Today, Explained - Once more unto the Brexit

Episode Date: June 16, 2021

The Atlantic’s Tom McTague provides a halftime report on Brexit. It appears it’s going very well for Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I don't think anybody would have predicted the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. I don't think anybody would have predicted that Brexit might come close to breaking the Good Friday Agreement either. Now, we knew there was a chance you might have missed what Rashid meant by that, but we were also pretty sure we'd be explaining it today,

so we let it slide. We have made a good many episodes about Brexit on Today Explained. One's about the economy. One's about the arguments for and against. One was actually about Megxit. And one was about how the move could affect the fragile peace that the Good Friday Agreement brought to Northern Ireland. But now Brexit is really happening. And President Biden just visited the UK and did some photo ops with Prime Minister Boris Johnson. So it felt like a good time to check in and see how everything's

going out there. Hi, it's Tom McTague here. I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic. I'm sitting off the coast of Cornwall in a place called the Silly Isles. And I am about 10 feet from my baby who's just waking up as we speak. Tom, we're back again today to talk about Brexit because Brexit is, of course, still happening. Why does a Brexit take so long? Well, because Brexit is not an event, it is a process. It's a process of disentangling a country from an organisation it has belonged to for 40 years. And that's 40 years of law and court decisions and, you know, jurisprudence and all of these things.

This is deep integration into a sort of grand project. David Cameron, the former prime minister, said one of the strongest reasons for not leaving the European Union was that it would take 10 years of effort just to do this thing. There's no saving from leaving the EU. There's a cost. And my message is very clear, which is don't risk it. Now, look, the fact is that decision was taken in 2016 and we're three, four, five years into it.

And we're still debating this thing. So in some senses, he was right. But we're also moving on in other ways. Just yesterday, actually, the UK and Australia announced that they had made the initial agreement on a trade deal. The Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, strolling to Downing Street this morning to make history. The first nation to strike a post-Brexit trade deal with the UK completely from scratch. And this is something that Boris Johnson said was like, these trade deals are the big prize. You give us Tim Tams, we give you penguins, you give us Vegemite, we give you Marmite. I think it is a good deal. Boris Johnson

is coming at this and he is starting to sort of deliver what he would see as the positive sides of Brexit. And over time, you're just diverging slowly from the European Union, making it very hard to ever go back. And this is Boris Johnson's legacy. And this is why he is so committed to it, because it's the thing that is going to define who he is and what he stood for as prime minister. We will be more dynamic abroad and more focused on delivering for our citizens at home. When we last asked you about Brexit, Tom, in the summer of 2019,

you left us on sort of a cliffhanger. You said, we just don't know whether Boris is going to take Britain out without a deal, which would be revolutionary, or he will somehow manage to succeed where Theresa May failed and take the UK out with a deal. What ended up happening just to catch people up? Boris Johnson did the thing that very few people thought he would be able to. He did a deal with the European Union,

stripping out a controversial element of the trade deal which had stopped Theresa May being able to pass the thing through the House of Parliament. But it was quite a sneaky way that Boris Johnson did it. He sort of changed the name of something, but it didn't really change in its form. But it was enough to get it through the House of Commons and the House of Parliament. We've taken back control of our laws and our destiny. We've taken back control of every jot and tittle. So what has changed so far? Can you give us an idea? Not a lot right now. The big difference really is that Britain has got control of its own immigration system. So like the US or Canada or Australia, which have their own immigration systems. Britain now has its own. Whereas when it was inside the European Union, it was a collective immigration policy within Europe.

So anybody from the European Union could move to anybody else's country, just like they were a state in the US. Britain has left that system. And now it is treating citizens from the European Union like citizens from any other country in the world. So they're treated no differently to whether they are Australians or Americans. And the consequence of that is Britain no longer has a closer trading relationship with the European Union.

So trade between the European Union and Britain is harder. So checks on goods happen where they didn't used to happen. So trade flows have slowed down because it's just harder to do. It's more expensive for business to do it. Near the mouth of the Eurotunnel in Kent, customs expert Stephen Cock says problems on the way out mean problems on the way in.

We have a situation where Border Force's car park is full. The roads are heavily congested. They're turning lorries back now. Exports are grinding to a halt at the moment. Britain is taking control of something, but the cost is there is more friction in the system. It's harder. Let's talk about something a little more concrete. In January of 2020, we made an episode, Not With You, titled The Invisible Border, in which our former reporter Noam Hassenfeld covered the story of the potential for Brexit to throw Northern Ireland back into a state of

acrimony. We have a very delicate piece here in Northern Ireland. I only think I've just put it over the edge. How has this move affected the tensions there? It has affected the tensions in Northern Ireland. It's an incredibly complicated story. States, Washington, the UK, plus the European Union, have one thing we absolutely all want to do, and that is to uphold the Good Friday, the Belfast Good Friday Agreement. In some levels, there is a sort of simple truth here, in that what Britain did when it left the European Union is it said it wanted its law to be sovereign. That means a border.

