Two articles came up yesterday, one of them a couple of days old.
In the first we see that Britain is to launch a
"Brexit charm offensive" because
"London has become increasingly sensitive to accusations that Whitehall is underprepared for Brexit". The other is from an interview with a former senior EU negotiator who
tells Business Insider that
"decisions taken by Prime Minister Theresa May and
her predecessor David Cameron over the UK's relationship with
Europe will be as harmful to Britain's interests as any
decision the government has taken for over 50 years".
Meanwhile,
in a letter to the House of Lords EU select committee, David Davis tells us
"the second round of negotiations have given us a lot to be positive about". This is the letter which prompted complaints from the committee that Davis was not willing to speak to them again before October
"following the fourth and fifth rounds of negotiations" as he puts it.
The story so far
Under the timetable which Davis had previously said would cause the
"row of the summer" but which the government simply accepted on day 1 of the first round (something to do with a disappointing election result) negotiations are scheduled for the weeks beginning 28 August, 18 September and 9 October, followed by an EU Council summit on 19-20 October at which May & co are hoping to be given the green light to move on to talks on trade.
The legalistic framework established by the EU27 mandates Michel Barnier to talk
only about "separation issues" (the rights of expats, a financial settlement, the Irish border and a long list of supposedly less complex issues) until
he judges that "sufficient progress" has been made to report back to the EU Council, who at some point thereafter will agree a mandate for "phase 2" of the talks which might address May's proposed "deep and special partnership" for the future. There really isn't much time.
Last month, Brexit Secretary David Davis said he was confident
negotiations would continue as planned after
reports Brussels may delay trade talks because of a lack of progress on the "divorce" settlement.
The only visible
output from July's second round of talks was a table of areas of agreement, disagreement and lack of information from the working group on expats' rights (they call it citizens' rights, but I prefer the shorter, more meaningful word). As a side note,
a junior minister has confirmed that the government does not have the data on EU expats in the UK which would inform policy making or support the use of existing EU-wide immigration rules that allow people to be expelled from a country if they are not working or actively seeking employment.
On the financial settlement we have a
working paper from the EU and reports, swiftly denied, that the UK is willing to countenance a payment of £36bn (sums between 30 and 60 billion have been bandied about in various currencies, the Financial Times worked out €100bn and ultras like Peter Bone protest that, if anything, the EU should be paying us). Barnier's immediate objective (presumably agreed at that first meeting) is to agree a "methodology", a formula, by which a final figure can be agreed, and some have said that an actual number at this stage is not helpful. Former EU negotiator Steve Bullock attempts to explain in a Twitter thread:
The Irish question has received a lot of public attention, more on the Irish side of the border than in Northern Ireland, let alone the "mainland". I'll be looking at it in another post, but suffice it to say that Irish ministers are not impressed with what they've heard from Northern Ireland (not least because the province doesn't yet have an executive; that'll have to be something to do after the long summer holidays, or even the political conference season, it's not as if it's anything important). And - praise be! - the
UK government has announced that there
will be a position paper on the subject, possibly next week.
One
of the results of the Brexiter assumption (nay, article of faith) that
everything will be easy, so why are we worrying our pretty little
heads etc, is that they daren't think about the huge amount of work
which should already be underway. Is this like Cameron forbidding the
civil service to make any preparations (which could be seen as natural
prudence, since it "wasn't going to happen") or more like Blair's much
reported refusal to let the military prepare meaningfully for the 2003 Iraq
invasion (because he didn't dare admit what he was up to)?
(I know lots of work is going on, but we have little idea what on, and with what results, and this post will point to several reasons why keeping your cards close to your chest can make it look as if you're not playing seriously.)
Whatever has been going on means that it has now taken nine months to set off a
two year process which is 3.5 months gone, and we have very little to show for it.
It
is not patriotic to assume that everything will simply go right
because we've taken a virtuous decision and everybody will agree with us on what their best interests are.
It is not unpatriotic
to point out that preparations which need to be well advanced NOW
don't even seem to have begun. Jonny Morris's tweet thread lists some of the many
big ones:
But rather than press their government for urgent work to
complete new agreements to ensure (for example) that planes will keep
flying, Brexiters point and sneer: "That's stupid. It's not in anybody's
interests. It won't happen." I agree with all three of those sentences,
but they might not like why:
- It's certainly stupid not to do anything to replace agreements we will fall out of on exit from the EU.
