As the start of 2021 looms, the EU and UK have a new relationship
underpinned by their new trade and cooperation agreement. This agreement
fractures, damages and complicates economic, political and social links
between the UK and EU. And, alongside the 2019 Withdrawal agreement, it
ensures there is a customs and regulatory border between Britain and
Northern Ireland – meaning the fractures are within as well as beyond
the UK.
This attempted distancing of the UK from the rest of
Europe, in the pursuit of some illusory, right-wing ‘global Britain’
ideology combined with continuing propaganda around regaining
sovereignty, is overall bound to fail. Instead, the UK is now moving
into the position of being a rather large economic and political
satellite of the European Union. And while in some ways, as intended by
the Brexiters, leaving the EU will certainly weaken EU-UK relations,
Brexit will mainly have the result of leaving the UK with less
influence, less voice, less say but still hugely dependent on and
interdependent with our European neighbours.
The political and
media frenzy around the possibility of deal or no deal was deliberately
stoked by Boris Johnson and his entourage to encourage headlines of an
ultimate UK victory in the talks (Johnson’s cowardice and self interest
always making a deal look the more likely outcome). The deal/no-deal
stand-off also served to take attention away from the fact that any deal
was bound to put up trade and other barriers and to fracture the UK’s
part in the EU’s economic and political institutions, and so to damage
the UK. But now, in the face of a 1246 page deal – and much more yet to
be negotiated or unilaterally decided (on data, financial services and
more) – the reality is laid clearly out for all to see.
UK as a Satellite of the EU
The
EU is well used to negotiating agreements with its neighbours and
taking on board both its own political and economic interests and
constraints and those of whichever neighbour it is bargaining with – be
that Turkey (customs union), Ukraine (association agreement),
Switzerland (a set of bilateral treaties), Norway/Iceland/Liechtenstein
(the European Economic Area) and now the UK (trade and cooperation
agreement).
But the EU-UK deal is unique in creating a major
series of barriers to trade and cooperation rather than opening up
opportunities. Still, as for the EU’s other neighbourhood agreements, it
sets up a whole range of new governance, consultation and management
bodies for the agreement under the so-called joint partnership council.
Alongside these sit a detailed set of arrangements for dispute
settlement, for review of the whole agreement, and the possibility, with
notice, to withdraw from it in its entirety. The EU and UK are
condemned to keep trading, to keep talking, to update and amend the
agreement and to deal with disputes.
But the status quo of EU
membership has been ruptured. The UK has chosen to give up power and
influence, vote and voice. There is plenty here to keep policy experts
occupied not least comparing Norway’s democratic deficit, given its
limited ability to influence EU law, to the even lesser influence the UK
will have on EU laws and regulations (though the UK’s diplomats would
do well to talk in depth to their Norwegian counterparts about best
routes to attempting to influence new EU laws). Despite the multiple new
EU-UK committees set up by the new agreement, the UK’s diplomats and
officials will still have much less contact and interaction with their
EU counterparts than they had inside the EU – knowledge, influence,
networks are all weakened by Brexit.
And the UK’s freedom, much
hyped by Boris Johnson, to go in a different direction looks very
constrained – both by the EU-UK agreement itself and by the reality of
standards being increasingly set in competition between the world’s
three main blocs: the US, EU and China. UK products sold to the EU will
anyway and of course have to meet EU standards – and be certified to do
so (except where there are some provisions for mutual recognition). The
multiple types of non-tariff barriers removed in the creation of the
EU’s single market in 1992 are now back with a vengeance for EU-UK
trade. This will dampen EU-UK goods trade and hit services most
dramatically and deeply of all.
The UK may attempt to engage in
regulatory competition on labour or environmental standards. But the
range of provisions for dealing with unfair state aids, divergence in
labour, environmental and climate standards and for ‘rebalancing’ the
level-playing field if it all goes wrong, should provide reassurance to
those who fear the UK government may still go down the Singapore on
Thames route (as should, for example, the EU moves to suspend Swiss
access to its stock markets last year – the EU is not a passive partner
in its agreements with its neighbours). The EU has not established these
provisions in the partnership agreement simply to leave them idle. Nor,
given the deep lack of trust that the EU member states and Brussels now
have in the UK, and especially in the current UK government, has the EU
left any option uncovered to revisit the agreement in part or in whole
if it proves necessary.
The Degeneration and Undermining of British Politics and Democracy
The
UK’s European question has, then, not gone away, whatever Boris Johnson
may declare. Brexit itself was driven by the takeover of the Tory party
by its eurosceptic fringe, supported and encouraged down the decades by
the major part of the UK’s right wing media. Whether Tory divisions
over the EU, and the nature of the UK, will be calmed for now by the
reality of Brexit is an open question. Indeed, the Tories created a
European question where there was none – where the UK was an agile and
influential EU power, where the public was broadly accepting of our EU
status quo.
Now, as a satellite of the EU, the UK will mainly
prosper – and recover its political and democratic stability and
integrity – to the extent that it rebuilds a close, strong and honest
partnership with the EU. But the route to that is not straightforward.
