Greg Clark appointed new Housing Secretary

Greg Clark is Michael Gove’s replacement at DLUHC. He is MP for Tunbridge Wells.

Clark was a junior minister in DeCLoG (the predecessor to DLUHC) from 2010 to 2012, and later went back to DeCLoG as Secretary of State in 2015. He was the Secretary of State between the 2015 General Election and the appointment of Theresa May as PM in 2016, when he was moved to the post of Business Secretary, serving in that office under Theresa May from 2016 to 2019.

Following the replacement of Theresa May as PM by Boris Johnson in July 2019, Clark (who was opposed to a ‘No Deal’ Brexit) voted against the EU Withdrawal Bill, whereupon Boris Johnson withdrew the Tory whip from him and other Tory rebels. (The whip was restored in the following month.) He is regarded as a Tory moderate.

So, rather unusually, his new department is one that is familiar to the new Secretary of State. (Complete inexperience in and ignorance of the subject with which the new minister will be dealing is more usual!)

Politics is still in a state of some flux, and it is uncertain how long Clark will serve in his new post. This will depend on how long Boris Johnson continues as PM. All ministerial posts will be at the disposal of a new PM when he or she takes over from Johnson.

© MARTIN H GOODALL

Gove out!

The Department for ‘Levelling Up’, Housing and Communities has lost its Secretary of State this evening. Unlike other ministers who have left the government in the past few days, Gove was sacked. At the time of writing (10 p.m. on 6 July), the PM’s reason for this sacking has not yet been made public.

A new Secretary of State will no doubt be appointed in the next day or two (provided that the besieged Chief Clown can find one). It is too early to say what effect this will have on the so-called Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill. This may well depend on the fate of Bojo the Clown. Tonight he is fighting like mad to face down his critics, but if he does not resign in the next day or two, his hash may be settled by Tory MPs next week.

The new Secretary of State (if/when appointed), like other newly appointed ministers, may have a very short term in office.

Watch this space!

UPDATE (7.7.22): News came through just ater 9 a.m. this morning that Johnson has bowed to the inevitable and will step down as Chief Clown and leave the circus. However, there is coninuing controversy this morning over whether he should continue as Prime Minister pending the election of his successor as leader of the Tory Party, or whether he should be replaced now by a caretaker PM. This leaves considerable uncertainty over the refilling of nearly 60 ministerial posts that have been vacated in the past 48 hours. Even greater uncertainty centres on the position of Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communiites, bearing mind that Gove was the only cabinet member who has been sacked, as opposed to resigning.

© MARTIN H GOODALL

Brexit wrecks it

My last piece in this blog about Brexit appeared on “Black Friday” (31 January 2020) - the day on which the UK formally ceased to be a member state of the European Union. Re-reading it almost 2½ years later, I have not found any need to alter a single word of what I wrote in that piece.

For a year or two, the government hid behind the covid virus pandemic as a convenient excuse for the consequences of their actions (or, in some cases, inaction), but the fog is clearing now, and it is becoming increasingly clear that Brexit itself has been and will continue to be a significant factor in the economic problems our country is facing. The economy is already 5% smaller than it would have been if the UK had not left the EU. Investment is more than 13% down, as is trade between the UK and the EU. Brexit has cost the government (and hence taxpayers) £30 billion, and growth in our GDP next year is set to be the second lowest of any G20 country except Russia. Farmers are no longer getting the payments they received under Common Agricultural Policy, which the government has failed to replace, and the fishing industry is being devastated by their inability to sell fish into the lucrative European market as they did before Brexit.

Of course, we could have negotiated much more favourable terms for continued trading arrangements with the EU, but the present government, having bluffed and blustered about the possibility of leaving the EU with no deal at all to provide for our future trading relations with Europe, eventually agreed minimal terms at the last minute in order to deliver the ‘hard’ Brexit that their Brextremist right wing demanded, and they have been whingeing ever since about the terms that they themselves signed up to, threatening unilaterally to break the treaty by which the UK is bound in international law.

What the Brextremists on the right-wing of the Tory Party have never understood, and would prefer to ignore, is that the UK is now a ‘third country’ which is in the same position as any other country in the world that is not a member of the EU. It is this (almost certainly wilful) ignorance of the position that leads these Brextremist idiots to wail that the EU is ‘punishing’ the UK for having left the club. But the UK is being treated no differently than any other non-member. You can’t resign from the Golf Club and still expect to have free use of the clubhouse and its facilities or to be able to play on the course in the same way as you did when you were a member. Terms would nevertheless have been available for a much more advantageous relationship that would have preserved the close trading links which this country enjoyed with the EU for nearly 50 years, and which the present government has so wantonly trashed.

The sad fact is that the government has not “got Brexit done”, because Brexit was not a single event; it is a continuous and never-ending process, which will involve constant negotiation and re-negotiation between the UK and European Commission for years to come, in order to sort out the numerous loose ends and anomalies thrown up by the slipshod trade agreement that our Chief Clown cobbled together at the last minute with his mate ‘Frosty’.

