EU Referendum


Brexit: an absence of harmony


07/09/2017





I really didn't want to get embroiled in the growing controversy over the government's leaked document on immigration, a production which has been denounced by the Irish Times as "collective lunacy" and by other somewhat partisan sources, as "completely confused", "economically illiterate" and "a blueprint on how to strangle London's economy".

But I did rather enjoy Joris Luyendijk's commentary on it. Luyendijk is a non-fiction author and former writer of the Guardian's banking blog and he offers a view that many of us would endorse. "One of the hardest questions surrounding the British government's approach to Brexit", he says, "is how much of the blundering is down to incompetence and how much to duplicity".

That is a question that has exercised many of us but, as a useful guide, he argues that duplicity suggests a plan towards which the lying is meant to contribute. It also requires a basic understanding of the facts. You cannot deliberately lie until you know what the truth is.

In some respects that exonerates the government from many of the charges of lying which might be levied against it. Rather than mendacity, we are dealing with incompetence at an almost heroic level.

The EU, however, is not taking a passive role in this ongoing soap opera. While the UK has just produced a lightweight and premature paper on science collaboration, the Commission is, according to the Guardian, about to risk "heightening tensions" by publishing "five combative position papers" in the coming days.

These, we are told, includes one that puts the onus on Britain to solve the problem of the Irish border, calling on the UK to work out "solutions" that avoid the creation of a hard border and guarantee peace on the island.

Despite the media attention on the financial settlement, and another attempt by the Ultras to assert that we owe nothing to Brussels, the Irish question is the most complex of the issues raised by Brexit, a point underscored by Brussels' acknowledgment that the Irish document is "different from other papers".

Mandelson hits the nail on the head, warning that Northern Ireland may have to choose between political identity or economic interest. He would not, he says, bank on the latter prevailing.

In a move that will probably not go down too well in Whitehall, Brussels intends to say the UK should shoulder the responsibility for resolving the border question, spelling out that the Brexit vote has caused the problem. The paper, which has been seen by the Guardian, thus states:
The onus to present solutions which overcome the challenges created on the island of Ireland by the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union and its decision to leave the customs union and the internal market remains on the United Kingdom.
The paper is due to be discussed by EU diplomats today, along with the others. And what is interesting here is that the Guardian is saying that they are focused exclusively on the "divorce issues", spurning Davis's call for the EU's negotiating team to be more "flexible and imaginative".

Making no concessions to the desire of the UK team to discuss trade, the papers "lay bare the complexity of disentangling Britain from the European Union", delving into technical minefields not aired during the referendum campaign.

The fact that these papers are being leaked to the Guardian also suggests that the Commission isn't at all minded to bury the hatchet (except in Davis's skull). It seems also that the Independent has seen copies and it is adding its own details.

Says this newspaper, around two-dozen pages worth of content covers data protection regulations, intellectual property rights and public procurement – three areas omitted from an earlier round of EU position papers.

Crucially, the paper then relays an observation from an EU official, reinforcing the line from the Guardian. He says the papers represent a move by the Commission to make sure not only that its positions are unambiguous, but to make clear the EU’s insistence that issues being discussed are purely "separation issues", as far as Brussels is concerned.

There may be a link here with what the Ultras' favourite newspaper is reporting. It says that the UK's leaked migration paper has provoked fury in Brussels, where it has been described as "simply toxic" by an influential group of Liberal MEPs.

With expats now describing the UK as a "hostile environment", the Telegraph is also claiming that Barnier was left "incensed" by last week's round of negotiations and has told officials that British hopes of negotiating a "bespoke" transition deal had been "killed off" as a result of the UK delegation's attitude.

As always in these matters, we are relying on anonymous sources, and here it is a "senior EU diplomatic source with knowledge of Mr Barnier's feedback to EU capitals". He is cited as saying: "The Brits have passed the threshold when anything 'bespoke' is possible". Instead, we are told that Barnier suggested that Britain will have to settle for an "off the shelf" transition deal, similar to the Efta/EEA option.

This meshes with a report in the Irish Times which says that the leaked proposals on immigration "would represent a hardening of Britain's approach to Brexit, making impossible the kind of transitional arrangement suggested by UK ministers".

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that a number of FTSE 100 CEOs have refused to sign a letter endorsing the government's Brexit policy, in what is being described as an "embarrassing own goal".

And today, Mrs May has to deal with a "growing rebellion" in the Commons over the Withdrawal Bill. With the second reading due today, that gives the opportunity for domestic politicians to come out to play, but apart from increasing the noise level, nothing constructive is expected.

The localised vacuity makes an interesting contrast to Germany where the biggest industry group has set up a task force including companies such as Airbus, Siemens and Deutsche Bank "to prepare for a disruptive British departure from the European Union".

But what we're not getting anywhere is any sense of harmony. Clearly, the Commission is not prepared to make any concessions on sequencing. Instead, it seems to be piling on the agony over the Irish question, as well as adding other "technical minefields" that cannot help but slow the negotiation process. Everywhere one looks, there is friction.

This cannot augur well for the future. Issues come into focus, bringing with them controversy but we then see the controversy abate without resolutions. In time., the same issues then emerge, and the process repeats itself. If anything, the antagonism is intensifying as more issues are piled into the cauldron.

It is hard to see how, in the absence of harmony, that the negotiations can progress. When every step generates controversy, we seem to be going backwards. That cannot continue.