Back to school

There’s a distinct ‘back to school’ feeling in the air – and never has the beginning of the school year been the news story that it is in these Covid times – with that slightly chilly tang in the mornings that presages the end of summer. Nowhere is that more so than for Brexit, with next week’s talks marking the beginning of the final phase of the Transition Period, and the likelihood of considerable political drama. Many people who have, very likely, switched off from Brexit in recent months will see it return with a vengeance. Even leaving aside the UK-EU negotiations there will be a substantial programme of domestic legislation necessary in advance of the transition ending.

Yet for all that feeling of newness, we will be returning to a very familiar landscape. For the more time goes on the clearer it is that Brexit consists of a series of recurring themes. So before we get back to the grind of the detail of state aid, fisheries (£), conformity assessments, equivalence regimes, geographical indicators (£), border queues and all the rest of it (links are to some of the latest reports/ discussions of each issue), this last post of the summer will consider some of these themes and what they mean for the coming period.

Brexit: more about Britain than exit

Little of substance has happened in the negotiations over the summer, which is not a surprise. Boris Johnson talked of putting a ‘tiger in the tank’, but as usual it was just boosterish phrase-making with no substance. As noted in my previous post, the process is in limbo awaiting political decisions that Johnson hasn’t made, or hasn’t communicated. But looking back over the entire Brexit process so far it is striking how many of these long periods of relative inactivity there have been. Despite the loudly-ticking clock of, first, the Article 50 period and, now, the transition period there’s somehow been a remarkable lack of focus on the actual task of exiting the EU. Indeed it Is only very recently that basic practical preparations for, for example, border management have begun to be made.

Some of those quiet periods have, of course, been caused by the inevitable hiatuses of the political seasons in both London and Brussels. But that aside, instead of what should have been focussed and intensive negotiations with the EU, most of the last four years has been taken up with UK domestic politics. The most obvious example is how, almost immediately she had triggered Article 50 and despite repeated promises that it would not be in the national interest, Theresa May launched her ill-fated General Election, wiping two months out of the original twenty-four month schedule. Then, when the first main extension from April 2019 to October 2019 was agreed, and Donald Tusk pointedly advised the UK “not to waste this time”, it was mainly taken up with the Tory leadership contest.

That domestic and, especially, Tory Party politics have been so central is not accidental. It has arisen because the UK tried to undertake Brexit at the same time as trying to define what it meant and how it could or should be done, something which continues to be true right up to the present moment. That obviously flows from the lack of definition by the Leave campaign, but was very much compounded by the secretive and non-consensual way that May came to define Brexit (i.e. no single market, no customs union, virtually no ECJ role), and especially the unnecessary rapidity with which Article 50 was invoked, on the back of fighting a deeply divisive and also entirely unnecessary legal battle to prevent a parliamentary vote on doing so. It was not as if there had been a time frame promised to the electorate but, as with so much of the Brexit story, keeping the ever-angry, ever-suspicious, Brexit Ultras temporarily mollified trumped every other consideration.

Perhaps even worse than that, the ongoing battle to define Brexit whilst simultaneously enacting it has been characterised by repeated refusals to accept quite obvious facts. The consequence is not just that the debate has moved more slowly than the formal process required, but that it has gone round in endless circles. There are several examples that could be given but I’ll highlight a couple of the most important.

Going round in circles

One is the wilful refusal to accept that the terms of leaving would have to be agreed in advance of the terms of the future relationship, including the future trading relationship. That was built into Article 50, which only specified that the exit terms would be agreed “taking account of” the future relationship between the departing member and the EU.

Yet from the outset many Brexiters refused to accept that this was so and in particular to accept that a financial settlement would need to be made in advance of, and separately to, any trade deal (some, indeed, have never accepted that there is any need for a financial settlement at all and some, even, that the negotiations required Article 50 to be invoked at all). May herself did not seem to grasp the issue of there being two separate deals to be done until April 2017, and even in 2019 government ministers were still saying that a trade deal would be in place the day after exit.

