EU Referendum


Brexit: a question of options


16/04/2018




I like grapefruit for breakfast – not the tinned variety but the whole fruit, cut in half and served in a bowl, chilled with its own crisp sugar topping. I also enjoy the evening ritual of preparing it, the special curved, serrated knife which takes delicate skill to get the cut just right.

But no more. I've had Mrs EU Referendum touring every supermarket within a five mile radius and there is not a single grapefruit to be had. We are at the epicentre of a grapefruit famine.

Under normal circumstances, you might think that this would merit a mention in the legacy media. For sure, it's not front page news, but the disappearance of a popular fruit from the shops is of some significance. But such is the incontinence of the media that seems able only to handle one subject at a time.

Mrs May's vainglorious adventure in Syria, playing with Tonkas and million-pound bombs over the Mediterranean, has consumed all available space. There is no room for mere details such as the fate of part of the nation's food supply. I can find nothing in the popular media to explain why our grapefruits have disappeared.

As it happens, though, there is an interesting – and worrying – story here. The proximate cause is the failure of the Florida harvest, recounted in detail by the Fort Lauderdale Daily. In the late 1990s, Florida was shipping ten million cartons of grapefruit a year to Japan, nine-million cartons to Europe. But this season, the amount is down to 700,000 cartons for each of those markets – the lowest level since 1918.

This catastrophic fall stems from the emergence of a disease known as "greening", caused by the bacterium Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus introduced by the Asian citrus psyllid, a sap-sucking insect the size of a grain of rice.

Like the citrus trees they feed on, psyllids are not Florida natives. They are thought to have landed in the US around the year 2000 as stowaways on plants shipped through the Port of Miami. When psyllids then fed on citrus shoots and leaves, they inadvertently infected trees with the disease, which has spread to the current epidemic levels.

This has some relevance to Brexit. Ostensibly, the invasion signifies a failure of US border controls, the very phytosanitary controls which are also part of the EU system for preventing the introduction of plant diseases into EU Member States. Whether this disease can be stopped is questionable but, so far, the disease has not become established in mainland Europe.

The principle legislative control for plants and plant products in the EU is Council Directive 2000/29/EC which we lose on Brexit, leaving us to set up a replacement. At the very least, we will have to match the Union system. Without that, there is not the slightest chance of the EU accepting plants and plant products from us, especially if they have been re-exported from third countries, without stringent border checks.

And there we confront core issues which should be dominating the Brexit debate but are scarcely being heard – exactly the same issues that we have with aviation. In essence, we have to ask what sort of regulatory system we want, what system we need, and what are we prepared to pay for it.

In the case of aviation, one can definitely see the CAA's point, one which goes to one of the justifications for the European Union. With 27 countries in the Union (after Brexit), there seems little sense in all of them, separately, carrying our all the regulatory functions associated with aviation.

There is no obvious advantage, for instance, in all these countries having their own airworthiness certification. It is far more efficient for them to group under the one (European) umbrella and subscribe to a common system, then negotiating with third countries for mutual recognition.

Now the UK is able to stand aside from this system and exercise its own "sovereignty", it can go to all the expense of duplicating the various systems. But it will find that, if we are to gain mutual recognition, all the essentials must be the same as those of every other country. Thus we end up separate, but identical regulation. We get to change the label, but the contents stay the same.

Before taking this route, we need to ask ourselves whether there is anything to be gained from so magnificent an enterprise. Yet, clearly, the CAA has already made that decision. But it has yet to work out how it will then relate to the EU if it decides to throw in its lot with EASA regulators. More to the point, the EU has yet to decide whether it wants the UK to remain on board and, if so, on what terms. In turn, we would have to decide whether those terms would be acceptable to us.

One alternative, of course, is that we could move closer to the United States, working as an adjunct to the FAA – if they would allow it. But then, that might be seen as the UK moving towards the status of the 51st State – not something that would be universally popular.

Whichever way we care to go, there is a debate to be had. We could hardly, for instance, accept a permanent, subordinate status in EASA, where we become a law-taker and never again have any consultative or voting power. That would negate the whole point of Brexit. And if our "sovereignty" is so special to us – or the EU's terms are so unacceptable that we feel impelled to go it alone – how many hundreds of millions of pounds a year are we prepared to pay for the privilege of giving our regulatory systems a UK badge?

Then multiply those costs through all of the twenty regulatory chapters covered by EU law, potentially bringing our annual bill into the billions. See how many beat police, nurses, doctors and even street sweepers the public is prepared to forego in order to afford the new phalanx of UK officials dedicated to duplicating the systems we abandoned on Brexit.

But if we decide to go down the path to deregulation, we have a different set of problems. Grapefruit provides a good illustration. We don't produce them in this country, so we might decide that we don't need to protect ourselves against invasive pests which might affect the crop.

But Spain and Cyprus are significant producers. Neither country is going to take kindly to importing any agricultural produce from a deregulated UK – including those all-important re-exports. And what concerns these two countries will concern the whole of the EU (and EEA). If our exports to them are restricted, it will affect access to the whole bloc.

So, we find ourselves in an awkward situation. If we are going to make any sense of Brexit, we have to decide how we are going to be regulated, or how we are going to regulate ourselves.

There is no point, as Mrs May is doing, trusting to relationships that don't or can't exist - such as mythical memberships of agencies which simply cannot be permitted under EU law. We have to settle working arrangements which are practical, acceptable to the European Union and other states, and affordable.

On that basis, we can decide our regulatory systems first and then define our broader relationships. In this, the overall structure has to be compatible with our regulatory system, not the other way around. If we try to define the structures first, we close down our regulatory options. They will have to be made to fit with whatever we have decided.

On the other hand, if we define our relationships first, they define our regulation. Staying with the EEA, for instance, requires that we conform with the EEA's acquis. We have no discretion – the one is dependent on the other.

And there's the rub. We need to stop playing games and start making those fundamental decisions. Initially, we have to make the choice as to whether we optimise on relationships or regulatory structures.

What we can't do – or continue to do – is mix and match incompatibles. We can't elect for relationships which require certain regulatory structures and then insist on a regulatory free-for-all. That simply can't work. Likewise, we can't set up an elaborate regulatory structure and then find that it is incompatible with the requirements of the bodies with which we seek to associate.

And this, is seems to me, is what we're failing to do. This is more than the government wanting its cake and eating it. It's a question of avoiding the inherent incompatibilities that any new relationship throws up. But it also says that we have very few options. We have to stop thinking we can make it up as we go along and work within realistic frameworks.

Whatever else, though, if all that is ensuring that there is a continued supply of grapefruit is phytosanitary regulation, when supplies come available again, then we need to think very hard about what we do next. A chap can only go without his grapefruit for so long.