How refreshing – a British government that actually believes in Brexit
What is the point of Brexit? What does it mean, in policy terms, to leave the European Union? These were the questions which haunted Theresa May’s unhappy premiership and prolonged Britain’s Brexit crisis beyond the 2016 referendum and into two general elections. Now, at long last, Britain has a government offering some clarity on these questions.
Britain’s negotiating mandate, Our approach to the Future Relationship with the EU, was outlined today in the House of Commons by Michael Gove, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He said that the “first principle of our approach” to the negotiations would be that of “friendly cooperation between sovereign equals.”
What all this means in practice is that the UK wishes to trade with Europe on the same terms enjoyed by Canada, Japan, and South Korea. These countries all provide precedents in which the EU has accepted a mutually-beneficial Free Trade Agreement, or FTA, without requiring regulatory alignment to EU laws. This would mean that Britain and the EU will respect one another’s legal orders while also agreeing to uphold common high standards in environmental enhancement, labour rights, and social protections.
Crucially, however, this does not mean that “the criterion of suitability in these areas should be adherence to EU law and submission to EU models of governance.” And Gove has also made clear that the government will negotiate until the EU Council’s summit in June, at which point they are going to “take stock”. If no progress is being made on trade negotiations, the government is saying, they are willing to pull the plug in as early as four months’ time.
The government has come under fire for what Brussels – and opponents in Parliament – view as Britain reneging upon the Political Declaration of the Withdrawal Agreement negotiated in October 2019 and passed by Parliament in January 2020. In rejecting the EU negotiating mandate’s notion of a “level playing field”, the argument goes, Britain is reneging upon international agreements signed in good faith by the EU – a point put before Gove in Parliament today.
This is not the case. The Political Declaration of the WAB clearly speaks of a commitment to “a level playing field for open and fair competition”. It does not, as the EU’s new negotiating mandate unveiled on Tuesday now does, insist on the UK upholding “corresponding high standards over time”. It says nothing about these standards being modelled on EU laws over which Britain has no democratic control.
In line with the commitments made in the declaration, the UK government’s approach does not actually mean that Britain is ruling out in its entirety the notion of a “level playing field”. It is simply expressing that this platform for fair trade should be based upon each country’s agreement to recognise and maintain the high quality of one another’s divergent standards.
What is clearly being dismissed by Gove and the government is the EU negotiation mandate’s insistence that the playing field should be based on EU law in perpetuity. This would require dynamic alignment with EU regulations and keep Britain subject to rulings by the European Court of Justice. Instead, the UK will seek for its FTA to be governed and enforced through regular mechanisms for such an agreement, which includes an independent body to police disputes.
It is also clearly not the case that the EU is treating the political declaration in any better or worse faith than the British government. As Raoul Ruparel, the former Special Adviser on Europe, has pointed out – the EU side has also quietly shifted position. Their mandate no longer includes the key dates outlined in the declaration for achieving financial services equivalence and a data adequacy ruling by June and July 2020 respectively.
Of course, the political declaration is not legally binding on either party; and it would seem that, when push comes to shove, Brussels does not consider the declaration to be worth the paper it is written on. Indeed, Jack Blanchard at POLITICO says that he can recall speaking to one senior EU27 diplomat who, glass of wine in hand, described the Political Declaration of Theresa May’s Deal as being “like a piece of toilet paper that you write down all the things you want on.”
The truth of the matter is that the EU’s negotiators are playing the same game that the UK’s government is. Theresa May’s fatal mistake was not just that she refused to play the game – she didn’t really realise that one existed. The EU grew used to dealing with hard words which were not backed up by a Prime Minister who was naive to the EU’s intentions, crippled by a hung parliament and undermined by her own cabinet.
This time it is they – Michel Barnier, Nathalie Loiseau, and the EU’s negotiating team – who misunderstand the situation. They haven’t realised that the rules of the showdown have changed. They now confront a British Prime Minister with a unified party and a commanding majority behind him against an EU 27 at war over its budget for 2021-27. The landscape has shifted.
Britain is also now no longer seeking the kind of comprehensive, ambitious access to the Single Market sought by May. Since Boris Johnson and his cabinet are now only aiming for a minimal FTA, the distance between this arrangement and WTO terms has been minimalised. And because they are asking for less, they open themselves up to fewer opportunities for the EU to raise complications and exercise leverage. They will not have to trade off sovereignty for economic expediency. Their negotiating hand is simpler, and stronger for it.
It is refreshing to have a British government which, for all its flaws, not only says it supports Brexit but understands it and believes in it too. There is, in the end, no good reason why Britain and the EU cannot strike a deal between amicable, sovereign equals. But the government is ready to go its own way if the EU chooses not to oblige.