by Richard North

Brexit: the end of Civitas

Jonathan Lindsell, Civitas EU research fellow has produced what he laughingly calls a “book” of 119 pages, in which his idea of “research” is to put statements to a small group of people and then to record their edited statements, without further elaboration.

On the role of international organisations in agriculture, he chooses to quote “EU commentators such as Dr Richard North” who argue that, “like Norway, Britain would have a lot of ‘upstream’ influence on global organisations such as UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe) and the Codex Alimentarius Commission, which sets food standards, guidelines, codes of practice and advice.

Citing as background, a six-year-old blogpost (sending readers to the now redundant blogspot site), Lindsell then turns to Martin Haworth of the National Farmers’ Union, to ask him if this might alleviate the problems of leaving. He gets the following response:

Not really. We’d definitely be a separate member of the WTO, but not a particularly influential one. As for the Codex and UN – those are important in terms of global trade but have no influence at all in terms of European single market.

I don’t know what Lindsell thinks he’s trying to achieve by spreading such ignorant trash. Not least, it contradicts completely his own narrative (on p.95) where he cites a KPMG report that notes the importance of UNECE and the World Forum for Harmonisation of Vehicle Regulations (WP29) in “influencing global harmonisation and mutual recognition”.

This, we are told, “has implications for more than the Department for Transport: all UK departments will find, post-Brexit, that they gain (or regain) ‘competences’ that have been controlled by or shared with the EU for decades”.

I other words, outside the EU, the UK would gain “upstream influence” though organisations such as UNECE, Codex and many other organisations, which, largely through Article 2.4 of the WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, are increasingly dominating EU single market standards.

With such shoddy work, Lindsell is ruling out any idea of Civitas being a serious player in the “Brexit” debate, which will be increasingly dominated by the very thing he dare not mention – the Flexit plan.

For sure, Civitas will get an airing, because it has “prestige”, and it is really interesting to see the lengths to which some commentators will go to avoid mentioning Flexcit. It really does terrify them that much.

But, in the event, the torrent of trivial, rival plans – and associated commentary – will dry up and disappear. They have no substance to sustain them.