One could actually argue that the EU showed flexibility in agreeing to create two phases for the Article 50 talks, one on the exit terms and, if sufficient progress was made, a second phase on future terms, even though that could not yield a signed trade deal in the period. But that, itself, was resented by the Brexiters who, as David Davis, the then Brexit Secretary, put it, threatened the ‘row of the summer’ (of 2017) over this sequencing.

That row never happened, but the sentiment underlying it continues to this very day, with its lineal descendent being the growing clamour from some Ultras to repudiate the Withdrawal Agreement even if there is a trade deal, and certainly if there is not. Even more bizarrely, despite having wanted to get going with trade talks from the outset, when phase 2 was entered, the UK collapsed into internal dissent about what future terms it was seeking, leading to eighteen months of infighting that culminated with May’s defenestration and replacement by Johnson

The second main way that Brexit has gone round in circles is the refusal of Brexiters to accept – or perhaps their inability to understand – the very basic proposition that leaving the single market (SM) and leaving the customs union (CU) both, in different ways, create borders. This isn’t some ruse of the EU’s, still less is it the EU’s punishment or even choice. It is the logical and legal consequence of leaving the institutions that remove borders.

If, as Brexiters insist, Brexit must mean the UK setting its own regulations and its own tariffs, then there must be a territory within which these apply, and if there is a territory then there must be a border delineating that territory. That is true in general, and it has the economic consequence of making ‘frictionless trade’ with the EU impossible. And it is true in the particular case of Northern Ireland, with all the political ramifications of that, something which again some Brexiters still insist is confected by the EU, or Ireland, or both.

Yet for years the UK continued to talk about frictionless trade as perfectly possible, even after hard Brexit had been announced. Even now, it’s common to see Brexiters talking as if post-Brexit borders will only happen if the EU insists upon it. As for Northern Ireland, the number of times under which ‘alternative arrangements’, ‘technological solutions’ and the ‘Malthouse compromise’ have come and gone in the Brexit debate is almost impossible to count. To these examples could be added other zombie ideas, of which the claims about GATT Article XXIV are perhaps the most infamous.

Choices have consequences

So the years of the Brexit process have been characterised by a repetitive grinding down of these recurrent refusals to face reality. What could and should have been understood before the Referendum – and certainly before beginning the Article 50 process – has had to be taught, like simple arithmetic to a child who is simultaneously truculent and dull-witted, to the Brexiters (or, as it seems to outsiders, to the UK itself). And these lessons – whilst varying in content - are all of the same general sort: in choosing Brexit, the UK has chosen the consequences of Brexit, which can’t be magicked away. In particular, if the UK is outside the EU (SM, CU) then none of the things which come with being in the EU (SM, CU) any longer apply.

The impossibility of frictionless trade and the unavailability of ‘alternative arrangements’ for borders has now –  at least at governmental level – been accepted (though, jaw-droppingly, is now described as “growing the customs sector” as if it were some sensible industrial policy rather than the introduction of massive new costs). Yet it is still necessary and justified for Michel Barnier to remind  the UK that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, as he did at the end of the last round of talks.

For although the UK’s negotiating position under Johnson and David Frost has superficially accepted being a ‘third country’ to the EU, it continues to seek things which go well beyond what any third country has* in a whole swathe of areas. And, more subtly, by framing many of its demands in terms of third country precedents, the UK fails to understand that these do not constitute a set of established ‘rights’ for a third country but are contingent upon what – in the specific circumstances of the UK – it is in the interests of the EU to agree.

Brexiters’ negotiating conundrums

This idea that the EU is likely to give the UK a generous deal is one of the strangest features of Brexit. It appears in various slightly different guises. One is that those who most loathe the EU and denounce it for any manner of evils, including that of bureaucratic rigidity and being a ‘protectionist racket’, seem, paradoxically, to have had as their working assumption that the EU would be charitable - or, in Brexiter-speak, ‘flexible’ - in its approach to a departing member.

