Politics after the New Brexit Deal

The summer seems like a million years ago now, but of Boris Johnson's no deal bombast I remember writing that if he does manage to get a deal with Brussels, it would be a respray of Theresa May's efforts. Well, Johnson has indeed struck a deal. And he managed to plagiarise chunks of the previous deal, but making it much worse. We've seen the outline of of what he was aiming for, but what did he get?

In the new text, the entirety of the UK leaves the EU's customs union. This, readers will recall, was one of the big draws of Brexit: the idea we could be free to swashbuckle our way around the world piling up lucrative trade deals and leaving our former EU partners in the dust. In reality, it's the effective subordination of the country's economic health to electorally expedient photo opps. However, one part of the UK - Northern Ireland, naturally - only appears to be outside of the customs union. In practice, it remains within it. Effectively, the new customs border between the north and the republic is a fiction because the border moves into the Irish Sea. Goods coming into the north will be checked, and duty paid on anything at risk of ending up in the Irish republic. The BBC has a helpful explainer. Effectively, the UK has turned itself into the border guard for the EU, under EU supervision and subject to the European Court of Justice. Taking back control, you say? These arrangements, including the north's alignment with the EU single market on some VAT rules are still subject to periodic vote by the Northern Ireland Assembly, but between Johnson's proposals and these negotiations the veto wielded by any community has been done away with. Continuation with or reversion back to UK rules is now by a simple majority vote of Assembly members. Everything else from May's deal is kept.

Therefore, it's still awful. Remember, this is an insurance policy if these arrangements are not superseded by the coming trade deal with the EU, but whatever we end up with it's not going to be what the UK has now, and it is the Tories who are negotiating it. Therefore the hard Brexiteer's dream of a tax haven off the north western coast of Europe walks the earth again. Their enthusiastic welcome of regulatory divergence only means one thing: the considerable costs of Brexit are due to get offloaded onto us. Behind the legalese and boring technocracy, there is a plan, a class war plan to make us pay - and the EU, that nice Mr Barnier and the nicer Mr Juncker, are complicit. Keir Starmer gets it, and Jeremy Corbyn has announced Labour's opposition to this tawdry document. Despite this, what are the chances Johnson can rely on opposition votes to get it through the Commons on Saturday? If scabbing on the interests of our class and opening Britain up to a deregulation bonanza doesn't move would-be rebels, perhaps remembrance of Jo Cox will. It is less than a month since Boris Johnson mocked MP's concerns about their safety and tried annexing her to the hard Brexit cause. As voting for the deal means empowering the most disgusting and morally bankrupt creature to have occupied Downing Street for decades, we'll soon see how well her memory is kept. And if after all that, if even a residue of solidarity and compassion doesn't do the job, the threat of the removal of the whip might. Now is not the time for prevarication. The moment requires steel.

And everywhere else? Andrew Bridgen, the hard Brexit bell wether (readers might be tempted to substitute 'wether' for another word) tendered his capitulation live on Channel Four. "It looks like Brexit and smells like Brexit - that's Brexit for me" chuntered this pathetic hobbit. With leading ERG supporters in the cabinet, and their "principled" opposition of the last year, the speechifying about the sanctity of the union, and attacks on May's deal for detaching Northern Ireland now forgotten, all of this was for absolutely nothing. Well, not entirely nothing. Their unhinged opposition has successfully transformed the Tory party into an English nationalist outfit and it's the cracked priorities of the hard right now hegemonising matters. The split in the core Tory constituency is resolving in favour of the complete rout of EU-oriented business and finance and the consolidation of the most backward and socially regressive sections of capital.

Yet, mark my words, most of the ex-Tory "rebels" are going to submit to this. There are significant differences between the factions of the boss class, but few if any of our independent Tories are troubled by the bonfire of the regulations this shoddy document promises. Dismantling the pathetic workers' protections we have, opening the NHS to more profit-taking, the tearing up of food standards, Johnson's Trump-first Brexit doesn't alter things for them. As long as the old class relations keep chugging, they'll reconcile themselves to the new set up eventually. Johnson might even give them the whip back as a thank you for publicly demonstrating how thin their opposition was.

The only schadenfreude to be had here is about the sorry position the DUP are in. Understandably, Johnson's deal is unacceptable to them. They are unionists after all, and the disappearance of their veto means the disappearance of their reason to exist. There's stitching up, but the DUP's erstwhile allies on the Tory right have filleted them like a kipper. The DUP were too willing to confer the Bakers, the Bridgens, and the Moggs a patriotic fig leaf only to find their concerns now fall on deaf ears. Johnson has reasoned, and it might well turn out to be the case, that he doesn't need their votes any more and we can get back to Westminster business-as-usual in forgetting about Northern Ireland and its politics. However the vote falls, may the DUP's slide into marginalisation be lingering and painful for all concerned.

And there we have the state of play. Brexit on a knife edge, the making and breaking of Boris Johnson in the balance, the possibility of heading off a new tranche of attacks on our people. What happens on Saturday could set the tone and the character of our politics for a generation. Time for some serious thinking and for would-be Labour rebels to examine their consciences, and make their mind up about what side they're on.

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