Over the weekend the new Tory Home Secretary Sajid Javid decided to tear up the longstanding British convention that our government opposes the death penalty in all circumstances. He apparently made this decision entirely on his own, without any cabinet discussion, legal advice, or permission from the Prime Minister.
Theresa May is such a weak and incompetent leader that she's absolutely failed to correct or discipline Javid for making up government policy on the hoof, and ended up eventually agreeing with him in order to minimise the scandal, which is a very dangerous green light to all of her other ministers to just completely make things up as they go along without fear of repercussions.
It's possible to imagine that May's lackadaisical attitude to Javid inventing policy on the hoof could stem from the extraordinarily weak political position she's in (very few remaining allies, razor thin majority in parliament, under constant threat of a "no confidence" vote triggered by Jacob Rees-Mogg and the ERG Brextremists) but this incompetence isn't actually new.
Back during the 2017 General Election campaign her (now resigned in disgrace) Defence Secretary Michael Fallon made the shocking announcement that Britain would consider using nuclear weapons as attack weapons, which amounted to a sudden declaration that the UK is abandoning the long-established "no first strike" policy, and endangering the "Mutually Assured Destruction" deterrence compromise that has existed between the nuclear powers since the 1950s (by giving other nuclear powers a clear incentive to get their strike in first before Theresa May does).
Amazingly Fallon made this seismic change to Britain's nuclear weapons policy without cabinet discussion, legal advice, or permission from the Prime Minister. But Theresa May decided not to discipline him or put the record straight on Britain's actual nuclear weapons policy for fear of making one of her ministers look like a fool during an election campaign.
Even more amazing was the way the media (and especially the BBC) completely ignored this extraordinary on the hoof abandonment of Britain's longstanding nuclear weapons strategy in favour of a certifiably insane "yes first strike" policy, and instead focused all of their nuclear weapons political questions on relentlessly attacking Jeremy Corbyn for sticking with the traditional "no first strike" policy!
If Theresa May allows her ministers to just make up new policies on issues as important as nuclear weapons and the death penalty with no discussion, legal advice or permission, her incompetence and weak leadership is clearly and obviously a danger to Britain, British standards, and the British way of life.
And the fact that she actually ends up agreeing with them in order to save face, even though they went behind her back to announce these new policies has set a dangerous precedent. It doesn't matter how dangerous, regressive, un-British, or downright insane the new policy, she'll probably end up green lighting it just to avoid the fuss of disciplining them and putting the record straight.
Even if you somehow agree with the Fallon's crackpot "yes first strike" strategy or Javid's efforts to undermine Britain's longstanding opposition to the death penalty, there's absolutely no way that you can agree that the correct way to introduce these wild new policies was to do it behind Theresa May's back, safe in the knowledge that she's such a weak and directionless leader that she'd simply agree to them after the fact to avoid a fuss.
And if the non-reaction of the bulk of the mainstream media to Theresa May letting her ministers go unpunished for repeatedly going behind her back to announce wild new policies this is anything to go by, then she's not going to be held to account for this dangerously weak and incompetent attitude either.
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A spectacularly misleading article in the Independent by the little-known hack Benjamin Kentish has gone super-viral on Twitter after it's been picked up by the anti-Corbyn mob (a combination of marginalised pro-neoliberal Labour right-wingers, Tory concern trolls, and extreme Remainers who are just as prepared to lie and deceive to achieve their agenda as the Brextremists are).
In this article I'm going to go through some of the stuff Jeremy Corbyn actually said in his speech, and expose the cynical selective quotation and manufactured outrage tactics that helped this shocking piece of "journalism" to go mega-viral.
Selective quotations
The Independent article about Jeremy Corbyn's speech to the EFF (the British manufacturing industry) manages to squeeze two selective quotations from the speech into the title alone.
This selective quotation tactic has really got the anti-Corbyn mob and the Remain extremists frothing at the mouth.
