Call the EU’s bluff and prepare for a no-deal outcome
‘Happy to read that the Hungarian & Slovak Govs have failed to sabotage a European response to the refugee challenge we face”. So tweeted Guy Verhofstadt, the EU Parliament’s Brexit negotiator, last week, following the news that a controversial legal challenge on asylum seekers from Hungary and Slovakia had been rejected by the European Court of Justice.
What struck me about Mr Verhofstadt’s tweet was the choice of the word “sabotage”. This is not a person who is looking for an amicable reconciliation with the grace expected of someone whose side has just won a legal battle. It is someone failing to hide their contempt for member states which have challenged the EU.
It is the same sentiment which incites Michel Barnier to mock the stability and accountability of his negotiation partner, David Davis, in a meeting of European Commissioners. And it is because of such attitudes that it is now looking more likely than ever that we will leave the EU without a deal. As Jeremy Browne, the Special Representative for the City of London to the EU, puts it in a recent memo: “Such a virtue is made of intransigence and ensuring that Britain learns lessons from the EU. The restricted mandate means little energy is expended on the imaginative search for long-term solutions. People can look most contented when they have declared a problem to be intractable”.
This, then, is why now is the time to call the EU’s bluff, and start preparing for a no-deal outcome. And here is what our Government should do.
First, it needs to communicate clearly to businesses that we may have to deal with Europe
– as we will with the rest of the world – on World Trade Organisation terms until we have free trade agreements in place. Businesses are already putting plans in place for a no-deal outcome, but they will need the assurance that the Government will stick to its guns and not enter into a punishment deal with the EU, entailing punitive restrictions that they have not been able to prepare for.
Next, we need a liberal immigration policy to ensure businesses can fill the jobs they create with high-quality and appropriately skilled labour. Decades of failure to invest in training up our own people, combined with companies’ exploitation of the EU single market in poaching cheaper labour from neighbouring countries mean we will need to rely on wellmanaged immigration to keep the economy growing.
Finally, we need to ensure we retain our competitive edge as an economy by implementing attractive tax rates, and streamlined regulations. For too long, successive governments have been quick to blame regulatory burdens on Brussels. They will no longer have that shield and will need to put their money where their mouth is to create the right environment for businesses to grow.
It is a rare moment when one is reminded of the value of democratically-elected politicians running a country. Whatever grievances one has against them, they are still better than any form of unelected alternative.
EU bureaucrats can afford to jeopardise the future of the European member states in order to teach the insubordinate UK a lesson. Our politicians cannot. FOLLOW Dia Chakravarty on Twitter @DiaChakravarty;
at telegraph.co.uk/opinion
The British are notably not anti-immigrant. Anyone who has lived in pretty much any other country in the world will almost certainly be aware of this. Especially considering the unprecedented rate of inward migration to this small, densely populated island over the past decade there has been remarkably little overt hostility and almost no civil unrest. Perhaps ironically, when racial or ethnic conflicts have arisen they have tended to involve British-born Commonwealth minorities rather than recent incomers.
That is why so many of the world’s displaced people fling themselves on to lorries at Calais, determined to move on from the Schengen open-borders paradise of the EU to a country where entry is more problematic but the reception, once here, is likely to be, as they confidently believe, kinder and more tolerant. I overheard an East European waiter in a Cotswolds inn a few months ago responding to the friendly enquiries of a customer: he was from Romania, he said. He rang home to talk to his mother every week which always To order prints or signed copies of any Telegraph cartoon, go to telegraph. co.uk/ cartoonprints or call 0191 603 0178 www. telegraph. co.uk/ bobprints