Hit by a crisis like no other, the Eurocrats’ one wish is to teach Brexit Britain a lesson
We are stumbling and groping towards no deal. It’s not that either side exactly wants the talks to fail: London and Brussels already have quite enough on their plates with post-Covid recessions. Rather, it’s that the EU has locked itself into a position that was designed not to get the best result for its 27 members, but to stop Brexit. Although several of the 27 now see the need for flexibility, flexibility is not the EU’s forte. Like a mastodon, ponderous and purblind, it pounds towards the precipice.
To understand how we got here, we need to go back to the aftermath of the 2016 referendum. Eurocrats were feeling shocked and bruised. They had not seen the result coming. Some of them felt a batsqueak of regret that they had so airily rejected David Cameron’s requests for decentralisation; but that only worsened their mood, for we are rarely so cross as when we inwardly blame ourselves.
In order to show the recalcitrant British that they were in no mind to compromise, they appointed a hardline federalist who had previously enraged the City of London as their Brexit negotiator.
“I will have done my job,” Michel Barnier told EU leaders, “if, in the end, the deal is so hard on the British that they’d prefer to stay in the EU.”
His position had a certain logic. After all, the EU had overturned Eurosceptic referendum results in Denmark, France, Greece, the Netherlands and (twice) Ireland. Barnier duly began making deliberately outrageous demands in a bland tone. As long as he remained loftily dismissive, there could be no deal; and since British MPs were not prepared to leave without a deal, that meant no Brexit. Even when, in late 2018, Theresa May offered to adopt EU standards unilaterally, to accept continuing jurisdiction from EU judges, to stay inside the EU’s tariff arrangements and to pay for the privilege, Barnier continued to say no.
In retrospect, that was the best offer he was going to get. Had it been made by any other country, the EU would have snatched at it greedily. But the moment passed and, when Boris Johnson took over as PM, he made no attempt to revive the model that Eurocrats had thrown back in his predecessor’s face. Instead, he took Barnier at his word. The Frenchman liked to brandish a chart with a staircase that supposedly showed that the only deal available to Britain was one like Canada’s. “Fine then,” said Johnson. “Canada it is.”
At which point, Barnier swerved again, issuing another set of calculatedly impossible demands in his poker-faced manner. No, Britain could not, after all, have the sort of stripped-down deal that Canada has. It must first agree not to out-compete its neighbours, to open its waters to EU fishing vessels and to accept a continuing role for the European Court of Justice.
Perhaps three years of dealing with Theresa May had convinced Barnier that Britain would again bluster and fold. But things had changed across La Manche. December’s election had removed Parliament’s Brexit-blocking majority. The EU’s anti-Brexit strategy was redundant.
Understandably, perhaps, Eurocrats struggled to adapt to the new circumstances. They still hated Brexit. Despite having promised in the Withdrawal Agreement to deliver a trade deal before the end of 2020, they began to agitate for an extension of the transition.
Johnson was never going to agree to that. The transition leaves Britain in the worst of all worlds, subject to the costs and obligations of EU membership but with no vote, no voice and no veto. A commitment not to prolong it is written into parliamentary statute.
But EU negotiators carried on trotting out the same tired old lines about cakes and cherries. They continued to demand that Britain postpone its final departure. When the coronavirus hit, EU negotiators saw yet another argument for delay. It did not seem to occur to them that, from a British point of view, the epidemic had the opposite effect.
The single biggest concern about a no-deal outcome in Whitehall had been the prospect of delays at the Channel ports. Not now. Global trade and international travel have collapsed. While both will have picked up by December, the prospect of queues in Kent is no longer a worry.
Indeed, the end of this year is precisely when British companies, emerging butterfly-like from the pupa of lockdown, will be spreading their wings. In a changed world, many firms will be looking for new suppliers and customers. That is the moment to alter our terms of trade. It would be senseless – reprehensible, indeed – to leave our emerging businesses in limbo and then to impose the changes later.
For Britain, no deal will bring gains as well as losses. Yes, we will face more obstacles when we trade with the EU. But, from January 1, we shall have total freedom to deregulate, cut costs and remove trade barriers vis-à-vis non-EU states. For the EU, by contrast, there is no upside. Its trade with Britain will be less straightforward and its budget smaller but, otherwise, nothing will change.
Some politicians in the 27 national capitals are uneasily aware that they are heading for a needless bust-up, and wonder why the Commission doesn’t offer Britain the same basic deal as, say, Japan or South Korea. No one takes Barnier’s stated reason (geographical proximity) seriously. In any case, the UK has made clear that, if the EU doesn’t want a comprehensive trade deal, it will cheerfully settle for a looser one.
The fundamental problem is that, though Eurocrats are now intellectually reconciled to Brexit, they are not emotionally reconciled. If they can no longer stop it happening, at least they can try to stop it working.
But they can’t make life tougher for Britain without making it much tougher for their own countries. We keep being told, for example, that British banks and investment services might lose their unhindered access to Continental consumers. But this is the kind of mercantilist thinking that causes self-inflicted poverty. To the extent that the EU imposed barriers in financial services, it would be denying its companies access to the world’s best and cheapest money markets precisely when they need to recapitalise.
Stand back and look at how the EU is behaving. Faced with the worst slump anyone has known, it is still more interested in teaching the British a lesson than in the prosperity of its own citizens.
And people wonder why we left.
It’s not that either side exactly wants the talks to fail: London and Brussels already have quite enough on their plates