EU Referendum


Brexit: an inevitable botch


11/08/2017




To be fair to the unreconstructed remainers, if the referendum had gone the other way, I would not have given up campaigning to leave the EU. And I'm pretty sure that Farage and all the hard core leavers would have continued their campaign.

We'd have been in a situation similar to that in 1975, when the result took leaving off the agenda, but didn't settle the question. It took until Maastricht for Euroscepticism (as it then became called) to build up a head of steam, but in the meantime people such as myself hadn't gone away. We were just biding our time.

Thus, if the remainers want to set up a new single-issue political party, in the wake of James Chapman, who are we to object? We had Ukip, for what good it did us, so if the remainers want to go through all the toil and trauma of setting up a minority party, we can only wish them God speed.

To my mind, the remainers are an irrelevance. The problem we have is our own side, the "Ultras" who are set on making such a mess of Brexit that we could end up back in the EU in all but name, by default – a means of mitigating the damage caused by leaving.

The scenario in this case involves the post-Brexit EU-27 producing a much overdue treaty, in which they formalise their "Europe of circles" with the eurozone at the centre and rest forming an "outer circle" along the lines of the Spinelli/Bertelsmann "Associate Membership" – even if they gift-wrap it in a different name.

To a traumatised UK, the associate membership (or "economic partnership" if you like) can be made to look sufficiently different from full EU membership to make it saleable to a majority, including those who have turned away from Brexit and are looking for a new start.

Doubtless, we would have to go through the process of another referendum but, after a botched Brexit and the recession (if not depression) that follows, who is there amongst us who could be confident of the "no" proposition carrying the day – especially if the "colleagues" roped in the Efta/EEA members to their newly-formed outer circle.

The ultimate irony of the current situation is that, with the talk of transition and the prospect of us being unable to make a clean break from the EU for a number of years, the one sure way of securing a permanent "divorce" is to go for the Efta/EEA option. Efta membership is legally and practically incompatible with membership of the EU.

What so few people realise is that Efta/EEA never was an easy option, and there were going to be many loose ends to tidy up as well. Simply, this option was the only way we could secure a stable deal within the two-year timescale afforded by Article 50.

Even then, what I had in mind was a delay of at least a year before invoking Article 50, to give us time to make soundings to the Efta members and secure an agreement in principle that we could re-join Efta – the timing to coincide with our leaving the EU.

Since we are already a contracting party to the EEA Agreement, there would then be nothing to stop us negotiating with the EEA (through the Council, the Joint Committee and the Parliamentary Committee) to produce technical protocols and annexes to the Agreement, to cover our immediate administrative needs brought about by our EU withdrawal.

Even fewer people realise the extent to which opting for Efta/EEA takes the pressure off the Article 50 process, leaving – as I explained last year the bulk of the technical negotiations to be conducted with the EEA Joint Committee.

Had we gone for the year's delay in invoking Article 50, and made a good start with the Efta talks, would have had, in effect, three years to work out the technical details of our withdrawal, taking us out by June 2019.

In that context, the greater damage has been done by the "Ultras". Their antipathy to the Efta/EEA option has blocked us from taking the most effective and secure route to leaving, plunging us into uncertainty, where none of protagonists seem to have the first idea of what to do next.

Even worse, we have the likes of MPs Heidi Allen and Marcus Fysh who Pete so neatly dissects. With these people in positions of influence, alongside a legacy media which has completely lost the plot, there is little chance of the government coming up with a credible alternative sometime soon.

In fact, apart from the Efta/EEA option, there never was a credible option for leaving the EU. Any attempt to craft a "bespoke" agreement outside the EEA framework is going to bog us down in detail and absorb more time than we have.

By this measure, there is nothing the remainers can do to harm Brexit which the "Ultra" faction of the leavers haven't already done, with the unwitting assistance of the useful fools, such as Allen and Fysh, from both sides of the divide.

What we also tend to see is a conjunction of interest between the extremes of the argument, both seemingly wanting to sabotage a sensible Brexit plan for their own particular reasons.

It is here that Chapman's suggestion of a new party gets interesting. He wants to call an anti-Brexit party the Democracy party – obviously unconscious of the irony - arguing that Brexit is a "catastrophe" and pushing for a new referendum to get us back in the EU.

Those who would have it that Brexit is the problem, though, have got it badly wrong. There are good reasons why a well-managed Brexit could be beneficial. It is not the idea which is damaging, but its poor execution.

To that extent, we would use our own political party to guide us through Brexit – a centralist party of national unity that is prepared to put country before party and work to a stable, ideology-free Article 50 settlement, alongside a trade deal that is as close to the EEA Agreement as we can get it.

As time has gone on though, it has become more and more apparent that neither the government, parliament nor the media are up to the task of defining or shepherding us though the Brexit process. The think-tanks have shown no ability to fill the gaps, and academia – traditionally the intellectual resource to which governments turn in time of need – has retreated into a self-referential miasma devoted to applauding (and rewarding) its own "brilliance".

Rarely have all the instruments of what the pundits like to call "civil society" simultaneously failed to step up to the plate, and deliver answers for the most complex challenge of the century (so far). Restoring its capabilities is not going to be easy and nor will it be quick.

Many of us, therefore, are slowly coming to the conclusion that a chaotic Brexit is an inevitability. As do our military in the early stages of a war tend to lose their battles as part of their learning process, it seems that the civil equivalent must do likewise. It must make a mess of the Brexit process – from which it too must learn or die.

In in the meantime we get to see Foreign Secretary Johnson jailed – as Chapman is suggesting he should be – then not everything is lost.