Mordaunt in Blatherskite

The UK's Rainy Night in Georgia

The English language has a rich tradition of words to describe ‘language, behaviour, or ideas that are absurd and contrary to good sense’. Some of them are still in standard usage: stupidity, foolishness, garbage, claptrap, drivel.  Others are more old-fashioned and passé. Nowdays we don’t normally refer to balderdash, moonshine, bilge, codswollop, hogwash, twaddle and poppycock.  Not to mention words that have faded into the mists of time or acquired new meanings, from punk and applesause, to folderol, horsefeathers, slush, and - my particular favourite - blatherskite.

Any one of them can be applied to the extraordinary speech made by the Minister of State for Trade Policy Penny Mordaunt at the Carter Centre in Atlanta on 14 December.   I don’t know whether Mordaunt wrote this speech herself or whether it was written for her, but it is as delusional and dishonest an analysis of Brexit as I have ever heard, and this time the hubris that I have come to expect is steeped in a desperation that is embarrasing and not a little pathetic. 

Mordaunt gave this speech as part of a tour of US states that is clearly intended to build up a groundswell of support for a UK-US trade deal, following the Biden administration’s insistence that the federal government is not interested in any such thing in the immediate future.

Someone in the British government has had the brilliant idea of trying to persuade Biden to change his mind by building up pressure at state level. As a result one of the most arrogant if lesser known Brexiters has been sent to tell governors, mayors, and anyone who will listen that the UK is ready to do business. I mean, it is really ready to do business, as in please, for God’s sake, do business with us.

Not that it has been phrased exactly like that.  Mordaunt’s speech is a long one, but students of our ongoing calamity might like to take a look at it, because it really does tell us not just what the UK government would like America to believe it has achieved, but because it also indicates where the UK government would like to take us.

To save you the trouble, let me share with you some of the key points. The main theme of Mordaunt’s speech is that the UK has gone a great thing, a really great thing, in leaving the EU, and America needs to know this. In fact the whole world needs to know this, because what we have done is a model for other countries to follow, which is why Mordaunt has gone all the way to Atlanta to ‘bring people together.  And because I want to awaken you to an opportunity to do something really profound.’

Really profound. So freaking profound that it’s a wonder she doesn’t self-combust, because she makes it clear repeatedly, in a tone that borders on the condescending, that the US hasn’t fully appreciated how profound we are, or the mutual opportunities that Brexit presents. 

So what have we done? Mordaunt explains:

It is an idea. It could be a revolution. It is an opportunity born from recent history: the political and constitutional gymnastics that both of our countries have been going through…In recent years our democracy has been under attack, and through some extremely challenging times.  We have tested our institutions, our beliefs and our trust in each other to the limit.

It’s at this point, very early on, that the blatherskite and folderal start to morph into the kind of brazen disregard for the truth and rewriting of history that might be more appropriate in Mar-a-Lago than the Carter Institute.  After all, American democracy, as Mordaunt well knows, has been ‘under attack’ primarily from Donald Trump and the Republican Party, culminating in the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6. 

At no point during the last five years has the UK government done or said anything serious to criticise or oppose these developments.  On the contrary, it bent over backwards to court Trump in the hope of achieving a trade deal – even to the point of giving him and his appalling family a state visit to appease his bloated narcissism. 

As for attacks on democracy over here; these stem entirely from the Tory Party and the Tory press, whether proroguing parliament, undermining ministerial accountability, defanging the Electoral Commission, or seeking to undermine judicial review and the right of appeal, to name only a few examples of the Johnson government’s authoritarian drift.

Yet here is Mordaunt in Atlanta boasting of the effort undertaken by ‘our civil servants to reinvent our border, transpose the statute book and get every business in the land prepared for several eventualities.’

A few points here.  Those civil servants would not include those who were sacked or pushed out because they recognised the practical risks and difficulties in doing what Mordaunt says they did. The border was ‘reinvented’ only because Brexiters did not understand what was required by their refusal to remain in the Single Market or the Customs Area.   And there is no evidence whatsoever  that the government did anything at all to ‘get every business in the land’ prepared for anything at all.

Apart from that, it’s all good. ‘What kind of country does that?’ Mordaunt asks. ‘Why upset the status quo?  Why risk upsetting friends and neighbours?  What sort of country risks everything to go alone, to make a vision the reality?

