‘Really hostile environment ‘

‘Leaving the Customs Union‘

What they have in common is that they were both inspired by what the Conservative Party perceived as a need to tack to the right in order to shore up support within the party and to see off the UKIP threat . Immigration and the perceived need for ‘control of our borders’ loom large in both .

Both are riven with inherent contradiction .

Most significantly perhaps , in terms of what lies ahead , in both cases ends have been  willed with no real understanding of the means to achieve them e.g.

Conservative politicians while expressing themselves appalled and shocked at what has befallen the Windrush Generation seek to turn the conversation to bearing down on illegal immigration, where they believe they have public support . However in so doing they are repeating a ‘category error ‘ .

The Hostile Environment policy affected ‘people without papers ‘ indiscriminately whether or not they had made their lives here ,often having arrived on British Passports . This was designed into the policy at the outset .

In our country 9.5 million people do not have a passport.. The barest scrutiny of data reveals that out of a U.K.population of 66.1 million , 40.3 million have driving licences . The number of people without a Government issued means of proving their identity , and right to be here , is simply huge .

It is transparently obvious that the undebated shift from an assumption of  the right to be here to a requirement to provide proof would impact on a whole range of people.

The impact of the Hostile Environment policy was obvious .

However driven by a tendentious and unachievable target  (net migration in the tens of thousands ) Mrs May and the Home Office simply took no account of the blindingly obvious .

Regardless of whether this was done knowing the facts and ignoring them or because of a lack of capability to form coherent policy the effect was callous in the extreme .

This was policy illiteracy . It is self evident that the required concomitant of a Hostile Environment  policy is an Identity Strategy . If you are going to require people to produce ‘papers’ you should provide them with ‘papers’ to produce . Instead the Home Office destroyed them – or at least the historic records , a variant on the ‘lost in an office move’ phenomenon .

Mrs . May is renowned for her dogged determination  and the  tortoise like speed at which she shapes policy and its implementation. However this is punctuated by sudden lurches of policy developed in a small cabal  and then launched upon the world at what is regarded as a propitious moment.

The first example was construction of the Cabinet on what the Americans describe as the Pottery Barn rule :’You break it, you bought it’ putting leading Brexiteers  into the prominent roles responsible for delivering Brexit.  At first glance this was ingenious; there was an element of poetic justice: you got us into this mess, now get us out of it.

However not one of the three Brexiteers  has demonstrated any serious strategic grasp of the issues to be tackled. Instead they have fallen back on their collective stock in trade: bromides and bombast ,  and invoking a bold new  future heavily  coloured by the pink  maps of empire.

A particular fly in the ointment is that Mr Fox , who previously had to leave the  frontbench for  an episode of poor judgement, not to say dodgy dealing, has demonstrated  a profound lack of capability causing concern within the European Commission .However he never misses an opportunity to berate anyone considering a rational way of making sense of our confused future through a variant  of a customs union as betraying the will of the people .In particular , of course they would be denying him the opportunity to negotiate deals which  he is almost certainly incapable of delivering.

The next example of this was the Conservative party conference following her accession to the leadership at which ‘Brexit means Brexit ‘ was announced. The deadline of invoking article 50 and giving notice  by the end of March 2017 that we would leave the European Union  was also set. No doubt this was seen within number 10 as a smart move to placate the Brexiteers and steal their thunder .

 You will remember how agitated the European Union was in the early days about when we were going to get on with things and give notice. As Sir Ivan Rogers apparently advised at the time we should not have given notice until the pattern of negotiations had been agreed. Political considerations outweighed strategic ones. We played our only card with nothing in return. We have been on the back foot ever since.

If one  had thought it would be difficult to make a bad situation worse Mrs May demonstrated with alacrity that she could in the Lancaster House speech where the red lines of leaving the customs union and the single market were painted. We witnessed the disturbing spectacle of a Conservative prime minister setting about denying her country the benefits of the single market in the same venue as her predecessor, Mrs Thatcher, had proclaimed them .Now we have a Conservative Prime Minister dismantling the benefits for the UK of the single market which the UK had  driven within Europe.

 The absence  of a clear strategy in negotiating the U.K.’s departure from the European Union can be seen in the  draft Withdrawal Agreement published in March 2018. The Financial Times commented that on almost every substantial point the UK has accepted the EU’s position.

The UK accepted the “backstop” of Northern Ireland staying in the EU’s single market and the customs union. Unless the UK reneges from that position, that backstop will be part of the exit agreement. This means that unless the UK and the EU agree something else, the default will be that Northern Ireland effectively stays in the EU. And how that accords with the rest of the UK is a problem which can only be solved by the rest of UK in effect staying in the EU too. Or by a united Ireland.

At the time the Brexiteers  seem to accept this getting behind Mrs May.

However this now seems to be forgotten. The European Union is accused of having weaponised the Irish border issue.

So here we are again. Outrage is being expressed when the source of the outrage is in fact the result of what has already been agreed. Instead in scenes that are reminiscent of Gulliver’s Travels the Brexit Committee of Cabinet are falling out with each other on whether to pursue a solution based on magical thinking, or one based on even more magical thinking, and both of which were rejected last summer by the European Commission as impractical.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with Headline Messages or Sound Bites to drive a programme of change and communicate a message .

However you do need to be able to exemplify what you mean by them and illustrate how they might work in practice.

The endless mantric intonation of the same soundbites favoured by Mrs May will not cut the mustard.

Importantly the messages need to be internally consistent and driving in same direction .

You can’t create policy by cobbling together soundbites with the aim of appealing to every aspect of the focus group in which you have tested them .

There can seldom been a group of politicians and advisers at top of Government with such a profound lack of capability to think a policy through to its logical  conclusion .We have seen the catastrophic consequences for the Windrush Generation and others caught up in the Hostile Environment. We now all face the consequences of Mrs May’s Brexit Shambles which shares the same fatal flaws  as the Windrush Scandal .