Brexit resembles a short-lived dystopian sitcom in two specific ways. First, the farcical incompetence of its protagonists, which stretches and eventually ends the patience of the audience. Second, the unnerving way in which, at the end of each fast-paced, multi-storylined episode, the underdogs’ despair remains agonisingly unchanged and overwhelmingly predictable.
So it has proved over the last few weeks. Against the deepening drama and black comedy of the government’s own dire economic impact assessments, the prime minister’s admission that we will not, after all, gain the “exact same benefits” of our European Union membership, and the foreign secretary’s comparison of the Irish border’s century-old wound to the boundaries of a London borough, we remain largely where we have been since the start. The government, hopeless in intention and hapless in result, has followed the traditional formula and garnered the traditional consequences.
Last Wednesday the EU spelled out, once again, the realities of Brexit—this time in terms of the Irish border, and the required practical steps to implement the UK and EU’s joint December agreement which promised a last resort of “full regulatory alignment.” Two days later, the PM again delivered a speech targeted squarely at a domestic audience (in fact, the two wings of the Tory party), which called for bespoke Brexit outcomes she must have known Brussels would not accept. Five days after that, European Council president Donald Tusk again confirmed that the EU could not accept them. The pattern may have differed in nuance and degree, but was infused with the same conflict of exceptionalist delusion and political reality that has pervaded Brexit’s trajectory from the start.
Theresa May’s Mansion House speech was a success compared with her only other significant Brexit speeches, in the sense that it did not leave the EU fully horrified (as with Lancaster House), or immediately spill into a quagmire of contradictory, ego-driven ministerial briefings (as with Florence). Certainly, it also struck a more reasoned tone (she did not traduce “Remain” voters or threaten to burn EU regulation), and conceded significant ground on future convergence with EU rules and a role for the European Court of Justice. Most significantly, she confessed for the first time that we would not, in fact, be able to consume unlimited supplies of cake from a single market we were determined to leave.
"May’s Mansion House speech was a success in the sense that it did not leave the EU fully horrified"But in other, more important ways, it was May’s familiar political fiction masquerading as serious negotiation. She declared her goal of “co-operating more fully than any free trade agreement (FTA) anywhere in the world today,” knowing full well that the world’s most comprehensive FTA is in fact the EU single market. The EU cannot and will not offer us a tailored single market-lite deal, for political and economic reasons. Their interests remain the cohesion both of the EU and its markets; under “Most Favoured Nation” clauses they would be required to offer the UK’s new bespoke benefits to Canada, South Korea and Japan; and they need to demonstrate that EU membership is more nourishing than non-EU cakeism.
The most grievous element of May’s speech was its complacent discussion of Northern Ireland. In the week that the EU had presented comprehensive proposals for how to align tariffs and standards on either side of the border, in accordance with December’s UK-EU agreement and, more pointedly the Good Friday Agreement, May simply insisted that we would refuse to adopt the EU’s common external tariff, and would doggedly pursue a “meaningful independent trade policy”—even if that made us significantly poorer (as the government’s own research indicates) or re-instituted a hard border. Although she remarked that the UK would not simply leave it to Brussels and Dublin to resolve this most intractable of problems, she made no credible attempt to do so herself.
And so the EU response was wearily familiar. Documents leaked to the Guardian bemoaned May’s “double cherry-picking, taking in selective elements of EU membership and of third country trade agreements” and the “mutually contradictory UK objectives” for Ireland which involve leaving the single market and customs union but pretending at the Irish border that we had not.
Tusk himself performed the role of the grown-up in the room when he presented the EU’s guidelines for the future relationship. Yes, the EU wants deep cooperation on issues such as security, foreign affairs and aviation as well as trade, and, like May, intends to balance rights and obligations—but on the real substance he blew the PM’s speech apart. Within the UK’s red lines, there could be no deal significantly deeper than any other third-country arrangement, and indeed, it would be shallower than Ukraine’s. Tusk’s text stressed that the UK could not participate in individual sectors of the single market if it did not accept the entirety of it.
"Events in this tragic sitcom are moving fast: the manager of the port of Calais has warned of food shortages and 30-mile tailbacks"There are holes in the EU text as well. There was no mention, for example, of how this FTA could be reconciled with the need for Northern Ireland to participate in a “common regulatory area” with the EU. The truth—that the whole UK needs to be in the customs union and the single market in at least goods—remains for the moment unspoken.
But events in this tragic sitcom are moving fast. The manager of the port of Calais has warned of food shortages and 30-mile tailbacks if arrangements are not soon put in place. More ominously for Britain’s negotiators, Tusk yesterday signalled that negotiations would not continue until the Irish issue had been finally resolved—and tweeted the phrase “Ireland first.” Given that the terms of the transition must be signed off at the European Council summit in just two weeks, the omens are worrying.
Since the referendum, the Brexit news, statements and gossip have been unrelenting but underpinned by constant, even absolute truths. The EU, if it is united, can demand whatever it wishes. For political, if not economic reasons, it will not move substantively from any declared position. Specifically, it will not allow the UK to reap the benefits of EU membership while wielding the putative control of a third country. The Irish government, for its part, will not budge in its central demand of an invisible border. And the UK, which will not leave the EU without a deal, will, on the evidence so far, always cave.
Brexit increasingly feels like a David versus Goliath battle in which you are led to root for Goliath. In this farce, nothing fundamentally changes but the decay gradually worsens and its popularity slowly declines. If it really was television, executives would cancel it. In this far more serious real-life scenario, the British people should be granted the power to do the same.
