What "deal" are May, Raab & co negotiating at the moment? There's endless talk of a "Canada deal" or a "Chequers deal" or "no deal" but the only output actually described in Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union is "an agreement... setting out the arrangements for... withdrawal, taking account of the framework for [the withdrawing member state's] future relationship with the Union".
During negotiations that "framework for [a] future relationship" has been elevated to the status of a major document. May and Davis originally proposed to conduct full trade negotiations in parallel with talks on the terms of withdrawal, but Michel Barnier had no mandate to do so. Proper trade negotiations can only be conducted with a third country, and therefore after Brexit itself. Then May called an unnecessary election, lost her majority, and gave up her grand plan on day 1.
Even so, all the talk in politics and the media, in Labour as well as the Tories, is now of trade deals, to the extent that I fully expect that a majority of the population believes that is what we're expecting to see by 29 March 2019.
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A recent report by the Institute for Government lays out what has been achieved and what has still to be achieved, and one of the main points about the "future framework" is that "there is currently no public statement of what this framework will look like, and how much detail will go into it". Barnier suggests 15-20 pages, as opposed to the withdrawal agreement, whose draft PDF is currently 130.The IfG's report has a number of helpful charts and tables, of which I'll use just one. I advise you to look at the original to read it properly.
Half the main topics of the withdrawal agreement are considered complete (though EU expats in this country and British expats in the EU27 are not in unanimous agreement with that claim for "citizen's rights"). Then we have two groups of topics on which progress is being made (I'm sure the future of Gibraltar and the military bases on Cyprus will be a doddle) and the big problem of the Irish border (or as Andrew Maxwell the Irish comedian observed recently to loud applause from a London audience, the British border in Ireland).
The question of the future relationship intervenes strongly here. The idea of a backstop was introduced in the joint progress report agreed in December 2017. If you assume, as most people do, that the future relationship will not be defined, let alone agreed, by the moment of Brexit, some arrangement is needed to ensure that people and goods can continue crossing the border in both directions until a final (assumed to be superior) agreement is reached.
Barnier presented a legal definition of a backstop which was quickly rejected in March 2018. May protested that it effectively drew a border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland - down the Irish Sea - with its assumption that no customs or sanitary checks would be performed at the line between Northern Ireland and the Republic, but that they would be done on either side of the water.
The Chequers proposal emerged in part to solve this problem, imagining that the final relationship could be implemented before the end of transition (when the EU asks the rest of the world to pretend the UK is still a member state, when we obey the rules like a member state, but when we play no part in the decision-making), which is 1 January 2021. But the proposal is unacceptable to the EU27, since it involves cherry picking parts of the single market and expecting the EU to allow a third country to work as if it is in the same customs area without submitting to the full legal structures that maintain the customs union.
Various other ideas have been proposed for the Irish border, but they all essentially assume a final relationship, whereas the EU27 and the joint report May & Davis signed up to assume that something is required to cover the time between Brexit, or rather the end of transition, and an actual trade agreement. That something is the backstop, and Barnier has been tweaking it - "de-dramatising" it, in the negotiators' parlance - but May has continued to reject it because of that notional line down the Irish Sea.
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And so we arrive at Salzburg, where British politics and much of the British media judge that May was humiliated - Donald Tusk told her "Chequers will not work". In fact what happened was that May was told to her face what EU leaders have been telling the world for months, though they were being "gentle" (as reported in a former British trade negotiator's discussion of May's statement the day afterwards).This next section is disingenuous. The EU has been sending signals about why Chequers proposals are unacceptable since the day of their publication. But were trying to be gentle, as they'd been asked to be. Then got angry the UK Gov briefed this was acceptance 5/ pic.twitter.com/S0fdOCJ9mV— David Henig (@DavidHenigUK) September 21, 2018
Now there's open rebellion in the Conservative party, demands to "chuck Chequers", and yet more new proposals crawling out of the woodwork. With the "200 days to Brexit" mark receding behind us, we're left with the talks at an "impasse" and the clock still ticking loudly. Oh, and the Conservative party conference is days away, and everybody is well aware that May will have to try (again) to unite her warring factions with... a speech. Nobody serious wants No Deal, or at least not in public, so the talks are still the only game in town, and the rules are rather simple:
- If you want a half-decent future relationship with the EU you need a transition period in which to (begin to) negotiate one.
- If you want a transition period you need a withdrawal agreement.
- If you want a withdrawal agreement you need an Irish backstop, and it needs to be fully defined and implementable.
The withdrawal agreement is the only legal document which will come out of the Article 50 process, the only thing that the UK Parliament, the EU Parliament and then the EU Council actually have to vote on, according to the rules in the treaty. And there's a huge amount of work still to do on it. But all eyes are on this wretched "future framework" which hasn't really been started. And all the players and the ones who think they're players want to fill it with Chequers or Canada or Norway (see the Labour motion) or...
And that will be what many MPs think they're really voting on in October (no chance), November (fair chance) or later. The document which will actually kick off the next few decades of British history needs full scrutiny, but "trade deals" will fill the papers. After that, will anybody know what they voted for?
