Brexit: what price freedom?

By Pete North - September 15, 2020

I’m a leaver, I always have been. But it wasn’t until 2014, I picked up on the technical questions as regards to how we leave. Like most Brexiteers, I’d spent so long moaning about the EU’s inadequacy, never actually believing we would leave, that I never really thought about what Brexit would actually look like.

Some six years later, having given some considerable thought to it, the person I am now would be condemned by Pete of yesteryear as a remainer technocrat. I was forced to confront the unfortunate reality that there is no optimal mode of Brexit, particularly if your objective is national sovereignty.

The sovereignty as envisaged by Brexiteers can only really be achieved by a complete termination of formal trade relations with the EU. That is the only ideologically pure Brexit. But that’s not really much use when half your exports go to the EU.

The next step up, being the sweet spot for Tories, is a free trade deal. But a free trade deal is not what they think it is. Or at least their idea of one is not on offer: elimination of tariffs without certain assurances, allowing the UK to undercut the EU. The Tories would feed EU regulations into the shredder.

Since the first option is unrealistic and unsustainable and the second is not on offer (something the Tories have yet to accept) the remaining options are a comprehensive bilateral FTA with side agreements for wider cooperation – working toward the Swiss “model” or single market membership.

Had we never been a member of the EU, I would opt for the former, but the fact remains that much of our trade exists only because of the single market and the evolution of our industrial policy inside it for the last thirty years. That is a direct result of regulatory harmonisation and frictionless trade.

To maintain that level of trade, and the jobs therein, the only way to maintain that is to join Efta and remain in the EEA. 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.

This dilemma was rather crudely characterised by Tony Blair as a choice between either a disastrous Brexit or a pointless Brexit in that retaining the single market still means adopting much of the regulation the sovereignty fetishists have always hated.

For reasons outlined elsewhere I disagreed with Blair, but also, in a world of global regulations and standards, I have long departed from the sovereingty fetish just so long as we retain sovereign authority over what rules we adopt. It then puts Brexit in a different light – and the light is should always have been viewed in.

It comes down to a very simple assessment. What is it? Where is it going? Does Britain belong in it? Ultimately it is a political union and a supreme government working toward the establishment of a quasi-superstate. The EU remains committed to pursuing political union, and even if it were to undertake reforms, it would not change its nature. It would remain a supranational organisation, which is not compatible with the maintenance of a Parliamentary democracy.

In that estimation, I don’t mind sharing technical rules on meat hygiene and air travel. I just prefer to be asked rather than ordered. The debate regarding the adoption of those rules should happen in our own domestic political arena, scrutinised by our own media and the British public. For as long as the process goes on in Strasbourg and Brussels, it is out of sight, out of mind and able to get away with all sorts.

For all that the British parliament has devolved into such an unedifying spectacle, we are now debating trade deals – particularly today where the point was raised that Parliament should be able to look at the preliminary draft and debate it in public. As yet we have no such rights but that’s coming. Parliament will see to that eventually – and that’s more debate than we ever had about EU trade deals.

It doesn’t especially bother me that the UK would be a rule taker either. Everyone is. This week I’ve been re-reading Treaty-Making and Australia: Globalisation Versus Sovereignty by Phillip Alston. Published in 1995, he observes that:

“In countries like Australia, national sovereignty has long been a thing of the past when it comes to many areas of business regulation. In the world system, Australia is substantially a law-taker rather than a law-maker. This process of globalisation of regulatory law has been accelerated by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Thanks to the GATT, our food standards will now, effectively, be set in Rome rather than Canberra or Sydney.”

“The impact of the GATT is no more than an acceleration of what has been going on for a long time. For years, some of our air safety standards have been written by the Boeing Corporation in Seattle, or if not by them, by the US Federal Aviation Administration in Washington. Our ship safety standards have been written by the International Maritime Organization in London. Our motor vehicle safety standards have been written by Working Party 29 of the Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). Our telecommunications standards have been substantially set in Geneva by the International Telecommunications Union.”

