Brexit: does Brussels have the upper hand?
“EU leaders sense that the initiative is slipping away from ‘hard Brexit’ – they know time is on their side”
Did you celebrate British Independence Day last week? Neither did I, said Sean O’grady in The Independent. There were no street parties in my neighbourhood on 23 June, the day on which, a year ago, we voted to quit the EU. Instead of rejoicing, Leavers like me are now suffering voters’ remorse. We fear that investment will drift away across the Channel; that Ireland will be divided once again by an internal border; that the NHS will be deprived of the immigrant workers it relies on. After the election, we don’t even have a strong government to push the Brexit case. When Theresa May went to Brussels last week and introduced her plans to grant the three million EU nationals in the UK the right to stay, she was heard politely by her fellow heads of government, before being gently ushered out of the EU leaders’ meeting, like a “drunk at a wedding reception”.
May’s offer, fleshed out in a 22-page document, concedes ground to Brussels on several points, said the FT, notably on allowing EU residents to continue sending child benefit to their family back home. Yet EU leaders were quick to dismiss it as vague and inadequate, said Adam Boulton in The Sunday Times. They sense that the initiative is slipping away from the “hard Brexit” faction; they know time is on their side. They can afford to wait: she can’t. This was yet another example of how badly May has handled the Brexit negotiations, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. She could have made a “generous offer on EU citizens’ rights a year ago” – it would have had the overwhelming support of the country. But by using rights as a bargaining chip, she irritated our EU partners and discomfited three million people and their families.
Don’t let the Remoaners drag you down, said the Daily Mail. The PM may have suffered a “buffeting at the ballot box”, but on Brexit “she has stayed rock solid”. Last week’s Queen’s Speech introduced no fewer than eight Brexit bills designed to recapture powers “hijacked by EU bureaucrats” – to restore control over farming and fishing; to make trade deals with the rest of the world and to end free movement – and rule by unelected European judges. However, there’s one big problem with May’s vow to see Brexit through, said The Sunday Telegraph. She’s no longer in control. Her Chancellor, Philip Hammond, is pushing for a softer Brexit. PRO-EU Tories are planning to join forces with Labour and the Lib Dems to fight for continued membership of the single market. In the Lords, Labour and Lib Dem peers can outvote Tory ones.
Don’t assume Brussels would accept a soft Brexit, said Phillip Inman in The Guardian. It may be what European companies would like: since 2008, the UK has been the strongest export market for many of them. A new Deloitte report for the car industry shows that a hard Brexit would result in German car firms losing 18,000 jobs. Yet as the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has revealed in his disturbing account of negotiating with the EU, Brussels puts its own interests before the interests of business. Quite so, said Wolfgang Münchau in the FT. As Varoufakis (and now Theresa May) has found, there’s no point making a unilateral offer to EU leaders: they’ll just denounce it as inadequate. You need a Plan B. In Britain’s case, that means “a fully costed procedure of the steps to take if negotiations were to break down”. Only then will you know whether – to use a phrase for which May has been unfairly mocked – “no deal is better than a bad deal”. (It very probably would have been for Greece.) But it need not come to that. Given sufficient imagination, the chances of reaching agreement under the Article 50 process are, as I see it, not bad. But only given a much longer time frame. The sensible course for May is to negotiate for eventual departure from the single market and customs union, but to seek a long transitional period inside the single market – up to five years – in order to achieve it.
Well, if I were a “headbanging Leaver”, I’d suspect any such deal, said Matthew Parris in The Times. And justifiably so. Transitional arrangements tend to become permanent ones, so come March 2019, we’d probably find ourselves outside the EU but still bound by its rules, which we’d have no say in formulating. The cry would then go up: “How is this better than what we had?” We’d have less sovereignty than we had before. That’s why a soft Brexit won’t wash: the real choice is between a (disastrous) hard Brexit or a return to the EU fold. Yes, the latter option would be a “national humiliation”, but the British are a pragmatic people. They accepted the necessity of an embarrassing climbdown after the 1956 Suez fiasco; they can do the same with the Brexit fiasco, too.
In 2015, the kit abandoned at Glastonbury reportedly included 6,500 sleeping bags, 5,500 tents, 3,500 airbeds and 2,200 chairs. The festival is estimated to send 760 tonnes of rubbish to landfill or for incineration each year. The Sunday Times
The population of the UK grew by 538,000 last year, to 656 million – the biggest rise since 1947. Nearly two-thirds of that was accounted for by net migration. ONS/THE Times