- It's certainly not in our interests or those of the EU, the US or all the other countries with which we enjoy air connections because of agreements made by the EU and which we will not be covered by from "exit day" on.
- I have to believe it won't happen. I have to believe that our
government will suddenly admit there is work to do, tell the
Brexiters to shut up, and do the deals. No Deal, in this, as in just
about every other area, is not an option unless you want to destroy this
country as a going concern. And that wouldn't be patriotic.
We're
about to lose the European Medicines Agency from London but we're not hearing how
the government plans to build our own equivalent, as
regulators knew would be necessary the day after the vote. Instead we're hearing that
existing British bodies will lose work. And the
Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency doesn't seem to know:
"On 4 July the UK government gave a clear, public statement of its
desire to retain a close working partnership in respect of medicines
regulation after the UK leaves the EU, in the interests of public health
and safety. The question of the scale of that arrangement remains open
to discussion". Then there's chemicals regulation:
And dozens of others. Government, in the shape of junior business minister Richard Harrington,
has said we'd like to have some kind of membership of Euratom, but
we will lose the membership we currently have, and somebody has to do
the work of negotiating a new one. Harrington tells us there's work
going on but the British obsession with secrecy made that a surprise.
A report of some achievement (always assuming that there has actually
been some achievement) might even reassure some Brexiters, let alone the many who see
merely lack of preparedness or appreciation of the size of the task. Of
course it might annoy other Brexiters who think the prize should already have fallen in their laps with no effort, but we can ignore them.
Then
we should be seeing the work being done to prepare to take on the work
of the EU food safety authority, or the intention to negotiate
and pay for
some kind of continuing associate membership. And the meetings to
establish which British agency will do the work of the EU monitoring
centre for drugs and drug addiction, or to explore the possibility of a
continuing association, with access to its information. Or to decide we
don't want to do any of that work at all.
And the meetings and negotiations for many of the other dozens of projects and bodies... Europol,
Eurojust and things like the European Arrest Warrant are going to need
hard negotiation, but May put security cooperation into her Article 50
letter so she intends to stick with them in some way, and
last week's announcements about data protection (and the "right to forget") suggest we want to stay in, though conflict with the Investigatory Powers Act looks likely.
This area in particular is going to cause battles within the Tory party but the positions May & co eventually put
to the EU27 should be debated in public.
In little over a year we don't have to time to do
this thing "properly", but the way things are going at the moment we will
simply run out of time and drop out of the EU before half the work
has been thought of, let alone started and certainly let alone finished.
Anyway... those two articles
The charm offensive, sorry, "engagement unit", will draw staff from the Department for Exiting the European Union (or Department for Stumbling Incompetently out of an Incompetently Run European Union, as Professor Yanis Varoufakis, Greek ex-finance minister, put it on Radio 4's World At One yesterday) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
The initiative is the result of a direct
"edict" from the prime minister, to
"get the message out", a
"senior UK official"
told Politico. The impression has got around that Whitehall is not prepared for Brexit - could that have been all those pointed demands for clarification from Barnier at joint press conferences? And so No 10 is
"opening up", which is more the style of May's new chief of staff Gavin Barwell (Con, Croydon Central, defeated 8 June, almost immediately put on the party payroll) than it ever was of May's Rasputin twins Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill.
The new focus will particularly be on EU capitals. Just think about that.
"As we approach the next stage of negotiations — discussing
our future relationship with the EU once we've left — we want to ramp up
the communications work, campaigns and stakeholder engagement that will
enable the government to communicate its messages effectively in EU
member states as well as at home," said a spokesperson from the Department
for Exiting the European Union.
"Staff from DExEU and FCO are working together to deliver
this. This is about making the most effective use of specialist
knowledge across both departments." And everybody fell asleep.
I seem to remember foreign service mutters when May formed those new departments for Davis and Fox. The FCO lost departments, people and resources overall, and Davis's officials are now allowed to tell us that Britain’s network of ambassadors in the EU27 capitals have been underused in the Brexit process so far.
