Proustian moments at Le Café Brexit

There is an old saying that if you sit for long enough outside a café in Paris then, eventually, everyone you have ever loved will walk by. I was reminded of this not by the opening of the Paris Olympics but, perhaps more surprisingly, by an article this week in the Financial Times (£). In it, economics commentator Martin Sandbu ponders the possibility that, with the new government’s more positive and relatively more pragmatic approach to EU relations, some new agreement might be reached whereby the UK as a whole, and not just Northern Ireland, participated in the single market for goods.

It made for a kind of Proustian moment. For here, walking past Le Café Brexit, so to speak, was one, or perhaps two or even three, of the Brexit models we once knew so well, although Sandbu does not mention them by name in the article. Most obviously, it reprises the ‘Ukraine model’, first propounded, so far as I know, by Andrew Duff in November 2016. It also resembles the perhaps less familiar ‘Jersey model’, first propounded, again so far as I know, by John Springford and Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform in January 2018.

For that matter, it resembles what, in June 2018, seemed to be what Theresa May might seek to negotiate. (I mean by that not what ended up being her backstop proposal as regards the Northern Ireland Protocol in the Withdrawal Agreement, but what was floated as the potential final form of UK-EU relations.)

The sight of once familiar faces

Since the faces of these old ‘loves’ (if, indeed, they warrant that term) may now have been forgotten, it’s worth just briefly recalling their main features. Under the Jersey model, the UK would be in the single market for goods, including agriculture, accepting EU rules not just on products but things like state aid, and social and environmental standards, and be part of the EU VAT regime and, effectively, its customs union.

Under the Ukraine model*, there would be a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) effectively entailing membership of the single market for goods and some services, again accepting product rules as well as things like state aid and social and environmental standards. There would be customs cooperation, rather than a customs union (though Duff suggests the model could be augmented with a customs treaty). However, in a more expanded sense, the Ukraine model encompasses not just a DCFTA but an Association Agreement, encompassing wide-ranging political cooperation, including in areas of foreign, defence, and security policy.

Needless to say, in both cases there is considerably greater complexity than this (for which, see the links above), and no one regards them as precise templates for a UK-EU relationship rather than being indicative of a certain type or category of relationship. Why were they not pursued? One answer can be found in another remembrance of past things, this time the famous ‘Barnier staircase’, the diagram which encapsulated the various categories into which post-Brexit relations might fall, along with the declared UK red lines which ruled all of them out other than a ‘standard’ Free Trade Agreement indicated by the Canadian and South Korean flags on that step of the staircase.

The Jersey model doesn’t feature on the staircase, but the UK red lines which precluded it were partly the same as those for the Ukraine model, which does appear as one of the steps: no ECJ jurisdiction and regulatory autonomy. The Jersey model would also cross the red line of having an independent trade policy, at least as regards agreements about trade in goods. At the same time, it is worth recalling that the Ukraine model, certainly, and the Jersey model, possibly or even probably, does not cross the UK red line of ending freedom of movement of people.

Why are we seeing them again now?

Why, then, might these models have become relevant again, at least from a UK perspective? Firstly because, in a general sense, the Labour government has committed to “tearing down” the barriers to trade created by Brexit. These models would do so, at least for goods trade, by removing many of the non-tariff barriers to trade with the EU, and not just tariff barriers (as, to a large extent, the existing trade agreement does). Since it is goods trade, rather than services trade, which has been most badly affected by Brexit, this would, unlike some of the more modest reforms Labour have suggested, actually make a meaningful economic difference and this, in turn, would assist Labour’s broader growth agenda (it would also considerably, if not entirely, remove the need for the Irish Sea border).

Secondly, and more specifically, Sandbu stresses the significance, which I highlighted in my most recent blog post, of Labour’s planned legislation to shadow EU product safety regulations. It is an important development, rightly described as “a real blow to the Brexiters” by Niall Ó Conghaile in East Anglia Bylines, and one which requires no agreement with the EU. But it also seems likely that the government will agree ‘dynamic alignment’ of Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) regulations with the EU, at least if it is serious about reaching the ‘veterinary agreement’ which has been presented as central to its European policy. Of course, product safety and SPS are by no means exhaustive of the EU regulations, but the point is that, unlike the Tory governments, the present administration has no doctrinaire objection to regulatory alignment. Nor does Starmer have to contend with Brexit Ultras on his backbenches opposing it.

