Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Tamas]

Based on the PR drive around Johnson's dinner visit to Brussels, I think we have reached the stage where he submits to all EU demands and sells this back at home as a great victory.

Then in January he'll try to ignore what he signed, if past events are of any indication.

[Sheilbh]

I feel you underestimate both leverage and determination of the Brexit extremists. So far in this whole sorry affair, the most extreme Brexiteer positions prevailed almost every time. In the referendum, a hard Brexit was a comprehensive FTA, nowadays a hard Brexit is the Royal Navy sinking French fishing boats.
So the idea of abolishing food standards for that elusive US FTA seems fairly realistic.

Yes - in the context of Brexit talks they've always prevailed, but that's against the most incompetent political operation I've ever seen from soft Brexiteers and Remainers.

When it comes to weakening agrifood standards they'd be up against a coalition of the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the One Show and CountryFile - it is utterly toxic politically. I'd also add that Gove was Environment and Rural Affairs Secretary and introduced a lot of quite stringent regulations - it was very weird but he got a lot of praise from Friends of the Earth (similarly he was actually a very good, liberal Justice Secretary).

I think if the Tories have learned anything from 2017 it's that anything that appears cruel to animals will absolutely kill them with the public.

I've always thought we might end up here not because either party was negotiating in bad faith but because while the EU thinks Brexit is a mistake it wants to ensure that the UK isn't allowed to get a competitive advantage and if there's any chance of Brexit working to be better than being in the EU it surely has to lie in the ability to diverge from the EU (otherwise you'll be the same but with worse market access). But for what it's worth I don't actually think there will be significant regression from the current position. I can see a shift in approach on data but nothing like regression. In general I think there will be divergence over time but that'll be the two sides taking different approaches to new/emerging regulations (and in some of this the UK may be more regulated because it will be easier and quicker to regulate so there'll be a first mover advantage sort of thing).

And the hard Brexiteers are less important now (partly just maths) than the Red Wall Tories (who are simliarly hardline on Brexit but have slightly different politics).

I guess they can allow fox hunting as compensation then.

Still banned - and possibly the biggest May's biggest mis-step in the 2017 election. I understand there was nothing shared more on social media than content about her promise to hold a free vote on that. There were focus groups in swing constituencies and that was, I think, the issue people mentioned most as their issue with May.

It's the standard English/British fault of being utterly beastful to humans and humane to beasts.

[mongers]

So why doesn't Scotland get sliced up among the lowlands and uplands? Why isn't Wales split between Deheubarth and Gwynedd?

I've never met an open bigotry as vicious as North and South Welsh to each other - it's alarming but they really go at it

I could definitely see an Orkney/Shetland move for re-unification with Norway

I 'literally' lived in the middle of it for three years, and whilst not really vicious or a big thing, it was none the less real.

[Sheilbh]

I 'literally' lived in the middle of it for three years, and whilst not really vicious or a big thing, it was none the less real.

I've never lived in Wales but in Liverpool and Bristol (weirdly lots of people think I'm Welsh because of my accent - don't know why) and the terms they used for each other made me quite uncomfortable even knowing that they're both white so it's not really racism. It's certainly strong

[Zanza]

But for what it's worth I don't actually think there will be significant regression from the current position.

The only reason to object against the LPF clauses is when you plan a significant regression as that's the only thing they protect against.

[Zanza]

So they agreed to kick the can down the road and postpone a decision on further can-kicking to Sunday.

The characterisation of the discussion by the UK was "frank" and by the EU "lively and interesting". I guess the first means that the EU did not move on its core red lines LPF and Governance and the latter means Johnson was tipsy and quoted Latin. 

[Syt]

[Sheilbh]

But for what it's worth I don't actually think there will be significant regression from the current position.

The only reason to object against the LPF clauses is when you plan a significant regression as that's the only thing they protect against.

But the UK government has said they're okay with LPF like Canada or Japan which includes non-regression from the current state.

The issue is the future so on social and environmental regulation the EU wants a ratchet so if both sides increase their regulations that becomes the new non-regression benchmark. On state aid the EU wants closer future alignment (if not fully dynamic alignment where the UK adopts EU rules in the future too). From an EU perspective the argument is that the UK is a uniquely big, close and integrated economy so it needs more assurance about the future. From the UK perspective this is going beyond what's typically in an FTA and fetters the UK's ability to diverge.

There is also a bit of a governance piece because the EU wants to be able to take interim measures - so if the Commission decides the UK has broken those rules and gained a competitive advantage it can impose tariffs pending outcome of the dispute resolution. The UK wants it to go through dispute resolution first. And this is standard negotiation stuff - the party with more power wants more unilateral powers in the deal because it can take advantage of them, the weaker party wants process.

