Today’s deal means that Europe is at last treating Britain as an equal 

The deal has been done. The long wait is over. On Christmas Eve, after four-and-a-half years of negotiations, history has been made. Even though the official announcement has been delayed, there is no doubt that the free trade agreement between the UK and the EU will be signed. The 2,000-plus pages of text — longer than the Bible — go into the minutiae of goods, services and rights. It is impossible to comment in detail on a document that nobody outside the negotiations has even skimmed, let alone studied carefully. 

But the broad outlines are clear. The deal will deliver free trade, with zero tariffs and zero quotas. Britain will have the clean break for which a majority of its citizens voted. Sovereignty has indeed been repatriated; EU law and the European Court will in future have a negligible role on this side of the Channel. The EU will have most, if not all, of what it wanted: access to British waters for a transition period long enough to placate its fishing communities; and a “level playing field” to protect the Single Market from “unfair” competition, with reciprocal guarantees that will, as in most trade deals, be subject to arbitration in case of disputes. It won’t be perfect for either side, but it will remove uncertainty and reduce friction from an economic relationship that is of crucial importance to both sides.

This last-minute breakthrough was the best possible Christmas present that Boris Johnson could have given to the country that elected him so triumphantly just a year ago, but which has been periodically suffering buyer’s remorse ever since. Just as Labour under Sir Keir Starmer had begun to creep ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, after a drastic tightening of Covid restrictions which is still being steadily extended, our prime ministerial prestidigitator has pulled the biggest rabbit of all out of the political hats. 

Despite the fact that new variant Covid is rampant and the UK remains in quarantine, despite fears of a “double-dip” recession, despite all the myriad doubts about his character and his competence, it is his charisma that has carried Boris Johnson through. He has kept his nerve and kept his promise to “get Brexit done”. Nobody else could have done it and he deserves the credit that is his due. 

Many senior figures in Westminster and Whitehall had written him off. To cite just one example: a fortnight ago Lord (Nick) Macpherson, a former Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, deplored “this failure of statecraft”. Now he gives “kudos” to David Frost, the heroic chief negotiator, but merely for his “rare skill” in “selling a sub-optimal deal to the PM and the Jacobins [ERG backbenchers]”, which he thinks was “much more difficult than securing Ms von der Leyen’s agreement”. Well, Lord Frost certainly deserves the nation’s thanks, however little he can expect from his former Foreign Office colleagues. Yet one might have thought that the hard pounding of these talks, so nearly torpedoed by Macron the Machiavellian, would by now have dispelled the idée fixe of hardline Remainers: that the main obstacle to a free trade deal with the EU has always come from hardline Tories. The EU has fought ferociously in a last ditch attempt to extort painful concessions and impose punitive conditions, lest the offshore islanders prove to be the vanguard of an exodus from the Union. That the British have emerged, battered but unbowed, with everything they really wanted is testimony to a tenacity that many called into question over half a decade of Brexit. This is the largest comprehensive trade agreement ever negotiated by the EU, but for the UK, a global trading nation, it is more than that: a matter of survival.

How will future generations look back on this moment? So many events, in war and peace, which seemed at the time to be turning points in Britain’s long engagement with the Continent, have passed into oblivion. This one will not. By persuading the Europeans that they would not settle for a halfway house, still bound by a foreign legal framework and foreign courts, the British have demonstrated that the EU must treat not only them but other neighbours and trading partners as equals. That part of European ideology which claims that the nation state is obsolete in a world dominated by vast trading blocs has been refuted once and for all. Once the pandemic recedes, as it eventually must, it seems likely that the UK will, in Johnsonian terms, “do very well” on the periphery of the Continent, in Europe but not of it. We won’t be “Singapore on Thames” — nothing could seem less desirable or desired — but the proud nation that once ruled the waves will flourish as it always has by living on its wits.

Since 306 AD, when Constantine was acclaimed as emperor by his troops at York, and later made Christianity the established religion of the Empire, Britain has never ceased to make a profound impact on the rest of Europe. From Boniface and Becket, the English martyrs who converted the Germans and defied the Angevins, to Castlereagh and Disraeli, the Anglo-Irish and Jewish statesmen who saved European peace at the Congresses of Vienna and Berlin respectively, these islands have almost always been tied to the Continent by great causes of faith and freedom. That bond of honour was sealed in the last century, with the sacrifices of two world wars and the division of Europe. Forty years inside the EU was an experiment that ultimately failed, but an invaluable one because it has proved that liberty and sovereignty matter more to the British than the benefits of membership. Today’s deal is likely to lead to a much better relationship between the two signatories. For the sake of our prosperity and posterity, we must certainly hope so.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.