Brexit: reading the runes
By Pete North - December 14, 2020
Blogging wise I’ve struggled this year. Brexit fatigue set in with the public and if nobody is willing to invest the intellectual energy in what you produce then there is no point producing it. That partly explains my productivity slump this year. It takes enormous effort to stay on top of things intellectually (and emotionally) while the blowhards and morons reap the rewards on Twitter – where the less they know, the more popular they are.
What strikes me is how there is so much speculation and outrage over clauses and treaty apparatus that nobody has actually seen a working draft of. Consequently the debate is driven entirely by a fictional version of what is happening.
Having allowed myself to tune out the negotiations, climbing back into it is a bit of a chore. Separating fact from speculation if you haven’t been keeping an eye on things is quite difficult if you don’t know how. But I do know how. For starters, discount anything written by the Express, Mail or Telegraph and discount any reports based on anonymous sources. The general rule is that unless it’s been published or spoken by Michel Barnier, then it’s pure speculation and usually not informed speculation. Our media doesn’t know what it’s looking at and even if it did, they would lie about it.
When you’ve done that filtering you realise just how little there is to go on. Brexiteers are usually seething about something but it’s usually a construct inside their own parallel universe. Though Mrs Merkel is no doubt influential, she is not directly involved in negotiations and her comments are not gospel. Nobody, as I understand it, is proposing an autonomous ratchet mechanism but this is used as further evidence that the EU is seeking to tightly control the UK after Brexit to prevent it sailing into sea of prosperity.
When we remove all the angry Brexiteer clickbait from any estimations, we find we are back where we started – having nothing concrete to go on, left to take an educated guess, but it remains the case that talks are conducted behind closed doors. It would help if the talks were better structured with routine progress reports and drafts we can work off, but talks have seemingly not progressed far enough to produce drafts, leaving the field wide open for innuendo and wilful distortion. Both parties have under-priced how damaging this is.
Assuming for a moment, though, that I have got it wrong, were we to take at face value the Brexiteer version of events, that any deal with LPF provisions sees us tied to the EU, adopting rules verbatim and under the jurisdiction of the ECJ, I don’t suppose I will make myself any friends by pointing to the multiple times I warned about that exact outcome. This is why Efta made more sense and it’s why Vote Leave needed a plan so we didn’t end up a vassal state.
Brexiteers won’t have it though. They take it to mean we should simply leave without a deal in the belief that no-deal settles the matter and we simply adapt to life without formal trade relations with the EU. But f it isn’t this administration that recognises this cannot be the case, then it will be the next one, and in order to normalise relations the same basic topics will be up for discussion, only our need will be more acute.
But that again brings us back to the tiresome argument over what is and isn’t in other FTAs, observing that the EU’s demands are “unprecedented”. This is where there is an essential clash of ideas. The EU sees any deal as the foundation on a new relationship that evolves over time, whereas the Tories see a trade deal as something they can close the book on the moment it is ratified.
From the EU’s perspective, or indeed any sane perspective, two neighbouring first world economies with the most interconnected economies in the world require an unprecedented agreement. A basic FTA was never going to be adequate, and if the relationship is to evolve, it’s important to establish firm foundations. Consequently it cannot and will not enter an agreement without level playing field provisions and institutional mechanisms to maintain them.
Without such a working foundation we are unable to progress to the next level, addressing the very real problems created by leaving the single market. One assumes that the EU will execute its own time limited contingency measures entirely on its own terms in defence of its own interests, and the UK may be able to secure life extensions to these measures if it shows sufficient goodwill and reciprocity, but these cannot be formalised without an agreed foundation philosphy as embodied by LPF provisions.
If there is one positive ting we can say of late, it is that we seem to be doing a reasonably good job of rolling over our existing trade deals, finding more goodwill internationally that remainers would have us believe, and our trade department does seem to be getting up to speed as it establishes the civil society architecture to run an independent trade policy. This, though, is evidently not feeding into the Brexit operation in Downing Street. In all other instances it is understood that trade deals and relationships evolve, but still we’re treating the Brexit deal as a one time event.
This seems to give the game away in that the Tories think that when this is all done and dusted, our EU trade is then in maintenance mode while we turn our energies to emerging markets in the Pacific. The Tory groupthink is still stuck on the idea that the EU’s share of global trade is in decline thus we can afford to turn our backs.
This superficial narrative misreads the situation. The EU share of global trade may be declining but volumes are still growing. Or at least that was the rough outlook before Covid. It’s difficult to say what the picture looks like now, but with a shattered aviation sector, and global freight suffering all manner of stresses, this is not a good time to be burning bridges – especially when you don’t have to. Moreover, as much as nations are increasingly interconnected, so are trade deals. None of them operate in isolation and there is no cutting the EU out of the loop even without a deal.
In any case, there is little I can do to cut through the noise and I’m forced back to my original conclusion that there is little to be said until we see a draft treaty (if we even get that far). It smells like the PM has concluded that we do need a deal and the threat of no deal and repeated attempts to go around Barnier have failed. Perhaps the penny has dropped that no-deal is a non-option. Somebody has done the long term electoral maths and concluded that shafting every exporter of goods and services in the land will lose the Tories their majority.
We are told the Tories will punish Johnson if he signs up to a bad deal, but that’s a no-win game for Johnson in that the ERG will say that any deal is a bad deal. There is no deal within the realms of the possible that the Brexit blob would consider a good deal and if there was they would shift the goalposts, so Johnson is stuffed either way. He may as well try and salvage something of his legacy while he can. Until we get to the final, final deadline, though, whenever that may be, the issue may as well go back into snooze mode. The noise just isn’t worth the effort.