The UK’s
European question is far from over
by Kirsty Hughes on 4th
January 2021 @KirstyS_Hughes
‘Brexit’
stemmed from the takeover of the Tory party by its Eurosceptic fringe, whose
prejudices will now collide with reality.
Kirsty Hughes
As 2021 begins,
the European Union and the United Kingdom have a new relationship, underpinned
by their trade and co-operation agreement. This fractures, damages and
complicates economic, political and social links between the UK and EU. And,
alongside the 2019 withdrawal agreement, it ensures there is a customs and regulatory
border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland—meaning the fractures go
within as well as beyond the UK.
This attempted
distancing of the UK from the rest of Europe, in the pursuit of some illusory,
right-wing, ‘global Britain’ ideology combined with continuing propaganda
around regaining sovereignty, is bound to fail overall.
Instead, the UK is moving into the position of being a rather large economic and
political satellite of the EU. And while in some ways, as intended by the
Brexiters, leaving the EU will certainly weaken EU-UK relations, Brexit will
mainly have the result of leaving the UK with less influence, less voice and
less say but still hugely dependent on, and interdependent with, its European
neighbours.
The political
and media frenzy around the possibility of deal or no deal was deliberately
stoked by the prime minister, Boris Johnson, and his entourage to encourage
headlines of an ultimate UK victory in the talks (Johnson’s cowardice and
self-interest always making a deal look the more likely outcome). The stand-off also served to take attention
away from the fact that any deal was bound to put up trade and other barriers
and to fracture the UK’s part in the EU’s economic and political institutions,
and so to damage the UK. But now, in the face of a 1,246 page deal—and much
more yet to be negotiated or unilaterally decided (on data, financial services
and more)—the reality is laid clearly out for all to see.
Unique deal
The EU is well
used to negotiating agreements with its neighbours and taking on board its own
political and economic interests and constraints and those of whichever
neighbour it is bargaining with—be that Turkey (customs union), Ukraine
(association agreement), Switzerland (a set of bilateral treaties),
Norway/Iceland/Liechtenstein (the European Economic Area) and now the UK (trade
and co-operation agreement).
But the EU-UK
deal is unique in creating a major series of barriers to trade and
co-operation, rather than opening up opportunities. Still, as for the EU’s
other neighbourhood agreements, it sets up a whole range of new governance,
consultation and management bodies for the agreement under the so-called joint
partnership council. Alongside these sit a detailed set of arrangements for
dispute settlement, for review of the whole agreement and the possibility, with
notice, to withdraw from it in its entirety. The EU and UK are condemned to
keep trading, to keep talking, to update and amend the agreement and to deal
with disputes.
But the status
quo of EU membership has been ruptured. The UK has chosen to give up
power and influence, vote and voice. There is plenty here to keep policy
experts occupied—not least comparing Norway’s democratic deficit, given its
limited ability to influence EU law, with the even lesser influence the UK will
have on EU laws and regulations (though the UK’s diplomats would do well to
talk in depth to their Norwegian counterparts about best routes to attempting
to influence new EU laws). Despite the multiple new EU-UK committees set up by
the agreement, the UK’s diplomats and officials will still have much less
contact and interaction with their EU counterparts than they had inside the EU:
knowledge, influence, networks are all weakened by Brexit.
And the UK’s
freedom, much hyped by Johnson, to go in a different direction looks very
constrained—both by the EU-UK agreement itself and by the reality of standards
being increasingly set in competition among the world’s three main blocs: the
United States, the EU and China. UK products sold to the EU will anyway of
course have to meet EU standards—and be certified to do so (except where there
are some provisions for mutual recognition). The multiple types of non-tariff
barriers removed in the creation of the EU’s single market in 1992 are back
with a vengeance for EU-UK trade. This will dampen EU-UK goods trade and hit
services most dramatically and deeply of all.
The UK may
attempt to engage in regulatory competition on labour or environmental standards. But
the range of provisions for dealing with unfair state aids, divergence in
labour, environmental and climate standards and ‘rebalancing’ the level
playing-field if it all goes wrong should provide reassurance to those who fear
the UK government may still go down the Singapore-on-Thames route (as should, for
example, the EU moves to suspend Swiss access to its stock markets last year—it
is not a passive partner in its agreements with its neighbours).
The EU has not
established these provisions in the partnership agreement simply to leave them
idle. Nor, given the deep lack of trust which the EU member states and Brussels
now have in the UK, and especially in the current UK government, has the EU
left any option uncovered to revisit the agreement, in part or in whole, if it
proves necessary.
EU satellite
The UK’s
European question has, then, not gone away, whatever Johnson may declare.
Brexit itself was driven by the takeover of the Tory party by its Eurosceptic
fringe, supported and encouraged down the decades by the major part of the UK’s
right-wing media. Whether Tory divisions over the EU, and the nature of the UK,
will be calmed for now by the reality of Brexit is an open question. Indeed,
the Tories created a European question where there was none—where the UK was an
agile and influential EU power and where its public was broadly accepting of
the EU status quo.
Now, as a satellite
of the EU, the UK will mainly prosper—and recover its political and democratic
stability and integrity—to the extent that it rebuilds a close, strong and
honest partnership with the EU. But the route to that is not straightforward.
