EU Referendum


Brexit: time is running out


20/11/2016




There has been no neater comment on where we have got to on Brexit, writes Christopher Booker, than the two pictures on the cover of the current issue of Private Eye

The first, labelled "Then", showed that grandiose bus hired by Vote Leave, carrying the claim that, by pulling out of the EU, we could give an extra £350 million a week to the NHS. The second, captioned "Now", showed a clapped-out, windowless bus stuck in a field, going nowhere.

In Booker's view, our progress towards invoking Article 50 does indeed look ever more of a shambles. The real problem, as it has always been, he says, "is that so few people really understand the incredible complexity of what a successfully negotiated Brexit would involve".

That is certainly evident if we turn elsewhere to the Sunday Telegraph where we see an "exclusive account" of how: "Heavyweight Brexiteers among 60 Tory MPs to demand clean break from the EU".

These MPs, including seven ex-Cabinet ministers, are concerned that pro-EU figures in the Cabinet are fighting to soften the Government's Brexit position and are demanding that the Prime Minister pulls Britain out of the single market and customs union.

They say that only the "cleanest Brexit" can fulfil the country's referendum call to "untie ourselves from EU shackles and freely embrace the rest of the world".

This initiative coincides with the relaunch of the European Research Group (ERG), a pro-Brexit Tory body that claims it will produce "new thinking and policy ideas" for Britain's future after Brexit, as well as being "a constant reminder to ministers of the strength of Euroscepticism on the Tory backbenches".

As for these "new ideas", we are going to be waiting a long time, if a parallel piece in the ST is any guide. This is from Suella Fernandes, one of the 60 Tory MPs and vice chair of the ERG.

For her, we get the usual collection of issue-illiterate mantras, starting with the red herring of the customs union which was not even an issue until a few weeks ago, and was hardly – if at all – discussed during the referendum campaign.

The substantive issue is, of course, continued participation in the Single Market and here Fernandes claims that she and most of her Parliamentary colleagues took the referendum as an instruction to untie ourselves from EU shackles and freely embrace the rest of the world.

Fernandes also claims that it was "made clear in the referendum campaign" that remaining in the EU’s internal market, like Norway, or in a customs union like Turkey, "is not compatible with either of these commitments and doing so would frustrate the will of the electorate".

This is simply not true and these 60 have no more right than the lacklustre Vote Leave, Leave EU or Ukip to dictate the shape of the Brexit settlement. All of them consciously refused to adopt an exit plan prior to the referendum and, since that time, none of them have come up with any coherent ideas of how we manage the exit negotiations.

And that is the point that Booker makes in his column. None of the major "leaver" groups nor indeed the "remainers" were remotely prepared for the outcome.

The Remainers simply relied on their absurd Project Fear to ensure that the problem would never arise, but the Leavers were just as bad by deliberately refusing to work out any practical exit plan. Rather than come up with anything sensible, the "official" campaign believed they could wing it on vapid little make believe slogans such as the one blazoned on the side of their silly bus.

Five months later, with only four months to go before Mrs May invokes Article 50 and formally tells the European Council that we intend to leave, and here we are with the general debate no further forward or better informed.

All we can see is a dawning realisation by ministers that it really is turning out to be far more complicated than any of them ever realised, and that we have nothing like enough civil servants to cope with it all.

Booker reminds us that the Prime Minister, Theresa May, continues to keep her cards almost invisibly close to her chest, except for insisting that we must continue trading fully "within" the single market (because anything else would be a disaster), while staying hung up on how this could be made compatible with her wish to "control immigration".

This tension is why she added last week that we cannot be hoping for an "off-the-shelf" solution. Whatever she intended that to mean, there is only one way we can hope to achieve a deal that meets her primary requirement.

Only if, on leaving the EU, we nevertheless remain within the wider European Economic Area (EEA) can we hope to continue trading "within" the single market much as we do now.

But this would also allow us, outside the EU, to escape from the three quarters of its 20,000 laws that cover issues other than trade. It would even, under the "safeguarding" clauses of the EEA Agreement, give us limited control over internal EU immigration.

Whether or not Mrs May would regard this as the kind of "off-the-shelf" solution she now seems to be rejecting, its other immense advantage is that it would enable us, in the short time available for these negotiations, to focus on all those countless other issues that will need to be settled as part of our disentanglement from the rest of the EU system of government.

Look at the 35 different policy areas set out in the template for a treaty of accession to the EU and we can see just what will have to be unravelled in reverse, in the "Secession Treaty" that will be needed at the end of our negotiations. Only six of these 35 categories cover trade.

But our talks will also have to resolve the 29 other areas, such as what is to be done about our involvements in the EU’s common foreign and defence policies, its policies on justice and home affairs, our relations with the EU's 27 different agencies, and a whole host more – including, heaven help us, the unbelievably tricky questions of how we manage to extricate ourselves from the common agricultural and fisheries policies.

All this has so far been scarcely mentioned in the public debate, although it does help to explain why some are now suggesting that we may need to recruit 30,000 more civil servants just to cope with the myriad further issues needing to be resolved, including those ongoing financial commitments to the EU which, over a decade or more ahead, could amount to a staggering £60 billion.

The truth, Booker concludes, is that, in all directions, we are still hopelessly unprepared for what we let ourselves in for on 23 June. And the time left to get our act together is now fast running out.

And with that, the nonsense offered by the "Tory 60" is something we can certainly do without. As Pete observes, these people are dishonestly risking our global standing and flirting with recession on the basis of a delusion – a delusion that there is any credible alternative to continued participation in the Single Market, for the short- to medium-term.

Interestingly one person who in November 2014 saw this very clearly was Owen Paterson. "It is critical to remember, he said, that the economic Single Market and the political EU are not one and the same thing. We are perfectly at liberty to pursue participation in the Single Market without being saddled with the EU as a political project".

"Membership of the EEA", Paterson averred, "allows full participation in the Single Market without being in the EU, as enjoyed by Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein. Those such as the CBI, who confuse the memberships of the Single Market and the EU are making a basic error and misleading the British people".

"We can leave the political project and enter into a truly economic project with Europe via the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and the EEA", Paterson said. "We would still enjoy the trading benefits of the EU, without the huge cost of the political baggage".

And what was true then is true now. We cannot afford to be messing in the way we are doing. We need to move on. Most of all, if an "interim solution" is to be at all credible, we must define the end game. And that is something most people have scarcely considered.