Dating isn’t the same as marriage

Even under the Tories, it was de facto accepted that the possibilities for regulatory divergence were very limited in a practical sense, which Is why they identified so few, and pursued even fewer. Moreover, as the recent example of ‘tethered plastic bottle caps’ has illustrated, to the bemusement of Brexiters like poor old Isabel Oakeshott (£), whatever the UK government may do, UK businesses will often decide to follow new EU regulations.

That’s for the fairly obvious reason that it is cheaper to produce to only one standard, especially if it is that of the larger market, but, in any case, to produce to the standard which is required by one market and is acceptable in the other market (i.e. in this case, tethered plastic bottle caps are now legally required for sale in the EU and acceptable, although not legally required, in Great Britain). Moreover, there is an additional incentive for UK manufacturers, specifically, to produce goods to a standard which will be acceptable in both Great Britain and Northern Ireland, where EU rules apply anyway (an early example being that of baby food manufacture).

This is just one illustration of something that Brexiters have never been able to understand. They (generally) manage to grasp that exported goods have to meet the standards of their destination market, but don’t understand why firms producing goods which are not for export should have to comply with the EU rules, depicting this as unnecessary red tape. And, with Brexit, they proceeded on that basis, only to find that doing so actually increased red tape. Hence, for the most part, the UK continues to comply with EU rules but without having any say in making them (or, at least, only a very limited say, in some cases, via the British Standards Institute’s membership of European standard-setting bodies). So much for ‘sovereignty’.

But the Brexiters also failed to understand something which is admittedly more complicated, and which is highly germane to the re-appearance of the Ukraine and Jersey models. The fact that goods produced in the UK meet EU standards doesn’t in itself make those goods legally saleable in the single market. Alignment doesn’t mean access, any more than dating means marriage. It is exactly the same issue, though in reverse, which some remainers fail to understand when they wrongly assume that goods sold in the UK marked ‘Not for sale in the EU’ (NFEU) must mean that those goods do not meet EU standards.

So, for this reason, even if the Labour government shadows EU regulations for product safety and in every other area, whilst that is helpful for businesses (by ensuring there is no need to produce to two standards**), that does not in itself replicate or gain the benefits of single market membership. But if regulatory alignment is no longer a red line for the UK, then there is no good reason not to make it de jure and not just de facto (in other words, to agree dynamic alignment not just in relation to SPS, but across the board for goods)? Similarly, if dynamic alignment for SPS is to be agreed, then that crosses the previous red line on ECJ jurisdiction, which would ultimately be needed in the event of, for example, disputes. So why not do the same for all goods?

In short, since, under Labour, the UK red lines which the Barnier staircase showed to preclude the Ukraine model have now, apparently, gone, then why could the Ukraine model not be revived? Indeed, given Labour’s very clear desire for a deep security pact, there seems little the government would object to, on doctrinaire grounds, in the wider model of not just a DCFTA but an Association Agreement.

One potential issue, with the Jersey, though not the Ukraine, model, is that it implies a customs treaty, which would limit the possibilities for an independent UK trade policy. And, despite the very limited economic rationale for such independence, Labour seem as committed to this as the Tories were. However, even the Jersey model would not preclude UK trade agreements with other countries on services, and whilst it is true that, historically, FTAs have been goods-focused, it is at least arguable that a smarter UK policy would be to develop a focus on services deals. Indeed, last year’s ‘Trading Up’ report from the Nuffield Foundation funded Economy 2030 project advocated precisely that, along with replicating the arrangements for goods in Northern Ireland across the whole UK economy.

It takes two to tango

So much for the UK side, but about the EU? Sandbu suggests that admitting the UK to the single market for goods would require the EU “to abandon the theology of four inseparable single market freedoms”. It’s a slightly irritating formulation, since it’s hardly a ‘theology’, but presumably one thing he has in mind is the issue of freedom of movement of people, which remains a UK red line under Labour. However, the Ukraine model does not entail such freedom of movement (and, hence, that did not feature on the staircase as precluding the model).

Nevertheless, in terms of the likelihood of the EU agreeing to it, an obvious objection is that the current Brexit trade arrangements actually work fairly well for the EU, and also that the dividing line between goods and services is an increasingly blurred one. Moreover, as a report this week emphasized, the EU are likely to want to see the existing Brexit deal fully implemented before considering a new one. It’s also questionable whether either the Jersey model (which really only arises from the historically curious status of the Channel Islands, and anyway relates to a tiny territory) or the Ukraine model (which relates to a much smaller economy than that of the UK, and is really predicated on being a path of entry to full EU membership, rather than an exit destination), would prove attractive or practicable from an EU perspective.