Certainly, the Johnson government will not be able to avoid the perpetual
consultations and talks that the new agreement requires, including its errors
or unintended frictions (alongside the many foreseen and deliberately
introduced frictions). But, in the face of the costs and damage of Brexit, the
Tories will surely decide they have no choice but to maintain their ideological
falsehoods.
They will
continue to pretend that rupturing economic, social and political links is
creating a vast new European free-trade area or freeing Britain to establish
new trade deals (that are replicas at best of prior EU trade deals). The
ideology of Brexit will remain—in replacing the convenient European
health-insurance card (EHIC) with a global one (yet to be seen), in wantonly
withdrawing from the EU’s Erasmus programme or in refusing any structured
foreign and security policy co-operation with the EU.
And as the new
barriers and frictions to trade between Britain and Northern Ireland become
ever more apparent—as grace periods run out and as the Irish government ensures
access to EHIC and Erasmus for citizens of Northern Ireland—there will be more
obfuscation and denial from the UK government.
Overall, then,
the degradation of British politics, the pretence, the false pictures and fake
news—the deluded yesteryear language of pseudo-imperialism—are bound to
continue under the current UK government.
Key question
Whether the UK
itself will survive the real impacts of Brexit and the decay of its politics
which brought us to this juncture is one of the key political questions for the
coming period. Northern Ireland is on its own new trajectory, semi-detached from
the UK in ways that can only continue to intensify the Irish-reunification
debate. Scotland has elections in May 2021, and, since last June, there have
been sustained majorities in opinion polls for independence.
The EU-UK deal
will set up challenges a-plenty for a future England-Scotland border if
independence in the EU is the eventual outcome. But in the face of the myriad
borders which are now being installed by the UK government—whether it be with
the EU, Northern Ireland or even lorry drivers gaining access to Kent—these
challenges may not dent that independence majority. Hypocrisy will continue
here too, as the UK government which has established such deep barriers to the
EU through Brexit continues to fulminate against the possibility of a Scotland-England
border.
Also very
challenged, in the midst of these international, economic, political, social
and constitutional questions, is the Labour Party under Keir Starmer. Starmer
has adopted a stance of going along with a Brexit deal—of not letting the Tories
criticise Labour as Remainers—a narrow and backward-looking calculation. Apart
from having, for now, no separate Labour policy on what EU-UK relations should
look like, Starmer risks too being aligned with Johnson’s rhetoric and politics
of treating Brexit as a done deal, the European question as settled.
But the
European question for the UK looks like never being settled in the years to
come. Labour will have to answer the question as to what closer or better
relations with the EU look like—and waiting until four years time to answer
that question, as the bumpy path ahead creates damage, frictions and upset,
looks unrealistic. And closer relations with the EU will always run straight
into the problem of becoming even more of a rule-taker, and creating more of a
democratic deficit, than Johnson’s EU-satellite UK will be.
This is the
challenge which the ‘soft’ Brexiters never answered—as they try, curiously, to
re-fight old wars suggesting those who argued for Remain and for the UK public
to be able to change their minds (which polls show they had done) were somehow
responsible for Brexit, not the Tories themselves. For the UK to remain in the
EU’s customs union and single market without any say over decisions—a
rule-taker not a rule-maker—was not and is not a sustainable position. The
extent of the democratic deficit which a small state like Norway faces is
substantial. For one of Europe’s largest economies and states to create and
sustain such a democratic deficit was never credible—let alone in the context
of the UK’s divisive Brexit politics.
Mostly anathema
If Labour,
then, wants—eventually—to have a European policy, to bring the UK closer to the
EU, it will have to answer these questions. And while Starmer’s Labour looks
unlikely to come anywhere near the question of rejoining the EU, from the EU
perpective the idea of the UK rejoining in the next ten years or so is anyway
mostly anathema. A stable, pro-European UK with a revived, strong democracy and
politics—demonstrated over several years—might in a generation be able to
rejoin but not in the next decade. Faced with these conundrums, the lack of a
Labour European policy for now is perhaps not so surprising.
The UK’s
potential fragmentation will also put the UK’s European question in another
form. If, in a decade’s time, Scotland is independent and/or Northern Ireland
has reunified with the Republic of Ireland, there will be more European
questions for England and Wales, not fewer.
What the
Brexiters have ensured is that a European question which was once only the
obsession of the Tory fringes and the Eurosceptic media has become an unending
question for the UK—and one that may, in part, lead to its demise. Brexit has
upended the UK’s European alliances, shrunk its considerable influence within
the EU (and in the wider world) and damaged its reputation, as well as its
economy, society and politics.
On top of all
this, there is an inevitable narrowing of the focus of UK politics. While the
EU moves on to consider its relations with the US and China, its Covid-19
recovery strategy and funds, its European Green deal and its role in the world,
the UK is condemned to dealing with the extraordinary range of barriers and
bureaucracy which it has now introduced into its dealings both with the EU and
within its own state (to Northern Ireland) and with the political fallout from
the divisions Brexit has created.
The UK’s
European question is dead; long live the European question.
This piece
was originally published by the Scottish
Centre for European Research
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