EU Referendum


Brexit: the absence of answers


08/11/2020




With tedious predictability, the Guardian tells us that "Brexit" (it means TransEnd) talks remain deadlocked going into decisive week. "Large differences remain", we learn, after a scheduled call between yesterday Johnson and Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

The UK government has issued a press release on the call, which basically confirms that, resorting to the familiar formula that: "while some progress had been made in recent discussions, significant differences remain in a number of areas, including the so-called level playing field and fish".

If the Commission has produced a press release as well, I've been unable to find it. Possibly, von der Leyen had little to add to the British version, and has saved its efforts for a statement on the result of the US presidential election.

As an aside, there we find von der Leyen claiming that the European Union and the United States have built "an unprecedented transatlantic partnership rooted in common history and shared values of democracy, freedom, human rights, social justice and open economy".

I can certainly understand the bit about an "unprecedented transatlantic partnership", but I have a little difficulty with the idea that this is "rooted" in "common history and shared values", etc., etc.

The history, as far as I am aware, is rooted in the US and certain of the EU Member States beating the shit out of each other, which is why, supposedly, the EU was invented – to stop it happening again. But then, the "colleagues" always were a little wonky on their history.

Anyhow, that doesn't take us very much further forward on the EU-UK talks, except that the Guardian seems to have got a little more information from "leaked memo", which seem to have some interesting – if less than clear – observations on the issue of standards.

We are told that there are concerns "about progress on customs facilitation to allow goods to be exported and imported with the minimum of checks", which may be a reference to mutual recognition of conformity assessment, a contentious area which, we understand, has not been settled.

From what I can gather – although I may be wrong - this is because the UK wants the EU to recognise a distinct British Standard regime rather than the European system of Notified Bodies and CE Marking.

The Guardian also states that the EU and UK have "clashed" on the UK's insistence that "international standards for goods should be mutually recognised as acceptable by either side rather than EU rules". For some reason, this has Barnier concerned about derailing the entire customs declarations system.

On the face of it, the linkage between these points doesn't make sense, and neither is it entirely clear where the problem lies on the adoption of international standards for goods.

What doesn't help here is the terminology. If both parties decide to adopt specific international standards, and be bound by them, this isn't mutual recognition. It's the harmonisation of standards – which should not be a problem.

If, on the other hand, the UK is insisting that, because one party accepts an international standard, the other party should automatically accept it, I could see there being a problem. GM foods come to mind. There is, however, not enough detail to work out precisely what is at issue.

Meanwhile, in The Sunday Times, the self-important "remain" voter Robert Colvile is complaining that we are weeks away from the end of the "Brexit" negotiations (he means TransEnd), and the issue "is barely even mentioned on the front pages".

Perhaps, instead of writing his self-regarding piece, he should recognise the irony of him writing in a newspaper to complain that newspapers are not putting the issue about which he writes on their front pages, and have a word with the editor of The Sunday Times, to whom he should be addressing his angst.

But then he has had a look around the media to see where they are devoting their energies, and notice the rather excessive devotion to the US presidency and to Covid-19. Therein lies the problem.

In Mr Colvile's book, though, downplaying the importance of the "future partnership" negotiations has been "a deliberate strategy" on the part of the Johnson administration – as if the media ever took any notice of government publicity strategies.

More to the point, it is not as if the media have ever given serious attention to 'Europe', right from the very start. One might recall Con O'Neill's observations on the behaviour of the press during the UK's accession negotiations, writing that "journalists in Brussels had become thoroughly bored with the multiplicity of highly technical subjects still under discussion and were ready to be content with fairly superficial information".

Almost 50 years later, nothing very much has changed, with Colvile himself remarking that "the negotiations have been fairly boring". The narrative, he says, "sometimes seems as if it is being written by Zeno: both sides inching towards compromise, but never quite getting there".

While one can have some sympathy with this view, much of the subject matter is very far from boring – largely it is the uninformed and superficial treatment of the media that makes it so, where the journalists have so little understanding of the subjects on which they report.

Not least, is the pervasive "little European" approach to the reporting of the negotiations, typified by Colvile's remarks about "non-regression". This, he argues, "is the most important red line".

Essentially, he tells us, "the EU wants to make sure that we match our standards to its own after Brexit, whereas we feel there is no point leaving the EU if we are forced to copy all the regulations it brings in after we go".

Here, one yearns for the media to play catch-up, realising that by far the greatest bulk of Single Market standards are formulated at an international level, either regional (as in UNECE) or global, far above the narrow enclosures of Brussels.

In that sense, with nations throughout the world rushing to harmonise their trading laws, based on international standards, "non-regression" really is no longer an issue. The real issue – hinted at in the Guardian piece, but not fully explained, is how we handle the integration of such standards into domestic law, alongside our partners and competitors, making sense out of globalisation.

If the media could step outside its own self-imposed constraints and raise its intellectual horizons above the soap opera, and the preoccupations of second-rate politicians, coverage of the negotiations could be transformed, not least by remarking on the manifest limitations of the agenda and the lack of forward thinking.

But then, Colvile's own horizons are so limited that such issues are way above his pay grade. A no-deal scenario, he writes, would "result in considerable short-term economic disruption". But, he asserts (correctly) even if a deal is reached, we will still be adding significant frictions to our trading relationship with the EU, at a time when our attractiveness to investors and broader competitiveness were already on the slide.

Thus, he asks, how will we use the freedoms of Brexit to change this? What is the business plan for Britain that will make us not just rebound from the coronavirus, but also outperform our former partners?

Warming to his thesis, he demands to know how we will make our way in the world. Why, he asks, put your money, or your company, here rather than elsewhere? How do we ensure that, in a generation's time, voters look back at Brexit as an opportunity seized rather than a national wrong turn?

It is possible, he then concludes, to come up with convincing answers to all these questions. And, once the pandemic recedes, he says, "we need to hear them".

What he should have said, of course, is that we should have already heard these "convincing answers" – and the media should be asking why we haven't. But the absence of answers is matched by the lack of curiosity of the media, and the pomposity of its writers – which is why we are condemned to eternal tedium.

Also published on Turbulent Times.