There is also the perennial problem of Britain’s Brexiters, despite them being out of government. Even Labour’s fairly modest policy on tracking EU product safety standards got a full frontpage headline in the Express declaring it to be ‘The Great Brexit Betrayal’, and the rage at something like a Ukraine-style Association Agreement can be all too easily imagined. So one question is whether Labour have the courage to defy the wave of criticism that would come from the press, and which might well impact on the electorate. My sense is that the answer is that they don’t, but I’ll come back to that.

The bigger issue is what this means for the EU. It is exactly the same problem as that which would be created by the UK rejoining the EU, or the single market as a whole: what happens if the Tories pledge to reverse whatever Labour agree, if and when they return to power? That is a huge concern for the EU, and one which we know the Brexiters would play on because at least one of them, David Frost, has already openly stated (£) that both the “Conservatives and the Reform Party must ... raise doubts on the EU side about how politically sustainable any deal might be in the medium term”. This wasn’t a reference to a single market for goods deal, or to an Association Agreement, specifically, but clearly would apply to them, and it did make explicit reference to the policy of regulatory ‘mirroring’.

It's tempting to think that what Frost and his fellow Brexit Ultras say is now irrelevant but, unfortunately, they retain a wrecking power. For the EU, having gone through the pain and aggravation of Brexit and reached what appears to be a durable form for the future relationship, and with many other issues far higher up its agenda, there’s not much incentive for a major change in that relationship anyway. But there still less if there is a real risk that, a few years later, the UK might pull out of it.

This in turn makes it less likely that Labour will seek such an agreement, even if they were minded to take on the domestic opposition to it. Why take that hit to embark on a policy which they can’t be sure of delivering? And this is a point that those who are impatient for progress, up to and including joining the EU, should take note of. Suppose Labour pursued being in the single market for goods, and were rebuffed by the EU. Then, regardless of the underlying reasons for it, it would become an established fact of British political life that ‘the EU will never give us more’.

It is this, I imagine, which informs Labour’s rather stealthy approach to alignment and to closer relations generally. Some, at least, within the government may well hope that gradually, if circumstances change, that will morph into a substantive change in the institutional form of the relationship, perhaps in a second term of office, perhaps with the Tory Party smashed again, and an eventual marginalization of the Brexiters. Such an approach could include, apart from a security pact, seeking the kind of detailed trade easements recently discussed by trade expert Sam Lowe.

The realities of single life

However, even if I am right to hypothesize that there is the coherent long game in play (and, obviously, I may not be), whilst the government ponders asking the EU to set up home together, it still has to face up to the issues of being single. The most immediate of these is the completion of full import controls on goods from the EU. This is one of the major hanging threads from Brexit, deriving from the twin scandals of Brexiters’ failure to understand that such controls were the necessary consequence of hard Brexit, and the Tory government’s abject incompetence in setting them up.

It bears repeating that the equivalent controls on the EU side were introduced, in full, the day after the transition period ended. That is now over three and half years ago, and not only has Britain repeatedly delayed doing the same but also, as I’ve detailed in the past, the Tory government created an almost incomprehensible array of partial and/or deferred implementations, with a patchwork of completion dates over the coming years. This is borne out by a National Audit Office report of May 2024, which was scathing about the costs, delays, and lack of clarity about the future timetable. Within that timetable, at least as things stand, October will see the introduction of the next phase of safety and security declarations, as well as some of the physical checks left hanging from the previous phase.

Labour’s intention is to make much of this unnecessary by reaching an SPS deal with the EU, but since negotiations will not even begin until early next year, not least because the new commission will not be in place until then, what happens in October? Another delay, with the attendant biosecurity risks? Meanwhile, the costs of preparing the new facilities will continue to mount, and port operators are already calling for compensation if it turns out these are not necessary following a new SPS agreement.

This is actually just the latest iteration of this issue, as changes that the previous government made to the checks required have already led to significant wasted expenditure on port facilities, as recently reported by Sophie Inge of Politico. There is hardly a better illustration of the absurd folly of Brexit than this saga of dishonesty, incompetence, cost, and the fact that rectifying it will entail further cost. It may also be another example of the way the Tories ‘salted the earth’ in anticipation of losing the election.