In part it's a tension because of the point that Lewis Goodall made - most trade agreements are about managing convergence, this one is about managing divergence. What are the acceptable bounds for the UK to diverge and still have an agreement with the EU?

Edit: This is why I've always thought no deal was possible - almost through no fault of the UK or the EU. There may never have been a trade deal to be done, this is sort of the logical outcome. And that's why I've always thought we should probably decouple the trade deal from the other stuff where the UK and EU want to cooperate and are aligned because, personally I think those actually matter more than commercials.

Edit: And in having cake and eating it the Commission is publishing their no deal contingency plans. The one on fishing relies on agreeing with the UK to extend the status quo level of access for one year. Which is fairly unlikely

[Sheilbh]

Timothy Garton-Ash is one of my favourite writers on Europe - I agree with this piece on the importance of the budget row as well (I'd also note that the other bit issue for the upcoming European Council is Turkey and the initial drafts are very weak despite Greek and French lobbying). Although I query on the point about Sunak because I've not heard that before:

For Europe, losing Britain is bad. Keeping Hungary and Poland could be worse
Timothy Garton Ash
Timothy Garton Ash
The populists of Budapest and Warsaw are blackmailing the EU over the rule of law. They cannot be allowed to succeed
@fromTGA
Thu 10 Dec 2020 06.00 GMT
Last modified on Thu 10 Dec 2020 09.48 GMT

"Brexit means Brexit" – the mantra of the former British prime minister Theresa May – deserves a place in philosophy textbooks as the most meaningless sentence ever to contain the word "means". But let's not fool ourselves that when we finally discover if there is to be a minimal UK-EU trade deal, or no deal, we will then know what Brexit means. It will be five years at least, and probably 10, before we see a clear outline of the new relationship between the offshore islands and the continent. By then the EU may be a very different community, and the UK may not exist.

In a further referendum that is likely to happen in the next few years, the Scots will decide whether they want to leave the 300-year-old union with England and rejoin the European one. If they vote for independence, despite the attendant economic difficulties, then the UK will effectively cease to be. Any British politician who wants the Scots to stick with the English must soon present a different, federal model of the British union as the alternative to independence. So the choice will be the end of the UK or a new Federal Kingdom of Britain. (Federal United Kingdom produces an unfortunate acronym.)

The path from the 2016 referendum vote to this hard Brexit was strewn with broken promises: from the article Boris Johnson wrote in the Daily Telegraph four days later, blithely asserting that "there will continue to be free trade, and access to the single market" to then then trade secretary, Liam Fox, saying the free trade agreement with the European Union "should be one of the easiest in human history". In a triumph of cognitive dissonance, Brexiteers managed to hold two incompatible thoughts simultaneously: that "Europe" is a hideous Franco-German plot to submerge England in a Napoleonic empire; but also that those same new Napoleons would (on instructions from the German car industry) be bound to give the UK privileged, unfettered access to the single market, so the British could have their cake and eat it.

The question now is whether there will be a dynamic of convergence or divergence between Britain and the EU. Every plausible alternative to the current populist British government would prefer a softer Brexit. That includes a more pragmatic and competent Conservative government under a new leader such as Rishi Sunak, the current chancellor. It would be even more true of a Labour – or Labour-led coalition – government under Keir Starmer. This, as well as the logic of economic self-interest, suggests that Britain will, over time, gradually edge back closer to the EU, sector by sector, issue by issue.

On the other hand, the harder the Brexit, the more Britain must seek an alternative business model. As the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine demonstrates, even England and Wales on their own still have significant strengths: financial services, great universities, biotech, DeepMind, alternative energy, creative industries. The economy will be smaller than it would have been without Brexit, but may in time develop a new, competitive profile. This points to divergence. And the bad blood and mutual recrimination around a no-deal Brexit, if it comes to that, would be likely to infect and hamper the development of cooperation in other areas, such as foreign and security policy, for some time to come.

Yet the future of Brexit will depend as much on developments on the continental side of the Channel. People in Germany, France or Italy now talk very little about Brexit – not only because they are fed up with the subject, but also because the EU faces two other enormous crises, which will certainly be discussed at the European summit this week. The EU must urgently put through its impressive new €1.8tn (£1.6tn) budget and recovery fund, as without it, the post-Covid recovery will be more difficult and north-south tensions inside the eurozone may again become acute. But to do this, it has to overcome threatened vetoes from Hungary and Poland, which are holding the rest of the EU to ransom so as to further weaken the proposed rule-of-law conditionality on those funds.