Another equally contradictory version is that the UK holds all the cards whereas the EU is desperate for a deal (German car makers, trade surplus etc) and in any case moribund and on the point of collapse, but at the same time is a powerful bully, willing and able to punish the UK. Similar ideas are present when it’s claimed that the UK would be fine if there’s no deal and yet when the EU warns of the prospect no deal it is making a ‘threat’ to the UK; or, conversely, that the UK can gain leverage by threatening the EU with the damage of no deal and yet no deal would not damage the UK.

But the underlying issue here is that these negotiations do not conform to the normal idea of two sides each seeking to pursue its own rational interests. On the UK side that is partly because these fantasies about the EU mean that it is treated as this peculiar mixture of ogre and pushover, but it is more because, in pursuing Brexit, the UK is in the position of doing something which is not in its rational interests. If nothing else, that is clear from the fact that, as a trade negotiation, it’s unique in setting out to create worse terms than currently exist for both parties. For the EU, that has been forced upon it, and given Brexit happened it is acting rationally to protect its own interests – which turn out to be different to those ascribed to it by Brexiters, but no less rational for that (in brief: prioritising the protection of single market integrity).

For the UK it arises from the nature of Brexit itself. Brexiters themselves sometimes acknowledge this, when saying that they fought and won an emotional battle for ‘independence’, but don’t then follow through to realise that this has put the UK permanently on the back foot in negotiations over its interests, since these have been defined in irrational terms. That follow through has been avoided by insisting that the costs of the emotional appeal to sovereignty are just Project Fear, and that sovereignty comes, or ought to come, cheaply or even at no cost at all. So the emotional argument is cloaked in a pseudo-rational veneer. No hard choices have to be made because we can gain sovereignty (as Brexiters see it) without losing anything. This is also why Brexiters have repeatedly sought to discredit or conceal projections of the costs of Brexit.

This leads to a negotiating position which is partly captured by the familiar clichés of ‘cakeism’ and ‘cherry picking’, but it’s actually much more perverse than that. The idea of having the cake (of membership) whilst eating the cake (of leaving), or of picking the juicy, enjoyable cherries and leaving the rest does imply a rationality – even if an opportunistic and unrealistic one. But the extreme Brexiter position is so emotionally hostile to everything associated with the EU that actually the cake is tainted and the cherries suspect. So they don’t just want what they can’t have, but they want what they don’t want. They are caught between wanting ‘a’ deal, but not wanting any actual deal.

If all that sounds convoluted, a different way of stating the Brexiters’ negotiating conundrum is this: whatever benefits the EU has economically, they all come at the price of sovereignty – we want sovereignty and we don’t care what it costs – but actually it’s cost free – or it would be if the EU was reasonable and would agree to what we want – then we’d have the exact same benefits as before – but those benefits come at the price of sovereignty -  so if they agree to what we want then it isn’t sovereignty, which is what we want at all costs.

This, which has always been the background to, and in many ways incorporated into, the UK’s official negotiating position, effectively makes any negotiated outcome impossible.

The sand in the gears

But there’s always been some sand in the gears of this rickety Heath Robinson of an argument, which is that any government actually in power, even one defined by Brexit, has to have at least one eye on reality. In power, rather than jeering from the side lines, no government can afford the political and economic price of sovereignty at all costs when those costs become manifest. Which is why Brexiters like David Davis, Steve Baker, Dominic Raab and Suella Braverman all resigned from ministerial positions where they had responsibility for enacting Brexit so that they could preserve their fantasies intact.

That was true for Johnson, as well, when he resigned as Foreign Secretary, but the lure of premiership brought him back to the table. So he now faces a similar situation to Theresa May in being forced to at least partly confront reality. She, of course, got shredded by her party for doing so, a fact that won’t be lost on Johnson not least since he led the charge. Since of his own volition there has been no Transition Period extension, he now has no more room to indulge the fantasies he did so much to promote at the expense of the realities he did so much to deny.

Hence we’re now reaching a pivotal moment, because in the next few months, one way or another, the UK-EU relationship is going to be re-framed by a deal of some sort, or by no deal. Either will have a big negative impact on individuals and businesses but, despite the claims of some, no deal will be considerably worse than a deal. In that sense, what happens matters greatly, including the precise nature of any deal which is done as that could have big impacts on specific sectors or activities. But in some ways the outcome won’t have much effect on the underlying situation.