At least the import controls issue is one where, however difficult and expensive it may be, there is a potential solution. It is less clear that this is so for another Brexit-related issue the new government will soon have to face, the introduction, probably in November, of the EU’s new Entry/Exit System (EES) and, probably next May, of the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS). Taken together, these systems will introduce new processes for travellers entering the EU, and are likely to cause substantial extra delays at British airports, the Eurostar terminal, and ports, especially Dover.

Unlike import controls, these are not a hanging thread from Brexit, but they are a consequence of it. That’s not, as some Brexit commentators persist in claiming, because they are some sort of EU ‘punishment’. It is simply that they apply to all third country nationals entering the EU. The fact that they are likely to impact especially upon British nationals is because of the volume of travel between the UK and the EU. That, rather like the extent of UK-EU trade and supply chains, is yet another reflection of the basic facts of geography and economics that the Brexiters refused to understand. Now, it’s yet another price we are all going to have to pay for that ignorance.

As things stand, unless there is a further delay for technical reasons, which is possible, there isn’t much the government can do other than, as is reported to be happening, lobbying the EU to water down the impact of these new measures. But it’s not clear whether, or why, the EU will agree, and it is another example of the Brexiter myth of sovereignty that the only way Britain can ease the travel queues for its own citizens is by going ‘cap in hand’ to Brussels. What is in the government’s power, and has now been announced, is legislation to extend the rights of French border officials to operate on UK territory in Dover. That’s perfectly sensible, though, again, it scarcely betokens a great win for Brexit sovereignty.

Brexit: unloved and unlovable

It is still only the very early days of the new government, and it would be unrealistic to expect more than the beginnings of the re-set in the tone of relations with the EU, which we have started to see. In that sense, whilst it may be reasonable for commentators to take notice of foregone models of Brexit, these are still only passers-by at Le Café Brexit.

As we sip water from our bottle, with its tethered plastic top, we may have glimpses of paths not taken, and which might one day be available again, but for now we are stuck with the unloved and, even to its most ardent advocates, distinctly unlovable dishonesty, cost, and confusion of the Brexit we – in the collective sense of the polity – have chosen. As Proust put it, “it is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused”, and Brexit has certainly induced some especially stinging ones.

But Proust also suggested that “we are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full”. Although Brexit is already unpopular, that has still to happen. However, with the full impact of import controls and the new barriers to travel still to come, not to mention the accumulating drag on economic growth, it is perfectly possible that the harsh and bitter divorce created by May, Johnson and Frost may give way to a new kind of relationship and eventually, who knows, even a re-marriage. Or, since both parties will have changed, and lost times can never really be retrieved, perhaps that possibility would better be called, simply, a marriage.

Update 02/08/24, 08.26: since writing this post, I’ve seen that, just yesterday, it was reported that many of the import control processes and checks due to come into effect in October are going to be postponed, yet again, this time until the end of June 2025. Another Proustian moment! As before, this prevents, or defers, disruption, but at the risk of biosecurity breaches. It also maintains the farce of asymmetrical border controls. 

Notes

*Of course, this ‘Ukraine model’ was developed prior to the war with Russia, which has had many effects upon Ukraine’s relationship with the EU. My use of the term here simply refers to the basic type of the relationship, which is also illustrated by those the EU has with Georgia and Moldova. Note also that Andrew Duff has continued to develop and advocate this model since 2016, for example in a European Policy Centre discussion paper of March 2024.

**Some readers may be thinking the plastic bottle tops example makes this point irrelevant, since businesses don’t need the UK government to shadow EU regulations if they, as businesses, do so anyway. However, the bottle top example is of a particular sort, in that the EU standard, whilst not required in the GB market, is entirely legal here. But, absent of UK shadowing of EU regulations, there could be cases in which goods conforming to EU standards were illegal to sell in terms of UK standards. The legislation prevents this happening, at least within its domain of safety standards, and albeit with some caveats.

I am not planning to post again until Friday 30 August, unless there is a major Brexit development. During that period, I will be pondering the future of this blog, which by then will be about to enter its ninth year, and circumstances have become very different. I might just continue as before, but other possibilities include scaling back from a weekly to a fortnightly, or even monthly, post; or scaling back to posting only whenever there is a major, or interesting, development however frequently or infrequently that may be. I’d be interested in the view of readers on this, and in particular whether a regular post (so you know when it will be coming) is preferable to an ‘as and when’ post, and, if a regular post is preferable, whether every week, every fortnight, or every month would be better. If you have a view, please leave a comment below this post, or a message on X-Twitter.

