The EU is having fun giving us the runaround – but the crunch is coming

It may suit Europe’s negotiators to go round in circles, but it is not in the interests of any country

Flexibility is not a watchword of the European Union. That is, of course, one of the main reasons we are leaving it. Had the EU been prepared to let David Cameron limit, in some circumstances, migration into the UK, they could quite easily have kept us in.

The people of Greece have been subjected to a full dose of EU lack of flexibility. In his outstanding book Adults in the Room, the former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, describes the wall of intransigence he met when he attempted to restructure the debts of Greece rather stagger from one bail-out to another. What was so effective in defeating him was that he could never pin down who exactly in Europe he should be negotiating with. He would be passed from the eurozone finance ministers to the head of the European Central Bank to Angela Merkel and back again, receiving lots of sympathy and agreement but with no one ever taking responsibility for changing EU policy.

The first signs of the same problem are beginning to arise in the Brexit negotiations as they resume this week. Issues are now coming up which are so fundamental that only the German Chancellor and the French President talking to Theresa May can fully resolve them. But if she tries to discuss matters with them she is told the talks must be conducted with Michel Barnier at the European Commission. When he in turn is confronted with choices he says that his mandate is set by the 27 heads of government and he can’t change it.

For now, this circular way of negotiating suits the EU side. It gives Britain the runaround and increases the pressure on the Government. It allows them to be as obstructive as they wish without seeming to be. And in the meantime, it means they can avoid difficult issues that might divide them or push them to change any policy. The moment is rapidly approaching, however, when leading EU governments will have to make some serious interventions in the talks if they are going to act in their own best interests.

During the month of August, the British government’s position on Brexit has become clearer, as it needed to. Ministers have reaffirmed that we will be leaving the EU in March 2019 but that they want a transitional, or “implementation”, period after that in which things would run smoothly for businesses – implying that a great many EU rules and regulations would temporarily remain in place.

This move has in turn triggered a change in the policy of the Opposition. The Labour Party, still in favour of going ahead with Brexit, now wants the transitional period to involve full membership of the single market and customs union. This reversal of their previous position is pure political tactics: by changing their policy now Labour avoids the danger of being left with a “harder” position on the negotiations than the Government itself. It also means that there will be a close parliamentary fight over the eventual terms of exit, since Scottish nationalists and Libdems agree with them.

While these developments are a far cry from good order and general agreement breaking out in the UK, they do show that both the main parties, who fought the election on faithfully implementing the referendum result, are seeking an ambitious transitional deal – fully aware as they do so that this means compromises on paying more for longer into the EU and accepting a greater measure of freedom of movement of people as well. The British body politic has moved into a more pragmatic position.

At the same time, the Government has been busy publishing a sudden plethora of detailed papers setting out their ideas on matters ranging from ending the direct jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice to possible customs agreements. True, these ideas are easily criticised, and are bound to be in any negotiation. But they are fulfilling one of their key objectives, which is to demonstrate how difficult it is to solve the issues the EU has said must be addressed first without also talking about what the overall agreement is going to look like.

The EU has always insisted that “sufficient progress” must be made on the issues of payments by Britain, the border with Ireland and the rights of EU citizens in the UK before talks can begin on the future trading relationship. It is a convenient way of putting David Davis and his negotiators under the maximum possible pressure to make concessions on these subjects at an early stage. Yet the British papers do illustrate that it is only possible to decide on these three matters up to a point without knowing what that future relationship is going to look like. It is impossible, for instance, to get anywhere near finalising how the Irish border will work before knowing if the EU will agree to the British idea about “mirroring” the EU’S requirements for imports from the rest of the world and – if it could be done – removing the need for any UK-EU customs border at all.

This is where the likes of Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron will need to stir themselves before too long to ensure that their own countries’ interests, which undoubtedly lie in a reasonable agreement, are advanced. Satisfying as it must be to watch the British have to come up with the ideas and moderate their stance, they will need to ensure some reciprocal pragmatism if the negotiations are going to succeed.

The danger is that the EU itself will go round in circles with no one taking the responsibility for pushing things forward: the Commission might say, at the next crunch point in October, that insufficient progress is being made, and the EU heads of government might then decide they don’t want to override their negotiators and are in any case preoccupied with other things.

Already we see leaked French government papers advocating a transitional deal with the UK, and the German Chambers of Commerce warning that uncertainty will affect their members as well as their British counterparts. And, in the end, there will be the need for Germany, France and many other European nations to work with Britain on every global issue – Russia, migration from Africa, climate change – to think about.

For the EU, customary inflexibility is serving it well in these talks so far. But its leaders will need to know when to call Theresa May for a chat.