Daniel Hannan:
Even the civil servants seem suddenly to be standing straighter. After three years of immobilism, dreariness and funk, the Government is again exuding purpose. I spent a couple of days this week with some of the officials preparing for Brexit – all of them, as far as I could tell, Remain voters, all of them ready to find fault with the new PM. Instead, to their palpable surprise, they found themselves energised by the waves of determination and leadership pulsing out from Downing Street.
EU leaders, too, can feel the difference. They were all keyed up to loathe Boris Johnson, the man they blamed for swinging the 2016 referendum. But look at the body language on display at the PM’s meetings in France and Germany. Where Theresa May was wooden, passive, unable to deviate from a script, Boris is funny, charming, in control of the situation. Heads of government are human, too. They are as likely as anyone else to respond to warmth.
Will warmth be enough to secure a deal? It is possible, but unlikely. On paper, the EU has every reason to look for a compromise. Britain has put vast concessions on the table which will be whipped away if no agreement is struck: a continuing role for EU judges, a lopsided arbitration mechanism, a £39 billion payment that no international tribunal would uphold and, not least, two years of non-voting membership.
Surely, you might think, Brussels will accept these surrenders, rather than lose everything – including the
backstop. There is, after all, something almost risible about the EU’s stated position, namely: “You must accept the backstop that we claim is the only way of preventing a hard border, otherwise we might have to, er, impose a hard border.”
But, as this column has periodically pointed out over the past two years, the EU does not always think logically. If it were a rational actor, it would not have imposed the euro. Many Brussels functionaries are still miffed about the referendum result. They want to cut Britain down to size, to show that even a large and wealthy country cannot be truly sovereign in the 21st century. If that involves making people on both sides of the Channel worse off, so be it.
No doubt they will have rationalised that sense of annoyance to themselves. Perhaps they will have told themselves that, since no deal will hurt Britain more than it hurts the Continent, it is a trade-off worth making. They might even have convinced themselves that, if they make the terms harsh enough, we will reverse our decision. This, after all, is the message they have been hearing from Tony Blair, Nick Clegg and Michael Heseltine. We might think of these men as has-beens, but they are heeded in Brussels.
“To wish is to hope and to hope is to expect,” wrote Jane Austen. Some Eurocrats cling to the idea that, somehow, Dominic Grieve or John Bercow or some deus ex machina will halt Brexit altogether. But Brexit won’t be halted. The only device left to Remainer MPs is a no-confidence motion, and it is now clear that Boris would respond by toughing it out and forcing a dissolution. How many Labour MPs could expect to hold their seats in a snap election? Even if the opinion polls were to turn around, how many of them really want a Corbyn-led government?
At the same time, the presumption in Brussels that Brexit would disproportionately hurt Britain is looking shakier and shakier. Far from being tipped into a slump by the 2016 vote, our economy continues to grow. Three years on, we have received more foreign investment, not only than any other EU state, but than any other country in the world except China. As no deal looms, it is not our economy teetering on the edge of a recession, but Germany’s.
Is the EU truly prepared, when the eurozone is so fragile, to cause needless disruption? The IFO, arguably the most authoritative think tank in Germany, calculates that, if Britain responds to a no deal with unilateral tariff reductions, Germany and Britain will both suffer a loss of GDP of around 0.5 per cent – not the end of the world for either country. For Ireland, though, the hit would be a far more serious 5.4 per cent. Why incur such a pointless and preventable cost?
Perhaps because Brussels and Dublin have impaled themselves on a hook. They realised that openly demanding control of Britain’s non-EU trade was not a good look: every neutral observer would see it as unreasonable. So instead they claimed, in public, that their real concern was to keep the Irish border invisible. As a PR tactic, it has been a stunning success: commentators around the world now think that the hold-up is something to do with the Good Friday Agreement.
That claim is nonsense, though. Britain has made it clear from the start that it will not erect any border infrastructure. Ireland says the same, and has now revealed that, in the event of no deal, it will conduct any necessary checks away from the border. So if neither Britain nor Ireland is going to build a border, who is? Donald Trump? With Mexico paying?
One consequence of a no-deal Brexit will be to expose that lie, since it will immediately become obvious that there are no checkpoints. But why risk even a slight dislocation just to prove a point? The dislocation, by the way, would be felt by every country: four in five of the freight vehicles crossing between Dover and Calais are non-British, most of them Eastern European.
While many EU governments are privately keen to strike a bargain, the Brussels functionaries take a different view. For them, the key goal is to deter what Jean-Claude Juncker calls “deserters”. They would rather see all sides suffer than watch an independent Britain prosper. Hence Donald Tusk’s insistence yesterday that he was not prepared to discuss no deal. He evidently still hopes that refusing to talk about mitigating measures might bring Britain to heel.
If he gets his way, what might a breakdown look like? We are readier than we have ever been for no deal – readier, certainly, than the EU-27 are. We need not fear grounded flights or power cuts or food riots. There may be some transitional costs for particular sectors as our trading patterns reorient to the growing markets beyond Europe but, for most people, life on November 1 will feel much like life on October 31. Still, why risk even a small blip in our growth? Why, in particular, risk a significant hit to Irish GDP that would poison relations with our closest neighbour?
If any British politician can find a deal, Boris can. The question is whether the EU wants a settlement on anything other than visibly punitive terms. We shall find out soon enough.
Tusk evidently still hopes that refusing to talk about mitigating measures might bring Britain to heel