Deal or no deal, the Brexit psychodrama will continue

If Johnson strikes a deal of any sort, then the Ultras within and outside his party will decry it for having compromised sovereignty. If he doesn’t strike a deal, then that won’t just be an end to matters but the beginning of fresh – and very urgent and difficult - negotiations which will be caught in the same insoluble loops and conundrums of the last four years of Brexit.

There is therefore no scenario that won’t have Brexiters saying ‘this is not what Brexit was meant to be’ and there is no scenario in which they will say ‘now we have what we always wanted’. Not only will they denounce any deal, but If there is the no deal ‘clean Brexit’ the most extreme call for they will say that the UK could have had a perfect deal but for betrayal by May and the remainers, and the intransigence of the EU. And deal or no deal (but especially no deal) they will step up their agitation to renege on the Withdrawal Agreement as a price not worth paying.

That is really worth reflecting upon. No matter how much pain Brexit causes the UK it is never going to stop the Brexiters complaining. David Cameron once famously called on his party to “stop banging on about Europe”. That didn’t happen, and so the Referendum was meant to put the issue to bed. When that was won by Brexiters, it might have been thought that that, surely, would put an end to matters. But it didn’t, and nothing will, no matter what is or is not agreed in the coming months. The Tory psychodrama about Europe, into which they have dragged the entire nation, is far from over.

So as the new Brexit term begins, no one should think that it will bring a resolution. We’re not about to graduate from Brexit, we’re just changing schools. The difference is that we are moving from the sheltered junior school of EU membership and the transition period, to the much harsher senior school outside.

 

*The link at this point is a handy extract of the relevant parts from a speech given by Michel Barnier at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Ireland this week.

Time and motion

Apart from grotesque pointlessness of the Queen’s Speech and the understandable, but also pointless, proliferation of predictions and counter-predictions about the Brexit negotiations, the guiding theme of this week has been that of time. Could a deal be done, at all, and if so could it be in time for the EU Council meeting and for a UK parliamentary vote on Saturday, potentially avoiding the implementation of the Benn Act seeking an extension? The answer to both questions turned out to be yes.

We now face a situation whereby, within less than 48 hours, MPs will make a rushed, pressured decision which will shape our future for decades to come.

As ever, the roots of these events lie deep in the tangle of the last three painful years, and in particular from the aborted 2017 ‘row of the summer’ over sequencing.

A brief history of time

The theme of time has been present since the triggering of Article 50. Yet in and of itself Brexit needn’t have been characterised by relentless time pressure. The Referendum did not specify a date for leaving and had Brexiters been honest they would have recognized that, if they were serious about their project, it would entail a process of many years to complete it. For that matter, given that we are constantly told that those who voted leave knew exactly what they were voting for, it hardly behoves them now to complain that it ‘should just be done’. It can’t ‘just be done’ and if people voted thinking it could then they didn’t know what they were voting for.

But of course there has been no such honesty. That a deal would be quick and easy was a repeated promise during the Referendum campaign. Perhaps it was a lie; perhaps it was complacency born of ignorance of even the most basic of facts; perhaps, puffed up on chauvinistic dogma that all the UK needed was to name its terms, the leave campaigners believed it. Perhaps all three.

At all events, even after the Referendum, in December 2016 Boris Johnson was insisting that 18 months would be “absolutely ample” to get a “great deal” done. Who knows, but had the UK developed a detailed and realistic plan for Brexit before triggering Article 50 there might have been a grain of truth in that. Instead, entirely in order to appease the paranoid fears of the Brexit Ultras that they were going to be ‘cheated’, Theresa May initiated the Article 50 process.

From then on, the drumbeat of time has been the constant backdrop to Brexit. And yet May immediately squandered effectively six months by holding an election. And even when negotiations finally started the government was woefully under-prepared, starkly symbolised by the photo of David Davis, hapless and paperless, facing his EU counterparts with their bulging files of notes.

