Sir Ivan Rogers' was the UK representative to the EU until he resigned in January 2017. He has strong views on Brexit and has made a number of interventions in the eighteen months since, which are always powerful given his unrivalled knowledge of how the EU works. Yesterday, he made a speech in Dublin with concerns that both sides were "sleepwalking" into a no-deal Brexit (HERE).
"There is now, in my view, a higher risk than the markets are currently pricing of a disorderly breakdown in Brexit negotiations, and of our sleepwalking into a major crisis,” he said. “Not because either negotiating team actively seeks it, but precisely because each side misreads each other’s real incentives and political constraints and cannot find any sort of landing zone for a deal, however provisional".
"He said it was 'tempting' and 'an understandable accusation' for European capitals to think that 'the British have brought all this on themselves without much apparent thought or honesty'. But he urged leaders to take a longer view, or risk a brittle settlement that would not last".
I think there is truth in this. The problem is that the "constraints" on our side are all political but on the EU side are mainly legal. Our government has singularly failed to explain the trade offs that leaving the EU will involve. Brexiteers have given the impression that the EU is all negative while being outside is all positive. This is the dishonesty that Rogers talks of I think.
What is the EU to do? To be pragmatic and offer us something exceptional would be to reward dishonesty and be an abandoning of the sixteen million who could see through it. He apparently made a plea to EU 27 member states to take a strategic approach to Brexit, recognising that they (the EU) cannot have “just a bog-standard third-country relationship like any other” with the UK.
This is precisely the sort of line that the Brexiteers want the EU 27 to take.
In my opinion this would be a tragedy. Feeding the nation's appetite for a belief in its own exceptionalism is the worst thing that could happen. It would delay our rejoining the EU and be a slap in the face for remainers, those who genuinely see the EU as a force for good.
If we can get a CETA style trade deal with a few extras thrown in covering security issues I think would be the best the EU 27 could and should offer. More would be a betrayal of their own and our future.
