Remember how, as Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab said he hadn’t understood how much trade went through Dover? As foreign secretary and first secretary of state, he’s just as hapless. Here are some of his worst blunders.
“Easier” to get a deal after we crash out
Raab told the BBC late last month that: “The prospect of… getting a good deal will be easier after we have left.”
This isn’t true. Under Article 50 which sets out the terms for leaving the EU, the European Council agrees the Withdrawal Agreement on the basis of qualified majority voting by the member states. The European Parliament needs to approve the deal by a simple majority but there is no need for ratification by national parliaments.
If we leave, member states may need to approve a deal unanimously and ratification by national parliaments may be required too. As EU law professor Steve Peers wrote in The Telegraph, the procedure depends on the exact content of the deal but “in no way would the negotiation of a deal after a no deal Brexit be procedurally easier than at present”.
Irish backstop “undemocratic”
In the same interview, Raab said that the Irish backstop was “undemocratic’. But the backstop was agreed by an elected UK government. Even Boris Johnson, the current prime minister, signed up to the core principle in December 2017 when he was foreign secretary? (See para 49 of the “Joint Report”).
What’s more, as David Hannay, a former UK ambassador to the EU, noted in an article for InFacts: Northern Ireland voted in favour of staying in the EU in the referendum. “So the only thing undemocratic in Northern Ireland terms is the Democratic Unionist Party’s insistence on removing the backstop.”
No deal warnings during the referendum
Raab continued to his loose grip on facts in the same interview: “We made clear, those in the campaign, that we should strive for a good deal but if that wasn’t available that we should go on and make a success of Brexit.” Yet no one has found evidence that he did. We have already rebutted this claim.
He “hadn’t quite understood” how much trade went through Dover
Talking about future trade with the EU at a technology conference in 2018 Raab said: “I hadn’t quite understood the full extent of this, but if you look at the UK and if you look at how we trade in goods, we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing.”
Dover is the key route for the UK trade to reach the continental Europe. In 2017 the port handled 2.9 million lorries amounting to 17% of the UK trade in goods.
If Raab and his boss manage to engineer their crash-out Brexit, it will be interesting to see what happens to all those lorries.