Brexit negotiations crunch is coming much sooner than realised

The European Union typically likes to take things to the wire, and all the indications are that its key players envisage doing it again on Brexit. The organisation is a complex alliance of 28 disparate nations – soon to be 27 upon the departure of the UK‎ in March 2019 – with an integrationist supranational legal structure underpinning everything. Complexity, along with the fluctuating Franco-German relationship and the frequent need to establish a consensus, can make it difficult to get agreement until late in any process.

Both the member states and the EU central bureaucracy are used to talking through the night at summits and issuing communiques which declare that they did it, they got there eventually, thanks to their supposed brilliance and various leaps of imagination. This is how the EU has functioned for decades.

There is a major element of fakery, of ersatz theatricality, involved in this diplomatic dance, of course. I remember being particularly struck by it at the Nice summit shortly in December 2000. As between non-stories we journalists consumed piles of rather good food, and glasses of wine, in the temporary restaurant built for the hacks and paid for by you the taxpayer, there was a lot of speculation about how long the talks would run. At that summit the great Adam Boulton famously broadcast a marathon shift for Sky News and was pictured during a break flat on his back asleep on the stage. Of course, agreement was reached by the EU leaders about something or other, the machine moved on, and we journalists all returned home clutching bags of duty free and French chocolates. Even in the Eurozone crisis – with Greece beggared and the integrationist dream of a single currency tottering – the eurozone and the EU patched together a deal eventually to save themselves.

There seems to be a widespread expectation in London and Brussels that   the talks between the UK and the EU are going to follow this fashion. They will grind on, through various crises and scares, and culminate in the traditional manner, with the British kept up late until the final possible moment for a deal, offering yet more concessions just as the clock ticks down to midnight. Then a breakthrough clinches it. British reporters will run from the press conference in Brussels in early 2019 waving pieces of paper. We have a deal! Planes will not fall from the sky! The sun will still rise in the morning and there need be no awkward misunderstandings about whether Britain will adhere to EU standards on dishwashers, which incidentally are notoriously unreliable in part because they are underpowered thanks to EU eco-rules.

Brexit may yet run according to that script, but I doubt it very much and there is no indication that the EU is willing to concede anything, not a thing, that cuts across its sacrosanct four freedoms that you would think were ancient but were invented just a few decades ago.

The complacency on display about the prospects is a mistake when the “le crunch” – as a minister described it to me – is only three to twelve weeks away and the implications of failure are potentially so serious. As in a conflict which seems relatively becalmed before the main engagement, it suits participants and observers of Brexit to think that it can stay this way in perpetuity and turn out fine. One summit rolls into the next. Deadlines are set and passed. Speeches are made and parsed for signs. Months pass. Years elapse. Too little happens. Anyone who has ever worked in an organisation that is poor at forward-planning or incapable of taking the initiative will recognise such displacement activity for what it is.

On Brexit, it simply cannot go on like this for much longer and time is extremely short. As the result of a strict legal process – Article 50 – the UK is leaving the EU at the end of March 2019. December 2017 and January 2018 will be swallowed by the holiday season and after the return to work the British government and business will find themselves with little more than a year – hardly any time at all – to prepare for the disruption of leaving and for life after the EU. The psychological shock of the realisation that there is a year to go will, absent a terror crisis, be the biggest and most salient single political fact in March next year.

If there is not a rapid agreement in mid-December to move to stage two of the Brexit talks, involving discussion of a future trade agreement, then a “no” message from Brussels should be interpreted as fatally wounding the chance of a deal or relegating it to slim outside bet when there is too little time. “This is it. Do they want a deal or not?” says a cabinet minister.

Thus the historic decision the EU 27 are about to take is critical, and the tactics of the Irish government (worried about its own collapse) could be the cover President Macron (in no mood to be constructive) uses to say the 27 are united in not seeing enough progress to advance. Indeed, I detect in the questions I’m asked by informed and worried Remainers that they fear that Brussels and France and Germany are about to risk pushing Britain too far, confusing the chaos in a deeply divided UK elite for a public demand to reverse Brexit, and calculating that it is close to killing it.

The public reaction will be interesting if Brussels and the 27 do take this route next month and say “no”. It may be that if Britain’s offer of £40bn and hopes of trade and friendship are rejected then voters who are mostly tuned out will get up a clamour to be let back into the EU that has rejected British overtures. An opposite and rather resolute public reaction is also imaginable.

Either way, in such fraught circumstances it is simply not going to be good enough for the UK government to say in the spring that there’s a bit of progress but no promise of a deal – either on the orderly exit or the future trading relationship – and on we all merrily go to the next meeting. No, business cannot be put any longer in a position mere months from March 2019 with no clear steer on whether there will be a transition period and at least an outline of future arrangements.

A year to go – March 2018 – minus substantial progress would be the moment when someone (the Prime Minister, whoever that is by then) has to level, gravely, with the country, and say that while the talks will continue, it looks as though the chances of a viable deal are remote. After all, the EU set the format of these talks up in the expectation that the UK will pay upwards of £40bn to exit but perhaps get nothing on trade, a scenario which is unlikely to be a runner with either the government or British public opinion. At the point this becomes apparent the government and business will have to say it is preparing flat-out for a no-deal scenario, with individual sectoral deals, on issues such as airspace to avoid an emergency.

Or as the crunch point arrives the government could, Remainers suggest, simply halt Article 50 and suspend or stop Brexit. And that is where the possibility of an imminent political crisis, as soon as this spring, comes in.

If there is no serious progress by then the Remainers, Tory rebels and Labour europhiles who fear Corbyn, will be at their own decision point on whether or not to bring down the government. A vote in the Commons and in the Lords calling for a halt or delay of Article 50 would not necessarily be binding, subject to legal argument, but it would represent a rejection of the government’s core policy objective, that is delivering Brexit in line with the wishes of the electorate in the referendum. The government would presumably win a confidence vote that followed, but any remaining authority would be gone and a Tory leader – who? – might then have to take the question of Brexit or not to the country with the EU offering suspension of Article 50. Outside parliament, lawyers are limbering up on the question of revoking Article 50 too.

Quite how pro-Brexit voters and activists would respond to such a crisis, a no-deal scenario and parliamentary uprising, is unclear. The success enjoyed in altering the arc of history by forces such as UKIP and Momentum – the two most successful insurgent movements of recent decades in English politics, alongside Vote Leave – demonstrates the potential of non-parliamentary movements that are well-funded or driven by the grassroots. If this parliament becomes a Stop Brexit vehicle assisted by a mandarin class that wants the whole thing to go away, then I shudder to think what could be summoned and the consequences for our democracy.

Alternatively, the EU 27 could get a move on and agree in December to move straight to trade talks and to approach them in a constructive spirit.

Without that, the crunch is looming for Britain and the EU within weeks.