20 July 2017

FedTrust: No good choices for the British government in the Brexit negotiations

[...] Whatever the details of the negotiations in Brussels, the British government is confronted with three basic options for its future relationship with the European Union. It can opt for minimum change from the status quo; it can opt for maximal change from the status quo; or it can opt for a half-way house between the two. None of these options is attractive and all are demonstrably inferior to the present state of affairs. It would make no political sense to leave the European Union simply to enter into a similar,  but less empowering arrangement along the lines of the EEA; it would make no economic sense to substitute in less than two years time for the sophisticated and well-established legal framework of the  European Union the sketchy general principles of the WTO; and an uneasy compromise between these two extremes would almost certainly take many years to negotiate and would be neither economically nor politically persuasive. In reality, its commitment to the Brexit option leaves the British government with no attractive strategy in its negotiations with the rest of the European Union. It is a misconception to imagine that it is simply bureaucratic unpreparedness that is holding back the United Kingdom in its present painful negotiations with Mr. Barnier and his team. It is rather the nature of the Brexit project itself, which simply presents the British government with a range of symmetrically uncongenial options. None of these options corresponds to the optimistic basis on which British withdrawal from the European Union was advocated in the confused and misleading referendum of last year.

If Mrs. May had won in the recent General Election the substantial overall majority for which she hoped, she might have found it possible at least temporarily to choose one of the three basic options for Brexit and work towards it. Her personal authority might well have allowed her to suppress opposition from within her own party to whatever unsatisfactory path she had chosen. Her diminished stature as a result of the electoral debacle of 8th June means that no such option is open to her. Her Party must inevitably default back to unending internal conflict about which approach to Brexit is the least harmful. This is a conflict that can never be resolved, because, as Doctor Johnson might have put it, the tenement-dwellers are “arguing from different premises.”  There is no meeting-point between the economic calculations of Philip Hammond and the political motivations that drive many of his most Eurosceptic colleagues in the Conservative Parliamentary Party.

Now that Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty has been triggered, the inevitable incapacity of the Conservative Party to fix and pursue a course towards Brexit has a disturbing consequence unforeseen by the authors of that Article. As long as it is the present Conservative government that is conducting the Brexit negotiations, the United Kingdom is condemned to the hardest of hard Brexits, in a way entirely welcome to the most radical Eurosceptics of the Conservative Party. A catastrophic and chaotic Brexit, which can be blamed to an ignorant British public on the supposed intransigence of Mr. Barnier, is likely to be an altogether more palatable prospect for Messrs Fox, Johnson and Davis than a protracted negotiation which provides as daily object lesson in the self-harming absurdity of Brexit.  The Conservative Party will in the last analysis always be immune to pressure from its negotiating partners in Brussels. It is too busy negotiating with itself to pay excessive heed to Mr. Barnier and his colleagues.

It might have been hoped that in a mature Parliamentary democracy such as the United Kingdom, the toxicity of Conservative divisions over Europe would have provoked within the party or among the parties of opposition some elements of self-healing resistance.  An optimistic observer might well see in the indecisive General Election the first steps towards questioning Mrs. May’s commitment to leaving the single European market and the Customs Union as building-blocks of Brexit’s meaning Brexit. A more pessimistic observer might see by contrast a depressing absence of coherent and principled opposition to Brexit from the Labour Party in particular. The Shadow Business Secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey was recently reduced to defending Labour’s European policy as “having our cake and eating it,” while Tony Blair showed that the avoidance of hard choices remains his favoured mode of European policy by the disingenuous claim that our European partners were weakening in their commitment to free movement. As the negative consequences of Brexit become daily clearer over the coming months, the Labour Party will undoubtedly wish to exploit the growing embarrassment of the Conservative government in this area. But the hostility of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell to the European Union is long-standing and well-documented. Their reinforced position at the head of the Labour Party will act as a major barrier to the emergence of a Labour European policy fundamentally opposed to Brexit rather than looking simply to mitigate its perceived worst effects. [...]

Full article on Fed Trust

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