Colm McCarthy
Britain’s withdrawal from the EU will descend into a series of squabbles and grievances, writes Colm McCarthy
WITH or without a withdrawal agreement, the United Kingdom departs the European Union on March 29 next by automatic operation of the law.
The UK resigned, the treaty provision takes effect two years later and the UK parliament can vote against ‘no deal’ as often as it likes. If the House of Commons declines to endorse the deal as negotiated, the Article 50 resignation takes effect regardless, just four months from now, and there will be no standstill or transition period.
Barring some exceptional development there are just two choices — Theresa May’s deal or a chaotic crash-out, for which the time to make damage-reducing preparations has been squandered.
MPs from both the Leave and Remain wings of the Tory party have expressed opposition to May’s deal and it may fail on its first presentation to parliament. In which case there will likely be a second attempt and Damascene conversions all round.
There is just one circumstance in which another course becomes possible. If parliament votes for a second referendum, the EU could defer the operational date of Brexit in response to a UK request, which May says she will not make, to permit the necessary legislation and the vote itself.
Presumably May would have resigned and been replaced. But this prospect, a Brexit reversal, is receding, not least because Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has declined to support it. Of course, a second referendum could produce the same result as the first and for that reason alone the EU leaders may already have written it off.
For May to have antagonised both the pro- and anti-European wings of the Tory party is not such a surprising outcome. The red lines introduced in her Lancaster House speech in January 2017 have pre-ordained a sub-optimal result while raising expectations.
The Brexiteers welcomed the promise of departure from both single market and customs union, while the disappointed Remainers took solace from her insistence that ‘frictionless trade’ with Europe would somehow be delivered. Almost two years have been devoted to learning that no such happy outcome was possible, given the red lines.
Precisely because the EU’s internal market is deep, including customs integration and the regulatory union of the single market, there must be a sharp distinction between members and non-members. Hence border controls.
Frictionless access tantamount to membership in the single market has not been delivered because it is not deliverable. No non-member enjoys the full access which many in the UK thought feasible — not even countries like Norway willing to accept the single market rules.
May’s failure to square these impossible circles, and the shocked reaction to the deal unveiled these last two weeks, have been largely a failure of expectations management.
The key passages in May’s Lancaster House speech ruled out adherence to the single market and extolled the prospects for Global Britain, concluding, she hoped, new trade agreements with countries around the world, in competition with the European Union, which pursues such deals all the time.
She also committed to ending freedom of movement — that is, to control European immigration into the UK — and to ending the jurisdiction of the European Court. All of this was to be achieved without cost: the red lines would not inhibit the UK’s future trade with Europe and exciting new opportunities were going a-begging on the open sea.
There was never a feasible deal which offered greater sovereignty and freedom of action without trade-offs. The Lancaster House vision was a fantasy from the start and has nurtured unrealistic expectations ever since. Hence the incessant blame game in London and the accusations of ‘bullying’ against the EU. Now all that is left is the withdraw- al agreement as negotiated, an open-ended involvement with Europe’s customs union and not even freedom from a continuing role for the European Court.
The tangible ‘success’, if such it be, is the ending of free movement, which May has trumpeted for whatever it is worth.
Dissident Tory MPs and almost all the commentators on both sides of the argument are howling that the deal is a humiliation for the UK, but it should have been foreseen. The disappointments are not over. If the deal goes through, it will secure immediate relief from the horrors of a no-deal Brexit but then comes the negotiation of a long-term trade deal with the EU and further horrors.
What is currently before the House of Commons is the withdrawal agreement, which delivers for Britain the safe harbour of a transition period up to the end of 2020 and possibly extendable. But the cliff-edge has been deferred, not avoided. It is most unlikely that a free trade agreement between the UK and the EU will be concluded inside a few years (the Canada deal took seven) and the negotiating balance will be just as unfavourable for the UK as it has been up to now.
The ‘political declaration’ which accompanies the withdrawal agreement consists mainly of aspirational (and non-binding) language about future arrangements, but there are some unambiguous items. The most explicit provision is that the UK and the EU will be “separate markets and distinct legal orders”. This ends any hopes raised by May’s Chequers plan that the UK could somehow enjoy single market access without single market rules. Out means out and means borders of some kind.
The liberalised aviation market, for example, one of the stand-out successes of the European Union over recent decades, could be closed to the UK unless some serious agreements are negotiated during the transition phase.
The UK had sought some form of continuing membership in the European Aviation Safety Agency which licenses airfields, pilots, manufacturers and maintenance facilities.
This has been declined, in favour of ‘exploring fu- ture cooperation’. There is a commitment to talks about a future air services agreement, but it is all very vague.
If the withdrawal agreement goes through there will be no disruption at the end of next March but the potential for future squabbles is clear. There is no certainty either for London’s financial services firms, just more promises of talks.
The entire process on which the UK has embarked, assuming the withdrawal agreement goes through, will I fear turn into a perpetual grievance machine as the detailed negotiations proceed.
The expectation remains widespread in Britain that a non-member of the European Union, which has also chosen to exit the single market and to end freedom of movement, can somehow continue to trade in Europe as if trading in its home market.
There will be one grievance after another, about product standards, fisheries, aviation, passporting for financial services and all the rest as European negotiators engage with their UK counterparts.
The EU team will seek to secure the best deal for their principals from a superior negotiating position. This will be represented as bullying and taking unfair advantage in parts of the British press whose xenophobic tendencies have been much in evidence.
But it is neither bullying nor is it unfair: it is the way that international trade negotiations have always worked.
The EU negotiators will treat the UK as they would any other third country. That is, after all, what the UK has chosen to become.
‘EU negotiators will treat the UK as any other third country’