Chequers agreement: medium Brexit?

The outcome of the Chequers summit has been to produce, really for the first time, the beginnings of a proposal that can at least be the basis of a serious negotiation. For this, it seems we must thank Olly Robbins in particular. Although the detail is to follow in a White Paper next week, the three-page summary published last night indicates a substantial softening of the hard Brexit approach that has held sway since the Lancaster House speech. It does not, as yet, represent a soft Brexit approach either: what we have is a proposal for what might be called ‘medium Brexit’. As such, for now, the cabinet have signed up to it, although hardcore Brexiters in the Tory Party don’t like it, and those outside the party, like Nigel Farage, loathe it.

As expected, a core part of the proposal is for Britain to stay in a goods-only single market but, significantly I think, it is not described in that way but as a UK-EU “free trade area for goods”. This wording is either a sop to the Brexiters or represents the continuation of what has long been one of their core misunderstandings, namely that a single market is the same a free trade area. This confusion, discussed in detail in my blog post of 20 February 2017 is, as I wrote there, evidenced by an interesting insider account of the referendum campaign, written by Daniel Korski, formerly Deputy Director of David Cameron’s Policy Unit. He records the frustration during the pre-referendum re-negotiation with the EU: 

“Nor would our counterparts in Europe acknowledge that the EU’s four freedoms are very much divisible. A country can reduce tariffs and remove trade barriers and still maintain restrictions on which foreigners are allowed to enter the country. This is what the United States has done since World War II, with NAFTA being the best example.”

Later in that post, I suggested that the government’s approach to Brexit at that time was to try to shoehorn together the two fundamentally different models of international trade, a single market and a free trade area. On the basis of the wording of the Chequers statement that is still the approach or, at least, Brexiters are being allowed to believe that it is. It also panders to the ‘country cousin’ of the single market/ free trade area confusion, namely the habitual canard that ‘when we joined, we were told it was just a trade area’.

However, in other respects, the Brexiters are being asked to swallow something which looks more like ‘Ukraine plus’ or ‘Switzerland plus’ i.e. a goods but not services single market; some kind of UK-EU institutional arrangement which might look rather similar to the EFTA Court, or to the kind of ECJ-backstopped arbitration system associated with the Ukraine DCFTA; and an as yet unspecified ‘mobility framework’ that would be more or less close to free movement of people as per Switzerland. In addition to all of this, and very much in addition to Swiss or Ukraine models, there is the proposal for a new ‘facilitated customs arrangement’.

Will the EU-27 agree to this? Ultimately, no, for the reasons set out in my previous post. But they will almost certainly take it seriously and negotiate seriously about it, if only because, as noted above, it is the first time Britain has produced a basis for such a serious negotiation. In the course of it, I would expect the court arrangement to land up pretty close to the EFTA court and the mobility framework to get pretty close to freedom of movement.

As for the customs arrangement proposal – this remains a mess and it is very hard to see how it can generate something workable and, if so, not any time soon. So that implies a much longer transition period than is presently envisaged. Perhaps more likely it morphs into a straightforward replication of the existing customs union. What is most significant here is that by committing to a single market for goods and a customs arrangement, the statement also commits to agreeing to the existing Northern Ireland backstop agreement from phase 1, if only by dint of the assumption that it will never be used. That, at least, removes what has been the biggest obstacle to progress since the publication of the draft Withdrawal Agreement text.

Clearly if this does become the direction of travel, and it is hard to see how May can not expect it to be, it may fracture the very fragile unity of the cabinet and might provoke rebellions within the Tory Party. The question is whether what happened yesterday was that the Brexiters crossed the Rubicon and will now swallow pretty much anything that comes, or not. One irony, which I noted as a possibility in my post on the recent Withdrawal Bill votes is that the Brexiters have engineered a situation whereby a ‘meaningful vote’ on Brexit terms will not happen. They may live to rue that.

If things develop in the way just outlined, it will become increasingly difficult to see what the case is for not remaining in the single market for services, of course. It certainly makes no sense in terms of British economic interests for reasons set out by Charlotte Moore in a recent incisive article on the politics.co.uk site. By implication, the government still expect mutual recognition agreements to do far more heavy lifting than can be asked of them. And there is very little mileage in having an independent trade policy for services given that free trade agreements rarely liberalise service trade to any depth (the implication to the contrary in the Chequers statement is wholly fanciful and, presumably, just a sop to Brexiters along with the reference to potentially joining TPP; for that matter, it’s hard to see how the Chequers proposals give much scope for free trade agreements in goods).

