Brexit vs Breakfast: Food and Free Trade

The United Kingdom officially triggered Article 50 today, meaning the two-year march to Brexit has begun. The UK is leaving the European Union, and leaving without any concessions, any deals, any accommodations. It's the "hard Brexit." There are many reasons this is a bad idea, but let's keep it simple: the United Kingdom cannot feed itself.

Britain does manage to grow somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of the food it eats. The last numbers I saw were 54 or 55 percent. So better than half, but not nearly self-sufficient. And Britain does export some food and drink (read: beer), exporting things that its farmland and climate are good for and importing other things that it can't grow, or can't grow well. (If there are any British grapes, there should not be.) But the UK imports more than twice as much food as it exports. Britain depends on imported food from its neighbors, and has throughout its modern history.

Why is this? Because Britain's population is too large for Britain's own farmland too feed. Too many people on too small an area, with a good chunk of that area unfarmable. (Britain has plenty of lovely mountains.) They couldn't feed themselves if they tried. In fact, they have been trying, very very hard, and they can't.

This is not a question of farming more land: just about all the arable land is being farmed already. England has no field untilled, no stone unturned. And it is not a question of efficiency, because British farmers are already incredibly efficient, already wringing the absolute maximum yield from each acre. That they can feed more than half their massive population from that amount of land is actually pretty impressive. They cannot do better than they are already doing. In fact, they're getting close to some ugly short-term/long-term tradeoffs, where they could increase this year's harvest by a few percent at the cost of making the land less productive later. That is not a way out of their problem.

Now, the British are obsessed with British farmers. UK supermarkets slather their products with labels for British beef, British cream, British etc. etc. But that obsession just masks the basic problem that Britain doesn't produce enough beef, butter, and so on. The imperative to buy and cook home-grown products functions to distract the public from the larger problem that there's not enough home-grown food.

Likewise, British farmers are heavily subsidized by the EU, and this deal -- or rather, complete lack of deal -- kills those subsidies, which may or not be replaced. So this may hurt British farmers, too. But that complicated and murky policy question is much less important than the far simpler problem of not being able to feed your own population without buying food from other countries.

Where does most of that imported food come from? All over the world, but about half of the gap is made up by European Union farmers. Remember, England's traditional breadbasket is Ireland. It's been dependent upon Irish farming throughout its modern history. (Yes, even during the Potato Famine; Ireland exported food to England during the Potato Famine, and met its quotas, while the Irish themselves starved.) And of course, England's other nearest neighbor, France, is an agricultural powerhouse, blessed with acre after acre of prime farmland. So the EU produces more than a quarter of the food the British eat.

Now, I'm no economist. But it strikes me that if your country is dependent upon imported food, you never, ever want to leave a free-trade agreement. Tariffs on agricultural goods can only drive up the price of food for your people. God forbid you ever get into an actual trade war with the people who sell your citizens at least five meals a week.

Throwing up trade barriers on food makes that food more expensive, obviously. And, free markets being what they are, making one quarter of the country's food more expensive makes all food prices rise. If Irish beef is more expensive because of taxes, then people can charge more for British beef too, and will.

This makes daily living more expensive for everybody, but it hits poorer people much harder, because more of their income is taken up on basic necessities. Rich people spend a much smaller percentage of their income on food; even if they buy more expensive groceries, or go to fancy restaurants, it's a much smaller part of their monthly budget. (Having excess money for things beyond basic needs is what being rich is.) But if, say, one-third of your monthly income goes to the groceries, a spike in grocery prices can be truly painful.

The "elites" that Brexiteers love to jeer at are not going to be hurt by this; they will still have their French wines and their long lovely dinner parties. They will just pay a small surtax on those pleasures. It's the poor and hard-working Little Englanders, the people who voted for Brexit to stick it to the London elites, who will get it stuck to them at the supermarket checkout. They are the people who are going to be bringing home less bacon, and paying more for what they bring.

If this all seems like a stupid and self-destructive idea, well, Britain has never been Europe's farming superpower. But in the EU it's become the banking superpower, making enormous money as the financial capital of Europe because the whole bloc could locate its premier financial services in one city without worrying about financial borders. And now that those borders are returning ... oh, wait. What was the plan here again?

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Fairy Tale Promises: The Brexit, Conservatives, and Trump

The shocking result of the "Brexit" referendum, with Britain leaving the European Union, has widely been taken as Good News for Donald Trump. He was happy to say so himself, and to attempt to take credit somehow for the referendum's success. And people have been panicking about the danger that Trump's campaign could beat the conventional wisdom just as the British "Leave" campaign did. That danger is probably overrated, as Jamelle Bouie points out: the UK is much whiter than the US, so the angry white vote doesn't carry as far here any more, and we should remember that the Brexit result wasn't really a surprise: "Leave" and "Remain" had been polling neck-and-neck down to the wire, so the 52-48 result wasn't unlikely. But Trump, who led the Republican primary polls wire to wire, is clearly behind in the general-election polls. On the other hand, it's easy to see Trump and the Brexiteers as part of a wider movement: angry nativist populists, hostile to policy experts and welcoming to xenophobes and racists.  That movement won't meet with the same success everywhere, but it's real.

