Brexit: the end of the beginning

By Pete North - December 24, 2020

I’ve seen some complaining today that whatever is in any trade deal, Brexit is already “betrayed” by way of the withdrawal agreement and the pig’s ear that is the Northern Ireland protocol. As you can imagine there is very little sympathy from these quarters. Brexiteers squealed blue murder at the very suggestion of a plan, absolutely refused to contemplate the complexities, dilemmas and trade-offs involved, and with depressing predictably walked straight into every ambush they could and should have anticipated – but didn’t.

The next slew of complaints is likely to be that we do not in fact “take back our fish” and of what we do take back, the small print will indicate the futility of doing so. Personally it’s not something I’m minded to get wound up about. We lack the technical competence to run a fishery, can’t afford the investment required for the minimal returns and nobody serious thinks that “taking back our fish” was ever going to return fishing ports and coastal towns to their former glory. Times change, things move on.

Then, of course, one might point to the futility of taking back fish without extensive customs cooperation which will be the main thing to note in any trade deal. Or rather the absence of it. An FTA does not provide for internal market concepts (in the area of goods) such as mutual recognition, the ‘country of origin principle’, and harmonisation. Nor does an FTA remove customs formalities and controls, including those concerning the origin of goods.

As it happens I’m unable to speculate in any great detail as to what might be in the deal because I haven’t followed the gossip. I prefer instead to wait for a primary source. That said, Anton Spisak of the Tony Blair Institute has produced a good starter for ten on how to evaluate the deal.

But of course, the Brexiteers won’t anyone the courtesy of reading it before declaring it a sell out or a betrayal. Any deal with binding commitments of any kind is BRINO in their eyes, thus their impotent wailing is best ignored so that the adults can get on with deciphering it.

That is not to say the deal won’t contain a few nasties, and there will no doubt be questions as to the role of the ECJ. I won’t be surprised to see some role for it in dispute settlement, which was an inevitable consequence of rejecting an Efta based solution. Plenty of people saw that one coming well in advance.

In any case we won’t be looking at (if you’ll pardon the expression) the final solution. The deal will likely provide for further developments in recognition that any bilateral deal is the framework for a future relationship that will evolve and expand. Some things may have been left out for political reasons but will creep back in over time. And therein lies the importance of having a deal. The only reason a thin deal is important is that it shaves a year or two off the process of repairing the damage of needlessly quitting the single market. In the interim it does very little for British exporters.

Much of this now rests on the the ratification and implementation process, and whatever contingency measures both sides employ, but I’m still working on the premise that third country means third country, this official controls will apply, for the most part, form the very beginning. There is, therefore, every reason to expect difficulties at the ports and problems with supply chains. UK authorities may pre-empt this and deter traffic from even setting off, thereby avoiding a repeat of this week’s chaos, but still leading to substantially reduced volumes of freight.

As to whether it’s a good deal or not is a more complicated question. It entirely depends on what you you hoped to accomplish. If your expectations are unrealistic you’re likely to be very disappointed. In any case, the deal cannot be viewed in isolation of the withdrawal agreement. One has to evaluate the whole package, which largely indicates it’s a dog’s dinner. It’s a spaghetti bowl of red tape and bureaucracy that is both dysfunctional and unsustainable, and will inevitably see us going cap in hand to Brussels to try and repair the damage.

This is ultimately the consequence of failing to plan, failing to set out coherent objectives and not having any real idea of what to do with Brexit once they’d got it. We’ve been winging it from day one.

This is why I believe the Tories are almost certainly on their way out. There is no coherent agenda as to what comes next, while it seems Labour is rebuilding its technical competence. Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have this week advanced some worthwhile contributions as to how to reform our democracy and fight Covid. Along with the primer from Spisak above, it seems Labour’s grandees have remembered how to do politics.

Ultimately there is little point in striving for power unless you know what you’re going to do with it. Blair always knew this, and the ideas were there ready to roll on day one in 1997. It seems their ideas engines are back in business – while on the right, Tory think tanks got old, fat, crooked and lazy. The Tony Blair Institute is turning out smart policy analysts like Spisak while the IEA et al has given us Darren Grimes and Tom Harwood.

With the Tory government led by an oaf, stuffed to the gunwales with clueless cronies and spivs, unable to bring any big guns to the fight, if Labour is able to capitalise on the hard edge research coming from Blair and Brown then they can put together a winning prospectus. With competence and integrity in office in short supply, Starmer might start looking like a curry to a pisshead.

I would venture, however, that the deal is not the measure of Brexit. Brexit has only one mode. Since we have left the treaties of the EU then the mandate is discharged and what comes after is a matter for politics. We have left the EU, the UK assumes sole competence over our territorial waters and freedom of movement ends. Thus Farage, BXP and the ERG are owed nothing further. Their influence over the ratification process is most likely their swansong.

The real measure of Brexit will be further down the line, assessing whether we are closer to the holy grail of more accountable and responsive government. On that score, Brexit alone was never going to be the whole of the solution. It is ironic that Gordon Brown, he who ratified Lisbon in a back room away from the public gaze, could bring us closer than the current Tory party ever will.

His reform plan is certainly worthy of further debate, though when the left talks about devolution, it often means the opposite, instead creating regional fiefdoms that further mute local democracy. But in terms of Lords reform he seems to be in the right ballpark. The Lords cannot continue as a dumping ground for party donors and those who failed commons selection (or were booted out).

Ultimately the means are negotiable but Brown recognises that the centralisation of power has hindered our fight against Covid and increased disaffection with politics. If he grasps that much, he’s closer to the mark than Cummings ever was who thought the answer came in the form of a space age control room in the Downing Street bunker. If power can be restored to the local level where it belongs, freed of the targets and directives inspired by Brussels, free to innovate in policy, then we might get somewhere.

The question of how we unscramble our regulatory affairs and the technical relationship with the EU is a much more long term affair and we must first establish how it works for the time being before we can identify scope for reforming and improving it. Much there is contingent on rebuilding goodwill with the EU, which probably won’t happen until this Brexit government is ancient history. In this there are no easy answers. EEA would have been a good starting point but we are past the point where it would have been a relatively simple operation.

One would imagine that if a deal is concluded and ratified, there will be a strong desire to refocus energies away from the EU question to focus on Covid recovery and wider reforms, so the time is not yet right for big ideas in relation to the EU. The Tory “free trade” agenda has to be seen to fail first. And it will, without having to wait very long. With things about as bad as they can get, we have some clearing out to do, and the architects of what comes next will be those still left standing – but only if they have a plan – which pretty much rules out the Oaf.