Brexit: the wind blows chill

10/06/2018

Of the eight Brexit-related links to reports currently posted on the Guardian/Observer website, only one of those – with a dateline of Friday afternoon – has any direct relevance to the talks in Brussels.

This would not be so bad if the media had explored fully the events of that Friday, but that never happened. And while, traditionally, the Sunday papers review the main events of the week, that isn't happening either. The lead in the Observer is given over to another exposé on Arron Banks, and the Sunday Times carries on the same theme.

Its online lead story, late on Saturday evening was an "exclusive", telling us: "Emails reveal Russian links of millionaire Brexit backer Arron Banks". This then became another "exclusive", with the headline: "Revealed: Brexit backer Arron Banks’s golden Kremlin connection", followed by the Independent publishing: "Brexit donor Arron Banks 'met with Russian officials in months leading up to EU referendum'".

With coprophagia high up on the menu, we have the Sunday politics shows nicely set up for an orgy of irrelevance, allowing commentators to indulge themselves in lurid conspiracy theories about how the Russians stitched up the referendum. Still, it makes an interesting contrast with the 1975 referendum, when the CIA was funding the European Movement, pushing hard to keep the UK in the EEC.

I suppose there is room for a sort of deal here – if we accept that the 2016 referendum result was flawed, will the Europhile concede that the 1975 result was similarly flawed? Can we then also accept that the UK should never have joined the EEC without a referendum, and no further treaty should have been adopted without an additional referendum?

And if we do all that, where does it leave us? We are where we are and the crucial need is to manage the Brexit process – something the government doesn't exactly seem to have in hand. Mrs May, however, isn't getting a great deal of help from the well-meaning but ineffably ignorant Daniel Hannan who, after all these years, still doesn't seem to understand the relationship between Efta and the EU.

This absurd little man - entertainingly dissected in The New European - is arguing from his squat in the Telegraph that "we should join the European Free Trade Association (EFTA)", even if only as a transitional measure. "Then", he says, "we wouldn’t need to worry about a separate transition deal".

Instead, the man burbles, "We could take our time to negotiate a new European settlement that would work in everyone’s interests, creating a broad pan-European free trade area within which our more federally inclined allies could pursue their closer union surrounded by a ring of friends".

Elsewhere, he says: "During the campaign, I suggested that Britain should seek a Swiss-type arrangement with the EU, inside the common market but outside the political institutions", adding that he repeated that call after polling day.

This would seem clear enough – a suggestion that he wants us to go for the Swiss option. Nowhere in his piece does he actually mention the EEA or the Norway option. But he goes on to say that, in Efta, "we'd be clearly outside the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Polices, we'd pay a significantly reduced budget contribution and we'd be untouched by some 85 percent of EU legal acts. We’d also have our own trade deals".

But this sound more like being in the EEA (even if he gets the figure wrong on "legal acts"). This is Hannan to a tee. He wafts in conveying a degree of supercilious self-confidence that would seem to imply knowledge, but this is a front that conceals a bizarre confusion about even the most basic structures of the EU and its associated bodies.

It is a matter of record that Efta does not, as such, have a relationship with the EU. There is no Efta-EEA agreement. Efta members do not, by virtue of their membership, pay anything to the EU budget, and they do not adopt EU law – directly of indirectly.

To enter a relationship with the EU, there are two options. Hannan can have us go for the EEA Agreement - a multilateral accord between the members of the EU and the three Efta states, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Or he can go for the Swiss option – a series of bilateral agreements with the EU, which owe nothing to membership of Efta. It is worth noting, incidentally, that the current round of EU-Swiss talks started in 1994 and took 16 years to complete.

In effect, Hannan is confusing the two arrangements, without really understanding which it is he wants. In truth, he's never really understood what he wants. There is a hazy zone in his brain which is somehow linked to Brexit, but what he comes out with is jumbled garbage.

At least, though, no one could accuse Gisela Stuart of being confused about "possible alternatives to the EU".

"Vote Leave", she says, "was clear - none of these models would work". The Norway model, with the UK staying in the Single Market, she tells us, "would mean continued free movement of people, paying billions into the EU budget and having to accept EU rules without getting any say over them".

Leaving the EU, according to Stuart, "was about taking back control of our laws, borders, money and trade. These are the red lines set by the public in the referendum and these red lines are crossed if we do not leave both the Single Market and the Customs Union. That's one thing both sides agreed the referendum vote entailed. Indeed, Remainers repeated it over and over again as a threat. Leaving the EU would mean leaving the Single Market and Customs Union".

How it is possible for any sentient being, supposedly at the heart of politics, to be so locked into these myths is beyond comprehension. Great merriment has been gained from the stupidity emerging from Love Island programme but, in reality, Stuart is little different from the thickest of its "stars".

As to membership of the Single Market, here Booker pitches in, using his truncated column to challenge "one of the more deceitful myths built up around Brexit is that what the British voted for in 2016 was that we should get out of the single market".

In fact, he says, this issue was never discussed in the referendum campaign. It only surfaced in January 2017, when Theresa May for the first time announced that this was her intention".

Until then she had repeatedly stated that we would remain "within" the market and that she wanted us to continue enjoying "frictionless" access to it. This was in accord with a campaign poll which showed 52 percent of voters putting our continued ability to trade with the EU at the top of their agenda. Immigration scored only 24 percent.

Booker argues – and it is certainly my belief – that if it had been openly argued during the campaign that we should cut ourselves off from "frictionless" access to our largest single export market, it might have been rather harder to get a majority in favour of leaving. We then might not be looking at the catastrophic shambles which confronts us today.

Looking at my first version of Flexcit - a mere 97 pages which I published in April 2014, I wrote that, having regard to the character of the debate on Britain's EU membership, we see the Single Market, and the related issue of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), having assumed a totemic status.

It is thus inconceivable, I suggested, that the "out" campaign could have succeeded without it having made firm, unbreakable assurances that current trading relations will continue.

The truth of the matter is that figures such Johnson, Paterson and Hannan all made very public noises about retaining "access" to the Single Market. Here is the weasel Hannan in May 2016 – a month before the referendum. Citing Michael Gove, he wrote:

Britain would find itself in the same position as every other non-EU state in Europe – that is, part of a European free trade area by dint of an intergovernmental treaty. Andorra, Bosnia, the Faroes, Iceland, Jersey, Macedonia, Monaco, Montenegro, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey – all trade freely with the EU while making their own laws.

Astute readers will quickly pick up the inconsistencies, where Hannan put Iceland, Switzerland and Turkey all on the same plane. But the "killer" passage cites George Osborne claiming after Gove had spoken that: "We have had the Leave campaign admit this morning that Britain would leave the single market…".

Says Hannan, "the Chancellor must have known that Michael Gove was not saying anything of the kind. The only geographically European states that don't have unhindered access to EU markets are Belarus and Russia. No one seriously thinks that that would be Britain's future".

You can make of this gibberish what you will, but Hannan is clearly at pains to convey the impression that we would continue trading with the Single Market, more or less on current terms.

We can go round and round in circles from there, but Booker in my view accurately conveys the sentiment that prevailed during the referendum. No one in their right mind expected that Brexit would amount to terminating trading relations with the EU. There was no mandate for it then, and no mandate for it now.

The great tragedy, of course, is that so many of the Muppets believed we could have "access" to the Single Market without being part of it. But we can't. We are either in it, or we're not. And outside, as a third country, the wind blows chill.