An extra year shackled to Brussels
Brexiteers react with fury as EU proposes extending transition until end of 2021 to solve Irish border issue
THE Brexit transition period could be extended by another year to help Theresa May find a solution to the Irish border problem, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.
Michel Barnier, the EU’S chief negotiator, proposed the move, which would also buy Mrs May more time to strike a trade deal with Brussels.
Britain would remain tied to the EU until the end of 2021, rather than Dec 31 2020, which is the current agreement.
Tory Eurosceptics reacted with fury, saying the move would add up to £17billion to the Brexit bill and could cost the Conservatives the next election because the benefits of leaving the EU would not have been felt by 2022.
The DUP, on whose votes the Prime Minister relies for her working majority, said the time had come to “show the EU negotiators the door”.
Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, effectively confirmed an extension of the transition period yesterday, by saying: “It is true that there needs to be a period – probably following the transition period that we’ve negotiated and before we enter into our long-term partnership – just because of the time it will take to implement the systems required.”
British negotiators believe an agreement to extend the transition period would help engineer a breakthrough in the Brexit negotiations by pushing back the need for a “backstop” solution to the Irish border problem.
Mrs May is also trying to fend off the threat of Cabinet resignations after at least four senior ministers expressed concerns about her current backstop, that would involve the whole of the UK staying in a customs union with the EU with no specified end date.
Dominic Raab, the Brexit Secretary, raised the stakes yesterday by saying that any customs union backstop that was not “finite” would fail to deliver on the result of the EU referendum.
Yesterday, No 10 insisted that Mrs May would never agree a deal “that would trap us in a backstop permanently”, but refused to guarantee it would be time-limited. She may feel that ministers will be reassured that a longer transition period would make the need for a backstop far less likely.
Extending the transition period would also confront the reality that trade experts have no confidence that a EU-UK trade deal can be completed in the 21 months currently available.
However, Britain would almost certainly have to pay billions more for continued access to the customs union and single market during an extended transition, as the £39billion Brexit “divorce” bill only covers the financial period up to 2020, when the EU’S current seven-year budget cycle expires.
Britain’s gross contribution to the EU in 2016 was £17.1billion, which was reduced to £8.6billion net after the UK’S £4billion rebate and £4.5billion of EU spending in Britain were deducted.
Whether Britain would still get the rebate or money flowing back to the UK from Eu-funded projects during a transition extension would be a matter for negotiation, but Günther Oettinger, the EU’S budget commissioner, yesterday confirmed that Britain would be stripped of the rebate negotiated by Margaret Thatcher if a second referendum resulted in the UK staying in a customs union permanently.
Brexiteers fear the UK being trapped in a never-ending “limbo” Brexit.
Jacob Rees-mogg, the leading Eurosceptic MP, warned that extending the transition period would be a “very high-risk strategy” with the UK “liable for our share of the bills without having a say in the budget”.
He added: “It not only leaves us in the EU for longer, it leaves us as a nonvoting member for longer so we have no say over the rules coming in.
“It’s also bad news from a party point of view because we would not have been able to show any of the advantages of leaving the EU by the time of the next general election.”
It is not clear whether EU leaders will agree to such a deal when they meet in Brussels next week.
Despite Mrs May’s insistence that any backstop plan would be temporary, Simon Coveney, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, said imposing a time limit would be a “deal breaker”.
However, Mr Raab said: “It would have to be finite, it would have to be short and it would have to be, I think, time-limited in order for it to be supported here. What we cannot do is see the UK locked in via the back door to a customs union arrangement which would leave us in an indefinite limbo. That would not be leaving the EU.”
Sammy Wilson, the DUP’S Brexit spokesman, told Mrs May: “Go with your principles, go with your instinct, go with your responsibility to the people of the UK and show the EU negotiators the door.”
Theresa May cares, above all, about “burning injustices”. She often tells us so. Yet she seems determined, next week, to ignite the biggest injustice yet. She goes to Brussels ready, it seems, to frustrate the result of the EU referendum.
Her Conservative election manifesto last year promised that “we will no longer be members of the single market and the customs union”; but in fact, unless she changes, we shall be. The “deep and special partnership” with the EU with which she wants to replace them is nowhere to be seen.
A hard-working Brexiteer at Change Britain yesterday counted up, detailed and tweeted 21 times in the House of Commons when Mrs May has promised that the United Kingdom (sometimes explicitly including Northern Ireland in her remarks) would leave the customs union. If she had really meant what she said, would she have had to say it so often?
