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1/ Thread - why does Johnson's plan have support from the hardliners, but not May's Withdrawal Agreement. Didn't people think Brexit was about ending Freedom of Movement?
2/ In the Conservative conference, with a psychopathic smirk, Prit Patel vowed to end “freedom once and for all”.
3/
Theresa May as home secretary as well as PM was also a freedom of movement (FoM) obsessive. Ending FoM was the star around which all other concerns orbited. Prioritising it meant leaving the single market (which has FoM as one of its requisite 4 freedoms).
Theresa May as home secretary as well as PM was also a freedom of movement (FoM) obsessive. Ending FoM was the star around which all other concerns orbited. Prioritising it meant leaving the single market (which has FoM as one of its requisite 4 freedoms).
4/ Immigration was the #1 concern of both leave and remain voters in the 2016 referendum, so for leavers ending FoM was their big prize to be coveted over all else.
5/ Yet ending it via May’s withdrawal agreement (WA) was not enough for Brexiter MP’s. After repeated “meaningful votes”, May’s deal was rejected by MP’s, especially hard line Brexiters. Why was this and why do these same MP’s now back Johnson’s plan?
6/ May’s WA involved an effective UK wide customs union with the EU in perpetuity, but only regulatory alignment for goods within NI. The UK could diverge from EU rules. This means regulatory checks between the mainland and the UK.
7/ However by being within a customs union with the EU the ability to forge new trade deals with regulation-divergent third countries is limited. For example lowering food standards in the UK to make a deal with the US might be threatened.
8/ May’s WA also included 100 pages of level playing field rules on worker’s rights, environmental protections state aid, tax.
9/ Ending FoM might be the prize for the leave electorate and some social conservative MP’s who want to appease their constituents, but it isn’t the prize for the hard liners.
10/ Promising to end FoM for them was just a means to an end. And that end was the removal of regulations protecting the environment, workers.
11/ Johnson’s proposal ends this regulatory alignment, and pulls Great Britain and NI out of the customs union. This adds customs checks on top of regulatory checks with no commitment to maintain a level playing field. This is the prize the ERG were looking for.
12/ The Vote leave and Leave EU campaigns both drummed up support for Brexit by playing on the anti-immigrant sentiment of voters, but the people behind Brexit have much bigger fish to fry.
13/ For one thing, they want immigrants. It’s just they don’t want these immigrants to have any protections, rights, or decent pay.
14/ As an immigration expert friend of mine said “If cheap immigrant labour is required to make them profits then they will facilitate this no matter what they say about cracking down on immigration and free movement...
15/ "..…And cheap labour will be required in their low tax, low regulation economy especially as EU workers will simply leave to seek better conditions/pay/jobs elsewhere.”
So Poles out, Ukrainians in working under UAE conditions.
So Poles out, Ukrainians in working under UAE conditions.
16/ Even Patel who is pushing ending FoM from her position as <check notes> Home Secretary, has a history of corruption, funding from lobbyists blogs.bath.ac.uk/iprblog/2017/1…
17/
It’s no stretch to imagine she is saying one thing for political purposes (appealing to both anti FoM MP’s and anti-FoM voters) whilst helping engineer the deregulated post Brexit Britain her lobbyist funders request.
It’s no stretch to imagine she is saying one thing for political purposes (appealing to both anti FoM MP’s and anti-FoM voters) whilst helping engineer the deregulated post Brexit Britain her lobbyist funders request.
18/ Laura Kuennsberg deleted a tweet quoting a senior Tory saying, with respect to Israel “The entire apparatus has turned a blind eye to a corrupt relationship that allows a country to buy access”.
19/ Guess what happened this week? Along with the Backstop, Johnson has removed the intent to respect the level playing field in the political declaration: independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi… 
20/ May didn’t have a problem with the level playing field side. She only cared about immigration. She was and is an immigration obsessive, who prioritised ending Freedom of Movement over all else.
21/ If it wasn’t for that, she could have offered a compromise deal with the commons offering single market and potentially customs union. In that “branching history” Brexit would have been over years ago.