Now, where do you put the border? That's the question in Northern Ireland. If you put it between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which is between the UK, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland which is between the UK Northern Ireland is a part of the UK and the Republic of Ireland which is a separate country then that causes problems because half the people in Northern Ireland roughly do not consider themselves British do not want to be a part of the UK and consider themselves Irish and they would resent crossing the border to see their

auntie or their mother or their brother or their doctor or go shopping and have to go through an international checked trade border. Now, the thing that has happened is that to stop that from happening, the border, the trade border was erected between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, the mainland, Great Britain. The checks on some goods coming into Northern Ireland from Britain are frustrating some businesses and consumers, but they're also firing up a unionist sense of grievance and abandonment. The largest minority group, everyone is a minority group now, are a group called the Unionists. They are Protestant Unionists who consider themselves British and want to remain part of the UK. Now, they are absolutely furious that a trade border

has been erected within their own country, which means that things like if they want to get plants, potted plants from the mainland, or take their dog to their own country, or import sausages or bacon, that there are these really quite substantial checks now so that the other people in Northern Ireland aren't offended by a border going somewhere else. It just shouldn't be there. One country, no divide. So this is a kind of zero-sum situation where wherever you place the border, either on the land or in the sea, somebody is upset because somebody feels that their country has been divided arbitrarily. So is there potential for this to get particularly violent in Northern Ireland for a return to the Troubles?

I think most people think that the chances of a return to something like the Troubles are slim, in that back then, you know, you had an armed militia or paramilitary organization, or in their terms, an army in the Irish Republican Army, the IRA, which were importing really serious weapons and going to war with the British Army. Now, you don't have that situation or anything close to that situation right now. But what you do have is the potential for the cycle of violence to start. Some who lived through the troubles

are passing lessons and grievances to the next generation. I don't think young people really understand the details in terms of the Irish sea border and stuff. I think what they're being told and what they're seeing reflected in the media is that Sinn Féin are winning, the Republicans are winning, and that our identity is under attack. And when they hear those words, when they hear that stuff, and then they're told, all right, and the way that you can help is by going out there and throwing bombs, sticks and stones at people. They're more than willing to do so.

That is what politicians fear. That's why they're so scared of this situation. That's why there is so much effort going into it. Has Brexit led to anything that the British remain thrilled about? Has there been any clear upside to this thing that a majority of Brits voted for. I mean, yes. So, you know, if you look at the polls, Boris Johnson is quite clearly ahead in the polls at the moment. There is, you know, he has quite considerable support. People who were concerned about immigration got their immigration control, and they placed that above other concerns. Northern Ireland, to a lot of people, it's like Alaska. It's like a place

that you hear about and you heard about in the history books, but you often don't go. So that's one of the ways to understand it. But another way is, you know, when the pandemic hit, Britain had just had its election. Boris Johnson had won his majority and he had a big decision quite early on. Should he stay within the European Union's collective vaccine procurement programme? He turned that down because he didn't like the strings that were attached to it. And Britain went its own way. It was a kind of early indication of the kind of split that would happen because of Brexit. Now what happened was... The World Health Organization has criticized the speed of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout

in Europe, saying that it is quote, unacceptably slow. After days of tongue lashing by Brussels, AstraZeneca's CEO came out swinging, laying the blame for shortfall in vaccine deliveries at the EU's doorstep. The EU's vaccination effort now heavily criticized as rollouts in independent nations like the UK and the US pull ahead. It was slow, slower than the UK, slower than the US, much slower than Israel. And a lot of people have put two and two together, fairly or unfairly, and said, look, this is an immediate Brexit

benefit. We can do this by ourselves better than as a collective. So people look at that, and a lot of people who were pro-Brexit thought, great, that's your benefit right there. More with Tom in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. Thank you. you can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. So, Tom, when we had you on the show back in 2019, we asked you to tell us about Britain's new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.

And just to take you back, this is how you described him. He has a reputation for taking risks and doing things that you would think would kill off other people's careers and doesn't kill off his. And there's something about him that people forgive things. It's because he burns brighter than most people. He's more charismatic. Boris has now been in office for some two years, and you've just written another big profile of him for The Atlantic. Has anything changed about how you think of him? Or did that hue pretty closely, that prediction?

Listening back, I'm quite happy with that. Yeah, I think that's right. It's two years in. He's overseen a terrible response to the pandemic in the first year of the pandemic in 2020. Britain had one of the worst death rates in the developed world. I should just really repeat that I am deeply sorry for every life that has been lost and of course as Prime Minister I take full responsibility for everything that the government has done. Really nothing impressive came out of 2020 at all, almost, until the vaccine procurement programme kicked into place.