So perhaps the model then shifts towards ‘Norway plus’ (i.e. Norway plus customs arrangement). If so, another irony emerges: since most Brexiters have, since the Referendum, insisted that this would not be Brexit at all they would really have no convincing argument against simply abandoning Brexit altogether although (as always) the route and timing to that outcome remains unclear. In any case, to the extent that Chequers makes a soft Brexit more likely it may also reduce pressure to abandon Brexit in the face of a possible ‘no deal’ crash exit which, by contrast, is now less likely.

We’re not, of course, at anything like the point of knowing anything for sure yet. It is still perfectly possible that the Tory Party will implode into civil war over the Chequers position, or that for fear of that the government refuse to make the accommodations which might, conceivably, make something like this position fly in the negotiations with the EU.

The whole situation remains absurd, needless to say. None of this is remotely worth doing, and if it was worth doing it would have been better to have arrived at this proposal before embarking on Article 50. Still, yesterday was, by Brexit standards, slightly less absurd than usual.

 

Note: I’m aware that people who have signed up for email notifications of new posts are not receiving them. I’m afraid I have no idea why this is, or what if anything I can do about it.

A Westminster whimper, and a Brussels bang?

So the much vaunted Tory rebellion on the ‘meaningful vote’ amendment ended not with a bang but a whimper. Those who held out – Allen, Clarke, Lee, Sandbach, Soubry and Wollaston – deserve very high praise but in the end, as outlined in my previous blog post, there were not enough of them who had the steel to stand firm. Unlike the Brexit Ultras, they seem to look for reasons not to rebel rather than being constantly on the lookout for opportunities to do so.

I received some criticism for that comment, as have others saying similar things, for giving insufficient weight the extraordinary level of pressure and outright bullying the potential rebels were subjected to. I certainly don’t underestimate that, and it is a mark of how toxic and vile political culture has been made by Brexit that bullying and death threats now characterise it. But my comment is not meant to be judgmental, just factual: whatever the reason, and however understandable it may be, as a matter of fact the rebels do not, in sufficient numbers, have the determination to rebel.

That may change, for example over possible amendments to the Trade Bill to insist on a customs union but I think this is unlikely for two reasons. First, because on the customs amendment to the Withdrawal Bill the rebels were bought off with the fudge of a ‘customs arrangement’, so why wouldn’t the same thing happen with the Trade Bill? Second because if, as seems to be the case, Grieve and others held off on the basis of the damage it would do to the government to be defeated on the meaningful vote amendment then that argument would be far stronger in relation to the Trade Bill customs amendment. For if that were carried it would rip apart a central strand of the government’s entire approach to Brexit in a way that would not have been true for the meaningful vote issue.

I don’t suppose, by the way, that the climb down will win the putative rebels any great respect or gratitude from the Ultras for having ultimately put party loyalty first, nor do I imagine that those Ultras will take it as an example of how they, too, should be willing to compromise in a spirit of unity. Rather, it will just confirm their sense that they, rather than the rebels, have the ruthlessness to hold fast to what they want and that they will continue to get it.

However, one aspect of Wednesday’s vote that I have not seen commented on is that it may end up backfiring rather badly on the Ultras. Take a step back from the immediate drama, and what happened at that vote was truly bizarre. For who would ever imagine that a legislative body when asked - about any issue, let alone one of such gravity as Brexit – whether it would like a meaningful vote would give the answer ‘no, thanks’? It’s an extraordinary idea that any group of lawmakers would choose to neuter itself to executive power in this way. But this is what our MPs have done.

Given that this is the case, it applies quite as much to the Ultras who cheered it on as to the rebels who went along with it. So if it turns out that the government negotiates a form of Brexit that the Ultras find objectionable then they will find, to their chagrin, that they have engineered a situation in which it is they who will have to take it or leave it.

There are many straws in the wind that something like this is going to unfold. Sam Coates of The Times argued last weekend that the ludicrous ploy (which has since rather backfired) of claiming a ‘Brexit dividend’ for the NHS was a sop to the Brexiters in preparation for the government making numerous concessions on its red lines in the next few weeks. That seems plausible in that unless the ECJ red line, in particular, is substantially softened, if not abandoned, the prospects of meaningful progress on security cooperation and participation in many EU programmes is highly unlikely.