I want to move past the obvious similarities to look at two more important comparisons. Both the American and British situations feature 1) the country's major conservative party tearing itself apart, mostly because of 2) a long history of campaign promises that were never meant to be kept, because the people making them considered them impossible. Let's take these one at a time.

First of all, the Brexit is deeply tied to  a civil war inside the UK's Conservative Party. The "Remain" and "Leave" campaigns were led by rival Tory politicians: the Prime Minister, David Cameron, led the campaign to stay in the EU and Boris Johnson, who has long been gunning for Cameron's job, led the campaign to quit the EU. That would be bad enough, but it's worse: the leaders of BOTH campaigns have destroyed their political fortunes. Cameron resigned his Prime Ministership the day after losing the vote. Today, Boris Johnson turned his expected announcement of his campaign for Prime Minister into a surprise resignation speech. He won't be running for PM, and is resigning his seat. It's like House of Cards, but with lots of twists and drama.

The Brexit vote itself was meant to ward off Tory civil war, with Cameron throwing the referendum out as a sop to fend off both the anti-immigrant fourth or fifth party called the UK Indepence Party, and the Brexiteer faction of his Cameron's own party ... essentially to shut Boris Johnson up. So, that plan has gone as badly as it could go: UKIP and its loathsome chief, Nigel  Farage, have now been empowered, Cameron has lost his premiership, and Johnson has immediately fallen on the sword he used to decapitate Cameron. How did it go so wrong?

It went so wrong because the Brexit itself was a poison pill: easy to campaign for, but a disaster to put into practice. Once the Leave side had won, and Cameron had chosen to resign without triggering the exit (as opposed to triggering the exit and then resigning, which only a fool would have counted on him doing), Johnson and the other Leave leaders were stuck. The Prime Minister who actually triggers the Brexit, who begins the formal process of withdrawal, will be on the hook both for the bad effects that follow, especially the flight of business and banking from London to other European cities, and for the drawbacks of whatever deal the UK hammers out with the remaining European powers.

Here's the thing: Boris Johnson knows the consequences of the Brexit will be bad, and he knows that the deal with Europe won't deliver what he promised. London has become the financial capital of Europe under the current deal, and that becomes impossible if the UK leaves. An enormous amount of business WILL leave the UK, and take jobs with it. Meanwhile, the EU will never allow a country access to its market without both paying dues and (more importantly) allowing free immigration from the rest of the EU. Countries like Switzerland, which have side deals with the EU, have to allow free immigration, so the end to immigration that the Brexiteers promised will never happen without losing access to all that sweet tariff-free trade. BoJo knows these things.

But BoJo and the other Brexiteers publicly denied all of these things. They denounced the (true and totally common-sense) warnings that the Brexit would lose British jobs as "scaremongering." And BoJo began making noises after the vote about how the UK could stay part of the European market, etc. etc. etc. Except it can't without, you know, staying in. So Johnson, who has made his entire career on basking the EU, had no way forward. The backstabbing finale, in which Johnson's deputy from the Leave campaign put the knife to his prospects, was just the inevitable ending.

Johnson has been living for years off a popular (and populist) movement which he knows would be disastrous but which he didn't really think could succeed. It's very obviously that he had no plan for what to do when he won. He didn't plan for the Brexit because he never expected not necessarily even wanted it to happen. It was just a convenient set of talking points to rally a populist base against the party insiders, splitting populist Tories from the party's pro-business establishment, to advance BoJo's career. He was making a set of fairy tale promises.

Boris Johnson has campaigned for years, as both politician and journalist, on a "Let's All Go to Narnia" platform. It's not practical in any way, but it strikes a deep chord with voters and gets them passionately enthusiastic. Even better, it forces Boris's political opponents into the unenviable position of arguing against Narnia, and sounding like passionless, pedantic jerks. No one likes the Anti-Narnia guy. And Boris never had to worry about what he proposed coming true, because it was so far from being possible.

Then one day, Boris Johnson found himself hip-deep in snow, staring dumbfounded at a lamp post. What to do, but crawl back into your uncle's wardrobe and hide?

Here in America, we're seeing a parallel breakup of the Republican coalition, as its populist wing breaks away from its traditional business-oriented policies. Everything Trump promises the crowds would be catastrophic for American business. But the other Republicans aren't in much position to debunk Trump, because they have been cynically feeding Trump's own fairy-tale promises to their base for years now. Trump's border wall is not Trump's idea. Trump has no policy ideas of his own. The border wall with Mexico has been a fairy-tale proposal that various Republicans have hawked during primaries and off-year elections for years. (Sometimes they have called the wall a "security fence" in order to sound smarter, and make the totally unworkable proposal sound like something practical.) I've been hearing about that "build a wall" plan since at least the 90s. No one who made that promise ever had to worry about it happening. And if Trump actually won, he would quickly discover that building the wall would be ruinously expensive and pointless.