When Jeremy Corbyn actually spoke about the "benefit" of Brexit, he was actually making the point that the Tory government had squandered the "one benefit" of Brexit, which is the way the devaluation of the pound should have made British exports more competitive.
Here is the relevant section:
"Our exporters should be able to take proper advantage of the one benefit to them that Brexit has already brought – a more competitive pound.
After the EU referendum result the pound became more competitive and that should have helped our exporters.
But they are being sold out by a lack of a Conservative Government industrial plan which has left our economy far too reliant on imports."
Omission of this vital bit of context can only have been deliberate.
The next selective quotation is even worse. When the article quotes Corbyn talking about "cheap labour from abroad" the objective is clearly to get people furious that he's seemingly attacking immigration and the free movement of labour within the EU, but what he was actually talking about was the problem with globalisation and the offshoring of production to sweatshops in places with extremely low wages, poor workers' rights, and weak environmental standards.
Here's the relevant section of the speech in full:
"For too many of our people today the spread of insecure work, low pay and zero hours or temporary contracts is causing stress, debt and despondency.
It could not be clearer that change is needed, we must aim for something better.
Our new economic approach is necessary because for the last forty years a kind of magical thinking has dominated the way Britain is run.
We’ve been told that it’s good, even advanced, for our country to manufacture less and less and to rely instead on cheap labour abroad to produce imports while we focus on the City of London and the financial sector.
While many economics professionals, politicians and City types insisted this was all a strength the banking crash confirmed it was in fact a profound weakness.
A lack of support for manufacturing is sucking the dynamism out of our economy, pay from the pockets of our workers and any hope of secure well-paid jobs from a generation of our young people.
This is why Labour is committed to turning things around."
It's also worth noting that as well as the "to produce imports" part having disappeared, the word "from" has mysteriously appeared too.
In the body of the article the selective quotation tactic is continued with another use of the brazenly traduced "cheap labour from abroad" quote to imply that Corbyn is attacking immigration and the free movement of Labour rather than critiquing the offshoring of manufacturing and production.
Given that the selective and inaccurate quotation tactic was used both in the body and the title of the article, there can be little doubt that the idea was to manufacture as much outrage as possible. And the sheer number of outrage shares on Twitter just goes to show that this kind of cynical and dishonest manipulation works a treat.
Trump
The article works incredibly hard to create the impression that Jeremy Corbyn is imitating Donald Trump's "America First" rhetoric, rather than expressing his concerns about globalisation, privatisation, and offshoring that have remained consistent for decades.
This attempt to enrage the reader by casting Corbyn's speech as some kind of Trump-style posturing is particularly misleading because the speech actually criticises Donald Trump three times!
Here are all of the mentions of Donald trump in the speech:
"No amount of desperate attempts to cosy up to President Trump would compensate for the damage done by getting this [Brexit] wrong. Now is the time to put people’s jobs and living standards first."
"It must be said however that wanting to build it in Britain is not turning away from the world, nor some return to protectionism or Trump-style trade wars."
"A botched Tory Brexit will sell our manufacturers short with the fantasy of a free trading buccaneering future which in reality would be a nightmare of our public services sold to multinational companies and our country in hock to Donald Trump whilst we all eat chlorinated chicken."
It takes some incredible amount of chutzpah to cast a speech as Trumpian when the content is highly critical of Donald Trump, but that's exactly what's been done, and exactly what a massive number of delusional right-wing "centrists" and easily-led Remainers have fallen for.
The rest of the speech
The hatchet job article worked incredibly hard to whip up fury over a few selective quotations and a desperately misleading effort to portray it as Trumpian rhetoric, but in doing so it neglected to even mention other aspects of the speech.
Procurement
"If [Theresa May] is so serious about taking back control why has her Government offshored the production of our new British passports to France?
Workers in Gateshead were making them and that work has been taken away from that community.
Unsurprisingly the French aren’t queuing up to have their French passports made in Britain.
We have plenty of capacity to build train carriages in the UK and yet repeatedly over recent years these contracts have been farmed out abroad, costing our economy crucial investment, jobs for workers and tax revenues.
