Are you fed up with the Brexit propaganda in all the media? I am. The only thing I’m more fed up with is yet another article whinging about how it’s a terrible injustice that privileged ambitious white women aren’t being given even more privileges. I don’t read those articles past the W-word in the headline. Anyway…
To recap: the EU cannot and should not give up the demand, that two conditions of super-privileged access, are a) the legal sovereignty, of the European Courts, and b) the Four Freedoms. The UK Government was given strict instructions by 17+ million voters that it was to regain control of its borders and legal system. So no capital-A Agreement is possible. The people whose jobs it was to understand this stuff knew this about thirty seconds after the referendum result was announced. The A50 rules forced them and everyone else into two pointless years of fake negotiation and preposterous posturing. The only real diplomatic problem was wondering how to blame the Irish, and the Border did the trick. (Irish and UK Customs authorities say they don’t need a hard border to make it all work post-Brexit, but hey, where diplomacy needs, the Devil take the Customs man, or something.)
We’ve reached the stage where everyone is talking openly about a hard Brexit, and the most sensible remark I’ve read about that is that, while the British will pay the price of a hard Brexit, it is not so clear that the individual European countries will want to.
Remember your history: the Brits are good at four things (as well as pop music, inventing stuff, banking, flexible legal systems, and a bunch of other things, and on the other hand they did need the EU to tell them to clean up their filthy beaches, but I digress)
First, getting off ships before anyone else has heard the water coming into the bilges. The EU will never be a federal nation state, but it will ruin itself trying. Time to leave. Especially before the Euro falls apart.
Second, being prosaically, anti-climatically, practical. The Brits can reduce the consequences of what looks like an history-shaking event to a handful of petty changes. For instance, the uncertainty about customs arrangements, all that huffing and puffing, and what does it mean? That a firm in Rochdale has to fill in EU/HG/12-35UTF/RE and file it a week in advance, instead of getting by with a UK registration plate on the day. And UK Passport-holders have to line up behind the Ugandans rather than the Poles when they pass through Immigration at Nice Airport. Duh.
So don’t be surprised when whole swathes of the British economy wind up being prepared for 30/4/2019. Some won’t be, but that’s only because they wanted to create a crisis they didn’t want to waste.
Third, being able to handle ridiculous amounts of ambiguity, aka It’ll all work out in the end. God, as we know, is an Englishman, and he looks after his own, ever since he took his eye off the job in 1066. So it will work out. How far away that end is, and how much it will cost to get there doesn’t matter to the Brits, which brings us to...
Fourth, the UK Government has never been shy of bankrupting and indebting its taxpayers to win a war. They did it twice in the twentieth century. They only beat Napoleon at Waterloo because they borrowed a ton of money to hire the German Army. Further back, they paid the Danes boatloads of silver to stop looting and raping in the streets of Newcastle. Real historians could doubtless list a dozen much more ordinary examples.
Few other countries are prepared to bankrupt themselves in any cause. That’s why it’s taken the 27 an age to understand that the Brits will bankrupt themselves to keep their precious independence. While a hard Brexit might hurt the British more than any random European country, it’s going to cost that random European country, and not spare change either.
And remember, in a hard Brexit, the EU doesn’t get its money.
So there will be a hard Brexit, because there can’t be a capital-A Agreement. But it won’t be a malicious Brexit. The EU can’t afford the PR. The French will be awkward for a couple of months, but they love that kind of publicity. The Dutch don’t. The Germans don’t. The Iberians and the V4 can’t afford it. Everyone else wants as much business-as-usual as possible. So there will be lots of temporary transitional arrangements (TTAs) to keep things going. That, I’ve always thought, is what the negotiators are really doing now: working out the TTAs. There will be Trade Agreement on the Canadian or Japanese model agreed tout de suite (once special access is publicly acknowledged to be non-negotiable) and the EU will get a chunk of its €50bn.
The final part of the drama will be that those TTA’s will only be introduced at the last moment, when it can be spun as preventing a world-wide economic crisis the like of which mankind would never have seen before or after. TTA’s can’t be introduced sensibly, beforehand, as that would let Parliaments argue about stuff. It has to look like an emergency.
Can’t help feeling this is exactly how Donnie told Terry to play it.
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