Anyone scanning the British media in recent weeks can hardly have failed to notice that the hitherto ‘conspiracy of silence’ surrounding so much of Brexit at a political level over the past few years is finally coming to an end. The first murmurings of serious criticism from the right, including some from the staunchest advocates of leaving the EU, are starting to be heard.
An article by Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood in PoliticsHome at the beginning of June, prompted by a recent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) report, broke the silence and called for the UK to re-join the single market. Ellwood has since doubled down with an article in the Times yesterday morning: Brexit outside the EU single market isn’t working.
The OBR were of course not alone in issuing veiled warnings about the impact of Brexit. The Centre for European Reform suggest we have already suffered a 5.2% (£120bn) hit to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) has forecast stagnation in 2023 for the UK. Plenty of other authoritative sources have also pointed to Brexit and trade frictions as the reason for our economic headwinds.
David Smith, the economics editor at the Sunday Times is the latest to draw attention to the ongoing problems in: Counting the cost of the Brexit vote six years on.
Brexit isn’t working
Ellwood’s original piece kicked off a spate of related articles acknowledging the problems but only seeming to rekindle all the old arguments, albeit now with hard evidence gathered from the perspective of actually having spent 18 months out of the EU.
Nobody (apart perhaps from the lone, deranged voice of Lord Moylan who believes that “Brexit is working beautifully”) seems to be arguing that Brexit – even at a stretch, by a highly partisan government – could be described as going well.
A despairing cry came from arch Brexiter Lord Hannan in the Telegraph where he seems to describe Britain’s departure from the EU as “a tragic, needless waste,” while in the Times, leave-supporting columnist Iain Martin wrote as if he has turned into A C Grayling (“Painful as it is, we need to talk about Brexit”).
Needless to say, among the die-hard fanatics, criticism is aimed at fifth columnist remainers whom they believe are beavering away in the bowels of Whitehall thwarting Brexit every waking minute.
Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph thinks “Britain is in ruins thanks to the failed dogmas of our permanent Leftist elite” – this is mainly about the ECHR but he thinks we have ended up “with a technical Brexit in which Britain is subservient to a permanent Left-wing, politico-managerial class.” Heath has obviously been living in the parallel universe which is 111, Buckingham Palace Road, since 2010.
David Davis, former Brexit secretary and MP for Haltemprice and Howden, went so far as to claim the Brexit we ended up with is in fact a “remainers’ Brexit” – an oxymoron if ever there was one surely? Unless that is he meant the worst possible Brexit that remainers warned of in 2016.
This was after he struggled to name a single benefit, six years on from the referendum (“Ask me back in a year and I’ll give you an answer”).
So, while there seems to be general agreement that Brexit isn’t working, there is as yet no consensus on what to do about it.
A consensus on the problem but not yet the solution
The Centre for Brexit Policy (CBP) – a sort of care home for aging fundamentalist Eurosceptics run by creationists – also seems less than thrilled with progress. In a press release launching a blistering 100-page report, they too blame Westminster’s and Whitehall’s “ruling elites” who along with “the professions” are apparently “still in the grip of a defeatist mindset”. One of the authors is the Rt Hon Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP, who seems the very epitome of the ruling elite but wants you to think of him as an obscure working class revolutionary anarchist.
Their solution, to put it mildly, is not to rejoin the single market as Ellwood urges, but “to ensure that Brexit is a tangible success and in light of the rejoiner plots, now finally and fully to make it unambiguously irreversible”. Irreversible – unambiguously. What can they mean?
The CBP calls for “a new self-confident national mindset, one that sets aside the myth of declinism and recognises that the country has huge assets, not least the fact that it is held in high regard across the world and that it plays a pivotal role in the Commonwealth”.
This is a bit like the board of the White Star Line asking the crew and passengers on the Titanic to engage in some sort of collective levitation in order to maintain buoyancy. Keep believing the ship is unsinkable and you’ll soon be safely in New York.
Anyway, Lord Heseltine felt able to write in the Guardian that: “Even the Murdoch press is now waking up to the truth: Brexit was an act of self-harm” and a few days later in the FT: “The consequences of Boris Johnson and Brexit are coming home to roost”.
The Sun meanwhile, pausing in its so far fruitless search for any sign of Brexit successes, has taken to doing the next best thing – launching an attack on those doubters who have the temerity to point to its more obvious and growing list of failures. They have launched a “Remoaner Watch” to spot any evidence of “remoanery” – a task which might best be described as trying to find fallen leaves in autumn.
There is clearly ‘something going rotten in the state of Brexit’ and people on both sides are now prepared to say so. This is perhaps progress of sorts. The question is what happens next.
If Brexit isn’t working what do we do about it?
The FT ran a big read article last week: The deafening silence over Brexit’s economic fallout, in which they say “a tentative debate has started over whether the UK would be better off trying to reach accommodations with the EU to smooth trade in some areas, rather than launching a new front in the Brexit war with unilateral action over Northern Ireland”.
They also suggest that even among the Eurosceptics in Johnson’s cabinet, there is a growing acknowledgment that the UK should try to “rebuild economic relations with the EU”. They have one anonymous pro-Brexit minister saying:
“Would I like to be in a better place on Brexit? Yes, absolutely. But we’ve got to find a way of doing it without it looking like we’re running up the white flag and we’re compromising on sovereignty.”