Carrying on like this is simply not sustainable."
Critiquing Tory anti-EU rhetoric
"Too often, we have been told by Conservatives who are ideologically opposed to supporting our industries that EU rules prevent us from supporting our own economy.
But if you go to Germany you’ll struggle to find a train that wasn’t built there, even though they’re currently governed by the same rules as us.
When the steel crisis hit in 2016 Italy, Germany and France all intervened legally under existing state aid rules but our government sat back and did nothing."
Regional development
"The next Labour government will rebalance our economy so that there is prosperity in every region and nation.
We will do this by setting up a national investment bank and a network of regional development banks to provide capital to the productive, real economy that secures good skilled jobs."
Housing
"We will focus relentlessly on ending the housing crisis caused by the Conservatives and their uncompromising commitment to the free market.
We will build homes for the many not investment opportunities for the few and with them will come a new generation of zero carbon homes, creating new training opportunities and skilled jobs."
Solar industry
"Once innovators [in solar development], we are now falling back as the industry takes off across Europe. And why?
British solar firms were hit by cuts to subsidies in 2015 and 2016 and changes to business rates for buildings with rooftop panels.
Why did the Tory government do this? To save a few pounds in the short term, yet it has cost us jobs and innovation.
As a result between now and 2022 France is forecast to add five times as much solar capacity as the UK, Germany ten times."
Outsourcing
"When there are billions of pounds of public money and thousands of skilled jobs at stake we cannot just focus on saving a quick buck when awarding these contracts.
It is a totally false economy.
Instead by considering public interest such as job creation and the supply chains, we can grow our economy in a way that works for everybody.
Just today a cross-party committee of MPs has said that the stated reasons for contracting out services to save taxpayers money and to encourage innovation in delivery are too often simply not being met.
In the words of the Public Accounts Committee 'there has emerged a small group of large companies which are expert at winning contracts but do not always deliver a good service'."
Customs Union
"BMW, Airbus, and companies after company has warned of the real and damaging effects of Conservative customs chaos.
Theresa May and her warring cabinet should think again, even at this late stage and reconsider the option of negotiating a brand new customs union.
This decision needn’t be a matter of ideology, or divisions in the Tory Party. It’s a matter of practical common sense.
It’s not often that the Labour Party and the Institute of Directors, the CBI and the TUC agree, we need to negotiate a new customs union. What will help our manufacturing industries?
The companies themselves are giving us a clear answer. The government should listen to it.
But the Prime Minister seems more willing to listen to Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson.
Never before has a Prime Minister discarded the interests of the country so recklessly in favour of the interests of their own party or their own self-preservation."
A new deal for British businesses
"The very richest companies must pay a bit more tax and pay their workers better and in return we will train our people to have the skills our economy needs, upgrade our creaking infrastructure and provide the planning and support to help industry compete on the world stage.
And those companies that we do business with as the government will have to be at the forefront of best practice to create social as well as economic value.
Firms our government does business with will have to: properly pay their taxes, respect workers rights, provide equal opportunities, protect the environment, train their workers, pay their suppliers on time and end boardroom excess by moving to a 20-1 limit on the gap between the lowest and highest paid.
That is the deal that we want to make with businesses, it’s one that will benefit our whole economy."
Propaganda
The sheer amount of detail that was left out in order to traduce and distort Corbyn's speech into looking like a trumpian extreme-Brexit anti-immigrant rant is extraordinary.
If the so-called journalist had any integrity at all he would surely have focused on the fact Labour are committed to securing a customs deal with the EU (a very significant difference from the Tory approach), and would have at least bothered to mention the bold "new deal" that Corbyn offered to Britain's business leaders.
But no, Jeremy Corbyn's bold "new deal" offer to British business leaders that formed the actual conclusion to the speech wasn't even mentioned once!
