Government moves to damp down No Deal panic created by leadership bidding war

The bidding war between Johnson and Hunt grows more depressing by the day. The ideal differentiation would have been Hunt the rationalist pointing out the huge risks of Johnson’s “ hell or high water” date with the 31 October deadline. But this is no seminar. It’s a struggle to woo a tiny electorate supposedly in a frenzy to Leave  before the victor confronts two very different electorates in turn, first the Commons and then if he gets that far, the entire electorate in a general election.

Later Hunt  has fleshed out his No Deal policy

 Jeremy Hunt’s 10 point no-deal Brexit plan

Jeremy Hunt has set a “hard deadline” for negotiating a new Brexit deal, warning Brussels that if no agreement is reached he will call off talks by September 30 and switch to a no-deal footing. .. Whilst the Foreign Secretary insisted that his priority was securing a better deal, he said would begin ratcheting up no-deal preparations on “day one” in Downing Street in case Brussels “refuses to budge”. 

Speaking in central London, Mr Hunt said he would first seek the approval of Parliament for his new Brexit plan before heading to Brussels to renegotiate with a clear mandate from MPs. 

The discussions would last for three weeks, he said, but would be cancelled if by September 30 it became apparent that a fresh offer stood no “realistic chance” of being ratified by Parliament. 

“If my judgement is that there is no deal to be done I will immediately cease all discussions with the European Union and focus the whole country’s attention on no deal preparations,

1. He says he would begin “immediate ramping up of no deal preparations” on his first day in Downing Street.
   All government departments will be expected to act on the basis that we are leaving without a deal on October 31st and, he adds, all leave in August will be cancelled unless department heads say their preparations are on track.
2. He will assembled a no-deal Cabinet Task Force, with similar powers to COBRA, which he would chair.
   The task force would identify weaknesses in government preparations and improve them, develop financial support for export industries, and approve infrastructure changes.
3. Mr Hunt will create a new Brussels negotiating team which will include members of the ERG, the DUP and moderate, Scottish and Welsh Tories.
   It will be led by the Brexit Secretary and Crawford Falconer, the UK’s top trade negotiator. They will be tasked with producing an alternative exit deal, based on the alternative arrangements proposals. The plan will be published by the end of August, Mr Hunt says.
4. Mr Hunt intends to hold new talks with European leaders during July and August.
5. He will establish a National Logistics Committee led by the Department for Transport to produce a plan to keep goods flowing in and out of the UK in the event of No Deal.
   This will include an assessment of any emergency powers required to ensure ports and airports will work in a coordinated way nationally.
6. The Treasury will start preparations on a No Deal Brexit Budget to be delivered in the first week parliament is back in September.
   These will include his pledges to cut corporation tax from 19 per cent to 12.5 per cent and slashing business rates for 90 per cent of high street businesses.
7. The Treasury will also create a £6bn fund for the fishing and farming sectors who export to Europe to ease transition.
8. His government will pursue zero-tariffs where suitable but will keep open the possibility of import tariffs for certain goods to protect industries such as farming.
9. Mr Hunt will pursue new customs solutions to prevent a hard border arising between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
10. He will seek to gain a Parliamentary majority for his Brexit plan and then will head to Brussels to renegotiate the withdrawal agreement.
    Mr Hunt will then decide by September 30 if a new deal can be approved by the Commons.

 

Huffpost’s Paul Waugh brilliantly sums up where we’re at.   

With ballot papers sent out this weekend (and most members return them pretty damned quickly), Team Hunt know their man hasn’t got much time to win members round. For many of them, Johnson is the predator, Hunt is the prey. In what looks like a last-ditch masochism strategy, he gives a speech at 11am followed by a Q&A and then appears on SkyNews for a 7pm interview with Kay Burley (and she won’t pull her punches even though this was meant to be a head-to-head debate with Johnson). 

If Hunt says the word ‘turbocharge the economy’ one more time, political hacks’ heads may explode. Yet he has to somehow look like he will protect Britons hit by no-deal. This is particularly true after he walked straight into that elephant trap of a question from Andrew Marr that gifted Labour the headline ‘firms going bust is a price worth paying for Brexit’. Of course, Hunt didn’t actually say those words but when asked if he was prepared to countenance bankrupt family owned businesses, he replied: “I would do so, but I’d do it with a heavy heart”.

