Batting eyelids at Barnier
‘The message to the UK was clear: if you do not engage, then we will simply frame the negotiation as we see fit’
Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt to put clear “red” water between himself and Theresa May in the Brexit negotiations points to the central dilemma facing Europe. EU diplomats are adamant that they have no wish to meddle in the internal affairs of the UK, but they are equally clear that Mrs May’s apparent paralysis in the face of internal party divisions is making the negotiation impossible.
While Mr Corbyn’s overtures were noted by Mr Barnier, it is difficult to find too many decision-makers in Brussels who think that either a lurch to the left, or indeed to the right, will solve the problem.
The collapse of a May government, a bloody Tory party leadership contest and, very possibly, another general election, would only further postpone a process which Europe now wishes to get on with, to clear space for addressing their own deficiencies.
When Mr Barnier said this week on his trip to London that the time had come for Britain “to make a choice”, he was saying the same in public as he tells the British side in private. The Labour party batting its eyelids at Mr Barnier does not change that position.
The publication this week of a draft legal text on a transition deal which included a unilateral “punishment clause” that representatives of more than one member state believe to be excessive, was clearly designed to put pressure on Mrs May.
It was published with no effort to synchronise its contents with the Prime Minister’s need for concessions on free movement and accepting EU laws without comment. The message to the UK side was clear: if you do not engage, then we will simply frame the negotiation as we see fit.
Mr Barnier, a former French foreign minister, is well aware of the delicacy of being seen to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign state, and will protest that he intended no such thing by meeting Mr Corbyn.
But it is hard to believe that his decision to take the meeting at such a sensitive moment, and then report it back to the notoriously leaky chambers of the Brussels diplomatic corps, was not intended as another nudge to Mrs May. Because – as Mr Barnier never tires of reminding his British interlocutors – the clock is indeed ticking not just on a transition deal, for which Mrs May has set a self-imposed deadline of this March, but for establishing trading terms too.
Oliver Robbins, the lead British Brexit official, is due to brief Mr Barnier today on how the UK sees the future relationship with the EU developing, but he is unlikely to come bearing the kind of clarity the EU side wants to hear.
The Cabinet is still wedded to the idea of the so-called “three baskets”, in which the UK will manage its divorce from the EU sector-by-sector – a position that would no doubt suit Britain, but has been written off in Berlin, Paris and Brussels as a threat to the single market and “cherry picking” in disguise.
Instead of a workable solution to the Northern Ireland border question or the sound basis for a discussion on future trading relations, they see the “three baskets” idea as a mere scheme to enable Mrs May to paper over the divisions in her cabinet for a few days more.
For Europe the answer is not further prevarication and delay. Nor, when seriously considered, is it the blandishments of Jeremy Corbyn; but if Mrs May cannot corral her ministers soon, they equally cannot ignore the fact that it may yet come to that.