The truly sad thing is that it's highly likely that vastly more people will end up believing the warped version of events described in this shockingly deceptive hatchet job, than those who will actually encounter a more honest account of what was actually said.
What you can do:
- You could share this AAV article on social media to provide a more honest interpretation of what Jeremy Corbyn said.
- You could share the full transcript of the speech (here)
- You could add your comments on the Independent article to point out what a deceptive hatchet job it is, or correct people on social media who are using this desperate piece of propaganda to launch their own deceptive anti-Corbyn rants.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
So much has been happening in relation to Brexit over the last few weeks it's been difficult to keep on top of it all, especially given the incredibly sketchy mainstream media coverage.
Party Political chaos
Understandably a lot of coverage has been given to the fact that the Lib-Dem leader and his predecessor Tim Farron didn't even bother to turn up for a crucial knife-edge Brexit vote, despite having misleadingly championed themselves as anti-Brexit saviours for the last two years. Tim Farron's reason for missing the crucial vote was that he was too busy giving a gay-bashing speech about how he's such a victim because his outdated views on gay sex are pretty damned unpopular these days!
Also a lot of attention has fallen on a number of Tory grandstanders like Anna Soubry and Justine Greening who made passionate interventions to criticise the hard-right ERG Tory Brextremists who dictate Theresa May's every move, and to call for a second referendum. But for some reason very much less media attention has been given to the fact that they caved in to Theresa May's threats of another Tory meltdown of a General Election, and actually voted to support the ERG Brextremists that they pretend to oppose just to save their own skins from the threat of another General Election.
Then there's the four Labour cranks who repeatedly cast decisive votes alongside the hard-right ERG Brextremists too. Right-wing Blairite MPs have been implacably opposed the concept of reselection for MPs (a democratic safeguard against political squatters that is used by the SNP and is absolutely commonplace in other countries), but the treacherous scheming of Kate Hoey, John Mann, Graham Stringer, and Frank Field to prop up Theresa May's shambolic government and facilitate the ruinous "no deal" catastrophe the ERG Brextremists are plotting is surely grounds for the introduction of reselection so local people can get rid of these Tory collaborators.
The NC3 trade deal amendment
Beneath all of the party political chaos at least one MP was actually getting on with their job. Caroline Lucas of the Green Party tabled an amendment to the Tory governments' Trade Bill, which sought to ensure that "all post-Brexit free trade deals are subject to parliamentary scrutiny and approval, with a guaranteed vote for MPs".
One would have thought that Brexiteers who spent the entire EU Referendum campaign banging on about the importance of "democracy" and "parliamentary sovereignty" might have actually appreciated an amendment to ensure that parliament is sovereign, and that the government of the day can't just draw up trade deals with foreign powers behind closed doors, and then enact them without any parliamentary oversight or approval.
But if you expected any kind of consistency or integrity from the Brexiteers, you'd be wrong.
What they actually did was vote down the amendment by 314-284 in order to essentially kill parliamentary sovereignty when it comes to future post-Brexit trade deals.
Amendment 58
In light of this Tory vote to scrap parliamentary sovereignty when it comes to post-Brexit trade deals it's important to think back to the way they also scrapped the cross-party Amendment 58 to the EU Withdrawal Bill in November 2017.
This amendment sought to prevent the Tory government from using Brexit as a Trojan Horse to attack our workers' rights, weaken our environmental laws, water down our consumer protections, undermine our food standards, or scrap our equal rights rules.
By stripping out this amendment the Tories clearly indicated their intention to use Brexit as an excuse to attack these aspects of British life. Just think about it. If they had no intention of attacking these things, why on earth would they vote to scrap an amendment to prevent them from scrapping these things?
A Trump-Tory trade deal
Donald Trump's administration have already made it absolutely clear that if Britain seeks a trade deal with the United States, the UK government will be expected to trash workers' rights, open up the NHS for even more privatisation, and trash our food standards to allow the import of cheap, low quality, heavily-subsidised US produce like chlorinated chicken, hormone-riddled beef, and unlabled GM produce.