The problem is that Hunt risks sounding not just like a paler version of Johnson, but like a paler version of Jeremy Corbyn. The idea of splurging Philip Hammond’s £20bn ‘headroom’ will dismay some fiscal conservatives, but it also undermines the Tories’ whole ‘magic money tree’ attack on Corbynomics (a mix of extra borrowing and more spending to stimulate the economy). After years of austerity, some voters may well ask why they should buy Coke Zero when they can have The Real Thing?

As for Boris Johnson, he will float above the fray today, safe in the knowledge that his strategy for wooing Tory MPs and then members is paying off. It’s not so much that he is avoiding media scrutiny, but more that he actually ignores it even in an interview. His session with SkyNews’s Sophy Ridge yesterday was a case in point, where he shrugged aside EU threats of a sudden imposition of tariffs in a no-deal Brexit, suggesting Brussels would agree a ‘standstill’ arrangement.

There’s a growing mood among the EU27 and at Westminster that a Halloween no-deal exit is inevitable. This is partly because parliament, for all its anti no-deal majority, won’t find a way to force Johnson’s hand. It’s partly because there just aren’t enough MPs (Tories or independents) willing to back a no-confidence vote. And it’s partly because some in Brussels think the Dover gridlocked chaos of no-deal (even with an EU-imposed tighter border in Northern Ireland) will force Johnson back to the negotiating table with his tail between his legs.

One reason for the difficulty British politics finds itself in right now is not populism, but (as Ian Leslie coined it recently) ‘simplism’: the belief that very complex problems can be solved with simple solution. That ranges from the complex sense of disenfranchisement in English towns being solved by cutting ties to the EU and spending ‘£350m a week on the NHS’, to the brain-scrambling problem of the Irish border being solved by ‘technological’ magic…..

Meanwhile on Labour..  Do the party divisions over Corbyn and what he stands for, added to  the persistence of  the bitter anti- semitism dispute fatally weaken the cause of a second referendum and Remain? It’s starting to look like it..

Buried underneath the focus on the gossip about Corbyn’s health, the Times had a much more important story: the claims of bullying within the leader’s office. And there was a really telling quote from chief of staff Karie Murphy on Brexit to the Labour leader on the issue of a second referendum: “We’re not doing that, we are not selling out our class.”

Meanwhile it’s  left to  hat stout Brexiteer  International Trade secretary Liam Fox no less,  to  try to  damp down  a No Deal panic. Just shows how far the pendulum has swung towards No Deal as the Tory orthodoxy

Fox, the international trade secretary, said that while the UK was “not entirely in control” of whether no deal happened, he believed it would not.

“You have got a new commission coming in, and we will have a new prime minister. The European Union have to listen to the economic realities,” he told BBC Radio 5 Live.

“It’s rational. Britain is not asking for anything that’s unreasonable. We’re simply saying: we have an agreement to leave the European Union. We want some changes to the backstop arrangement to make it get through parliament. And then we can leave with a deal, which is in everybody’s interests.”

Hancock, the health secretary, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Johnson’s pledge to leave on 31 October “do or die” minimised the risk of no deal.

“The best way to deliver Brexit is with a deadline, and Boris is the only candidate with a deadline. No deadline risks no Brexit, and slip-sliding towards a second referendum, which I don’t want to see.”

Great tweet about vicar of Bray Hancock from the Sun’s Tom Newton Dunn

Question of the day, Mrs Merton-esque, from John Humphrys to Matt Hancock: “What first attracted you to support the man who will be the next Prime Minister?” #r4today

 

Finally.. the latest advice from the superBrexiteers in Brexit Central

The new Prime Minister needs a credible negotiation strategy

It is going to be déjà vu all over again, unless the new PM has a clear strategy to leave the EU on the basis of what game theorists call a non-cooperative solution. That is one that the EU cannot block if it is not willing to cooperate in producing a solution that makes both sides better off.

This means that the starting point for any negotiations with the EU cannot be the WA. The EU says that it will not renegotiate this and it remains completely unacceptable to the vast majority of the British people.

How a British Prime Minister could collaborate with the EU to produce this document and how so many MPs could subsequently vote for it is beyond me. The WA is nothing less than a venus flytrap. It therefore needs to be avoided at all costs.

In any case, the WA does not offer a ‘deal’ about a future relationship in any meaningful sense. For example, there is nothing on services which account for 80% of UK GDP. Trade in services will be negotiated after the UK leaves the EU. It is completely bizarre for MPs to object to leaving the EU without a deal, when the WA itself involves leaving the EU without a deal. 

A non-cooperative solution requires the UK to specify both the terms under which it will leave the EU and the terms under which it will trade with the EU in the future. And to do so in a way that the EU cannot block.

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