Some have argued that Brexit may actually help the EU because, liberated from the Anglo-Saxon awkward customer, the other member states can smoothly move ahead to further integration. This is an illusion. It took a marathon five-day summit this summer to agree the budget and recovery fund, over fierce resistance from the "frugal four" (Austria, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands), with the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, playing Thatcher.

What the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, are now doing to their EU partners makes Thatcher look like a gentle Europhile. The former British prime minister may have cried "I want my money back", but at least Britain was a major net contributor to the European budget. After she got her rebate, she forcefully advanced a central project of European integration – the single market whose "level playing field" (a very British metaphor) the EU is now insisting the UK must accept.

Hungary and Poland, by contrast, stand to be enormous net beneficiaries from the budget and recovery fund, which together could contribute more than 6% of Hungary's GDP. Yet they are refusing to accept some fairly minimal rule-of-law conditions, without which the EU will gradually cease to be a community of democracies and a shared legal order.

In effect, what the Hungarian and Polish leaders are saying to German and Dutch taxpayers is: we won't let you make those badly needed transfers to southern eurozone countries like Italy and Spain, both of them hard-hit by Covid, unless you allow us to go on using large amounts of your money without any significant constraints. In Hungary, that means EU funds being distributed to prop up Orbán's increasingly undemocratic regime, not to mention it benefiting his family and friends.

If this shameless blackmail succeeds, the populist, xenophobic, nationalist ruling parties in Hungary and Poland will be able to go on doing pretty much what they please, being paid for it generously and, for good measure, biting the German and Dutch hands that feed them.

Fast forward to Hungexit or Polexit? Why would they be so stupid? Johnson can talk of having his cake and eating it; Orbán actually does it.

No, the immediate threat to the EU is not that Hungary and Poland will follow Britain out of the door, but that they will remain full members of the club while continuing to violate its most important rules. It is hard to say which is now the greater danger to the future of the EU: a democratic Britain that has left, or an undemocratic Hungary that remains.

• Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

[The Brain]

And the bad blood and mutual recrimination around a no-deal Brexit, if it comes to that, would be likely to infect and hamper the development of cooperation in other areas

Bad blood and cooperation between the UK and the EU, or bad blood and cooperation between different groups in the UK? I don't know why there would be bad blood from the EU's side after a no-deal Brexit, since no one in the EU cares at all about the issue.

[Tamas]

One thing to note and I might be just reading this into the article but it seems to be one of the long line of British studies that completely ignore the political considerations of the EU member states.

A no-deal UK exit, at this stage, would be an economic damage to the EU, sure, but not a political one. Whatever political danger Brexit had initially has been mitigated and removed by the massive blunder Britain has made out of the exit process.

What CAN very much be a political risk and damage to the EU, is a deal that is perceived to favour the UK. A lot of member states could after that raise the question - why am I t struggle keeping to my duties if I can get most or all the benefits without having to do that, like Britain?

[The Brain]

I mean (sup yister), the only thing keeping the UK from being the #1 laughing stock of the world is the US.

[Sheilbh]

One thing to note and I might be just reading this into the article but it seems to be one of the long line of British studies that completely ignore the political considerations of the EU member states.

The article isn't really about Brexit though - that wasn't the bit I thought was interesting at least (except for the point of whether this leads to convergence or divergence). It's about the political risk of agreeing to Polish and Hungarian demands being worse for Europe than the risk of no FTA with the UK.

The extent there's a point about the political cost of no FTA for the EU is that there will be a political cost to it, but the EU has weighed that against the political cost to perceived cherry picking (but given that we're talking about the terms of an FTA where the UK is not in the single market and is not in the customs union I query if that's really that relevant now as opposed to two years ago). That's a fair assessment - it may not be right, we don't know yet, but it's certainly reasonable.

Because to an extent what your saying is kind of the point he's making about Hungary and Poland, no?

[Zanza]

@Sheilbh: I think you are mischaracterizing the "ratchet clause". It's not automatic, just on mutual consent. Without consent, unilateral tariffs to protect the new regulation can be levied. That does not limit each sides freedom to diverge, it just puts a price on it.

The harsh governance mechanism is a direct result of British shenanigans. Self-inflicted.

[Tamas]

The point I am making is that I think at this point in time there is no EU political cost to a no deal Brexit and possibly there are political benefits to it, especially compared to a deal that would allow British cherry picking because THAT could have high political cost indeed.

I think this is key consideration has been consistently missing from British analysis and narrative which in general struggled to grasp the true priority and nature of impact for the EU.