Certainly, the Johnson government will not be able to avoid the
perpetual consultations and talks that the new agreement requires,
including its errors or unintended frictions (alongside the many
foreseen and deliberately introduced frictions). But, in the face of the
costs and damage of Brexit, the Tories will surely decide they have no
choice but to maintain their ideological falsehoods. They will continue
to pretend that rupturing economic, social and political links is
creating a vast new European free trade area or freeing Britain to
establish new trade deals (that are replicas at best of prior EU trade
deals). The ideology of Brexit will remain – in replacing the convenient
European health insurance card with a global one (yet to be seen) or in
wantonly withdrawing from the EU’s Erasmus programme or in refusing any
structured foreign and security policy cooperation with the EU.
And
as the new barriers and frictions to trade between Britain and Northern
Ireland become ever more apparent – as grace periods run out, as the
Irish government ensures access to EhiC and Erasmus for citizens of
Northern Ireland – there will be more obfuscation and denial from the UK
government.
Overall, then, the degradation of British politics,
the pretence, the false pictures and fake news, the deluded yesteryear
language of pseudo-imperialism are bound to continue under the current
UK government.
Whether the UK itself will survive the real impacts
of Brexit and the decay of its politics that brought us to this
juncture is now one of the key political questions for the coming
period. Northern Ireland is on its own new trajectory, semi-detached
from the UK in ways that can only continue to intensify the Irish
reunification debate. Scotland has elections in May 2021, and, since
last June, there have been sustained majorities in opinion polls for
independence.
The new EU-UK deal will set up challenges a-plenty
for a future England-Scotland border if independence in the EU is the
eventual outcome. But in the face of the myriad borders that are now
being installed by the UK government – whether it be to the EU, to
Northern Ireland, or even for lorry drivers to access Kent – these
challenges may not dent that independence majority. Hypocrisy will
continue here too as the UK government that has established such deep
barriers to the EU through Brexit continues to fulminate against the
possibility of a Scotland-England border.
Also very challenged, in
the midst of these international, economic, political, social and
constitutional questions, is the Labour party under Keir Starmer.
Starmer has adopted a stance of going along with a Brexit deal – of not
letting the Tories criticise Labour as remainers – a narrow and
backward-looking calculation. Apart from having, for now, no separate
Labour policy on what EU-UK relations should look like, Starmer risks
too being aligned with Boris Johnson’s rhetoric and politics of treating
Brexit as a done deal, the European question as settled.
But the
European question for the UK looks like never being settled in the years
to come. Labour will have to answer the question as to what closer or
better relations with the EU look like – and waiting until four years
time to answer that question, as the bumpy path ahead creates damage,
frictions and upset, looks unrealistic. And closer relations with the EU
will always run straight into the problem of becoming even more of a
rule-taker, and creating more of a democratic deficit, than Johnson’s
EU-satellite UK will be.
This is the challenge that the ‘soft’
Brexiters never answered (as they try, curiously, to re-fight old wars
suggesting those who argued for remain and for the UK public to be able
to change their minds (which polls show they had done), were somehow
responsible for Brexit not the Tories themselves). For the UK to remain
in the EU’s customs union and single market without any say over
decisions – a rule-taker not a rule-maker – was not and is not a
sustainable position. The extent of the democratic deficit that a small
state like Norway faces is substantial. For one of Europe’s largest
economies and states to create and sustain such a democratic deficit was
never credible – let alone in the context of the UK’s divisive Brexit
politics.
If Labour, then, wants to – eventually – have a European
policy, to bring the UK closer to the EU, it will have to answer these
questions of democratic deficit. And while Starmer’s Labour looks
unlikely to come anywhere near the question of rejoining the EU, from
the EU perspective, the idea of the UK rejoining the EU in the next ten
years or so is anyway mostly anathema. A stable pro-European UK with a
revived, strong, democracy and politics – demonstrated over several
years – might in a generation be able to re-join the EU but not in the
next decade. Faced with these conundrums, the lack of a Labour European
policy for now is perhaps not so surprising.
The UK’s potential
fragmentation will also put the UK’s European question in another form.
If, in a decade’s time, Scotland is independent and/or Northern Ireland
has reunified with the Republic of Ireland, there will be more European
questions for England and Wales not fewer.
What the Brexiters have
ensured is that a Europe question that was once only the obsession of
the Tory fringes and the eurosceptic media has become an unending
question for the UK, and one that may, in part, lead to the UK’s demise.
Brexit has upended the UK’s European alliances, shrunk its considerable
influence within the EU (and in the wider world), damaged its
reputation, its economy, society and politics.
On top of all this,
there is an inevitable narrowing of the focus of UK politics. While the
EU moves on to consider its relations with the US and China, its Covid
recovery strategy and funds, its European Green deal, its role in the
world, the UK is condemned to dealing with the extraordinary range of
barriers and bureaucracy that it has now introduced into its dealings
both with the EU and within its own state (to Northern Ireland) and with
the political fallout from the divisions Brexit has created.
The European question is dead; long live the European question.
By Dr Kirsty Hughes|January 4th, 2021|Categories: Brexit, Coronavirus, Devolution, Europe, Scotland, Trade, UK Constitution, Views from the Federal Trust|Tags: Brexit, Brexit deal, EU-UK deal, Johnson Brexit, Kirsty Hughes, Kirsty Hughes Brexit, Kirsty Hughes SCER, TCA
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