Sir Ivan Rogers, the former UKREP to the EU made a speech yesterday at The University of Glasgow on post Brexit options. It is 25 pages long but is a wonderfully sober, clear sighted view of the present position and sets out what the government's (and the EU's) options are in reality. The text of the speech is HERE. If you read nothing else today on Brexit, I recommend this, every word is a gem. The Telegraph take on it is HERE.
Firstly on the question of leaving without a deal:
It is not just the British side of the table which has done its homework on the implications, sector by sector, of all post exit scenarios. Both sides know the legal position in the event of a “no deal” and they also know the contingency plans of major tracts of industries located in the UK if it happened. It sometimes feels as though it is only large chunks of the Westminster village who are blissfully unaware, or wish to write it all off as fear-mongering from those notorious anti-capitalists who run large businesses.
Which is why the threats to walk out have stopped and the repetitions of “no deal is better than a bad deal” have ceased. (There are of course people who want to crash out without a deal. They just do not include the PM or a good 90% of the Commons.)
On the free traders like Liam Fox and Jacob Rees-Mogg:
I talk to lots of people in EU capitals who despair that the UK political class, whose forebears they think made the strongest case for tackling the real, pernicious behind the border barriers to trade across borders in both goods and services, and who remember that in a world where we rely purely on national rules, national Courts and national enforcement mechanisms to strike down those trade barriers against foreign goods, services and companies, we are always waiting for Godot. And who hear people professing themselves free traders who have only a hazy understanding about multilateral, regional and bilateral free trade deals, have never negotiated one – but know it’s straightforward, once one has left the EU.
And on the government and what he calls the basically fantasist position which he warns against miss-selling to the British people:
A third way school, which attempts to satisfy both the extremes by asserting that, from outside the EU, we can resume total control of our laws, borders and money and exercise full sovereignty, without intrusion by a foreign Court, but still retain virtually all the benefits of current trading arrangements with our former partners, whilst diverging from them to taste, wherever we derive advantage domestically or with other partners, from so doing. Plus of course still have a major role in setting the key policies of the bloc we have left.
What it means to be a third country:
There is no legal status of “being a third country which used to be a member and therefore can be treated radically better than other third countries”. There is no legal “half way in, half way out” option for either the Single Market or the Customs Union. There is therefore an asymmetry. If you are in, you can, within constraints, negotiate bespoke arrangements, carve outs, opt-outs, opt back-ins, and so forth. But once you are out of the legal architecture of the EU, the scope for bespoke arrangements is massively diminished.
On mutual recognition:
If the UK believes that the EU will agree to admit UK goods and services into the Single Market simply because they comply with UK law and that law aligned is aligned with EU law, so we might get treated as if we were still close to being a member state, rather than in one of several different categories of third country, this is simply wishful thinking, driven by people who have not even half understood how mutual recognition works and what it depends on.
On cheap bananas:
We can certainly, for example, have cheaper bananas if we want Chiquita and Dole to monopolise the UK market at the expense of African and Caribbean – UK Commonwealth – producers whom we have protected since we joined the EU – indeed, as in cane sugar, via our own Accession Treaty – and for whom the European Trade Commissioner, a British Tory, for whom I was working, fought a pretty brutal trade war against the Clinton White House 20 years ago. I much look forward to watching that debate in the Commons. Perhaps it’s only the White Commonwealth – CANZUK as it is sometimes called – whose future matters to some professed Commonwealth trade enthusiasts?
And he concludes:
But the sooner we realise there are no perfect choices, that there are serious trade-offs between sovereignty and market access interests and that we are best off if we make stone cold sober judgments of where sovereignty at the national level can be real and effective, and where it is purely notional and actually a material loss of control, the better for the UK.
You can be sure Brexiteers will seize on it as the last cry of a committed remainer and the elite establishment, but it is all remarkably fair, logical and rational. What a dog's breakfast it is all turning out to be.
