Tuesday 12 December 2023

Rejoining the EU will not take 'decades'

Martin Wolf, the FT’s chief economics commentator, has written an article which remainers might find quite depressing: Britain won’t rejoin the EU for decades — if ever. I'm sure you've seen it. He admits that public opinion on Brexit has “shifted powerfully” and that more leave voters think it’s gone badly than think it’s gone well, yet he’s convinced Britain might never rejoin the EU and even if it did, the process would take decades (plural).  I think Wolf is far too pessimistic.

Here’s his rather flimsy rationale:

“So, why, given this awakening to (an entirely predictable) reality, should the effort not be made to rejoin? There are three decisive reasons: first, it would create a host of new and damaging uncertainties; second, it would tear British politics apart just as they were calming down; third, the deal the UK would get would be quite different from the one it had, not least because, as Michel Barnier, the erstwhile EU negotiator, has told the Financial Times, “The EU today is no longer the EU that the UK left. We have begun to draw the lessons of Brexit.”

“The uncertainty an application to join would create is quite clear. The battle to reapply alone would consume much of a parliament. There would need to be a new referendum — in my view, two, one to launch negotiations and another to assess its terms. Between these, there would be yet another negotiation, with unpredictable outcomes. The UK would look deranged in doing this so soon. For business, it would be a nightmare.”

Let's be honest, Britain isn't going to submit a bid to rejoin next year. There is a lot to be done in the way of pitch rolling before the process can begin and the Tory party will need to change radically. It will take years, but decades?  I don't think so.

His colleague Chris Giles, also a financial commentator at the FT, is not so sure either:

Giles has a good point. Just as Brexiteers blamed everything on the EU, Remainers are going to blame everything on Brexit - and for years and years if Wolf is right. Those of us opposed to Brexit aren’t going away and the polls are already clear, we are definitely winning the argument, mainly because it's logical and rational.

The whole raison d'être for Brexit is being eroded before our eyes and nothing is going to stop it.

It’s certainly true at the moment the subject is taboo with both parties refusing to publicly contemplate rejoining the EU. But, the Tories are quietly moving closer and Starmer is a bit more open about wanting to ‘make Brexit work’ and being pretty explicit about the need to sign more side deals to make trade easier.

Starmer is necessarily constrained - at the moment. He can’t be explicit and making Brexit work is just a slogan that can mean anything to anybody. It could mean a simple SPS agreement, membership of the single market or anything in between.

Once Labour is in power (and I don’t think anyone seriously doubts they will be sometime next year) we will get a lot more clarity. I don’t expect anything dramatic overnight but I do think they will quickly begin exploratory talks with Brussels.

An SPS agreement will make trade in plant and animal produce much easier and would be widely welcomed. I don’t believe there is much standing in the way of getting one either.

But, it does mean complying with EU food standards and giving a role to the ECJ. Once you’ve made that decision what’s the problem in following more EU law? The principle has been conceded and other industries might want some of the same trade lubricant.

Next, a big majority of Labour members are pro-EU and you can easily imagine all kinds of resolutions being proposed at conference.  Shadow ministers are tight-lipped as you would expect since the right-wing media are poised to attack any slip that might indicate Labour is even thinking about rejoining. After the election, Starmer will come under increasing pressure from his own emboldened members, industry, and voters.

The civil service and The Treasury know the problems but it’s all been suppressed since 2016, a Labour victory will change all that. I think we'll be able to see a different rhetoric and more pragmatic thinking very quickly. By 2025 the direction of travel will be much clearer. It isn't going to take decades. 

Retained EU law

One consequence of Brexit is that the UK Statute Book is starting to look like a dog’s dinner. I’m not a lawyer so I may be wrong, but as far as I know, rewriting stuff just to ensure legal certainty after Brexit in 2020  has already added thousands of pages of Statutory Instruments.

Now we are close to the date when the supremacy of EU law in the UK ends and George Peretz KC points to an obscure bit of legislation designed to exempt the government from the impact of its own law

I had a look at some draft legislation published last month about how VAT and excise law is to be interpreted after Retained EU law loses supremacy at the end of December this year. Mr Peretz kindly provided the link. It's of eye-popping complexity. Have a look HERE.  I defy anybody to understand it.

Sunak

The PM gave evidence yesterday to the Covid inquiry and I watched quite a bit of it. He made the same mistake as Johnson - perhaps out of necessity given the appalling performance of the UK which not only suffered one of the highest excess death rates but also the deepest recession. He treated the questions as he would a political interview, obfuscating rather than illuminating things.

Others have given evidence in a straightforward way to assist the inquiry in coming to proper and helpful conclusions to avoid repeating the problems in a future pandemic. The two men at the heart of the crisis were covering their own backsides.

There were a lot of social media comments about the fact both Sunak and Johnson were unable to produce all of their WhatsApp messages (indeed for Sunak ANY at all) for the relevant period and are now both the butt of a lot of jokes.

Suank, I assume, calculated that it would be better to look an idiot by being unable to remember anything that even remotely presented himself in a bad light while recalling in phenomenal detail everything that everyone else had done that provided him with a possible excuse.

By far the funniest account is the one by Robert Hutton in The Critic: Total lack of recall, Taking a walk down memory wilderness with Rishi Sunak.  I had a really good laugh at this:

"Rishi Sunak deployed it [an inability to recall anything damaging] pretty much from the moment he sat down at the Covid Inquiry, after explaining that he had been sadly unable to hand over any of his phone messages. He had changed his phone “multiple times” since 2020, he said. We didn’t find out how he’d come to get through so many devices. Had they all tragically gone to the bottom of the North Sea, or does he assume you just buy a new iPhone when the one you’re using runs out of battery?

"Tragically, each time he’d smashed an old phone with a heavy magnet before cutting up the SIM card and distributing the parts into bins across Westminster, the messages on them had somehow got lost. Once, I recalled a time when his office was briefing that he was a “tech bro” who got the modern world. And then it struck me that, just possibly, losing all evidence of his activities in a tricky time might suggest that he’s not quite as bad at politics as we’d all assumed." 

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