There are many possible answers to those questions, none of which reflect well on the UK.  Let’s just  keep it polite and answer ‘a foolish country led by nationalist ideologues that didn’t understand what they were doing and exploited the fears, anxieties and accumulated resentment of the British public.’

That’s not the answer Mordaunt is seeking. According to her we are a country that loves freedom, like America, to the point when we are willing ‘to die for it.’ Afer all

There’s a reason that Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence sit side by side in Washington. It shows that first America followed Britain in reinventing its human rights.  Two hundred years later. Britain has returned the compliment.

Yes you heard it correctly, leaving a trade bloc that you voluntarily joined and were allowed to voluntarily leave is the same as an anticolonial war and the military defeat of the colonial power. And now that Britain has ‘returned the compliment’ with a ‘seismic shift’, Mordaunt wants to see a ‘paradigm shift in the American response in order to maximise the opportunity for all of us.’

After all all, ‘It’s not every day that a G7 country does that.  Leaves the orbit of the EU to enable it to be closer to others. To be closer to you.’

Just like the bees, as Karen Carpenter once sang, we want to be close to America, and Mordaunt really wants America to recognise that Brexit is a ‘major geo-political event’ and also a ‘massive opportunity to anyone who believes in democracy and the power of trade as a force for good in the world.’

The Global Chessboard

This is where we start to get to the nitty-gritty – sort of - as Mordaunt informs her listeners that

there is a global battle between two competing versions of capitalism.  One which is checked by democracy and organised by competition, wide-eyed to the limits for the state, and has the progress of humanity as its polaris.

Don’t ask me what that last sentence means.  I have no idea, and I doubt that Mordaunt or her audience had any idea either.  None of which stops her arguing that ‘our vision of free and fair trade is best for humanity.’

To achieve this ‘vision’, Mordaunt calls for the dismantling of ‘market-distorting practices, such as harmful state subsidies and more other pernicious government interventions which damage competion.’ 

This, Mordaunt suggests, is why we left the EU.  She may well be right, as far as her extremist clique is concerned, even though this was not the argument that most Brexiters made. 

Ironically, the ‘Lexit’ opposition to the EU ‘bosses club’ was partly due to the belief that the EU’s commitment to open competition might limit Labour’s plans for a more interventionist economy.  But Mordaunt seems to regard the EU as still too interventionist for the entirely deregulated economy that the British government has in mind, which it will only support UK businesses ‘to compete fairly and on merit.’

The idea that British businesses don’t already do this will be news to many. But the subtext of Mordaunt’s speech is that the UK will do nothing to protect UK businesses and agriculture from whatever American companies and corporations and farmers want to do.  

According to her, the UK is already in discussion with US States about ‘liberalising regulations and increasingly partnerships in key growth areas’ as well as ‘cutting bureaucracy and increasing flexibility in the core areas of economic trade between our countries.’

Leave aside the fact that ‘bureaucracy’ has not been cut, but increased, insofar as the EU is concerned, or that the UK has little chance of achieving these aims at a state level in the US. Mordaunt is offering to open up the UK economy to whatever the US wants to do. She is all but begging for a trade deal, and that is not a good thing for a medium-sized power that wants to enter into negotiations with a superpower.

All this is topped off with fatuous boastfulness and condesenscion, such as the following:

We have made our move. We have made ourselves a player on the global chessboard and presented you with an unprecedented opportunity.Let future generations of Americans not say in the moment of choosing you failed to grasp that opportunity. Too many people in the world, many of whom are voiceless, are relying on us both to make the right choice.

There is no ‘global chessboard’ – only a world with many different players with competing interests, amongst whom the UK is a dwindling power.  Much of the world is speechless, not voiceless, at the stupidity and fanaticism of the UK, in tearing up its relationship with its largest and nearest trading partner. Not only is there very little to suggest that the UK has made the ‘right choice’, but the evidence overwhelmingly shows that Brexit has harmed the UK economy in multiple ways.

Even the British public is no longer certain that the UK has made the right choice and regards a trade deal with the EU as preferable to one with the US, and both Leave and Remain voters have turned against Johnson’s Brexit deal.

Mordaunt doesn’t see that and nor does her government, and she doesn’t want Americans to see it either.  But she does want America to see Brexit as advantageous for its economy, regardless of its consequences for ours. And her pompous heap of folderol is another indication that her government has no interest in defending the UK’s interests, but only its own, so that can finally bring back something to justify the futile trauma of the last six years and brag that it has actually achieved something.