The UK government has been threatening to trigger article 16 since late summer and nobody now expects it this year and in my opinion it won’t happen next year either. It is an attempt to pressurise the EU and is bound to fail.
It's entirely self defeating anyway. Article 16 simply calls for the two sides to get back round the table and seek solutions while the problematic parts of the protocol are temporarily suspended (as they are now). In short it will simply continue the process that has been going on for weeks and weeks but now with the threat of massive retaliation on trade by the EU. As with much of Brexit it really makes no sense except viewed through domestic politics.
I am beginning to think that Brexit will one day end with a whimper. It will simply peter out with the nation simply fed up with the constant open sore over Northern Ireland, the total absence of any practical benefits from Brexit plus the slow erosion of our industrial base and the EU 27 growing quicker than Britain.
Professor Chris Grey had a nice post on his blog as he does most Fridays. This week it was about how Brexit is being discredited and the Brexiteers apparent lack of knowledge or understanding of how markets actually work. I think if you look at the House of Commons very few MPs have any experience of trade and even fewer know anything about international trade. They talk a lot about it but most of them are fund managers, lawyers or solicitors or army officers.
Professor Grey refers to Johnson’s speech at the Centre for Policy Studies where he talks about Mrs Thatcher who was one of the founders of the right wing, small state think tank. Johnson praised her but described the single market as her one “blind spot.” Many see it as her greatest achievement.
It’s like hearing Johnson describe the Second World War as Churchill’s biggest strategic mistake.
This is the section:
And under the terms of the Treaty of Rome, I’m a Thatcher fan I can say this, she was part of the government that handed away this country’s ability to control its own trade policy.
And while she was always sceptical over the inexorable extension of European powers over those things, she was later persuaded that she needed to go further and agree to another cession of powers in the mid-1980s.
And I am not going to name the guilty men who talked her into it – I can’t see any here tonight – but my fellow CPS disciples I am proud to tell you that thanks at least partly to your assistance we have righted that spiritual wrong. We have freed Margaret Thatcher posthumously from the ideological prison in which she inadvertently locked herself.
The idea that she was persuaded against her will or that she had agreed to the single market 'inadvertently' is an insult to her. Hearing this from the idiot Johnson is even worse. And it wasn't the SM that stopped the UK having control over its trade policy but joining the EEC Customs Union in 1973. Johnson doesn't even understand that now. Thatcher did thirty years ago.
Grey rightly says it is regulations that make markets work efficiently and to the benefit of both producers and consumers. Brexiteers seem to think regulations aren’t needed or exist somehow in the natural world.
In his post the professor provides a link to a Yorkshire Bylines article about the many fruitless drives in government to slash ‘red tape’ all of which have come to nought.
I note that the most recent, the so-called TIGRR report, is from June since when things have as usual gone quiet. The TIGRR led by Iain Duncan Smith, didn’t suggest any specific EU rules that should be scrapped entirely.
In fact what they suggested came under four 'aims' which were these:
- A bold new vision for UK regulation and a framework for delivering it.
- A package of specific regulatory reforms to unleash substantial growth in a range of high-growth sectors.
- Removing unnecessary regulatory burdens where possible.
- A practical mechanism for implementation across government.
It seems to me even IDS has given up on scrapping EU regulations since the third of his four proposals ends in “where possible.” Flicking through the TIGRR report this morning there are few if any specific regulations which they recommend scrapping altogether although they do suggest amending and replacing some.
One of the biggest is the GDPR data privacy rules. IDS suggest creating a new set of UK GDPR rules for example. There is no guarantee they would be that much different or cheaper to administer than the EU GDPR rules which have been adopted even by the USA. Another EU regulation concerns feeding insect protein to animals, something which the EU may or may not do in the future.
In any case, any move to water down privacy rules would cause the EU to immediately withdraw their data adequacy decision and stop UK businessmen storing the data of EU customers in this country. It would cause uproar and will never happen.
If it did, we would be in the position of having regulations just as costly to comply with but sufficiently different to lose access to the whole EU and EEA market. Who would benefit?
In other areas, assuming we come up with cheaper rules that benefit UK companies the EU will say this gives you an unfair advantage - tilting the level playing field as it were - and will retaliate with tariffs.
There is much more talk in the report, not so much of scrapping 'burdensome EU rules' as creating new rules for industries of the future in the hope that the EU27 will adopt UK regulations in areas such as fintech (financial technology), clinical trials or autonomous vehicles.
This too is clinging to straws. Even if we could write good, effective standards that might form the basis for some international standards (I am not convinced) the idea that the EU27 would get together and agree to adopt our standards unchanged is for the birds. The Conservative approach to any standards is usually contradictory anyway and left to MPs will leave it all to the market (until things go wrong). The EU approach is far more cautious and they prefer to regulate properly at the outset. These are philosophical differences.
If anything, it will put our businesses at a disadvantage. They will first bear the cost of meeting UK rules, then find themselves locked out of the EU market (some will choose to relocate) until they have spent more money complying with EU rules.
All of this is going to take place against a backdrop of falling support for Brexit.
Sooner or later (and probably later) people will begin to see that Brexit has not made Britain wealthier, or happier or more influential and there will be talk of scrapping all the customs red tape - making exactly the same arguments that Mrs Thatcher and Lord Cockfield used in the late 1980s when the single market was conceived. When that happens it will at first be membership of the single market that is suggested but it would lead inevitably to asking why follow rules you don't make?
And then we will have to rejoin and commit to the Euro and probably Schengen.
