Brexit: End of the Beginning
On Brexit, size is everything. If you think bigger is better, you will probably see Brexit as a national humiliation: Britain’s exclusion from the First Eleven of global players. If you are one of the “small is beautiful” brigade, you will see Brexit as a consummation devoutly to be wished. These are deep intuitions, imperfectly articulated in political or economic structures, but difficult or impossible to change.
In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift satirised Whigs and Tories as “Big-Endians” and “Little-Endians”: Lilliputian politics divided over how to open a boiled egg. Remainers are the Big-Endians, Leavers the Little-Endians of our day. They aren’t going to be reconciled any time soon.
The problem for Theresa May is: does the deal she agreed yesterday with the other European leaders satisfy either of the factions? The answer, to judge by the reaction on all sides, is no.
Britain will no longer be a member of the EU, the biggest trading bloc in the world. No more free movement (on which many big companies and the public sector depend). No more membership of big EU research projects (on which the biggest and best universities depend). No more big summits and junkets for politicians. The Big-Endians are disgusted by our sudden reduction to a spectator.
But Britain will still belong to the customs union until further notice. We will still be subject to the EU’s rules and regulations. We won’t have escaped the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. Our freedom of manoeuvre in trade and diplomacy will be constrained by our status as a kind of unofficial, non-voting associate member, tied in by the Irish backstop. The Little-Endians are incandescent: there is nothing beautiful about being small if it means being bullied by the big boys.
Indeed many on both sides think this the worst of both worlds. They have a point. Rather than resembling proudly independent Singapore, under Mrs May’s deal we would look more like Hong Kong: a window on the world and a valuable source of revenue for mainland China, but subject to the tyranny of Beijing.
The Prime Minister rejects both arguments, of course. We have a better deal than Norway, Switzerland or Canada, she says. Her line is: we were always going to have to compromise and this is the best deal we could get. To which Jean-Claude Juncker added last night, in his interview with Katya Adler, “It’s the only deal.” In other words, take it or leave it. Mrs May’s strongest argument is the ticking clock: there’s no time left to negotiate a Plan B or to hold a second referendum. Indeed, there’s precious little time left to prepare for the possibility that, if she fails to get her deal through the Commons, we will leave without one. No deal was always the likeliest outcome unless the circle could somehow be squared by goodwill on both sides of the negotiations.
But that was never going to happen. Despite the protestations last night by Emmanuel Macron that he was “saddened” by the British departure, or by Angela Merkel that it was “tragic”, neither of these leaders put pressure on Michel Barnier and the Commission to meet Mrs May halfway. The deal she has come back with is much worse than most people expected when they voted, by a clear majority, to leave. The crocodile tears of our partners cannot disguise the fact that Theresa May has been ruined by Europe, just as David Cameron and indeed Margaret Thatcher were.
So what has changed since 2016? The EU, for one thing: it has doubled down on further integration and is now set on a course that leads directly to a single European army, a single Eurozone budget and, ultimately, a single European government. The British, however Europhile, were never going to be comfortable with that. But that is the EU to which we would now belong, if a second referendum were to deliver a vote to remain.
Britain, too, has changed since 2016. Partly in the ways emphasised by advocates of a “People’s Vote” (how has the 2016 referendum been “unpeopled”?). The pollster Peter Kellner, for example, claims that by next March 1.6 million, mainly Leave, voters will have died and some two million, mainly Remain, voters will have come of age. But Britain has also moved on in other ways: both Conservatives and Labour have polarised; we have a hung Parliament; and the spectacle of the EU bigwigs enjoying our disarray while imposing ever more penal conditions before we are permitted leave their club has alienated many who were hitherto indifferent to Europe. Schadenfreude is a German, not an English, word for a good reason: the British find it repulsive.
What has never changed, of course, is our geographical situation as an offshore island. The British can neither leave the Continent nor remain part of it: we will always oscillate between closer or weaker relationships with our bigger neighbours. But when Macron threatens to deny Britain the chance to leave the backstop unless we concede French demands over fishing rights, he is overplaying the EU hand.
What has also not changed is the fact of British sovereignty. No matter what Mrs May has signed up to on the Irish backstop and the customs union, Parliament remains sovereign. The constitutional principle that no Parliament can bind its successor remains valid. So we could, in fact, unilaterally leave the arrangement after the transition period, even if the Commission tried to veto it. There would be a price, of course, but it might be worth paying. In any case, our EU partners have imposed an “exorbitant” price for Brexit, as the French finance minister Bruno Le Maire has gleefully pointed out. So we might as well get our money’s worth.
One way or another, Brexit was always going to be messy. This is not the end of it. To paraphrase Churchill: it is not even the beginning of the end. But it does look like the end of the beginning.
