Monday 21 December 2020

Still no agreement as Britain is cut-off from Europe

I suppose it was too much to expect the great ditherer to make a decision yesterday and the European parliament deadline for receiving the text of the deal came and went almost without notice. Instead the whole issue of Brexit was overshadowed by the news that France has followed many other countries, closed its border with the UK and banned all travel, including drivers of freight vehicles who are now stuck either on the M20, or if they're lucky elsewhere in the UK.  We are now into omni-crisis territory.

Some people are suggesting that Johnson had to exaggerate the effect of the new coronavirus variant in order to backtrack on his commitment last Wednesday when he said it would be 'inhuman' to ban Christmas. But this has panicked other governments into closing their border to travellers from Britain to prevent the spread of the new mutation.

I have no idea if they are right or not but that doesn't matter really, the sorry truth is that other countries have ceased to trust Johnson's statements and when the stakes are so high, they take him at his word and assume that he might accidentally have said something which is true.

The problem with not acting swiftly to prevent, avoid or mitigate a crisis is that you are always in danger from another, unrelated crisis arising to compound the problems. So it was with Brexit when the government should have requested or accepted an extension to the transition period when they had the chance. But coronavirus came out of the blue and serious mismanagement of the pandemic has not only hampered negotiations with the EU, it has got us into a potentially serious national crisis.

The new variant may or may not be more transmissible but the government's apparent knee jerk response on Saturday led to thousands of people leaving the capital on crowded trains to spread it to all parts of the country and now we have the effective isolation of Britain from the continent.

The BBC's industrial correspondent Simon Jack tweeted:

We are being reassured that it won't affect food supplies over Christmas because UK warehouses are full of stock but it may spark a bit of panic buying and it certainly won't help preparations for a no deal Brexit - especially if we begin January with empty or part-empty warehouses.

Negotiations are continuing in Brussels with issues, particularly fish, still separating the two sides. It now seems unlikely that the UK or EU parliaments will be able to scrutinise the deal or approve it until the New Year.

Gove told The Telegraph that Britain and the EU can agree on a series of “mini unilateral” deals to ease any chaos if no trade deal can be agreed by the end of this month and he said a trade deal is also "realistically" unlikely to be signed off until after Christmas.  As usual he brushed away any 'teething problems' by saying they would "resolve themselves to a normal relatively early in the new year." 

I wish I shared his optimism.

Richard Corbett, the former Labour MEP tweeted about how the European parliament might handle a deal - assuming there is one:

I think he may be right. If the deadline for ratification is to be missed MEPs could choose to take their time if we get a provisional application and they may object or demand extra commitments, as happened in CETA. These are handled by a sort of codicil called a Joint Interpretive Instrument agreed by the two sides and published later.

Our own House of Commons may well do the same, setting up a clash between parliaments with the arguments over fish or market access stretching well into 2021.  It is not an impossible scenario by any means.

David Henig says at the heart of the Brexit trade negotiations is that the UK government's central objective, apart from wanting to diverge rather than converge our rules with our closest trading partner, is that it wanted a 'victory' over the EU.   It wasn't so much about improving the life of anybody in this country and was much more about damaging the EU as much as possible and claiming a win.

Mujtaba Rahman, former Treasury and EU official thinks the EU have called Johnson's bluff and used the ticking clock against us:

So, now the next ten days will be absolutely chaotic as more bad decisions are made for short term political reasons and piled on the bad ones already made. We truly are headed for an unimaginable shambles.

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