It is a point that May has half-conceded before, both in her Munich speech on security, but also in relation to the phase 1 agreement on citizens’ rights. It was always crazy to have drawn that line so firmly anyway, the more so when accompanied by the strategy – if it can be graced with the name – of seeking to opt back in to as much of the EU as possible after Brexit. It is really the key stumbling block to creating some kind of Association Agreement with the EU which many, including most recently the eminent barrister and Brexit commentator George Peretz QC, see as a more logical aim than that of a Free Trade Agreement. If May’s ‘deep and special partnership’ is to mean anything, it entails something akin to the ‘Ukraine model’, but that is unachievable without some role, even if backdoor, for the ECJ or, conceivably, some new kind of UK-EU court with the ECJ as the ultimate arbiter.

Another such straw in the wind can be found in Pippa Crerar’s report in today’s Guardian to the effect that the government’s “direction of travel” is to stay in a single market for goods trade. Such an idea seems to be a version of what is sometimes called the ‘Jersey model’, and it is not without substantial difficulties to my mind, at least. Principal of these is that it is not always possible to separate goods and services in any neat way (e.g. maintenance contracts associated with goods).

One irony of such a model is that it would finally make use of the old Brexiter saw about the advantages of the UK trade deficit with the EU, since Britain does indeed have a deficit in goods trade; but by the same token it would have a chilling effect on services trade, where Britain runs a large surplus with the EU. But, in any case, the point for present purposes is that if this is indeed the direction of travel it will entail concessions both on the ECJ and also, most likely, freedom of movement of people.

So that, too, would enrage the Brexiters whose only comfort would be that independent trade deals – in services only – would become possible. That would be mainly symbolic, of course – almost no free trade agreements touch deeply on services, primarily because to do so entails the kind of common regulatory framework that Brexiters regard as incompatible with (what they mean by) sovereignty. Then again, the entire notion of an independent trade policy is primarily symbolic anyway, since in economic terms British trade is served much better by single market membership and access to EU-brokered trade deals.

None of this should remotely be taken to imply that some version of either the Jersey or the Ukraine models would in my view be a good thing for Britain. Both of them, like any other form of Brexit, are damaging to Britain and sub-optimal (economically, politically and culturally) compared to remaining in the EU. But given that Britain seems determined to make itself a worse place in all these respects such models are – by a long way – better than the ‘no deal’ catastrophe that remains a very real possibility.

Rather, my point is that if one or other (or another) of these kinds of compromises with May’s ill-judged red lines is in prospect it will put the Ultras on the wrong side of the decision to reject a meaningful vote. This isn’t to posit May as some Machiavellian genius, playing a cunning long game to thwart the Ultras. As Rafael Behr argued this week in a very acute profile of May’s leadership, she is bereft of pretty much any of the leadership skills which Brexit demands of her. And as I have said myself in the past, she appears totally lacking in any strategic thinking, rather than the day-to-day tactics of keeping her government going and her party from completely imploding.

The window of time such a purely tactical approach is rapidly closing now. With the latest Westminster games now over, talks with the EU resume in earnest in the run up to the EUCO meeting in a week’s time. As the ever-excellent Tony Connelly, RTE’s Europe Editor, argued last Sunday “the view from Brussels and Dublin is that Westminster is quite simply in a parallel universe”, quoting a senior EU official to the effect that a “cataclysmic” outcome is a conceivable prospect. So events in Westminster may have ended with a whimper, but just around the corner there may be a big bang to come in Brussels.

Britain would do better to look to Ukraine than the Pacific

The need for realism about Brexit, suggested in my previous post, is underscored by the report this week that Liam Fox and the Department for International Trade are developing plans to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This – like joining NAFTA or creating hypothetical Commonwealth or CANZUK free trade areas – is the kind of idea that surfaces from time to time amongst Brexiters on social media, but so far as I know this is the first indication that it is being seriously considered.

The deficiencies of this idea should be obvious – there is a very big clue in the name. Regional trade agreements make sense for countries in a particular region, but not for countries on the other side of the world. Which is also why the TPP countries account for a very small percentage of UK trade currently and any further expansion by joining TPP would be trivial compared with the volume of UK-EU trade. In any case, the EU already has actual or in progress trade agreements with seven of the eleven TPP countries, including Japan, the biggest. Moreover, as Samuel Lowe argues in an article in Prospect, the TPP negotiations are already fraught and there is absolutely no reason to think that the countries involved have any interest in adding Britain to them, and certainly not whilst the terms of the UK-EU relationship are unknown.