What the Tories have done is to wreck cross-party efforts to prevent them from using Brexit as an excuse to lower British standards first, and now they've voted to ensure that parliament has no ability to stop them from drawing up horrific trade deals behind closed doors and enacting them without any parliamentary oversight or approval whatever!
Hard-right Brexit
It should be blindingly obvious by now to anyone who has actually followed the details of the Brexit votes that we're heading for a hard-right, anti-democratic, economically ruinous Tory Brexit.
It should be obvious that the left-wing Lexit voters were absolute dupes. Useful idiots who voted for Brexit for left-wing reasons only to enable an unprecedented hard-right power grab by the Tory establishment.
It should be obvious that the Brexiteers were absolutely lying through their teeth when they talked about grand themes like "democracy" and "parliamentary sovereignty" during the referendum debate. Everything they've done since betrays their absolute contempt for democracy, and their intention to over-ride parliamentary sovereignty in order to centralise as much power as possible in the hands of the executive.
It should be obvious that the hard-right ERG Brextremists who control Theresa May's puppet strings are intent on inflicting the most economically damaging Breixt possible in order to make fortunes by picking £billions worth of distressed british assets out of the ashes of their Brexit bonfire.
It should be obvious. But unfortunately, to millions of people who don't pay attention to the details, and just base their decisions on sentiments and feelings, none of this is obvious, none of the details matter, and "we should just get on with it".
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Last night Theresa May survived two incredibly close votes on Brexit legislation after whipping her MPs to support hard-right Brextremist amendments to the customs bill that have clearly been designed to make her Brexit White Paper unworkable.
There were 14 and 11 Tory rebels who voted against Theresa May and her Brextremist puppet masters in the two votes, but the vast majority of Tories (and their bigoted sectarian DUP backers) actually voted in favour of the Brextremist amendments.
Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party voted against Theresa May and the Brextremists, but they were let down by four of the usual suspects who actually voted alongside Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ilk, despite knowing that a defeat at this stage could have triggered the final collapse of this shockingly weak and incompetent Tory government.
The four Brextremist collaborators were Kelvin Hopkins, Graham Stringer, Frank Field, and Kate Hoey.
Nobody should be surprised that these four stepped in to save Theresa May's bacon. They've consistently sided with Theresa May and the hard-right Brextremists when the Labour leadership and the other opposition parties have voted to oppose them.
A much more shocking revelation is that the current Lib-Dem leader Vince Cable, and the former Lib-Dem leader Tim Farron didn't even bother to turn up to vote in the debate.
This is utterly extraordinary stuff from the most high profile politicians in a party that has relentlessly positioned itself as the "Stop Brexit" party since 2016.
Less than a month ago these two charlatans were smugly chanting "where's Jeremy Corbyn" at the pro-EU People's Vote protest event in London. But when it came to the crunch, and enough Tory rebels finally decided to stand up against the hard-right Brextremists who have usurped their party, Jeremy Corbyn showed up to vote against them, while these two posturing frauds were nowhere to be seen.
In fact, the extraordinary reason Tim Farron decided to not bother showing up to such a crucial parliamentary Brexit battle was that he was too busy banging on about how much he hates gay sex again at a £5 per head event at the Sherborne Institute!
This astounding no show from Farron and Cable is proof that (just like with tuition fees, proportional representation, and countless other Lib-Dem so-called policies) their opposition to Brexit doesn't come from any serious political principle at all, it's simply pure opportunism designed to soak up the votes of Remainers who are too gullible to realise that they're being played like idiots by the biggest bunch of morally-flexible political charlatans out there.
So in conclusion Theresa May gets to cling onto power for a little while longer, mainly thanks to her own MPs, many of whom voted against what they knew to be the national interest in order to stave off the collapse of the Tory party.
But more crucially (because Tories putting the interests of the Tory party above the interests of the nation is hardly 'news'), the Lib-Dems have now been totally exposed as a bunch of absolute charlatans whose leader couldn't even be bothered to show up to vote against the Tory Brextremists, and whose former leader was too busy banging on about his aversion to gay sex to participate in such a crucial knife-edge vote.
