon claiming that he's just invented the wheel, telling us the need for a transition deal has "been obvious to every business group and European Union policy expert since 24 June".

And now Enda Kenny has joined the know-all club, with the stunning observation that: "there's a growing feeling in Europe that there should be a transition period, and that the transition period will be longer than those two years". And then, with a prescience at which we can only marvel, he tells us: "I think it will be".

So, five months down the line since the referendum, these geniuses are finally coming to a conclusion we reach on page 13 of Flexcit, with nearly 400 more pages to go. And we're the ones who are supposed to sit back and watch in awe as our politicians stumble around in the dark, trying to catch up with us, waiting for the applause like performing seals, every time they fart.

Well, Bruno has said it. EU negotiations are no longer the property of a tiny circle of technocrats and civil service control freaks obsessed with secrecy and keeping the public out of it. They are not the property of the media, nor the self-serving claque of big-ego academics, lawyers and think-tankers, and they sure as hell don't belong to the ranks of prattling, terminally ignorant MPs.

This was the people's referendum and the outcome also belongs to the people. And if we are continually kept out of the loop, the growing irritation is going to transform into something much more aggressive and harder to contain. The warnings are there – they should be heeded.