Will coronavirus derail Brexit?

As the coronavirus pandemic changes economics, society, travel, sport, people contacts and trade, how long before it infects the relentless march to a full-scale rupture with Europe that the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is so obsessed with?

For many, Brexit meant leaving the European Union Treaty and restoring the authority of the House of Commons as the only source of law in the UK. That was achieved on January 31. Steve Baker, the chairman of the European Research Group of Tory MPs who destroyed Theresa May, has now resigned because Brexit has been done. “I thank God we have succeeded,” he says in his triumphant claim of having won the Battle of Brexit.

But the Brexit revolution ploughs on and on. The Robespierres or Trotskys of anti-Europeanism are still in the driving seat in the Cabinet, even if Baker thinks it’s all over. The unshining knights in Brexit armour — Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Sir John Redwood and Sir Bernard Jenkin — keep seeking to expunge the faintest hint that Britain is a European nation.

But now an even bigger menace than the EU is threatening Britain. The impact of coronavirus on the economy has forced the Bank of England into full-scale panic, as Mark Carney — who has been solidly complacent about Brexit — cuts interest rates to 0.25 per cent, while the new Chancellor Rishi Sunak outflanks Labour on the Left with a full-on Keynsian borrow-and-spend Budget. Treasury ministers have denounced such policies since the days of Nigel Lawson in No.11.

The latest Brexit move is that Britain has withdrawn from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), which allows planes to fly over Europe. Non-EU nations like Switzerland are in EASA, which pools money to draw up safety rules.

Paul Everitt, the CEO of ADS, the UK’s aviation and defence industries trade body, has accused British ministers of bad faith in announcing a departure from EASA before promised consultations with the industry. Writing in Aviation Week, he says: “Ministers including Michael Gove and Nadhim Zahawi have told us in recent weeks that the Government would be led by the evidence and was open to continuing our EASA membership. They have spoken of their intention to consult industry on our future relationship with the EU.

“Before that consultation has begun, the Transport Secretary has announced that the UK will leave EASA and create its own regulatory system under the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). By doing so, the Government will be incurring substantial cost to build up the capabilities of the CAA, match the standards required for recognition by EASA and the Federal Aviation Administration in the U.S. It will be gambling that companies can absorb the additional costs and complication created by regulatory divergence without an impact on their future investment in the UK.”

Grant Shapps’ unilateral announcement throws into doubt the point of the UK-EU negotiations that are just getting under way. They are falsely described in the London media as “trade” negotiations, but the discussion of a new free trade agreement is just one of the 11 subject areas under discussion.

Aviation is one of the other headings, as is “mobility”, which is now thrown into confusion by the endless variety of pronouncements from Priti Patel about workers from Europe coming to the UK to do the work the sturdy Englishman and woman won’t do at the pay rates on offer from profit-hungry British firms. Police and security chiefs are aghast at leaving the European Arrest Warrant, which in their eyes is the most useful tool we have in combating trans-frontier crime and terrorism.

For Brexit purists, however, all cooperation and partnership via the EU has to be expunged. Next week the 200 UK and EU negotiators, divided into 11 working groups, will meet somewhere in London for the second round of their negotiations.

The idea that a completely new, legally watertight deal between the UK and the EU, covering almost the totality of what the British state does, will be agreed between now and the end of June is not real. With travel bans and a reduction of personal contact or proximity events, public bodies shut down, and private firms telling employees to work from home, it is unlikely that 200 British and European functionaries breathing into each others faces can carry on as usual.

That will be one impact of Covid-19, but the other will be an increasing question mark over whether the totalising rupture with Europe makes sense. President Trump may have exempted UK citizens from his travel ban, but Britain is very slow in implementing the tough measures Trump now insists are necessary in the fight against the virus. The Asian countries that the pro-Brexit revolutionaries held up as Britain’s trade future, in the language of “Global Britain” or “Empire 2.0”, are also closing frontiers as coronavirus rages globally.

In short it is hard to see how Britain can handle both Covid-19 and the biggest ever makeover in economics and society. The modus operandi of the financial services sector, universities and creative industries, as shaped over the last half century, was bound to be disrupted by Brexit, even before the impact of the pandemic.

Remember when Michael Gove derided “experts”, mainly mathematically trained economists, who pointed out in 2016 that Brexit would lead to the UK being poorer? Gove insisted these experts could be safely ignored. Today he and Boris Johnson shelter behind a different set of “experts” — doctors and government specialists in public health — and say all government decisions are based on expert advice.

Now the OBR, the unchallenged “experts” on national income, puts the cost of Brexit so far at around two per cent of GDP — roughly £40 billion a year — mainly due to weaker business investment. Might Johnson and Gove, as they struggle with coronavirus, decide that the experts on the damage to the economy from Brexit are now worth listening to?