Robin Niblett, director of the London-based foreign policy
think tank Chatham House, says it has been going on longer than that:
"During the last big push for 'Global Britain', prior to
Brexit, the government raised the number of British diplomats in India,
China, the Gulf, while cutting back some of the human capacity in
European capitals. Now the government is having to do some
re-engineering to bring back that capability to prepare for the pointy
end of the Brexit negotiation".
Just a thought: isn't talking to EU capitals what David Davis spent his first year in post doing?
****
Michael Leigh, knighted in 2012 for his contribution to EU enlargement and now a senior adviser to a US-Europe think tank is not impressed:
"You have to go back to the Suez crisis in 1956 or to Munich in
1938 to find decisions taken by a British government that will
turn out in time to have had such negative consequences for the
United Kingdom."
Negotiations haven't really begun, says the former chief negotiator, who has seen the two sides using the time since Theresa May's Article 50 letter on 29 March very differently. Michel Barnier is working from a fully agreed position, and the EU Commission has prepared
detailed statements in many areas, but the British side hasn't obviously done the work and, particularly since the
"loss of the government's majority and therefore the loss of
authority for the prime minister", the cabinet is divided.
This, Leigh believes, makes it difficult for David Davis to be trusted by his opposite numbers, since anything he says can immediately be contradicted by another minister, but
"[a]ll this might be clarified in September if clear negotiating
positions which have the full approval of the Cabinet are put on
the table. If this happens then things could begin to improve". September might be optimistic. We might hear about it at the Tory conference in Manchester, 1-4 October, a whole five days before the fifth negotiating round.
Many people have observed that the civil service don't have the negotiating experience to handle a task of this type and scale. Whitehall lacks the
"institutional capacity" to deliver Brexit,
Leigh says, and is struggling to persuade talent to join its
ranks. Government has
"gone looking for talent in New Zealand and
Canada... but isn't always able to
pay the salaries to attract them".
His estimation is (and he's hardly alone in this) that a withdrawal agreement,
including Britain's financial obligations and rights of EU
citizens, can be settled within the two years allowed under Article 50 (which is, after all, what it's supposed to cover). A full free-trade arrangement, which Davis
and Liam Fox insist can be negotiated in parallel, will take much longer, however. And, again as many people have pointed out, there's not much more than 13 months before whatever the Davis-Barnier roadshow can cook up has to go to the EU parliament for discussion and ratification.
That's where transition comes in. Leigh thinks a transition period could be agreed, under which
"the whole of the
EU's laws would continue to apply once Britain had left... [f]or one year, two years,
renewable or otherwise. But what could not be agreed during this period is a pick
and choose arrangement... That would require detailed
negotiations that would be more lengthy and go against the
principles from the EU's point of view". And
"one has to be clear about negotiating objectives
and to begin to talk about transitional arrangements... it has got to be a transition towards
something. As there is no consensus yet on what that thing would
be, this is another consideration that has held up negotiations
on the British side".
"The single market
was largely a British creation," says Leigh,
"... created by Mrs
Thatcher... working together with Europe to put
into place the single market, which British Conservatives,
liberals and others strongly advocated. So... to see this landmark British accomplishment
being rejected by a later Conservative government, is astonishing
and depressing".
On messages on the side of a bus
 |
| Image by @maxalbedo |
Some Remainers fell on this rather too eagerly to be dignified, but
the Sky headline says it all:
"UK made weekly net payment of around £156m to EU in 2016/17". Some of the more brazen Brexiters are protesting that the figure on the bus was the gross figure, that everybody knew the net figure was lower, and the syntax "Let's spend..." is a suggestion, not a promise.
To which my answer is...
Gisela Stuart, co-chair of Vote Leave,
15 April 2016:
"Every week we send
£350m to Brussels. I’d rather that we control how to spend that money,
and if I had that control I would spend it on the NHS."
and...
Dominic Cummings, director of Vote Leave,
February 2017:
"Pundits and MPs kept saying 'why isn't Leave arguing about the economy and living standards'. They did not realise that for millions of people, £350m/NHS was about the economy and living standards - that’s why it was so effective. It was clearly the most effective argument not only with the crucial swing fifth but with almost every demographic. Even with UKIP voters it was level-pegging with immigration. Would we have won without immigration? No. Would we have won without £350m/NHS? All our research and the close result strongly suggests No. Would we have won by spending our time talking about trade and the Single Market? No way."