The timewasting went on. Having pushed for completion of phase 1 of the talks in December 2017, desperate to get to the 'real business' of trade talks, it emerged that the government had no agreed ideas as to what they wanted from phase 2. Worse, May almost immediately repudiated what had been over-hastily agreed in terms of a Northern Ireland only backstop during phase 1.

As a result, to all and intents and purposes there never were any phase 2 negotiations. Instead, there was a de facto re-negotiation of phase 1, leading to the all-UK backstop of the eventual Withdrawal Agreement (fuller detail on the convoluted history of the backstop here). As for phase 2 issues, it was not until the ‘Chequers’ Proposal’ of July 2018 that any kind of plan emerged from the UK and at that point the government effectively fell apart in acrimony, setting in place the long grind that ended in the extension of the Brexit deadline to the end of October 2019.

Despite warnings from Donald Tusk not to waste this time, the Tory Party decided to ditch May, have a leadership contest, and installed Boris Johnson who did nothing other than declare the inviolability of the October leave date, apparently expecting the EU to come up with new proposals rather than risk no deal. That ‘strategy’ foundered partly because the Benn Act rendered it impossible and partly, if rumours are true (£), because Johnson – like May before him – finally came to realise the disaster that no-deal Brexit would mean, both economically and, especially, for security in Northern Ireland.

Hence we arrived at this week’s panicky ‘essay crisis’ politics. It’s a consequence not of that Brexiter canard that EU talks ‘always go to the wire’ (the dynamic of the Brexit negotiations are quite different to those of, say, an EU summit) but of this long history of dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetence.

Time sequencing

Nested within that history is something much more complicated and, I think, somewhat under-appreciated. Apart from the general effluxion of time, the issues around sequencing in particular are crucial to what happened this week. Brexiters always thought and talked of the negotiations as being about future terms, specifically future trade terms, with the EU. Whereas from the beginning, and anyway entailed by the Article 50 process, the EU saw the negotiations as being about withdrawal terms and only when these were agreed could future terms negotiations begin.

Moreover, Brexiters usually talked, and still often talk, as if a trade deal can be completed as part of withdrawal or at least be ready for “the day after”. Theresa May herself seems only to have recognized the legal impossibility of this (the EU can’t do a trade deal with a country that is still a member state) in April 2017. That was after the Article 50 letter which, at the very least, envisaged withdrawal and future terms talks occurring in parallel, rather than in sequence.

This was the background to the threatened ‘row of the summer’ of 2017, a row which never materialised because the UK accepted sequencing, leading to the phase 1 agreement mentioned earlier. But Brexiters have never really accepted that sequence. That is evident in the repeated complaints about having to agree the financial settlement without having any guarantees about future trade terms (mistakenly, of course, since the settlement is for past commitments). But most significantly of all it is evident in relation to the Northern Ireland backstop.

Here, the Brexiters’ position – not entirely unreasonably – has been that the arrangements for Northern Ireland are to a degree contingent upon the future trade terms. Why, then, should the EU insist on sorting them out first? The answer is that the moment the UK made ending single market and customs union membership its red lines there were inevitably going to be implications of some sort for the border. In the absence of knowing what these would be, a backstop was necessary to ensure that, whatever happened, the border would remain unchanged.

In Johnson’s approach over the last two weeks, this basic structure, embedded in sequencing and legally articulated in May’s Withdrawal Agreement, has been ripped up. Thus rather than making new proposals for the backstop, what he made were new proposals for what the final state of the Irish border will be. This remained the case even after the original ‘two border’ proposals of 2 October were discarded in favour of the dual customs approach (see below) that has now been agreed. Many commentators expressed surprise when the new deal was unveiled to find that there was no longer a backstop. They shouldn’t have been – that is precisely what has been at stake over the last fortnight.

This is significant partly because it develops out of a persistent misunderstanding amongst Brexiters of what the backstop meant. For, in their eyes, it “permanently trapped” the UK (in May’s agreed version) in the customs union. That was nonsense to the extent that were a different solution to materialise then the backstop would never be used, or would be superseded. Nevertheless, they treated the backstop as a statement of the final state.

