Daniel Hannan:
‘Look what Brexit is doing to you,” a German MEP told me this week. “You’re in crisis, your system is breaking down, everyone is looking for a way out”. I get this a lot in Brussels. “Brexit is making you poorer.” “Brexit is making you angrier.” “Brexit is making you more xenophobic”.
Do I really need to spell this out? Brexit hasn’t happened. The thing that is causing a crisis is not Brexit, but its precise opposite – the refusal of our leaders, despite their promises, to deliver Brexit.
I have almost given up trying to explain this in the EU. Pretty much every interview with continental media begins from the assumption that Britain is collapsing, that we’re scrambling for European passports and the leaders of the Leave campaign are ashamed to show their faces. I try to explain that there is no crisis except in Westminster, that the economy is outperforming the eurozone and that opinion polls have barely moved, but I can tell interviewers don’t believe me.
It’s not surprising that foreign elites, whose chief English-language newspapers are The New York Times and the Financial Times, should have a partial understanding of our politics. The bizarre thing is that lots of British people engage in similar doublethink. Listen to the way Lib
Dems talk, for example. They tell us that Brexit has created a terrible mess and then, in the next breath, they claim that the only solution is a new referendum.
Sorry to be a bore, but one more time. Brexit. Has. Not. Happened. The mess is caused by MPs being elected on a promise to deliver Brexit but then doing everything they can to block it. It takes some chutzpah to create deadlock in Parliament and then point to that deadlock as evidence that Brexit was a bad idea all along. As for the notion that the way out is to prolong and deepen our divisions through a second referendum – that is not so much selfserving as psychotic.
Every one of the original Tory leadership candidates recognises that a failure to deliver Brexit will mean the extirpation of their party and the possible collapse of our parliamentary system. That is why all of them are determined to leave the EU.
I’m not sure they get this in Brussels, though. It is human to believe what we find congenial, and there is still a sense – understandably after three years of Theresa May – that Britain will never leave without a deal. Since the only alternatives are accepting punitive withdrawal terms or cancelling Brexit, Eurocrats are holding their ground. Which, as Sir Ivan Rogers, argued again this week, makes no deal the likeliest outcome.
You might reasonably protest that, during the referendum campaign, Leavers said that withdrawal would be orderly. I certainly believed it: it seemed to me impossible that the two sides would inflict needless disruption on their own citizens. Neither I nor anyone else foresaw the cataclysmic mistakes that the May government would make. Neither did we foresee that the House of Commons would kick away Britain’s negotiating strength by telling Brussels that we would never leave the table.
Even now, logic demands a deal. At the very least, it should be possible for the two sides to agree not to raise tariffs or other new trade barriers against each other pending more comprehensive talks.
The trouble is that we may be in a game of chicken in which each side has misread the other. Brussels believes that, if it refuses to discuss trade, Britain will eventually cave in. But the likelier consequence is simply to ensure that there is no deal in place when Brexit takes effect, which will cause a headache for the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Germany, a worse one for the UK and a worse one yet for Ireland.
Still, given the real possibility of this outcome, the new PM should act immediately to anticipate it. I am not talking about technical preparations on haulage, aviation and the like: these have now largely been made. I am talking about the economic policies needed to see us through the transition – above all, cuts in business taxes. There is no point in leaving such things until after we have left.
Even more urgently, we need to engage properly in the trade talks which, for three years, we have pursued in a desultory fashion because, whatever was said in public, our officials assumed that we were staying in some version of the EU’s customs union.
Let me put this as simply as I can. Australia has offered us a trade deal. America has offered us a trade deal. China has offered us a trade deal. Brazil has offered us a trade deal. Indeed every major economy in the world is offering us a trade deal except the EU. Isn’t it time to switch partners?