Hold on tight for bumpy ride on the Brexit rollercoaster
Here, Geraint Talfan Davies, a co-founder of the Institute of Welsh Affairs and member of the Executive Committee of Wales for Europe, reflects on another momentous week in the Brexit saga...
IT HAS been a extraordinary week on the Brexit rollercoaster, culminating in the Government’s first Parliamentary defeat. Defeat from the jaws of victory. Victory from the jaws of defeat. Take your pick, according to taste and the day of the week. But stable it ain’t.
A week ago Mrs May, bleary-eyed, recovered from the earlier snarling DUP spoiler to clinch a pre-breakfast deal on the terms of divorce. The gung-ho headlines in the tabloid press were predictable. The Daily Mail’s “We’re on our way” – the writer having failed to notice that the headline can be read two ways – was supposedly designed to raise a cheer. It may not have noticed that cheering was nowhere to be heard.
While a grudging DUP continued to make grumpy noises in the background, and Mr Farage does what Mr Farage does, Michael Gove went into overdrive, showering Mrs May with praise on the BBC’s Today programme, even while scribbling an article for the Daily Telegraph, telling its readers that “if the British people dislike the arrangement...the agreement will allow a future government to diverge”.
Not to be outdone, the following day Brexit Secretary, David Davis, told Andrew Marr on his Sunday show that the agreement was merely a “statement of intent” rather than legally enforceable. Under pressure from furious colleagues and Brussels he attempted to take it all back on Monday.
It followed hard on the heels of his denial to a Parliamentary Committee of the existence of “impact assessments” – or should one say “sectoral analyses” – that he had previously told them existed in “excruciating detail”. No doubt his department will soon be renamed the Department for Exiting Any Statement. By the end of the week he had only narrowly avoided being charged with contempt of the House.
There was a time when Britain had a reputation for “fair play” and “doing the right thing”. Perhaps that reputation was never wholly deserved. All countries tend pursue their own interests, and hypocrisy has ever been a deniable tool of statecraft. But it would have been nice had this dysfunctional government managed not to destroy all trust even before the ink was dry on our withdrawal agreement with the EU – an agreement the Government had initially asked us to applaud.
How can anyone negotiate with a government that seems unable to hold a steady line for more than five minutes. No wonder M. Barnier, who does hauteur even in the good times, and Mr Verhofstadt for the European Parliament started to insist on having the deal in joined-up writing, if possible on parchment with lashings of sealing wax.
If there weren’t so much at stake one might dismiss it all as a theatrical mish-mash of The Thick of It and old-fashioned Whitehall farce. But the shambles had consequences.
The mistrust sown at the start of the week became a crucial ingredient in the deciding the outcome of the debate on Wednesday.
In the end Conservative rebels simply did not trust their own government to do the honourable thing, and the Commons passed Amendment 7 to the European Withdrawal Bill that, if it survives the rest of the Parliamentary obstacle race, will ensure that MPs get the nearest thing to a “meaningful vote” that people seem capable of imagining at present.
Given the slim majority of four (309-305) the quartet of Plaid MPs were quick to deluge social media with claims that they made the difference. (Shades of the 1970s).
Predictably, the Government responded with the bad grace for which it is becoming known, threatening to remove the offending amendment at a later stage.
One can but suppose that senior members of the Cabinet believe they have this licence to go freelance, not only because of Mrs May’s weak position but also because the Government has no settled collective position on what it wants to achieve in the more important negotiations on the substance of our future relationship with Europe.
The problem is exacerbated by the caveat in the withdrawal agreement that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”. God knows how long that will be. The earliest possible date is currently set at March 29, 2019, the planned date of our withdrawal, only 15 months away. Yet the best we are likely to achieve by then is a “framework agreement”.
If this year’s slow trudge to an agreement on the mere preliminaries of our withdrawal from the EU has taught the Government one thing, it is surely that time and circumstance are not on its side.
Nine of the 24 months allotted under Article 50 have elapsed, squandered on those preliminaries. If the Government wants to stick to its plan to leave the EU on 29 March 2019 – and the Conservative rebels might even manage to expunge that from the Bill – far from having 15 months left to negotiate the framework agreement, it has only another 9-10 months.
The remaining time will have to be set aside for ratification of any deal by the EU 27 member states, the European Parliament and the British Parliament.
As for circumstance, it is surely clear that this is and will continue to be an unequal fight.
There is a massive gap between the UK and the EU in terms of clarity of objective, negotiating firepower, depth of preparation, and sheer numbers: population, size of market and economic clout. Those who argue that “they need us as much as we need them” are clearly not good at sums.
Those multiple disparities are going to be even more in evidence when talks begin on the infinitely more time-consuming work of negotiating the endless minutiae of trade in what, to use David Davis’ own words, will be “excruciating detail”. Those details will haunt him for as long as he is in office, and they will matter to the lives of everyone of us for a lot longer.
On one thing government ministers are right: the passing of Amendment 7 does not, of itself, mean that Brexit will not happen. But it does represent another of those small movements – that include changes in public opinion and in the mutating stance of the Labour leadership – that mean nothing can be ruled out.
Geraint Talfan Davies is a cofounder of the Institute of Welsh Affairs and member of the Executive Committee of Wales for Europe.