This ludicrous Lib-Dem performance is all the evidence any sensible person should need to understand that the Liberal Democrats are absolutely incapable of playing the role of "Brexit saviours" to defend us from the ideological lunacy of the hard-right Tory Brextremists who dictate Theresa May's Brexit strategy to her.
Anyone who still actually believes any of the Lib-Dem schtick about being the "anti-Brexit" party after this lamentable display is certifiably gullible.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
After wasting an incredible 15 months of the Article 50 negotiating period on their internal squabbles and distractions like Theresa May's failed vanity election, the Tory government have finally released their long-awaited Brexit White Paper.
In this article I'm going to address some crucial issues with the White Paper, but I strongly advise you to have a look through the document yourself (I'll provide a link at the end of the article) and to check out other people's analyses too, because the way Brexit is implemented is of such importance to our future as a nation that it would be grossly negligent not to investigate what the government is proposing for yourself.
An anti-democratic shambles
If the way the Tory government released their Brexit White Paper is indicative of their approach to Brexit, we're in for an anti-democratic farce of epic proportions.
The Tories decided to completely ignore parliamentary protocol by sharing copies of the White Paper with selected members of the press at 9am, while only providing opposition MPs with copies during the new Brexit minister's speech (necessitating the extraordinary spectacle of the Speaker suspending parliament for five minutes in the middle of the speech as copies were literally thrown around the chamber).
The reason the government is supposed to provide copies to opposition MPs in advance is obviously to provide time for them to read the proposals and formulate questions in order to hold the government to account.
The decision to cut out the opposition parties in favour of providing preferential access to their mates in the media just goes to show the absolute contempt the Tories have towards stuff like democratic scrutiny and due process.
Filler, fluff, and sound bites
Before we get to the actual details of the White Paper it's crucial to note that it's absolutely stuffed full of slick pro-government fluff, much of it utterly devoid of real meaning.
Take the repetition of the phrase "principled and practical Brexit". It's just more evasive and essentially meaningless floss from the "Brexit means Brexit" and "red, white, and blue Brexit" school of empty sound bite trickery designed for no other purpose than appealing to the hard-of-thinking.
Superfluous waffle
Take this concluding quote from just the 2nd point in the whole paper:
"The UK hopes that this will be the basis of a serious and detailed
negotiation in the coming weeks and months that will lead to a historic agreement in
the interests of both sides".
Why on earth is it necessary for the UK government to waste space by stating that it hopes that negotiations will take place and an agreement be reached, given that this is the entire purpose of the White Paper we've waited 15 wasted months for?
Toddler tantrum diplomacy
In the preceding days the new Brexit Minister Dominic Raab has reiterated the threat that if the EU don't cave into Tory demands, they're going to inflict an extraordinarily damaging hard-right "no deal" Brexit in retribution, and to underline the point the Tories have been briefing their allies in the press that they're planning to stockpile canned food and emergency generators to show that they're serious about their threat to plunge the UK economy into "no deal" chaos.
"Give us what we want or we'll destroy our own economy" is a totally crackpot negotiating strategy for two key reasons.
One is that the underlying threat completely undermines any goodwill that is earned from all the kind words, hopeful aspirations, and begging for cooperation in the White Paper.
the second is that the majority of the economic, social, and reputational damage from a "no deal" flounce would obviously fall on Britain, meaning the EU actually has an incentive to call our bluff, and then welcome the massive flood of businesses, skilled workers, and capital fleeing the self-inflicted "no deal" chaos in the UK.
Cakism
The economic partnership section calls for a new free trade zone for goods to avoid disruption to the modern cross-border supply chains that have built up over the last four decades, but this call for free movement of goods is totally undermined by the demands for the destruction of the right to free movement of people.
What the Tories are demanding is an agreement that provides greater freedom of movement to a British-made packet of crisps, than to a British citizen.
