Brexit: How We Found Ourselves Outside the Tent, Getting Pissed On
From a $5bn lawsuit against the BBC to a stalled £31bn tech deal, this is what “going it alone” looks like when your biggest ally starts turning the tables
I’ve been doing several metric shit tonnes of reading about the EU over the past week, all in the interest of debunking the 75 Brexit Benefits (benefit four is debunked and will be published sometime this week).
What I’ve found is that our relationship with the EU was never as straightforward as we were led to believe1. A benefit of this deep dive, however, is that it’s putting our relationship with other countries in sharp contrast - especially what could reasonably be considered our closest relative, the now peri-apocalyptic hellhole that is the United States of America, and two stories over the past week or so have thrown this into a pretty stark relief:
The president of the United States is suing the BBC for $5bn over a documentary.
A £31bn investment deal has been placed on hold over a 2% digital services tax.
And yes, by framing this in terms of our relationship with the European Union I can already hear all those Brexit True Believers go “So bloody what? This is just Trump being Trump2 - it has nothing to do with the EU”.
Sure - the US is just doing what it knows best, swinging its weight around like your drunk uncle at Chrimbo dinner who has decided that his opinions are facts and every else should just adjust their furniture accordingly.
But, the reason why these three stories are so useful as a lens for Brexit is specifically because it shows us exactly what it looks like when power starts leaning, and almost perfectly illustrates the difference between being part of one of the largest trading blocs in the world versus being a mid-sized country trying to go things alone while belting out “Rule Britannia” and insisting that it’s actually still a great power because once upon a time it owned a quarter of the globe.
Because there’s something that gets skimmed over in our conversations with the BTBs specifically, and an issue that the balls-to-the-wall rhetoric never really prepared us for - that sovereignty isn’t a standalone line item, it’s leverage. And pretty important, that leverage doesn’t mean terribly much when you don’t have scale, alternatives, alliances and the ability to say “no” to another power without immediately having to have the treasury do a quick calculation about which industries will collapse3 if one of your trading partners throws an epic fannywobble at you refusing to comply.
In terms of our three highlighted stories, the BBC lawsuit feels like the most natural place to start, because it’s so insanely and grotesquely disproportionate as a scenario that it almost loops back into what increasingly feels like a pantomime that no one asked for.
Just say this with me to understand the absurdity of the situation - Donald J. Trump, the geriatric orange gameshow host, insurrectionist and felon who is currently strutting as the President of the United States is suing the British Broadcasting Company for five billion dollars because they cut a documentary to truncate two things that he said. The said documentary was likely not even seen in the jurisdiction that this lawsuit has been filed in (Florida), and it shows absolutely nothing that the world did not know already.
This lawsuit is in no way or form about Panorama or bad editing itself though, it is purely about striking fear into media institutions and signalling to the BBC, the broader British media and to anyone who might want to cover him unfavourably that there is a dear price to pay for that scrutiny.
It is an action that is meant to chill any sort of criticism about an autocratic leader, and it is already having the effect if we consider the censorship of a Reith lecture by Rutger Bregman for daring to say that Donald J. Trump is “the most openly corrupt president in American history”.
How does this link us to the EU though?
Because one of the central myths of Brexit was that it was being done under the auspices of “Taking Back Control4” from a distant meddling power. Brussels was for years and years framed as an interfering overlord, hellbent on curbing our freedoms, uncurbing our bananas and forcing us to make decisions we didn’t want to (despite the fact we wielded an enormous amount of influence in the union.)
Yet here we find ourselves watching a foreign leader openly attempting to discipline our national broadcaster via a Florida court, asking for a sum that works out to roughly half its yearly budget5. And our room for manoeuvre? It’s basically limited to politely clearing our throats and hoping that a 79 year old man with paperthin skin doesn’t even further escalate the matter6, and for our Prime Minister to be wheeled out to loudly and ever more unconvincingly insist that the US is in fact our friend.
The BBC lawsuit in isolation already looks bad, but when you start thinking about the second of our identified stories, things start looking thoroughly dodgy. The long and short of this one is that the US promised a £31bn tech based investment from Amazon, Google, the whole gang7, which the government excitedly announced and jumped up and down about, just to have everything grind to a screeching halt this week because our American friends have taken umbrage with the 2% levy that we currently charge on large digital platforms.
