Brexit: Three Brexiteers Go Abroad!

If only Brexit really were a “Carry On” for a rainy bank holiday. Instead this very real comedy has a spin-off sequel as three Brexiteers, Liam Fox, Boris Johnson and David Davis split and go their separate ways to foster ties with North America, Australia and Germany in the hope of future trade deals.

The ever modest Jeremy Corbyn meanwhile is in the Highlands touring not distilleries but electorates that were once held by the Labour Party. Corbyn is putting some groundwork into what are now marginal Scottish National Party seats in anticipation of another election, capitalising on Parliament’s summer recess while Theresa May take a walking holiday in Switzerland.

Liam Fox

Liam Fox has been in Washington and he is one of the most avid fans in Westminster of the US alliance. A charity called “Atlantic Bridge” that he set up to promote political ties with the US employed his good friend Adam Werritty and was part of an influence-peddling scandal that forced Fox to resign as Defence Secretary in 2011 to spend almost five years in the political wilderness.

Now that he is Trade Secretary the open chicken gate that threatens to flood the UK with US chlorine-washed chicken has been pecking at his tail since he refused to rule out importing the poultry as part of a wider trade agreement.

When asked at a press conference in the US how he would feel eating a chicken that had been dipped in chlorine he spurned the question. “The British media are obsessed with chlorine-washed chickens, a detail of the very end stage of one sector of a potential free trade agreement,” he said.

Fox repeatedly refused to say whether the UK might eventually accept such chickens, which are now banned by EU health standards, insisting that was a decision that could only be made after advanced trade negotiations with the Americans.

His Cabinet colleague Michael Gove, the Secretary for the Environment and Agriculture, had no such qualms. Within a few hours of Fox’s comments Gove said a flat “no” when asked whether the UK would import such chickens.

Now what of those other “details” like hormone-fed beef and genetically modified crops? Perhaps the biggest question here is why Fox dismissed the question about eating local chicken when he had probably already been consuming such products on his visit to Washington. Maybe he should have just enjoyed a KFC bargain bucket for the cameras.

Boris Johnson

The foreign secretary has been attending the annual UK and Australian Foreign and Defence Ministers’ talks in Sydney, having flown in from New Zealand after raising eyebrows with his suggestion that a traditional Māori greeting called a “hongi”, which involves pressing noses together, “might be misinterpreted in a pub in Glasgow,” implying a headbutt.

He assured Australians of an open migration agreement when talking to small technology companies before heading to his hotel.

“A million Australians entered without any kind of visa at all last year – they just pitch up in Heathrow and they get a kiss on both cheeks,” he said, which is not exactly how many Australians view the often extortionately expensive UK visa process.

David Davis

The same day that Johnson flew to Australia the Brexit Secretary was in a series of negotiations in Germany. The “Brexit Bulldog” spoke with Bavarian Prime Minister Horst Seehofer of the Christian Social Union – the local sister party of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union – who has previously warned against trade barriers because the economic powerhouse of Bavaria relies so much on exports.

“With the Brexit our third-largest European trading partner will leave the EU,” he wrote in April in the magazine of the Bavarian Industry Association. “In the Brexit negotiations we have to put relations on a new footing as quickly as possible and do our utmost to avoid new trade barriers.”

Ilse Aigner, the Bavarian economy minister, said that Brexit is a big threat to the local region’s economy and argued that the UK is one of the “most important trading partners for Bavaria”.

Davis’s visit therefore mirrors David Cameron’s visit to the state to meet with the like-minded CSU in January last year when he was trying to gain support for a new deal within the EU, which of course did not go too well.

The travels of these three brexiteers underlines the fact that Theresa May has chosen these Brexiteers as Britain’s frontmen to deal with the world, and they have become the face of Britain far beyond the corridors of Brussels.

by Stewart Vickers

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