dawn ferry to tomorrow

It takes some time to work one's way around the documents of Whitehall. Often there's notes from a meeting that just say: "A meeting was held, some people attended and some stuff was discussed". Hardly minutes.

Now we have reached the Powerpoint stage for Brexit. I remember the consultants' credo "It always works in PowerPoint".

When I review something like this fresh Government PowerPoint deck, I'm drawn to the spaces. "in the spaces between the stars," as a Mersey poet might say. So what do we get?



Yes, we get a withdrawal agreement, about how to leave, but (in the spaces) not what actually comes next.

We get a set of separation issues, each with its own logo. I'm not sure how these have been prioritised although (surprisingly?) Euratom comes first. 'Spaces' seems an inadequate term to describe the things that don't get mentioned.



There's another four of these, described as 'other separation issues', but I'll summarise them using just their individual logos.



The next slide could be considered something of a stretch. It's about delivering stability throughout the implementation period. I assume stability doesn't mean the kind of 'strong and stable' environment we have right now.

Some of the ideas here could also be considered as wishful thinking.

Participation implies that the UK will be able to join in some of the EU meetings. There's a space around exactly what kind. Access to fishing rights is another area left dangling. Carry on as now until 2020 and then start an annual negotiation of fishing rights. That's with the EU unlikely to concede anything better than the rights provided during membership.

Then there's the legal/governance framework. It gets a whole slide and a special logo that shows that UK courts will 'pay due regard to the relevant decisions of the CJEU". Okay - so we're not really separated then?



Next we're on to the Protocols. Yippee some more management speak.

This is mainly the arrangements associated with Northern Ireland and the Island of Ireland. The main feature is explicit recognition in the Protocol is intended to be temporary and superseded by a future agreement. That's like another white space.

The 'uncomfortable arrangement' isn't resolved and is left until someone can solve the rest of the prime number series past 2^77,232,917 − 1.

After this area the PowerPoint switches to Political Declaration mode. In other words, everything else is tba (to be agreed).



It makes areas such as the economic partnership on goods fairly speculative.

It says zero tariffs, no fees, no charges, no quantitative restrictions, but this is political positioning, not an agreement.

If the approach to goods is speculative, then services and investment are even less defined, choosing words such as ambitious, comprehensive and balanced to define the relationship, whilst retaining regulatory autonomy.

Even as I write this I notice that from next March, European governments will access the €13bn-a-day MTS cash platform not from London but Milan. A desire to stay within EU financial markets has already inspired Refinitiv to say it is transferring its $300bn-a-day foreign exchange swaps business to Dublin. The €250bn-a-day BrokerTec repo trading operation, owned by CME Group, is moving to Amsterdam.

Plenty of white space being created in London office blocks as well as on these charts.

The slides go on to indicate that it can all be fixed in a couple of years, through to 2020. I'd say this seems very optimistic and may be a case of closing the door after the horse has bolted.

As for that couple of years concept. I'll use a different financial agreement as a comparator. Basel II/III, which is to regulate international financial settlements. Basel II started in around 2004 (before the banking crisis) and is still going strong with an implementation timetable stretching out (via the Basel III amendments) to 2022 for credit risk (and some other separated items that may drift) and to 2027 for its final parts. That's over 20 years, not including the Basel I part.

There's more on other matters including security partnerships and institutional arrangements and even a slide on areas of disagreement.

The closing section of the slide deck contains masterful slideware. It builds a new truth on top of the previous summarised political positioning.

The single logo-based "What Does It Mean?" slide. The one for the people who don't have time for the facts. Elevatorware/Liftware.



It's a 'work backwards' slide. What do we need to say? Now how do we revise some slides into a position which could support this?

It's also a highly distorted answer on a postcard which will be used to persuade Parliamentary votes, driven from this Government agenda.

I decided to make up my own preliminary version of that last slide, with a few comments.



See, I even left in the wiggly lines from PowerPoint.



And a whole lot of white space.