Daniel Hannan:
Tribalism stopped a compromise that would have avoided this humiliation
George Soros is too late. Just as the Hungarian-American financier launches his multimillion pound campaign for a second EU vote, Brussels has moved on. Eurocrats no longer talk, even in private, about reversing Brexit. It’s not that they have suddenly started to respect the will of the people. Rather, it’s that they have found what they see as an even better option. What could be better than a humiliated Britain begging to reverse its decision? Why, a humiliated Britain that remains in the EU without votes or a veto.
The United Kingdom is inching toward an open-ended transition period that will leave almost everything as it is. Brussels will continue to run our agriculture, our fisheries, our overseas trade, our employment laws. We shall continue to pump our squillions across the Channel. Our laws will remain subject to Euro-judges. Only one significant thing will change: we shall lose our representation in the EU institutions and, with it, our ability to block harmful new laws.
Why is Britain, the world’s fifth economy and fourth military power, contemplating a form of thraldom that none of the EU’s other neighbours – not Albania or Ukraine, never mind Norway – would dream of accepting? Is it sheer ineptness, or do some of our officials actively want it?
Part of the problem is that Parliament has never truly accepted the referendum result. While MPs and peers have the right – the duty, indeed – to seek the best possible outcome, that is not what all of them are doing. Labour’s current position – pro-customs union, anti-single market – represents the worst of all worlds. As recently as February, the party’s leaders were explaining how crazy it would be to stay in the customs union with no say. For Jeremy Corbyn, though, the question is not “in or out of the customs union”; it is “in or out of office”. If voting for a nonsensical proposition might hasten an early election, he’ll do it. EU functionaries look on in awed disbelief. Why make any concessions when British politicians are doing their work for them? Far better to sit back and keep rattling out their clichés: you can’t have your cake and eat it, and no cherry-picking (except when we want it, as in Northern Ireland).
Our negotiators seem to have concluded that their only option is to be conciliatory in the hope that the EU might reciprocate. One by one, they have handed away Britain’s bargaining chips. Preparations for a no-deal outcome have been paltry. Our ongoing payments are no longer tied, as was initially proposed, to getting a trade deal. Our security guarantee has become unconditional.
How has the EU responded? With sneering dismissiveness. Britain’s protestations of friendship are met with passive aggression. Even when there are benefits to the 27, such as over the Galileo satellite project, the response is a sullen “no”. The EU doesn’t seem to want friendship, only acquiescence.
Consider Michel Barnier’s call on Friday for a customs border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. No British government could accept such a deal, as the Frenchman well knows. Quite apart from anything else, it would make no economic sense: Northern Ireland sells more to Great Britain than to the Republic of Ireland, the rest of the EU and the rest of the world combined. Barnier is not simply being disdainful; he is being calculatedly and publicly disdainful.
The worst of it is that his disdain is understandable. Every time he says “non”, we rush to accommodate him. We could have promised not to place any physical infrastructure on our side of the Irish frontier and then left it to Dublin and Brussels to propose a trade arrangement based on mutual recognition that would make checks unnecessary on their side. Instead, we put ourselves in the ridiculous position of making what happens across the line our responsibility. Sure enough, Barnier has carried on rejecting every proposal in the expectation – fully justified by our cravenness so far – that we will eventually stay in the customs union and the EU’s regulatory regime.
Are our Europhile mandarins tacitly counting on Barnier’s intransigence? Are they deliberately aiming to stay in the EU’s legal orbit? The gleeful briefings about David Davis being “bamboozled” into accepting alignment, and “done up like a kipper”, suggest that at least some Downing Street officials are cynically using the Irish border to frustrate Brexit.
Several things have brought us to this pass: the loss of a parliamentary majority; the determination of unreconciled Remainers to capsize the process; the palpable distaste of some of the officials charged with delivering it; a debilitating tendency to procrastination.
It could have been very different. We might have built a consensus that most Leavers and most Remainers could have lived with. During the campaign, I suggested that Britain should seek a Swiss-type arrangement with the EU, inside the common market but outside the political institutions. I repeated that call after polling day, arguing that it was the best way to reach a settlement that most of the 52 per cent and most of the 48 per cent could at least live with.
We should join the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), I suggested, even if only as a transitional measure. Then we wouldn’t need to worry about a separate transition deal. We could take our time to negotiate a new European settlement that would work in everyone’s interests, creating a broad pan-European free trade area within which our more federally inclined allies could pursue their closer union surrounded by a ring of friends.
My mistake was in failing to predict that the tribalism of the referendum would endure. No one was interested in compromise. Any idea emerging from one side was automatically shot down by the other. Even two years on, everything is treated as zero-sum.
Still, whether you voted leave or remain, ask yourself this. How would EFTA have been worse than what is now being proposed, namely nonvoting EU membership? In EFTA, we’d be clearly outside the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Polices, we’d pay a significantly reduced budget contribution and we’d be untouched by some 85 per cent of EU legal acts. We’d also have our own trade deals. Indeed, the only way to join the customs union would be if EFTA as a whole did – something even Norway’s Europhile politicians regard as absurd.
“We’re not leaving properly,” complain some Brexiteers. Oh no, my friends, it’s far crueller than that. We are dangerously close to an outcome that is worse than either staying or leaving. That rasping noise you hear on the breeze? It’s the laughter coming from Brussels.
Negotiators have handed away Britain’s bargaining chips. The EU’s response? Sneering dismissiveness