There are alternatives: late Brexit or no Brexit
Two years was never going to be long enough to repatriate responsibilities
by Philip Stephens
Amid the noise everyone can cling to one certainty. Whatever the terms — cliff-edge exit or amicable separation — Britain will leave the EU at the end of March 2019. It says so in Article 50, and the treaty cannot be gainsaid. Wrong. It is time to add third and fourth options to the miserable confusion that is Britain’s effort to leave its own continent. Brexit could be delayed beyond 2019. And it is not impossible that it will be abandoned.
Pace the conspiracy theorists among Brexiters, there is no secret plan to thwart them. Rather, politics and bureaucratic circumstance are driving events in their direction. Donald Tusk, the president of the EU council, gave voice to the thought when he spoke in the European Parliament. It is “up to London how this will end,” he said. “With a good deal, no deal or no Brexit.” Mr Tusk, an intelligent and generous man who represents Europeanism at its best, weighs his words carefully.
“No Brexit”? To suggest that the 52:48 per cent vote in 2016 does anything but bind the nation in perpetuity has become a heresy. Burning at the stake is too light a punishment for those who dare suggest that unfolding realities might give cause for sober second thoughts. These are “enemies of the people”. The Brexiters are blind to irony: self-styled champions of parliamentary sovereignty they decree that parliament be denied the final say in the outcome. Democracy must make way for majoritarianism.
For all that, the Conservative party’s ideologues have a problem. They can hound Theresa May. True to character, Boris Johnson can whisper and plot against the prime minister. The foreign secretary might succeed in toppling her. But on one thing he is bluffing. Mr Johnson does not have troops at Westminster to implement his infantile vision for something called “global Britain”.
The EU27 have been accused of dragging their feet. Time is on their side so they have indeed been using the leverage. This is what happens in negotiations. The real obstacles to progress, though, have always resided in London.
What is missing is a cabinet consensus as to the shape of a final settlement. The faultline lies between sensible folk like Philip Hammond, the chancellor, who want to preserve significant post-Brexit access to the single market, and those who want to dispense with all ties to Brussels in the blind hope that business would thrive within a World Trade Organization framework for EU trade.
I am told that Mr Johnson’s response when presented with inconvenient truths is to cover his ears and hum the national anthem until the bearers of the bad news go away. One of the things that gets him humming most loudly is the hard evidence that falling back on WTO rules would decimate Britain’s professional services businesses.
Until the impasse is broken — and it is hard to see how it will be — neither negotiations in Brussels nor preparations in London for Brexit can proceed at a pace. Whitehall public servants say two years was never going to be long enough to repatriate responsibilities devolved to Brussels during more than four decades. More than a year has already been wasted. And in the absence of political direction, a post-Brexit transition period would simply shift the cliff edge into the future.
This is not just about setting up new customs arrangements, as complicated as that will be. Brexit demands an entirely new national infrastructure of regulation, standards-setting and oversight. Oh, and environment, fisheries and farm policies. Big government, you might call it. And nothing can be done until the cabinet agrees on the extent of future divergence from Brussels.
Even then the prime minister has still to reach a deal with EU27. She can take nothing for granted — even her proposed two-year transition. “Why should a non-member state have access to the single market?”, an ally of German chancellor Angela Merkel asks curtly. As for the final destination, Berlin is clear. Britain can have a Norway-like arrangement or it can spend five years or more seeking a trade deal that significantly limits access to the single market.
Put all this together and it is obvious the Article 50 clock is ticking too fast. Mrs May privately has already accepted the need for a three-year transition. That may not be enough. Though an outline divorce agreement could be completed during 2018, parliament will then demand its say. Those at the sharp end of Brexit are beginning to think the actual date of departure may have to be put back a year or two. There is nothing to stop Mrs May asking for such a delay.
The still more intriguing possibility, though, is that the prime minister fails to secure cabinet support for any arrangement acceptable to the EU27 and yet cannot get through parliament any deal (or no deal) that would win the backing of Mr Johnson and co. Deadlock.
The assumption has been in that in those circumstances Britain would simply crash out of the union. But would that be possible if parliament had not put in place anything to replace EU laws? Watching the country fall to political crisis, would a responsible prime minister really chose economic anarchy over the dispatch of a short letter to Mr Tusk, asking, with all due humility, if Britain might change its mind? The writer at present is a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin
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