Some time ago, she backed down from her original promise of leaving on the day of Brexit next March. Under her more recent plans, we shall stay in for a transitional period, losing our voting powers. We shall still be bound by the rules and still pay heavily – also losing, we are now told, the British rebate. At the EU’S insistence, which Mrs May has failed to shift, there is no certain date to end this transition. Indeed, the transition cannot be accomplished at all unless we agree now that Northern Ireland must for ever remain part of the single market and the customs union.
If that were to happen, and the rest of this country were to leave, that would defy the Good Friday Agreement, since the status of Northern Ireland would have been changed without the consent of its people. It would also destroy the Government, because the Conservatives would lose the majority provided by the Democratic Unionist Party. (In Brussels this week, the DUP leader Arlene Foster was angry to find out from Michel Barnier that his plans for the province were worse than Mrs May had told her.)
The EU would thus have achieved what the IRA killed for over decades. The United Kingdom would have been broken up. Having let herself be painted into this corner, Mrs May now presents herself as saving “our precious Union” with Northern Ireland by giving in to Brussels on the single market and the customs union.
Go back over the many weary months since the negotiations began, and you will see the pattern of concession. Mrs May has doubled the money she proposes to pay to the EU and more than halved the things she insists on in return. She said at first that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) would not have the last word over the rights of EU nationals in this country after Brexit. Then she gave in. She said that we would make our own trade deals: now, because of the terms of transition, we can’t. She agreed the crippling Northern Ireland “backstop” without even seeming to grasp what it meant.
She said repeatedly that no deal was better than a bad deal, but until very recently made only token preparations for no deal. Throughout, she has approached the talks in a frame of mind which made a bad deal inevitable. The one thing she knows she does not want is anything which puts Britain right outside EU structures – a Canada plus trade deal, or the WTO option. So she has had to beg.
Please could someone remind me of any significant concession the EU has made in return for Mrs May’s?
As we approach the moment of truth, is there anyone, on either side of this argument, who can wholeheartedly commend her plan? For Remainers, it is a damaging, pointless departure from the full membership they believe in: its only hope for them is that it won’t last and then we can slip back in. For the Leavers, it is worse still – the biggest wasted opportunity of our era.
I am not completely surprised by the way it has gone. In more than 30 years of covering the subject, I have noticed that most British politicians who want to get on in life attack Brussels rhetorically but usually give in to it. I have also noticed that most British officials treat EU membership like being a Christian in the 17th century – some are ardent, some fanatical, some cynically tokenistic, but almost none is a declared atheist. It is, for bureaucrats, an attractive combination of a belief system and a gravy train.
Two things have surprised me, though. The first is the official incompetence. In the past – over the Maastricht Treaty, for example – I thought our civil servants were aiming for the wrong goals, but doing so with skill and success. The Brexit process has revealed how low-grade our mandarinate has become – confused in the departmental allocation of tasks, negligent in diplomacy, back to front in negotiation. Its only excuse can be that it actively wants the talks to elongate and founder.
The second surprise is the failure of the Government to see political advantage in Brexit. Never in British history has a governing party been empowered to act by so many votes. Nearly 3.5 million more people voted for Brexit than for any party at any UK general election. Yet Mrs May has never picked up the popular enthusiasm and run with it. Instead, she has behaved like a disapproving headmistress, furious because she has to implement her predecessor’s decision to let the girls vote to get rid of school uniform. She and Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, got their current jobs because of Brexit, yet have made less than nothing of the chances it gives them.
Presumably Mrs May’s survival depends on the reaction of all those – certainly very numerous – who cannot bear to follow the Brexit process any longer and just want it settled. She may count on the view, fostered in the media, that any deal is always better received than no deal. This was so successful in 1938 that Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement got him invited on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace, where cheering crowds greeted “peace in our time”. Churchill’s supporters in Parliament against Munich could be numbered in single figures.
But Chamberlain appeared to have averted war. In this case, even Mrs May’s supporters know that she is achieving almost nothing. If, as remains likely, Mr Barnier and Co won’t give her the Chequers plan, she is actually in a better political place if she returns empty-handed.
Now she faces a most strange political situation. The DUP and the Tory Brexiteers will vote down Chequers (let alone the more probable “Chequers minus”). She almost certainly will not get it through with Opposition votes – why would Labour help her? Even if she could, that would produce chaos in her own party.
Therefore the Tories’ internal rules start to matter. If 48 MPS send in letters, a vote of confidence in the leader is triggered. Rumour suggests there are already more than 30 received. In theory, victory by one vote keeps the leader in office. In practice, a large-ish minority would normally do Mrs May in, as it did for Margaret Thatcher in 1990. But the rules also state that you can have only one vote of confidence in 12 months. Even if Mrs May won, she would be within her rights to cling on for another year. That feels like a burning injustice for at least 17.4 million people.
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