28 Britain The EconomistMarch 21st 2020
B
rexit negotiators spent months
mulling the prospect of empty super-
market shelves and grounded flights. Their
nightmare scenario duly arrived, but from
an unexpected source. And an early victim
of the pandemic has been trade talks be-
tween Britain and the eu.
Negotiations were due to restart on
March 18th, with Britain determined to rat-
tle through them in order to leave the eu’s
orbit by December 31st. They were put on
hold even before Michel Barnier, the eu’s
chief negotiator, confirmed on March 19th
that he had contracted covid-19. The delay
has raised expectations that Boris Johnson
will be forced to break his promise by re-
questing an extension to negotiations.
There are plenty of reasons to delay. For
a start, the two sides are already far apart.
Britain opposes euproposals for strict con-
ditions on unfair competition, and to allow
European boats to fish in its waters. With
covid-19 consuming the British govern-
ment’s attention, it is hardly an ideal time
to thrash out compromises. Charles Grant
of the Centre for European Reform, a think-
tank, notes that euminds are also else-
where, as they confront the serious risks to
the bloc’s economy and the potential for
destabilisation. “The chances of getting a
deal fixed in time are diminishing,” he
notes. “An extension is more likely.”
Agreeing a treaty is the easy bit. After-
wards, Britain would have to implement
new regulatory systems, immigration poli-
cies and customs controls. These changes
will be similar whether or not a deal is
struck and, despite the best efforts of
25,000 civil servants, the timetable looked
tight even without a pandemic. On top of
this, Parliament would have to pass a num-
ber of major pieces of legislation covering
trade, agriculture and fisheries.
If the virus is still causing havoc come
winter, the government may conclude it is
a bad time to introduce new checks at the
border, which risk creating delays to the
supplies of food and medical equipment.
Planners for Operation Yellowhammer,
last year’s no-deal preparations, warned
that “concurrent risks” such as a typical
winter flu or an outbreak of flooding would
stretch government agencies.
But while the logic of a delay is straight-
forward, the politics are not. A delay would
prompt a backlash from Tory Eurosceptics.
“It would turn Boris into Theresa May,” says
one. And any extension beyond December31st must be requested by the end of June.
That date acts like the mouth of a lobster
pot—easy for the government to swim
through in the belief that plenty of time re-
mains, but impossible to escape from later.
The hope is that Eurosceptic concerns
are outweighed by more pragmatic ones.
Businesses will plead with the government
not to compound the economic hit from
the virus with the pain of a hard exit. Given
that any settlement with theeuwill proba-
bly require compromises on sensitive
questions such as fisheries and the Euro-
pean Court of Justice, Mr Johnson may con-
clude they are best rushed through while
attention is elsewhere. 7The pandemic has delayed negotiations.
It may delay Brexit itselfBrexit and covid-19Crises collide
T
he internetis a lot like the London
Underground: both are made up of a se-
ries of tubes, both carry stuff—either peo-
ple or packets of data—and both have mul-
tiple nodes, so that if one goes down,
journeys can continue along another
route. This week, as people who could work
from home did, the Underground emptied
out and the internet filled up. By March
15th, a day before the prime minister asked
people to telecommute, British internet
traffic was already up 12% compared with
the beginning of February, according to
data from Cloudflare, a big network-infra-
structure provider. Ridership on the Tube,
meanwhile, slumped.
The two are alike in another important
way: the Tube is designed for its maxi-mum, rush-hour capacity. Ride it in the
middle of the day and there is plenty of
room. Similarly, Britain’s internet service
providers also plan for peaks. Data use is
typically heaviest in the evenings, as peo-
ple settle in to watch a show after dinner.
Sometimes that coincides with a live-
streaming sports event or a new video-
game release, or both, causing spikes in de-
mand. Yet such events rarely cause disrup-
tions to service because, as John Graham-
Cumming, Cloudflare’s technology chief,
puts it, “the internet was built for this.”
The Centre for Cities, a think-tank, reck-
ons that about two-fifths of workers in cit-
ies such as London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and
Leeds have jobs that they can do easily from
home. Since many of them are now doing
just that, traffic from corporate networks
has dropped to almost nothing. Home
broadband use is up. But most peoples’
needs are straightforward: video-confer-
encing and chat apps, neither of which use
enormous quantities of data. Even a big
rise in streaming and streaming, likely
now that schools are to close, should not
strain British broadband’s resilience, say
people in the industry.
There will still be hiccups. Mobile net-
works are “generally adapted to a consider-
ably lower level of data traffic passing over
their networks than fixed-line broadband,”
notes Mark Jackson of ispreview.co.uk, an
industry site. People who rely on mobile
broadband may find occasional lags if lots
of people use their phones for heavy-duty
tasks. For others, slow internet at home
could be the result of several members of
the household streaming and video-calling
at once, rather than of broader network is-
sues. Corporate systems unprepared for all
their workers logging in through virtual
private networks (vpns) could fall over.
The same applies to apps, which may ini-
tially struggle with the extra load. Micro-
soft Teams, a workplace chat app, briefly
collapsed in Europe on March 16th.
The bigger worry during a period of
widespread home-working is cybercrime.
The National Cyber Security Centre, an arm
of gchq, warned that criminals are taking
advantage of fear over coronavirus to target
internet users with “phishing” attacks. Un-
usual emails have become normal in many
workplaces over the past weeks, and peo-
ple have their guard down. There have also
been other types of cyber-attacks, includ-
ing malware and extortion. “Whenever
there is some type of crisis, almost inevita-
bly you see a spike in attacks,” says Patrick
Sullivan, who runs security strategy for
Akamai, another internet-infrastructure
provider. Workers who use corporate ma-
chines and must log into the vpns are less
vulnerable than those using personal ma-
chines and sharing home networks. But
they are not immune, any more than they
are from the virus itself. 7Britain’s internet is well-prepared for a
nation of home-workersDigital infrastructureStayin’ online
Work? Walk!