Not a massive windfall tax, extortionate raid or even a crackdown on tax avoidance - a minuscule charge that raises around £800m a year. That’s barely a stern look in the direction of these companies that make billions upon billions of dollars from UK consumers that’s being treated as though we have a white van driving around Silicon Valley holding Mark Zuckerberg hostage pending the handover of a ransom.
The key point of this dynamic between our countries though - and where the power imbalance becomes extremely apparent - is that the tech deal appears to have been structured as leverage from the get-go. It’s a completely conditional transaction, and essentially shouts “We will invest - but only if you behave!”
It was never really an investment opportunity so much as it was a carrot being held at arm’s length while we’re cornered into changing domestic tax policy to better suit US corporate interests - and it’s something that is much harder to do when you’re a country that’s negotiating as part of a bloc, and not out on your tod, something which we increasingly find ourselves to be post-Brexit.
A country that strikes out on its own is a great thing, but the balance of risk, which we’re now finding out, is that we are more exposed to the type of political blackmail we’re seeing in our relationship with the States.
We’re now at the point where we’re really seeing the impacts of Brexit beyond abstract arguments about flags, feeling and ancient grievances, and how it has seriously impacted our place in the world.
And yes, of course, the EU is getting the same “isn’t that a nice trading bloc you have there, it would be a pity if something had to happen to it” treatment from the Trump administration - tariffs are being threatened, regulations are being challenged, and digital rules are being portrayed by the president’s personal Emotional Support Billionaire as reason for the dissolution of the whole union.
It’s there for all to see - the difference being for the EU that the US is leaning on a market of 450 million people with a regulatory system that is collective, coordinated and, most crucially, has the ability to hit back. It has options, internal buffers and the ability to say “no” when the demands become too much and without having to sacrifice domestic industries to keep the peace.
Post-Brexit Britain has none of that.
The thing we’re seeing in these two stories (and believe me, there are many others), is not chaos or Trump-specific derangement or even novel behaviour - we’re seeing leverage being applied to our country after we actively decided to reduce our own.
The BBC lawsuit is a demonstration of how our institutions are now open to external intimidation and influence, and the tech investment pause is a reminder that the deals we’re being offered are so conditional, that we come out as, by far, the weaker party.
This issue in particular feels like a Brexit drawback that was never fully explained - we were portrayed, time and time again, as being better off outside the tent pissing in, yet now find ourselves locked completely outside of our original tent, being pissed on by a country with a lot more power than ours with no real options but to just sit back and take it.
If this piece landed somewhere between “oh for fuck’s sake” and “well… yes,” Bearly Politics is able to exist because readers back it - not because I’ve struck a lucrative post-Brexit deal involving sovereignty, optimism and self-delusion. A paid subscription lets me keep writing without sanding off the inconvenient bits.
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This is a very polite way of me saying that it appears that not a single proponent of Brexit appeared to have bothered to learn what the EU actually was about, how it worked or just how much more it is than Ursula von der Leyen on a power trip.
This is an excuse that’s being used with worrying frequency when you consider that the behaviour we’ve seen from DJT would be framed as a complete breakdown in social norms and cognitive ability in literally any other person.
Formally we’ll refer to this as “economic modelling.” Informally we’ll refer to it as another case of “Oh Christ, what now?!”
Something I’m learning in the course of the mass debunking is that control was for the most part taken back - it’s just manifested at more control over making pretty shit decisions.
Or alternatively calculated as several thousand David Attenboroughs.
I am told by actual diplomats that this is one of the worst diplomatic stances you can take.
A sidenote here: We have a £31bn investment deal being used to bully us into changing tax laws while Argentina was recently given a $40m bailout by the US on the basis that DJT has a thing about chainsaws and rampant austerity. Make of this what you will.
Exactly. I can't argue with any of that and I confess that I did try to find fault.
He has added to it by claiming that the BBC had used AI to make him say words that he says he did not. The BBC should counter sue for defamation. I think they have a lot better chance of winning than he does.