10 the spectator | 29 february 2020 | http://www.spectator.co.ukLe crunch
Two irreconcilable versions of Brexit are about to collide
JAMES FORSYTHwill also be roughed up by the United States
when it comes to discuss trade.
The EU’s strategy is to offer plenty of
carrot — saying that if the Brits sign, the
EU will do what it can to ease frictions at
the border. Everything will be as light-touch
as possible. But if no agreement is reached,
then the stick comes out: they will take the
strictest interpretation possible of all border
procedures. Brussels believes that the threat
of the garden of England turning into a lorry
park will trump concerns over sovereignty.
What puzzles many in government is
how the EU (which has a history of
misreading British public opinion)
can genuinely believe this will work.
First, Boris Johnson doesn’t just lead
a Brexit government; its central con-
viction is that the whole point of leav-
ing the EU is to do things differently.
Every member of the government’s
negotiating committee campaigned
for Leave, and thinks Britain needs
to be in charge of its own rules and
regulations. The more the EU seeks
to tie the UK down, the more con-
vinced the British side becomes of
the benefits of divergence.
Then there is the 80-seat Tory
majority to consider. If the two sides
decide to indulge in tit-for-tat meas-
ures at the border, that will cause
pain to consumers and the wider economy.
But Boris Johnson does not have to face his
voters again until 2024. Nearly every other
European leader is up for re-election before
then. They would have to pay the electoral
price for this economic disruption long
before he would. This is one of the reasons
why No. 10 thinks that the EU won’t ulti-
mately follow through on their threats.
The UK and the EU are also arguing
over things that have in theory already been
agreed. There are competing interpreta-
tions of what the Irish protocol, which must
be implemented by the end of the year,
means. The EU and the Irish government
are already angrily warning that if they think
that the UK is reneging on this agreement,
then the trade negotiations will collapse.
But the reshuffle — which saw GeoffreyW
hen Boris Johnson and the new
European Commission Presi-
dent Ursula von der Leyen met
in Downing Street last month, they agreed
on one thing immediately: that it was time
to stop the sniping, animosity and backbit-
ing that had characterised the first round of
the Brexit talks. The Prime Minister empha-
sised that Britain wanted to be the EU’s
close friend and ally.
Only a few weeks later, and already the
Brexit wars are back. The two sides are so
far apart that many diplomats think there
is a better-than-even chance that
the talks will fail. One member
state is already planning around
the central assumption that there
will be no deal by the Decem-
ber deadline. For its part, No. 10
is braced for the talks to collapse
sooner rather than later. And all
this before the negotiations have
even started.
For No. 10, the whole point
of Brexit was in order that Brit-
ain could break free of EU direc-
tives — but the first issue to be
discussed is the so-called ‘level
playing field’. Brussels is ada-
mant that unless Britain gives a
long list of undertakings about
its future behaviour (including
adhering to EU state aid rules), talks cannot
proceed. No. 10 says this is preposterous, and
that it will not negotiate on this basis.
What Boris Johnson wants from the
EU is very different to what Theresa May
required. May was determined to avoid —
or at least minimise — friction at the border.
She proposed a deal where the UK would
remain almost half in the single market and
the customs union. There would have been
what she euphemistically called a ‘common
rule book’ (ie, the EU’s rule book) govern-
ing manufacturing and agriculture. This was
the issue over which Johnson resigned, say-
ing that the UK was ‘headed for the status
of a colony’.
Johnson is not asking for frictionless
trade. He’d like a free-trade agreement with
the EU — albeit one with tariffs and quotasas close to zero as possible. He’d be happy
with a fairly standard free-trade deal where
the ‘level playing field’ consists of a general
agreement not to lower employment and
environmental standards to try to gain a
trading advantage. He harrumphs that the
UK already has higher standards than the
EU requires in many areas, and that his gov-
ernment intends to raise them still further.
But the EU’s definition of a ‘level play-
ing field’ isn’t all that level. Its negotiat-
ing mandate says that EU standards will be
the reference point on subsidies for strug-gling companies, employment rights and the
green agenda. No. 10 protests, saying the EU
made no such quasi-imperial requests when
it agreed a trade deal with Canada and Japan.
To which the EU response is that the UK and
EU economies are so intertwined that these
conditions are appropriate. In other words:
Britain is too close to be given such freedom.
To Sir David Frost, Boris Johnson’s chief
negotiator, this shows that the EU is still
struggling to come to terms with the very
fact of Brexit. The EU, he said recently,
needs to ‘genuinely understand, not just say
it, that countries geographically in Europe
can be independent countries’. Influential
figures on the EU side privately scoff at the
idea of the UK as a ‘sovereign equal’. The
EU view is that in trade talks, size is every-
thing, and that for the same reasons, the UKJames Forsyth_29 Feb 2020_The Spectator 10 26/02/2020 13: