Boris and the EU must calm down and compromise to get a good deal
Veterans of the 2016-2019 Brexit crisis will recall that one of the dominant themes from a UK perspective was the frustration of Leavers faced with the fact that the EU had its own point of view and its own starting point for the negotiations.
There was scarcely anyone on the Leave side, from David Davis and Jacob Rees-Mogg all the way to Mr Patel in the corner shop who didn’t believe that Brussels was behaving badly, if not tyranically, by setting out terms for a settlement predicated on Europe’s need to safeguard its own future.
What Jean-Claude Juncker, Donald Tusk and Michel Barnier should have done, according to the Leave side, was jot down the list of British demands and then agree to them with a happy smile, showing their good faith by waiving any claims to a divorce deal and banning all EU trawlers from the UK’s territorial waters with immediate effect.
Even then, there would have been those, like Iain Duncan Smith and Bill Cash, who would have said that we were being clobbered by a combination of imperial Germany and a bunch of unelected bureaucrats whose only concern was the protection of their EU pensions.
In the end, sense prevailed. Boris Johnson accepted a watered-down version of the deal brokered by Theresa May, including the Northern Ireland-only Backstop that just months before he had assured Unionists he could not, and would not, accept without risk to his immortal soul.
But now, apparently, we are back at the starting point. Once again, Britain is saying, give us everything we want or we’re off. Once again, we are being assured that German carmakers are demanding of Berlin and Brussels that they give Johnson everything he asks for lest BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen and Audi go down the plughole, leading to the kind of recession that gave us Hitler and the Nazis.
Europe, we are told, is “petrified” and “terrified” by the prospect of a new, nimble Britain making all sorts of things (we know not what they are) to its own standards and specifications, then unloading them on an impotent EU. The fact that this is essentially what the Government has in mind – British goods exported into the Single Market without dual standards or the possibility of sanctions – is, it would seem, neither here nor there. Freedom to make what we like, how we like, is what counts, and if the French and Germans don’t like it, well, they can always buy from the Japanese and South Koreans (with whom, as it happens, they already have fully operational trade deals).
Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot!
Simultaneously, the claim is being made that a simple free trade deal, along the lines of those negotiated with Canada and Australia, can equally apply to the UK. The fact is, it took seven years to complete the Canada deal, and talks with Australia are ongoing, having opened formally in June, 2018 after several years of preparation. Boris Johnson appears to believe that all Brussels has to do is rubber-stamp his set of demands and the whole thing can be done and dusted in a matter of months. This is rubbish.
As an example of how international deals can be achieved, the case of NAFTA – the Northern American Free Trade Agreement, linking the US, Canada and Mexico – is often cited. But NAFTA, having been painfully negotiated, over six long years, was blown apart by Donald Trump, who, like the prime minister, felt it didn’t give enough advantage to the United States, by far its largest component. He only agreed to reinstitute the deal when Mexico bowed to his terms. He barely even referred the matter to Ottowa, knowing that America First was an offer Canada couldn’t refuse.
In the case of EU-UK trade, it is the EU that is by some way the dominant partner. Europe First is not the same thing as America First, and Ursula von der Leyen is not Donald Trump. But the idea that Britain can dictate the terms of a deal by ignoring the self-regard of Europe is ridiculous and, more than that, self-defeating.
Johnson says that the most important thing for him is “taking back control,” regardless of the consequences. He wants everything agreed to his satisfaction by the end of the year, otherwise he is taking the ball (and his aircraft carriers) and heading home. WTO terms are fine by him, he says, and if the EU doesn’t like it, it can go whistle.
The tragedy is that it doesn’t have to be this way. It really doesn’t. Europe is bound to open negotiations with its own demands uppermost. How else should it begin? Some of these will be unfair and hubristic. For self regard, read amour propre. But Barnier doesn’t expect to win every round in the contest ahead. He will give ground if a convincing case can be made to counter the Commission’s more anally retentive excesses: a joint court of settlement, perhaps, made up of judges from Britain, Luxembourg and Geneva.
Nor should we forget that some of the 27’s member states are more “reasonable” than others – the Dutch, for example, and the Poles and the Hungarians. The EU doesn’t dance to Emmanuel Macron’s tune, and Germany’s carmakers, while adhering firmly to Berlin’s line on the paramountcy of the Single Market, would still like to see an outcome acceptable to their British friends. Europe is arrogant, not crazy.
If Boris Johnson understood moderation, he would have agreed to a two-year transition period and then worked assiduously (a word he might have to look up) to conclude a deal that satisfies both sides. But he is, to a cartoon-like degree, impetuous and impatient. He wants his cake now! Maybe it is time for Michael Gove and Dominic Raab (not Cummings) to impress upon him the need to enter the talks next week on a more open-minded basis, yielding in the end a relationship that, instead of provoking a new Thirty Years War, cements an Entente Cordiale with the whole of Europe.
The prize is there. He just has to seize it.