Nations revel in the illusion that their laws are creations of their national imagination, of the capacities for problem solving of their local political institutions. Most political leaders do not realise that most of the time they are voting for laws that are nearly identical to laws previously enacted in other states (at the same time political scientists have documented systematic patterns of verbatim copying of laws to the point where even serious typographical errors get copied). That is because they are only dimly aware of the mechanisms of globalisation.”

The point for me is that though the slogan “make all our own rules” is appealing, such would be far beyond the abilities and interest of our politicians. Allowing specialist bodies to take care of technical rule-making frees up political runtime to do more on things that matter to people (where rules on aubergine marketing don’t). What matters is that we can fix the rules or remove them where they malfunction without asking anyone’s permission – particularly not having to spend a decade horse trading with the EU27 to get anything done.

My pragmatism, though, is not shared by other leavers. Having failed to go through the process of thinking about what comes after, their Eurosceptic views have not evolved, and they are essentially the exact same people they were five, ten and forty years ago. They are still wedded to the sovereignty delusion – the very delusion driving our Brexit negotiations.

It’s interesting that they should invoke Japan and Australia as examples of countries who thrive independently but both adopt the same global standards and regulations as the EU and the EU increasingly exports its own regulatory frameworks based on those standards through its FTAs, on everything from meat to chemical products.

Of course what Japan, Korea, Mexico and Australia do not do through trade is surrender sovereign authority. Interdependence and technical convergence is common but they retain political control of their own destiny. That is where we want to be and EU membership is not compatible with that vision.

What makes it particularly difficult of the UK is its proximity to the EU. It will naturally trade more with its neighbours, requiring greater technical and regulatory cooperation and integration. It requires institutions for ongoing cooperation which will be in near constant communication. This is why Efta seemed like the logical framework. We may be leaving the EU but we are not leaving Europe.

Eventually when the Tory delusion has been tested to destruction – at great cost to the British public we will eventually get to where we need to be, but the withdrawal agreement, dog’s dinner that it is, means that the EU retains some considerable direct influence and to authority over Northern Ireland. This is largely down to the failure of the Brexiteers to plan. Had they anticipated the border dispute they would have seen the logical attraction of Efta. The only way to get to where we want to be ideally is to have never have joined to begin with, but sadly, we did.

I make no apology for voting for Brexit. For all that our politicians have cocked up the process, that – to a very large extent – is a result of systemic ignorance of the EU and trade in general, precisely because those functions have been an EU competence for decades. We lost the institutional knowledge.

Moreover, much of our predicament is the consequence of a legacy remain campaign that was more concerned with foisting this unloved EU on us, whether we wanted it or not, than shaping the exit process. In respect of that it is a continuation of the same arrogance that took us this deep in to begin with. It was never going to be without consequence.

But there is a consolation prize to all this. As much as it has exposed the class divisions and the elitism of the remainer class, we are also dealing with another toxic problem.

The ERG wing of the Tories is pretty much the old guard Tory establishment who’ve been stalking our politics for decades with a view to unleashing a radical free market experiment on us. Brexit was their window of opportunity and they are doing all they can to bring it about. It is now out in the open and we have seen the lengths they will go to in order to succeed – up to and including throwing international agreements on to the bonfire.

For now it looks like they’re succeeding with phase one, but with the onset of Covid, and the unhappy consequences of no deal, the Tory right will run out of time and popularity to fully implement their agenda, by which time they will be out of power for a generation – assuming the conservative party even survives.

Being of a Peter Hitchens persuasion (with caveats), I also hold the notion that the only way to revive conservatism is to destroy the burnt out husk that is the Conservative and Unionist Party. Brexit, or at least their version of it, might well be the ticket.

Beyond that I wouldn’t care to speculate what could happen, but that’s largely the point. We’ll be free to choose our own destiny and forge a new European relationship more befitting Britain’s idea of itself. It’s just a pity we’re going to pay more for it than we ever had to.