Britain must be bolder about Brexit
In an interview given shortly before the EU referendum, David Cameron agreed that if Britain voted Leave, he would trigger Article 50 “immediately”. He said he would probably do it at the next meeting of the EU Council, which means that by the 28th of this month, in an alternative universe, Britain would have been out of the EU in a blaze of flags and fireworks. Instead, we’re still negotiating our exit. Nigel Farage and Kenneth Clarke are still arguing on television; Airbus is still warning about job losses. And although Parliament has finally passed the EU Withdrawal Bill, it was only after an almighty struggle. As for what life will look like after Brexit, we don’t know because the Government won’t say. No wonder the polls suggest few have changed their minds on the wisdom of leaving the EU: Britain is stuck in groundhog day, June 23 2016.
This is not just a British disease. Europe’s leaders have not come to terms with the issues that drove Brexit, and there has been no humility, no push for greater democracy; Greece has effectively become a vassal. The EU’S answer to mass migration from the developing world is testing its very raison d’être because collective decision making on this issue has turned out to be unacceptable to individual member states: almost no country will accept a quota of immigrants. Hungary has in fact passed a law criminalising anyone who even helps asylum seekers; Italy has closed ports to ships that rescue migrants. By voting Leave, Britain gained a unique chance to create its own immigration regime that is transparent, fair and strict. So, where is it? Nowhere. Instead of debating the post-brexit future, the UK is still debating Brexit itself.
Take trade. Mr Cameron stated that Brexit means leaving the Single Market, and it was obvious during the referendum that to pursue new trade deals we would have to be out of the customs union. That prospect worries those who sell goods to the continent, naturally, but the first of the new trade deals will be with the EU itself. If anything, Britain is currently looking at a future marked by regulatory continuity – the price the Treasury is keen to pay to maintain the status quo. So, it is jumping the gun for Airbus (part owned by the German, French and Spanish governments) to say it could be forced to reconsider its UK presence in the event of a no-deal scenario that the Government is, in fact, fighting to avoid, and Remainers seizing on the company’s announcement do their country no good. The British negotiating team has not spent two years being unreasonable, cutting off its nose to spite its face. It has made one concession after another when it comes to the divorce bill, citizenship, defence and more. Almost the only thing it has taken a stand on is Northern Ireland, something the EU has no earthly right interfering in anyway. The UK would have done a lot better in these talks had it prepared for a “no deal” outcome seriously, making clear it was prepared to walk away from the table and, crucially, had plans in place to limit the impact on firms such as Airbus.
A short-cut exit from the EU would have been a mistake. The day after the referendum, this newspaper argued for a “gradual” process to “ease anxieties”, but still spoke, like Mr Cameron, in terms of two years. We could not have predicted that the EU would be permitted to set such a glacial pace – along with Remainers, big business and Whitehall – or that a perpetual transition might be on the table.
The US ambassador has said Britain should shake off its “defeatist” attitude towards Brexit, and sometimes it takes a friendly guest to spot what is amiss. The establishment’s ongoing refusal to accept the referendum result and its full implications has weakened national leadership and direction, and the Government must do better than just pledging a distribution of the Brexit dividend to the NHS (backed by tax rises). It should be promoting tax cuts, reform of VAT, speedy control of fishing waters, deregulation, deals with emerging markets and a new border regime. What most businesses ultimately want is certainty. Talk of parliamentary coups to keep the UK in the customs union, or force a second referendum, are self-inflicted wounds on a country that, if it just got on with things, as Mr Cameron once said it would, can emerge as a free-trading, independent nation.