So, look, these are the two sides of Boris Johnson. He had this terrible 2020. I've today left hospital after a week in which the NHS has saved my life. No question. But he got Brexit done as he promised. And then he has got this good story to tell in 2021. And how voters responded to those events with an enormous poll lead. They seem to have forgiven him for the response of 2021 or explained it away. And then they've given him the credit for the thing that he got right. So this is classic Boris Johnson. He gets forgiven

for the things that go bad and he gets praised for the things that go right. And why is that? That's the thing that I find fascinating about him as a politician. It's why I spent so much time with him over the last few months, trying to see up front what it is, up close, what it is about him that people like, and why he's so popular, because that's the fundamental point here. He remains very popular. And this isn't just in polling. This was in a midterm election too, right? Exactly. Now, this may not be a general election, but these polls and the results could prove incredibly important

across much of Britain. Halfway through the reporting for my piece, or towards the end of the reporting, actually, he had these big early tests of his premiership. He had elections across England and Scotland and Wales. The votes didn't go so well in Scotland for him. This is a big caveat because this is a big threat to his premiership in that Scotland is flirting with the idea of secession, of

independence, which would be a blot on his premiership forever. It would make him one of the worst prime ministers in history, the man who lost his own country. But in England, he did incredibly well. The Conservative Party did incredibly well. This is big. A colossal win in Hartlepool for the Conservatives and Boris Johnson. Another blue brick in what used to be Labour's Red Wall. There's a shift in who the Conservative Party are. These are blue-collar, older, white British voters

who are flocking to the Conservatives. What we've learned today is that post-Brexit, the Tory party is putting under the noses of the big sections of the English electorate a potent potion. It involves Brexit itself. It involves more government spending. It involves Boris Johnson. It probably involves the rollout of the vaccine. For me, what this means is that I think that it's a mandate for us to continue to deliver. What is it that's drawing these voters apart from Brexit, apart from COVID? What is this fundamental shift in British politics that Boris has overseen? So this is not a traditional

kind of Reaganite or Thatcherite Tory here, conservative. He's a more complex figure. He's prepared to intervene to help British business, to redistribute money to these areas, to spend money on public services. I've got an announcement to make, which is that we are putting a lot more money into schools. You'll be pleased to know. So people associate him with that. They associate him as a patriot, as somebody who stands up for the country. But also more than that, somebody who is optimistic about what the country can do.

We will build the foundations now for future prosperity to make this country a Britain that is fully independent and self-governing for the first time in 45 years, the most attractive place to live, to invest, to set up a company. But he differs from Trump in that he really isn't a sort of an aggressive, angry culture warrior. He himself doesn't embody that. He has people around him who are far closer to that. But he himself doesn't seem to embody that. He's more of a libertarian, live and let die, kind of do what you want, I don't care, kind of conservative. That speaks to a certain type of the country who quite like that. And it infuriates the rest of the people, half the people who just cannot stand him. Do we have a greater sense now of where he

wants to take the UK? We're starting to get the outlines of it. He wants to join the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership that Trump pulled out of in one of his first acts. This is a policy that is quite ambitious and sees Britain on the front foot in the world, more kind of self-confident in its foreign policy. Domestically, he sees his task as unifying the country, again, bedding down brexit and then dealing with the the the aftermath the problems associated with it because deep down he believes fundamentally that britain lost its self-confidence uh during the brexit process and before that and his for that. And his optimism, bonhomie, and just general confidence in life, his ability to just stand there and in his supporters' view, have the confidence to say whatever he wants. And in his

detractors' view, just have the confidence to lie. He sees that in a way, the country has to be more like him. He wants to turn the country into a version of him. And it sounds like he might be around for a very long time, kind of like a Thatcher or even a Tony Blair. He thinks that, I think. In one of my interviews, I pushed him on this. You know, this is a big project. And I said this to him and he kind of nodded and then he came back to it at the end of the interview and he said, you know, one thing you'm around for 10 years or whatever. But I think fundamentally, that's what he thinks. He thinks that he's going to be around for a while. You know, he certainly has his eyes on the next election, which is scheduled for 2024, which would then give him another four or five years on top of that. You quickly see how he could dominate a decade in a similar way to Thatcher and Reagan dominated the 80s. Johnson could be dominating Britain for the 20s. That's certainly, I think, his plan.

Well, let's get in touch in another five years and see how he's doing at that point. We really should. Yeah, something will have blown up so bad by then that he's no longer prime minister. And my prediction looks ludicrous. We've got five years. My brain hurts a lot. Five years. That's all we got. We got five years. Tom McTague, he's a staff writer at The Atlantic from the industrial northeast of England. Now he lives in London.

But he spoke to us while sitting off the coast of Cornwall in a place called the Silly Isles. You can find his big piece on Boris over at theatlantic.com. It's called The Minister of Chaos. That's all we got.