DON’T MISS
It’s late in the day and the UK still doesn’t seem to know what it wants. Full ahead for the icebergs, writes Colm McCarthy
Colm McCarthy
SINCE the European Union is such a thorough-going construct in economic integration, its external borders must be clear and unambiguous. There are no tariffs internally, no quotas, free circulation of goods, services, capital and labour, as well as a single system of regulation overseen by a common court.
There is, by design, a big difference between members and non-members.
It is possible for non-members to search from a menu of economic relationships with the EU, ranging from something close to membership (Norway and Switzerland) to a more distant arrangement with actual tariffs, perhaps moderated in a negotiated free trade package. But there are always borders, including customs inspections, limits on access for service providers and absence of joint citizenship.
The withdrawal agreement, without which there can be no transition period after the UK’s departure next March, was to have been finalised between the UK government and the European Council at the Brussels meeting last Wednesday. The draft should now be on its way for ratification to the UK and European parliaments. Failing which, the fall-back position was to be a further special Council in November affording adequate time for these parliamentary approvals. The one un-spinnable outcome at Brussels is the November meeting has been cancelled.
The proximate source of the continuing failure to agree a withdrawal agreement is the treatment of Northern Ireland.
There are special arrangements for portions of the sovereign territory of EU members, including the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands in the UK itself, as well as larger examples such as Spain’s Canary Islands.
The EU has offered the UK a choice, which it sees as a concession: the EU can have its external border between the islands of Britain and Ireland. The alternative is a full border at the international boundary, between the Republic and Northern Ireland, an outcome which the UK government has ruled out. There must be “no return to the borders of the past”.
But the UK government has failed to persuade the DUP and its Conservative backbench allies that a sea border leaves the constitutional integrity of the UK intact. The search continues for a ‘no hard border’ formula which may not exist.
There is no obvious intermediate solution which leaves Northern Ireland in two states of being — like Schrodinger’s cat — in the EU single market and customs union, while also fully part of the economy of a non-member, the United Kingdom. No credible technological ‘solutions’ have been located and there are no working precedents.
Last Thursday, French president Emmanuel Macron insisted that the obstacles to a withdrawal agreement are not technical but political: domestic British political problems. Lithuania’s president, Dalia Grybauskaite, was even clearer: “Today, we do not know what they want. They do not know themselves what they really want. That is the problem.”
Not merely does the UK not offer a workable plan for the Irish Border, there has been no realism about the nature of the post-Brexit economic relationship either.
The bountiful spring from which most of the subsequent confusion has flowed was revealed by Mrs May at the Conservative party conference in October 2016, less than three months after her assumption of the premiership, in her first major speech on Brexit policy.
The speech, according to the BBC, was drafted by her then political adviser Nick Timothy (subsequently fired after the snap election debacle in 2017). Mr Timothy now writes an ultra-Brexit column for The Daily Telegraph.
Early in the speech Mrs May name-checked, to applause from delegates, just three of her newly-minted ministers — Boris Johnson in foreign affairs, David Davis as Brexit minister and Priti Patel in international development. All three had campaigned for Leave and all three have since resigned.
She went on to promise that the government would resist in the Supreme Court the action requiring a parliathat mentary vote to trigger Article 50, the resignation from the EU. The government lost.
Towards the end of her speech she name-checked a group of countries with which ‘Global Britain’ would be conducting new free trade deals. The list included Canada and Mexico and these two countries have indeed concluded trade agreements in the period since. With the European Union.
Not all the incompatible red lines precluding a withdrawal agreement were fully sketched out at the 2016 Tory get-together. But the train of delusion had left the station.
There followed the Article 50 notification in March 2017, a commitment to leave on unknown terms. What followed is not really a ‘negotiation’, an unfortunate characterisation of the process which would better be described as a resignation followed by consequences.
Mrs May could have made a different speech in October 2016 and could have engaged a team of scribes more conversant with the limits to what was possible. She could have finessed the desired relationship with the EU’s single market. Instead she promised “…it’s not going to be a Norway model, it’s not going to be a Switzerland model”.
A short while later the wild goose chase for “fric- tionless trade” outside both single market and customs union had commenced, with the added bonus of no hard border in Ireland, to be attained through unexplained deployment of unidentified technology.
Throughout, the potential for ‘negotiations’ has been persistently exaggerated with any failure to deliver to UK requirements debited to EU inflexibility. The source of the alleged inflexibility is the nature of the union: it is what it is, a treaty organisation and not the centralised super-state of Brexiteer imaginings, free to make it up as they go along.
On his EU referendum blog, the pro-Brexit commentator Richard North summarised the position: “The EU, as a treaty-based organisation, does not have the flexibility to change its own rules just to suit the needs of one member, and especially one which is seeking to leave the Union. Yet, on the other hand, the UK government has political constraints which prevent it making concessions which would allow the EU to define a new relationship.”
North, and a small handful of Leave supporters, have been arguing that the objective of ‘frictionless trade’ from outside the EU can only be achieved through something like the Norway attachment to the single market. They have enjoyed no influence on the debate in the UK, unable to shed the intellectual handicap of familiarity with the subject matter.
The Good Friday Agreement is running short of sponsors. Both Sinn Fein, in hope, and the DUP, in fear, regard it as temporary — a deliverance or a threat on the route to a united Ireland.
The UK government, or at least a substantial portion of the Conservative Brexiteer wing, seem to regard it as expendable, with only the Irish Government (and the EU-27) prepared to stick with the GFA for the foreseeable future.
There can only be three outcomes at this late stage, a no-deal crash-out which nobody wants; a super-fudge storing up the same problems for the future; or a political crisis and a change of course, including a change of government, in the UK.
The latest wheeze, an extension to the 21-month transition period, may not be enough to salvage a withdrawal agreement and solves no problem that matters.
Political crisis it is, then.
‘The Good Friday Agreement is running short of sponsors. Both Sinn Fein and the DUP regard it as temporary — a deliverance or a threat on the route to a united Ireland...’