Now, instead, they have successfully sought to make a different solution (not Johnson’s original proposal, of course) the front-end agreement and to render this the permanent outcome, notwithstanding the new ‘consent’ clauses requiring periodic agreement from the Northern Ireland Assembly which set a very high bar indeed to consent being withdrawn. This seems a strangely pyrrhic victory from a Brexiter point of view, since it makes permanent a jurisdictional role for the ECJ in one part of the United Kingdom. It is also, of course, deeply ironic that what this new permanent arrangement looks like is not so very different to the original idea of a Northern Ireland only backstop, with an Irish sea border, that May had said no British Prime Minister could accept.

The other big change in Johnson’s deal compared with May’s deal also roots back to the earlier issue of sequencing. Along with expunging the UK-wide backstop in the Withdrawal Agreement (WA), the Level Playing Field (LPF) clauses have also disappeared from there, but have re-appeared in the new Political Declaration (PD). These clauses relate to things like employment and environmental standards and competition rules.

Their removal from the WA was proposed in the original Johnson plans [paragraph 4]. Whether he had originally wanted them to move to the PD, or whether this was forced upon him by the EU I don’t know. But it is a significant change because whereas the WA is legally binding the PD is not. In terms of sequencing, this puts LPF exactly where Brexiters said it should be during the withdrawal negotiations – in phase 2. This in turn means that it could be abandoned in the future trade talks.

There would be a price to pay for that, of course, since without agreeing to LPF any trade deal would at best be of a minimal ‘Canada Minus’ sort, whereas Brexiters typically say that they want a Canada +++ deal. Still, it may well be that Canada Minus is where they now want to go, especially given Johnson’s desire to do a quick trade deal with the US, which would be impeded by LPF. Moreover, the fact that the government are now talking about the trade deal with the EU being completed within about a year suggests either that it still hasn’t understood the complexities of trade negotiations or that it is content with a very narrowly-scoped agreement.

Politically, the presence of the LPF clauses in the PD may also prove significant in the coming parliamentary vote, but in ways that are rather unpredictable. On the one hand, the fact that they are in the PD not the WA is more palatable to Brexit Ultras. On the other, that they exist at all may be encouraging to Labour MPs who want to vote for a deal but not see rights eroded. The trouble for the government is that what is attractive to one group is unattractive to the other. Both may see it as ‘good enough’ but, equally, might conclude the opposite.

Time travel

Finally, it’s worth considering the proposed dual customs arrangement for Northern Ireland. That is, Northern Ireland like the rest of the UK would leave the customs union, but would apply the EU tariff regime. Thus (with the caveat below) a good entering Northern Ireland would be subject to the relevant EU tariff, but the importer would be rebated if the UK tariff were lower. If, on the other hand, it were then to be shipped into Ireland (or any other EU country) there would be no such rebate since the good had, indeed, had the correct EU tariff charged.

The problems with this are numerous, since the entire system is massively complicated and completely untried. But the central problem is that of rules of origin. It is one thing to identify the tariff to be paid on a good moving from one customs territory to another, and then make the appropriate adjustment. It is quite another to determine what to do if and when that good is then combined with others and then sold in a different territory.

Michel Barnier used the example of combining imported sugar with other ingredients to make a fizzy drink in Northern Ireland that is then sold in Ireland. There is really no practical way of working out what tariff should apply to this sugar (assuming that the EU and the UK tariffs are different). Multiply that across the full range of goods that are traded and it becomes very difficult indeed to implement it. The wrinkle that the new deal adopts to try to make this more manageable is to say that tariffs will only be charged on goods travelling from Great Britain to Northern Ireland if they are “at risk” of onward travel to Ireland. But which goods these will be is to be decided by the Joint UK-EU Committee. In this sense, the most difficult operational details of the new arrangement have been deferred, or side-stepped. It will be interesting to see, if this all comes to pass, just how it will actually work in practice.