Martin thought Ellwood’s call to join the single market went too far and was “deeply misguided” and asked instead that “some bespoke accommodation be devised to minimise friction at borders”.
This is not dissimilar to the Labour party’s position. Shadow foreign secretary David Lammy has outlined a plan to sign an agrifood agreement, restore visa-free business travel for touring musicians and performers, and improve haulage arrangements. Labour also want to obtain mutual recognition of professional qualifications such as accountants and architects, get a deal on financial equivalence for the City of London and secure associate membership of Horizon Europe, the EU’s £80bn science funding network, something the EU is delaying because of the row over the Northern Ireland protocol.
It looks almost like the makings of a sustainable consensus between the parties for a time (in the not too distant future) when Johnson is gone, doesn’t it?
I fear however that what is being suggested is not remotely practical and we are simply rehashing all the old arguments from 2016 and negotiating once again with ourselves.
More cakeism is not the answer
First of all, going back to Brussels like Oliver Twist and asking for a ‘bespoke accommodation to minimise friction at borders’ would be seen as an admission that you entered into an agreement you cannot live with and that the trade and cooperation agreement (TCA) was in fact a huge mistake.
We would be in a far weaker position than we were in 2017.
I am not a diplomat and have never worked in the public sector but in my (private industry) experience, contracts and agreements in continental Europe are viewed quite differently than here in Britain. They take things very seriously. Pacta sunt servanda (agreements must be kept) actually means something.
Let me explain. In Britain, if a company awards a contract, especially a significant one of six or seven figures, they have no shame or compunction afterwards in asking the supplier to ‘throw in’ stuff that they have overlooked without any extra costs. Amazingly many British suppliers will agree. I suspect this is often in order to buy some future goodwill, knowing it may be needed when the equipment is late/doesn’t work properly (or at all) and never meets the performance claimed for it.
European manufacturers don’t work like that. They tend to be far more confident in their own ability. Asking for a post-contract bell or whistle will get you a smile and a formal quotation, no matter what it is – and don’t bother asking for a discount. They are puzzled by suggestions that they should cut their profit by ‘throwing in’ something for nothing because the customer didn’t think things through properly in the beginning. You risk being taken to the cleaners.
So, those calling for Britain to go back and develop closer links to the EU to finesse problems with the Northern Ireland protocol or the TCA, should appreciate that anything and everything will come at a hefty price even if the EU agrees to reopen things, which it may not – unless there is a clear advantage in doing so.
And the idea the EU will offer anything ‘bespoke’ to help a third country is still trying to have our cake and eat it. Altruism ends at the border. We could not get the original six EEC members to give Britain a bespoke arrangement in 1972, there are now 27 to convince and zero trust in the UK.
As for rejoining the single market, I would point to a recent article by our former EU envoy Sir Ivan Rogers in the New Statesman in which he dismisses the idea out of hand:
“…because I am a realist about whether either major party could ever reintroduce full free movement of people and partly because, on financial regulation in particular, it is inconceivable that the UK could accept rule-taking in the way Norway does.”
I agree with this. For the world’s fifth or sixth biggest economy to have standards regulated by a trading bloc in which you have little or no influence is really not a runner.
Brexit will always be a binary choice
And short of single market membership, the belief that there is somewhere on a finely calibrated Vernier scale, a perfect position that will satisfy both pro-Europeans and Eurosceptics and be sustainable, is a unicorn with a pipe dream. In 2018, a small group of people in a Tory cabinet sitting around a table in a 16th-century manor house in Buckinghamshire couldn’t agree where the line should be. This is without considering whether or not the EU would agree in any case.
It is almost impossible to conceive such a position might be found even if both the UK and the EU remain in regulatory stasis, but when there is openly declared intent on both sides to move apart, it really is not serious.
Brexit is like a binary digit (a ‘bit’). It is one thing or the other, 1 or 0, on or off, in or out.
Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister at the time of the referendum, spoke with absolute clarity when he dismissed the idea of Britain following the Swiss or Norwegian model and enjoying the benefits of the single market without being an EU member. “That won’t work”, he said.
“It would require the country to abide by the rules of a club from which it currently wants to withdraw. If the majority in Britain opts for Brexit, that would be a decision against the single market. In is in. Out is out. One has to respect the sovereignty of the British people.”
That is still true today. We must live with what we have or rejoin the EU, there is no realistic middle path.
I should add that in an interview with the New Statesman, Sir Ivan Rogers also thinks Britain will be “forced” into a “closer relationship” with the EU but not until the late 2020s. Asked by online editor George Eaton (31:57 secs in), if he thought Britain would “ever rejoin the EU” he doesn’t rule it out but says in a long and very full answer, that he does not think it will happen in his lifetime. The interview is below:
He’s 62 and looking in very rude health to me so don’t get your hopes up too soon.
All the talk of developing – or worse, being ‘forced into’ – closer ties up to and including single market membership is simply to rerun the 2016 arguments over and over again.
This government, or more likely a future one, will need to decide. Either make what we have work – to make it a “tangible success” as the CBP claim – or apply to rejoin as a full member. There is no other long-term answer. But there may be a lot of hardship before we reach either point.
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