Here's the Republicans' real problem. They have a whole batch of fairy tale policies that they've been pushing to their voters for years now. (The Democrats also have some pie-in-the-sky plans that they don't think are achievable at the moment, but the actually think those things could work if put into place. And they have a habit of only campaigning on what they think they can get done in the next few years.) Clinton's policies are things she that she thinks could get through Congress and will work if they do.

"Repealing Obamacare" is a classic fairy-tale promise. It excites the Republican base like no one's business. But the Republicans also know that they can't actually do it, and that doing it would be a disaster. Throwing people off their health insurance is not something you do in office. Likewise, actually banning abortion would be the ruin of the party that does it for decades afterward. That doesn't stop them from campaigning on these fairy-tale promises. In fact, they campaign on them so hard because they know they can't make these things happen. But if they did, it would be a disaster. This is red meat you feed the rubes. The problem comes, not just for a political party but for a whole nation, when the rubes expect you to do what you've promised them.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Who Lost Scotland?

Today Scotland votes on independence: a fifty-fifty referendum on leaving the United Kingdom. It's gone from a long shot to a statistical dead heat, and nobody can say for sure how the vote will go. But what's certain is that Scotland's old relationship with the rest of Britain is finished. The Scottish independence movement will not just go away if they come up a couple percent short; they're never going to give up now that they've gotten this close. And if a united United Kingdom squeaks by, Scotland will expect to be given much more autonomy than it's had so far. In fact, this week the leaders of all three major parties have had to promise them that autonomy. So no matter how the vote goes, it's fair to say that David Cameron and his Conservative Party have managed to lose Scotland. They should pay a price for that.

The format of the vote is Cameron's fault. Cameron insisted that the most popular middle-ground option, so-called "max devo" or maximum devolution, which would have kept Scotland inside the United Kingdom but given it more power over its own affairs, be kept OFF the ballot. He made sure that it was an all-or-nothing vote: accept the status quo or leave the nation entirely.

I'm sure Cameron viewed this as masterful strategy: getting what he wanted by allowing no other workable option. You can choose between having it David Cameron's way and having this delicious shit sandwich. But it's backfired. Given a choice between a radical break and Cameron's status quo, many Scots would clearly prefer a radical break. Some of the most persuasive arguments I've heard  for a "Yes" vote on independence have been from people who said that what they really wanted was max devo, and that they were given no choice.

Pro tip to David Cameron: when people would rather eat a shit sandwich than spend time in your company, you're in no position to play the tough guy.

Now, of course, the danger of secession is so high that Cameron has had to troop up to Scotland with the Labour and Liberal party leaders and promise something close to max devo anyway. But many Yes voters hear that as an empty promise. For good reason, too: there are no specifics about what these "new powers for Scotland" would mean, and it's a promise to do something the voters want if the voters agree to give up all their leverage first. A promise like that isn't worth the paper it's not written on.

On the other hand, if No squeaks by, Cameron is in the position of having more or less promised to give Scotland the thing that he didn't want to give them and that he made sure was not on the ballot. So instead of exactly what he wants or an unpalatable alternative, he now faces a choice between exactly what he doesn't want and an unpalatable alternative. It's a kind of strategic masterpiece, carefully orchestrating his own defeat. It's a shit sandwich David Cameron prepared for himself, with his own two hands.

Now, most of the Scottish voters are far to Cameron's left, and he may think his Conservatives will gain politically if a whole region of Labour voters leave the country. But that's almost the definition of short-sightedness, and Conservatives who collude, even indirectly, in the breakup of the United Kingdom have failed at everything their party stands for. No one will admire a Conservative Party that allowed the dissolution of Great Britain. How could they? Churchill famously said that he hadn't become Prime Minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire. David Cameron now risks being the Tory MP who presided over the dissolution of Britain itself.

I'll admit that in my heart I'm hoping for a No, and a continued Great Britain. That's not because I'm a great Anglophile. (I'm from Boston, after all, where declaring independence from Britain is considered a heroic tradition.) But history, as I best understand it, suggests that Scotland will be dominated by its larger, wealthier southern neighbor no matter what, simply because that neighbor is larger and wealthier. Union, on balance, probably allows Scotland better terms in that relationship.

Remember how England took over Scotland: the King of Scotland inherited the English throne. After many decades of anxiety that the King of England would somehow get the Scottish throne and take over the country, the reverse happened. The King of Scotland took over England, and that ultimately put Scotland under England's power. For the last four hundred and eleven years, captive England has led conquering Scotland in chains, because the fundamental power difference is about things that no treaty can change. It's political gravity: the smaller country falls into the larger one's orbit. That underlying fact won't change with today's vote. But the strength of England's hold on Scotland will, win or lose.

cross-posted at Dagblog