What is clearly needed is an urgent effort to repair our relationship with the EU. Clearly the present government is unwilling to take any such step. In fact they seem intent on worsening an already troubled relationship and destroying any trust that the EU might previously have had in this country’s good faith and reliability as a business partner. So it will take an entirely new government of a different political complexion to restore a sensible working relationship with the EU.

The process will be a gradual one, starting with quiet and patient diplomacy to restore trust. From this foundation the new government must then move on to a friendly and sensible discussion with a view to restoring frictionless trade and closer and mutually beneficial trading terms between the UK and EU, starting with the removal of unnecessary non-tariff barriers and avoidable red tape. This will necessarily involve the abandonment of the present government’s stubborn insistence on ‘freeing’ itself from European rules and standards. Many small and medium enterprises dependent on importing from or exporting to Europe are crying out for re-alignment with the common regulatory regime that used to guarantee frictionless trade across the Channel. Only a fool could seriously advocate the abandonment of common food and environmental standards that underpinned cross-border trade, or the even sillier (and utterly impractical) idea of trying to turn Britain into a kind of ‘Singapore-on-Thames’.

No dramatic action will be needed to resolve any operational issues associated with the Irish Protocol. Most businesses in the province are happy with the current arrangements, which are generally advantageous to them. It is really only the DUP’s barmy army that are making a fuss about it, for purely doctrinaire political reasons. Any necessary or desirable adjustments to the protocol are likely be minor, and can be agreed as an integral part of the negotiations referred to above.

This is in fact what the Labour Party is now proposing. In his speech on 4 July, Sir Keir Starmer promised a plan “that will deliver on the opportunities Britain has, sort out the poor deal Boris Johnson signed and end the Brexit divisions once and for all. It is a proper plan to make Brexit work.”

The first step, he said, will be to sort out the Northern Ireland protocol. “If you’re going to make Brexit work, that has to be the starting point.” Labour, he promised, will get the protocol working and we will make it the springboard to securing a better deal. As well as building trust, Labour would eliminate most border checks created by the Tory Brexit deal with a new veterinary agreement for agri-products between the UK and EU. And they will work with business to put in place a better scheme to allow low-risk goods to enter Northern Ireland without unnecessary checks.

The second step Labour would take is to tear down unnecessary barriers. Starmer frankly admitted that outside of the single market and a customs union, we will not be able to deliver completely frictionless trade with the EU. This is the weak point in his plan, but he explained that there are things that can be done to make trade easier. Labour would agree a new veterinary agreement with the EU to cover all the UK, seeking to build on agreements and mechanisms already in place between the EU and other countries, which should benefit exporters “at a stroke”.

Starmer’s avowed intent is to ‘unclog’ the Tory Brexit deal, and all the red tape and bureaucracy this has created, which is hampering the flow of British business. Labour’s intention is to break that barrier down, unclog the arteries of our economy and allow trade to flourish once more. A Labour government would also seek mutual recognition of professional qualifications, ensuring UK services can compete and restoring access to funding and vital research programmes. Another important objective will be to strengthening security cooperation with our European neighbours, and an agreement to share data, intelligence, and best practice, and set up joint intelligence working in partnership with Europe.

This, then, is Labour’s plan “to make Brexit work”, hoping to put the divisions of the past behind us and to help everyone from exporters to musicians thrive. But I must confess, as an enthusiastic Europhile, that Starmer’s blunt assertion that under Labour, Britain will not go back into the EU (and that “We will not be joining the single market. We will not be joining a customs union” coupled with the undertaking that “We will not return to freedom of movement to create short-term fixes”) was extremely disappointing. Freedom of movement was never a short-term fix; it was fundamental to the fair and open operation of the Single Market. Far from British workers rushing to fill the jobs in the UK that before Brexit were being done by workers from the EU, many of those jobs have remained unfilled; crops have been left to rot in the fields, and the shortage of nurses and care workers has become even more acute. Freedom of movement in fact works both ways, as tourists, students and professional musicians in our post-Brexit world will ruefully attest. I wish I still had an EU passport!

Starmer’s stance seems to me to be unwise. Given goodwill and flexibility on both sides (especially on the part of UK negotiators, compared with previous performance), it should prove possible over time to move towards an agreement that would enable the UK to rejoin the EU’s Customs Union and the Single Market, as well as rejoining the Horizon scientific research programme as a full member, and other EU institutions, including Europol, the Erasmus programme and other Europe-wide arrangements.

After the history of the last few years, rejoining the European Union may be a bridge too far, for the Europeans as much as for us, but one of the promises of the Brexiteers in the 2016 referendum campaign was that this country could reach terms with the EU which would be just as favourable as the terms of our membership of the EU. They even averred that the UK could remain a member of the Customs Union and stay in the Single Market. So, in moving towards this type of arrangement, a future UK government would be doing no more than the Brexiteers themselves promised.

© MARTIN H GOODALL