Not only is this proposal something that's already been rejected by the EU as cherry-picking, it's also a pure distillation of the warped Tory mentality that property has more inherent value than people.
Agencies
The White Paper proposes that the UK should be allowed to retain membership of multiple EU agencies such as European Chemicals Agency, the European
Aviation Safety Agency, the European Medicines Agency, the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed
(RASFF), Rapid Alert System for Serious Risk (Rapex), the Information and
Communication System for Market Surveillance (ICSMS), Interpol, the European Criminal Records Investigation Sytem (ECRIS) and Interjust.
It's beyond obvious that the UK would be absolutely crackers to quit these agencies, especially given the necessity of spending £billions to replicate the regulatory roles they perform, and the total impossibility of replicating the functions of agencies like Interpol and ECRIS.
The decision to request continued membership of these agencies is one of the rare outbreaks of common sense in the White Paper, but continued alignment is likely to send the hard-right deregulation-obsessed Brextremists into fits of irrepressible rage.
European Court of Justice
"Where the UK participates in an EU agency, the UK will respect the remit of the
Court of Justice of the European Union."
Brextremists will be incandescent with rage at this bit too because they hate the European Court of Justice with an undying ideological passion.
Customs
One of the most contentions issues for the fanatical Tory Brextremists is the customs issue. The White Paper proposes the establishment of a Facilitated Customs Agreement (FCA) with a common rule book on goods, including agri-foods.
This is obviously going to be completely unacceptable to the hard-right Brextremists who see a free trade deal with the Trump administration as their number one priority.
A Trump-Tory trade deal would be completely incompatible with continued regulatory alignment with EU food standards because one of the main US negotiating objectives is to crack the UK open to cheap substandard American produce like chlorinated chicken, hormone riddled beef, and unlabeled GM produce.
If the UK government begins allowing cheap substandard US produce into the UK as part of a Tory-Trump trade deal, then the EU will obviously need to enforce customs checks to stop this American crap leeching across the UK border into their territory.
Standards
Food standards are not the only area that is under threat from a Tory administered Brexit. In November 2017 Labour put forward an amendment to the Tory EU Withdrawal Bill to prevent the Tories from using Brexit as a Trojan Horse to attack our workers' rights, environmental laws, consumer protections, equal rights protections, and food standards.
The Tories and their bigoted DUP backers stripped out this amendment, saying that we should just trust their word that they have no intentions to trash our rights, standards and protections (but why would they remove the amendment to stop them from doing it if they had no intention of doing it?).
Now they're making similar claims to the EU, claiming they have no intention of attacking and undermining workers' rights and environmental laws because they've made "strong domestic commitments" not to.
it's important to remember that the Tory party also made "strong domestic commitments" to not raise VAT during the 2010 General Election, then raised VAT within weeks of being enabled into power by the Lib-Dems.
One suspects that the EU negotiators won't be quite as naive as the British public when it comes to believing Tory promises.
Rule-takers
The White paper proposes that the UK would maintain regulatory alignment with the EU by continually updating its own laws (in Westminster and the devolved parliaments) in order to avoid the necessity of customs checks.
This raises a couple of really crucial issues.
What happens if one of the British parliaments decides to defy new EU standards (which is likely to happen sooner or later)? Do we then get customs checks by default?
And what's the sense in quitting the EU where we had the power to shape and influence new EU rules and standards as one of the largest and most influential member states, if we're simply going to accept the rules and standards they decide, without our input, in perpetuity?
Disputes
In the section on how the UK and EU deal with disputes the White Paper proposes an extrajudicial system of dispute resolution with no appeals process that is very similar to the hated ISDS components of the thankfully abandoned TTIP corporate power grab.
Here's the section:
"An independent arbitration panel, which would include members from both
parties. In some instances, the arbitration panel might include specialist expertise
such as where a dispute required detailed sectoral knowledge ... with the decision of the panel
binding on the parties."
