Brexit talks: heading off a cliff?
Michel Barnier returned to the Brexit negotiating table last week having fully recovered from his brush with Covid-19, but the talks he is leading with the UK “are in much less good health”, said Jim Brunsden in the FT. Britain resumed negotiations – now being conducted by video – with a bald statement that it would not seek to extend the transition period beyond the end of the year. Barnier said that, by taking this stance while refusing “to commit seriously on a number of fundamental points”, the UK was effectively pushing the talks to the edge of no-deal. There is, for now, no prospect of a breakthrough. The EU wants “an overarching” relationship overseen by its own institutions, enforcing its rules on the labour market, competition and environmental laws; it also wants a long-term deal giving EU fishing boats access to British waters. Britain wants a Canada-style trade deal, accompanied by a series of separate treaties. The two sides are “seeking to negotiate fundamentally different projects”.
In short, “Britain is getting set to jump off a no-deal cliff at its moment of greatest vulnerability”, said The Observer. What sane government, at this time of unprecedented human and economic distress, would deliberately risk further, massive disruption to trade and business? Yet that is what Boris
Johnson and his minsters are doing. Among EU leaders, there is “limited capacity, and even less inclination”, to engage in a rushed negotiation, just to suit Johnson’s timetable. Any transition extension must be agreed by 30 June. “After that, in EU and British law, there’s no going back. The chasm beckons.” Brexit was always a “delusional, dishonest project. Now it is entering the realms of fantasy and nightmare.” In the midst of the pandemic, a “second catastrophe – a calamity of choice – is racing towards us like a runaway train loaded with explosives”.
On the contrary, said Wolfgang Münchau in The Spectator: “the UK Government should be emboldened by recent events”. Before lockdown, the costs and benefits of a hard Brexit looked very different. The costs have always been hard to calculate, but whatever they would have been, “many of them have already been incurred”. Borders have been closed; global supply chains have been disrupted, perhaps permanently; prices have risen sharply. Compared to “the great lockdown”, the effects of a hard Brexit on World Trade Organisation terms would be small. Despite the great damage it has done, the pandemic may bring benefits – unleashing “creative destruction” across the economy and forcing it to modernise. Arguably, this is “the biggest economic opportunity of our lifetimes”.