In short, the whole idea is a non-starter and its meaning, if it has any meaning, seems only to be to avoid the reality – also mentioned in my previous post – that Liam Fox’s role is an empty one, at least until Britain is no longer bound by the EU Common Commercial Policy which is, at the least, several years off. But even if TPP were a viable option for the UK, it would only serve as a reminder of the limitations of the Brexit argument for ‘sovereignty’. All trade deals to some extent, and regional partnerships to a much larger extent, entail some loss of sovereignty. The ECJ is anathema to Brexiters, but TPP (like NAFTA and many other trade agreements) will make use of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) systems which effectively by-pass national courts and are beyond public scrutiny or accountability.

The reality is that you can have trade agreements, or you can have complete sovereignty: you can’t have both. Indeed, a strong argument for the EU single market is that it embeds regional trade within a set of publicly accountable political institutions, including democratic institutions. Britain within the EU has far more control of its own affairs than will the ‘Global Britain’ envisaged by the Liam Fox and Boris Johnson version of Brexit. For that matter, the typical requirement of modern trade deals to liberalise immigration policy bodes ill for those who voted for Brexit in the belief that it would limit immigration.

By contrast with the nonsense about TPP, Andrew Duff has written an extremely interesting and incisive analysis of the Brexit situation on Policy Network. It is well worth reading in its entirety, but the particular aspect that caught my attention was the idea that the UK could seek to create a form of association agreement with the EU modelled to some degree on the Ukraine Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA).

This, in brief, would entail free movement of capital, goods, some services on a sectoral basis potentially including financial services, but not free movement of people; a customs agreement (including rules of origin) outside of the customs union and the common commercial policy, as well as co-operation on security and defence. There is no contribution to the EU budget, although contributions are made to specific agencies and programmes such as Erasmus (something the UK have already indicated a desire to do). I am not entirely clear what the precise implications of a DCFTA would be for the Irish border, but my assumption is that free movement of goods would help to resolve one of the key aspects of this issue and that, in general terms, the closer the partnership the softer any border would need to be. (For more detail on what the Ukraine DCFTA involves see, apart from Duff’s excellent article, the European Parliament’s briefing on the economic impact of Brexit, especially p. 24).

Taken together, this would seem to be something that could be called the ‘deep and special partnership’ that Theresa May has repeatedly spoken of but without giving concrete detail. It goes well beyond the Canada CETA both as regards trade and non-trade issues and is more promising than CETA for resolving the Irish border issue. The fly in the ointment for Brexiters, of course, is that the DCFTA model gives an ultimate, albeit arm’s length, role of arbitration to the ECJ, and a high degree of compliance with the EU acquis (and the more services sectors that get included, the higher the degree of compliance). Clearly the Brexit Ultras will immediately reject this model, therefore. But it is at least possible the UK government will be more pragmatic. Such a DCFTA would give many Brexiters a lot of what they want – including an end to free movement of people, an end to EU budget payments, and freedom to pursue an independent trade policy – whilst being far less economically damaging than CETA (let along no deal/WTO). In terms of ‘control’ and sovereignty, it is already clear from the phase 1 agreement on citizens’ rights that the ECJ red line will be crossed, and most likely it will also be for participation in the various agencies. In any case, as noted above, all international trade agreements entail compromises of sovereignty.

The reality is that if Britain is going to salvage anything from Brexit then the corner that May’s red lines have painted us into will have to be substantially breached. I speculated in my previous post that they seemed to have been drawn up entirely by Theresa May and her (pre-election) inner circle of advisers. Since then, I have been reading Tim Shipman’s fascinating book Fall Out (London: William Collins, 2017). In it he confirms this speculation, writing “it is extraordinary that these, the foundational decisions of Britain’s withdrawal strategy … were taken, in essence, by two people [May and Nick Timothy]. The cabinet certainly had no chance to debate them” (p.12). Extraordinary, indeed – and it would seem absurd, given all that has happened, since that they should be treated as sacrosanct, whatever the political difficulties of modifying or abandoning some of them. There are, after all, political difficulties in all scenarios.

Of course this is not just about Britain. As Duff explains, a DCFTA would also require some degree of compromise on the EU side and would not automatically be available to the UK. Still, he regards it as worth exploring as “the least bad choice”. If by that he means, as compared with, in order, EU membership and EFTA membership then I think I agree. At the very least it is a model which deserves to be more widely discussed and considered than it has been; doing so will certainly be more worthwhile than wasting time with fantasies such as TPP.