Suppose you sold an old Ford estate car you’d had for many years. Then lots of folk tell you “The key thing now is what deals you can get on a new Ford hatchback”. Would you accept that? Or might you, instead, say: “Is that right? I haven’t yet worked out where I’m going to live, whether I’m planning to travel to work by car or train or bike, how many kids I’m carrying in the car, how much money I have to spend, whether I might want two cars rather than one, or what kinds of deals Vauxhall or BMW are offering. Why should I assume that it has to be a Ford, or a hatchback, or a car at all?”
The UK is leaving the EU. Those that wanted us to stay are now trying to claim that the key question we need to resolve, urgently, is what kind of new relationship we have with the EU. Will we be offered a Norway-type deal, a Canada-type deal, a Liechtenstein-type deal, etc.? But that is just like the person above thinking the key question is what kind of Ford hatchback deals are on offer.
We cannot begin to think about what kind of new arrangement (if any) we want with our former EU partners until we have addressed a basic set of questions about our geopolitical needs and ambitions. The most fundamental of these is the following. We are leaving the EU, which has been our main geopolitical partnership for decades. Do we want to seek to replace it with some new alternative geopolitical partnership?
Perhaps we do not need any new partnership. Some people would say we should be content to operate via other existing arrangements such as NATO, the Commonwealth and the WTO. If I understand him correctly, I believe that is Daniel Hannan’s position. Others would say that we want some new partnership with European countries. That is probably the position of most of those that favoured Remain in the referendum and is also the position of those that hope the EU might break up to be replaced by some looser new economic alliance. Others, again, would say that the point of leaving the EU was not that we object to deep geopolitical alliances of the nature of the EU; it was simply that the EU alliance had reached the end of its natural life, for us. Having left, we will now be free to seek similar, deep geopolitical alliances with new partners outside Europe.
We cannot simply assume that it is the second of these paths – the one involving some new partnership with European countries – that the UK should be pursuing, post-Brexit. We need to debate the pros and cons of these three broad, fundamental options, before we can even begin to consider what sort of new deal we would like to pursue with the EU, because the kinds of deal we would want with the EU will differ according to which of these broader options we seek. Roughly speaking, we would probably be likely to want a closer deal with the EU if we want a new European partnership than if we want no new geopolitical partnership with anyone; and we would want a closer deal with the EU if we want no new geopolitical partnership with anyone than if we want a new non-EU partnership.
The first priority, therefore, is for us to debate what the UK wants to try to do. Now, obviously, in the end what we will be able to do is not simply going to be a matter of what we want. We cannot have a new partnership with non-EU countries if no non-EU countries turn out to want a new partnership with us. And the same applies to new European partnerships. But we must first work out, internally, what we are trying to do before we can make any progress at all with our international negotiations. At present, it seems to me that we are nowhere near a consensus. I’m not convinced there is even a provisional majority for any of the three options I’ve described, let alone a decisive one. Even amongst my twitter followers, whom one might expect to lean towards a non-EU partnership given my own preference for that, there is a split of roughly 20% for a new European partnership, 50% for a non-European partnership, and 30% for no new partnership.
That should be the key debate for Autumn 2016: What does the UK want to seek to do next?