So if the Tories get their way, instead of disputes being decided in open courts, they'll be decided in closed rooms full of corporate lawyers with no scrutiny, and no right of appeal.
Mutual recognition
Throughout the White Paper the British government begs for mutual recognition of qualifications, mutual recognition of geographical origin designations, as well as for continued access to stuff like the Erasmus scheme and the EHIC travel insurance scheme.
All this begging raises the question of why we're leaving at all if we're so damned keen to cherry-pick so many of the benefits of membership as we leave.
Lexiter hell
All the left-wing people who voted for Brexit because they thought it would free the UK from the neoliberal influence of the EU should be spitting blood at this White Paper because the Tories are promising to tie Britain into all the hard-right, anti-state, pro-privatisation dogma the Lexiters voted Leave to escape from.
Here's an extract:
"To support the depth and breadth of the future UK-EU economic partnership, the UK
would propose to incorporate its domestic choice to maintain a robust state aid
regime into its future economic relationship with the EU. In light of this, the UK would
make an upfront commitment to maintain a common rulebook with the EU on state
aid, enforced by the Competition and Markets Authority."
Anyone who voted Leave in 2016 because they thought it would mean an escape from the hard-right anti-state dogma in the EU rules should be absolutely kicking themselves for imagining that such an escape could ever have happened under the Tories (who were instrumental in pushing these hard-right rules on the EU in the first place).
Outright dishonesty
"The Government has already
demonstrated during the passage of the EU (Withdrawal) Bill that it will actively
engage with suggestions from both Houses"
Anyone who actually followed the progress of the EU Withdrawal Bill knows that this is total bullshit. The Tories colluded with DUP to strip out all but one of the opposition amendments from the House of Commons, then they quickly stripped out all 15 of the amendments from the House of Lords with virtually no time allocated for debate over the amendments they were removing.
A more truthful statement would read: "The Government has already demonstrated during the passage of the EU (Withdrawal) Bill that it will actively ignore suggestions from both Houses".
Public reaction
One of the most alarming things about the Brexit White Paper is the bizarre public reaction to it, with an astounding 40% of the public claiming that Theresa May's approach is "too soft" as opposed to just 13% who think it's "about right", and 12% who think it's "too hard".
One wonders what percentage of the respondents to the YouGov poll have actually read the White Paper and found for themselves that it's clearly "hard Brexit with cherry-picking". I'd guess well below 1% of them. Which raises the question of how they have come to believe that it's "too soft".
My view is that it's come about through strategic Tory media manipulation. An absolute mass of coverage has been given to hard-right Brextremists like Boris Johnson, David Davis, and Jacob Rees-Mogg to slam May's proposals as "too soft", with virtually no coverage given to those who would accurately describe it as "hard Brexit with cherry picking".
The orchestrated Brextremist resignations have played a vital role in framing the public debate so that millions of people who have no intention of actually reading what's being proposed are left believing that the main problem with the White Paper is that it's "too soft" when the real problems are that it's too hard, too right-wing, and too much of an unrealistic shambles.
The Tory intent is obviously to move the public towards the economically ruinous "no deal" catastrophe the Brextremists have been craving from the beginning, and if over three times as many people see this White Paper as "too soft" as those who see it as "too hard", then their perception management strategy is clearly succeeding.
Conclusion
It's taken the Tory government an incredible 15 months to come up with this strategic document, when it's beyond obvious that they should have figured out what they wanted from the negotiations before they even considered triggering the time-limited Article 50 process.
Having left it so late to set out their objectives huge numbers of people remain spectacularly under-informed about what the White Paper actually proposes.
What they've actually come up with is a right-wing hard Brexit shambles that is massively over-reliant on unrealistic cherry-picking of the benefits of EU membership, while all of the good will necessary for any such cherry-picking to be allowed is being continually eroded by their toddler tantrum threats of a ruinous "no deal" flounce away from the negotiations if they don't get their own way.
Here's a link to the White Paper so you can have a look through it for yourself.
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