22/ But ending FoM trumped such practical concerns and for the ERG, ending regulatory safeguards trumped even that.
The ERG gambled correctly that they could get rid of May and get a deal that was more in line with their crazy ideology or go for no deal instead.
The ERG gambled correctly that they could get rid of May and get a deal that was more in line with their crazy ideology or go for no deal instead.
23/ Another reason the ERG may be supporting Johnson’s plan because they know they know it won’t happen. The plan is merely part of the Potemkin façade of pretending to a domestic audience (for general election campaigning purposes)...
24/ that the failure of the UK to achieve a deal is the EU’s fault. By submitting a deal which breaks the Good Friday agreement (aka the Belfast agreement), the failure of the plan is ensured.
25/ This, Benn act and Hungarian veto excepted, leads to no deal or a GE won on people vs establishment where the Tories can perhaps win a majority on a no deal ticket. That’s a plan the ERG can truly support.
26/ What kind of political calculation is this though? The ageing Tory demographic might buy into the anti immigration rhetoric, but the third worldification of the UK...
27/ - the dismantling of free healthcare, free education, benefits, the state, that’s “niche”. Interestingly as perhaps a decoy move, they are wrapping Brexit in a torrent of public spending promises to both out-do the Labour party, ...
28/ ...appealing to working classes, middle classes, but also to mislead the electorate that no deal Brexit or this 2 border deal won’t have a material impact on government purse strings.
29/ I.e. instead of leveling with the public that Brexit involves austerity max, they are pretending the UK can “style it out” with stimulus.
30/ The Tories must know that all of the above will go down like a bucket of cold sick with the EU. That’s intentional – it helps burn bridges, undermines attempts to rejoin. But do they really think politically this will work out for them?
31/ The Tory party has weighed up the pros and cons of this scorched earth approach and concluded this is their best shot. I’d like to see their working because from the outside it looks like they are just doubling down, tripling down on the losing side of a culture war.
32/ A losing side that demographically, is in run-off.
Like the labour party, the Tory party is a series of factions. Vote Leave leveraged the masses dislike of immigration to win the 2016 poll.
Like the labour party, the Tory party is a series of factions. Vote Leave leveraged the masses dislike of immigration to win the 2016 poll.
33/ Similarly the hardcore de-regulator minority in the Tory party is leveraging anti-immigration to achieve a deregulated, small state, Social Darwinist UK, or Britain – as the collateral damage of losing Northern Ireland or Scotland doesn’t faze them.
34/ Demagoguery defined is “political activity or practices that seek support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument”.
35/ The hardcore deregulator demagogues within the Tory party are using people’s prejudices to pursue a far more damaging agenda than most realise. Brexit’s anti-immigration appeal is a Trojan horse for the bonfire to come. The electorate were the useful idiots in 2016.
36/ Now it’s Tory MP’s and some Labour MP’s who support Johnson’s 2 border proposal.
May’s deal didn’t appeal because it didn’t go far enough for these de-regulators.
May’s deal didn’t appeal because it didn’t go far enough for these de-regulators.
37/ Ending FoM was enough to appease the masses, and enough to appease various socially conservative MP’s of all stripes who were intimidated by their anti-immigrant constituents.But it was not enough to appease the ideologues who would be deprived of their real prize...
38/ – The chance to dismantle all vestiges of social democracy within the UK state.
They knew if Johnson was installed, they wouldn’t just get a different deal or no deal, they’d get a new government whose core objective was to pursue the implementation of this target.
/ends
They knew if Johnson was installed, they wouldn’t just get a different deal or no deal, they’d get a new government whose core objective was to pursue the implementation of this target.
/ends
P.s. I forgot to mention the spin on why the masses would want deregulation, is "sovereignty". It's apparently patriotic to be exempt from supranational rules. Britain is too "exceptional" to be expected to comply with international regulations.
P.P.S. Yet strangely there isn't actually any appetite to make these rules?
P.P.P.S Perhaps they don't care about making rules at all, because the agricultural rules will just be whatever the US tells them they will be?
This could be the tweet assuming it's not a doctored screenshot
And now this