Such apparently abstruse technical details matter, because they are the practical substance of what Brexit means – precisely the kind of substance that Brexiters have for the most part been uninterested in. But they also matter because they exemplify a persistent problem within Brexiter thinking. It is widely remarked upon that much of that thinking exhibits a nostalgia for the past, for the latest discussion of which see Professor Robert Saunders’ excellent article in New Statesman. That nostalgia is apparent not just as a general pre-disposition but in an extraordinarily outdated understanding of how modern businesses and trade work. That is apparent whenever Brexiters talk about how ‘we managed perfectly well before we joined the EU’, in denial or ignorance of the multiple ways that business has changed since the early 1970s, as if they had not just won a referendum but built a time machine.

In the present example, it manifests itself in the problems Brexit poses given the complexity of modern supply chains. The new deal tries to accommodate this through the fiendishly complicated dual customs system, which may just about work for goods. But completely cut adrift by this system are cases where goods are combined with services (e.g. maintenance contracts), otherwise known as Mode 5 services which, within the EU, are intimately tied to freedom of movement rights. (It presumably goes without saying that services, per se, do not figure at all, either for Northern Ireland or Great Britain: they are the biggest economic casualty of hard Brexit).

This lack of understanding has more generally been shown by the Brexiter failure to comprehend not just modern international supply chains but their often just-in-time character. Because it has dropped the UK-wide backstop, Johnson’s deal, even more than May’s, probably sounds the death knell for businesses – most obviously auto – working on that model.  Relatedly, it is shown by constantly configuring trade barriers and trade agreements in terms of tariffs and their removal in a way that may have been true in the nineteenth century but is entirely inadequate in a world where non-tariff and regulatory barriers, especially for services, are the main obstacle. This then feeds through into the false proposition that a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) could substitute for single market membership, all the more false if it were to end up being an FTA of the most limited sort i.e. Canada Minus.

Clearly this will have long-term implications not just for Northern Ireland, where the focus of attention now sits, but for the viability of British business in general. This was underscored by the report this week from the UK in a Changing Europe research centre, showing how Johnson’s deal is more economically damaging that May’s deal. This forecasts that Johnson’s deal would over 10 years make the UK’s GDP between 2.3% and 7% lower than would have been the case if remaining in the EU, compared with between 1.9% and 5.5% under May’s deal. To which might be added that, according to the latest update from John Springford of the Centre for European Reform, by June 2019 the UK economy was already 2.9% smaller than it would have been had the Referendum vote been to remain.

Time for a parliamentary motion

And so, finally, it is parliament’s time again – and perhaps the last time it can postpone, or find a path away from, Brexit. It is utterly ludicrous that, after all the years of wasted time, delays and backtrackings described above, it should come down to a rushed debate barely hours after the new agreement has been made with the EU. In fact it is more than ludicrous, it is actually offensive to any lingering idea of rationality in politics, arising solely from Johnson’s fetishisation of the 31 October deadline.

The outcome now rests on the complex parliamentary arithmetic. Will the DUP stick to their present intention to oppose the deal? How many ERGers will remain Spartans to the last, and, like Farage, regard any actual form of Brexit as a betrayal of ‘true Brexit’? How many Labour MPs of the ‘Brexit must be done’ persuasion will support the deal just because it is a deal, regardless of its economic impact on their constituents? How many of the ‘Tory 21’ who lost the whip – even though many had voted for May’s deal – will feel inclined to support their one time leader?

As things stand, it seems impossible to predict how these numbers will land, both as regards supporting the deal and supporting an amendment – if tabled – on making support for the deal conditional on a referendum (which, in turn, would mean applying for an extension).

That latter option, to my mind, is the only sensible and morally correct course to take. Sensible, because if this deal is passed it is only going to lead to many more years of acrimony and dispute, so it would be better to seek explicit popular consent. And morally correct because nobody voting in 2016 could possibly have known that Brexit meant Brexit as defined in the agreement published just today.

Given that we are all going to have to live with this for decades, we should surely take just a little more time to check that this is really what we want to do.
 
I will probably do a short blog after Saturday’s votes