London: For weary Brexit negotiators on both sides of the English Channel, a Christmas Eve trade agreement sealed 11 months of painstaking deliberations over Britain’s departure from the European Union, encompassing details as arcane as what species of fish could be caught by each side’s boats in British waters.
But for many others - among them bankers, traders, truckers, architects and millions of migrants - Christmas was only the beginning, Day 1 of a high-stakes and unpredictable experiment in how to unstitch a tight web of commercial relations across Europe.
The deal, far from closing the book on Britain’s tumultuous partnership with Europe, has opened a new one, beginning on its first pages with what analysts say will be the biggest overnight change in modern commercial relations.
In the four years since Britons voted to cast off a half-century of ties to Europe, many migrants have stopped moving to Britain for work and British firms have sent employees to Paris and Frankfurt, Germany, to set up toeholds on the continent. But for all those preparations, seven days are now all that stand between businesses and an avalanche of new trading obstacles on January 1.
“We are going to have to learn how to do this as we go,” said Shane Brennan, CEO of the Cold Chain Federation, a British group representing logistics firms. “Let’s hope it’s for the better in the end, but it will be slow, complex and expensive.”
British distributors, spared the calamity of a no-deal separation, were nevertheless scrambling to prepare the first of hundreds of thousands of new export certifications to allow their meat, fish and dairy to be sold to the bloc. British food, once exempt from such burdensome checks, now faces the same inspections as European imports from countries like Chile or Australia.
Service sector pangs
Britain’s services sector - encompassing not only London’s powerful financial industry, but also lawyers, architects, consultants and others - was largely left out of the 1,246-page deal, despite the sector accounting for 80% of British economic activity.
The deal also did little to assuage European migrants, some of whom left Britain during the pandemic and are now struggling to determine whether they need to rush back to establish a right to settle in Britain before the split is finalized on December 31.
“As of the 1st of January, the landscape changes, and the safety blanket of the transition period is gone,” said Maike Bohn, a co-founder of the3million, which supports European citizens in Britain, laying out her fears that Europeans will be unfairly refused jobs and rental apartments amid confusion over the rules. “There’s apprehension, and also numbness.”
Negotiators have not formally published the voluminous trade deal, though both sides have offered summaries, leaving analysts and ordinary citizens uncertain about some details even as lawmakers in Britain and Europe prepare to vote on it in a matter of days.
But it had long been clear that the agreement would offer the City of London, a hub for international banks, asset managers, insurance firms and hedge funds, few assurances about future trade across the English Channel. Britain sells roughly 30 billion pounds, or $40 billion, of financial services to the European Union each year, profiting from an integrated market that makes it easier in some cases to sell services from one member country to another than it is to sell services from one American state to another.
Flow of goods across borders
The new trade deal does smooth the flow of goods across British borders. But it leaves financial firms without the biggest benefit of European Union membership: the ability to easily offer services to clients across the region from a single base. This has long allowed a bank in London to provide loans to a business in Venice, Italy, or trade bonds for a company in Madrid.
That loss is especially painful for Britain, which ran a surplus of 18 billion pounds, or $24 billion, on trade in financial and other services with the European Union in 2019, but a deficit of 97 billion pounds, or $129 billion, on trade in goods.
“The result of the deal is that the European Union retains all of its current advantages in trading, particularly with goods, and the UK loses all of its current advantages in the trade for services,” said Tom Kibasi, former director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a research institute. “The outcome of this trade negotiation is precisely what happens with most trade deals: The larger party gets what it wants and the smaller party rolls over.”
After January 1, the sale of such services will hang on whether European regulators decide that Britain’s new financial regulations are close enough to their own to be trusted, a process that excludes some common banking activities and leaves others subject to political considerations. Already, Britons living in Europe who have bank accounts in Britain have been told their accounts will be closed.
Uncertain immigration rules
For European citizens living in Britain, too, the completion of a Brexit deal did little to ease fears about how the country’s new immigration rules could complicate their lives. Migrants have been allowed to apply for so-called “settled status” in Britain. But few provisions have been made for people who cannot complete the process online, much less for people who do not realize they need permission to stay in a country where they have lived for decades.
“There’s the potential for a crisis in the next year or two concerning EU migrants who were already here, and had been here for a long time, but have fallen through the cracks of the registration scheme,” said Robert Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester.
The limitations of the Brexit deal reflect the fact that even as financial and other regulations have grown more complex in recent years, trade deals have struggled to keep pace, said David Henig, an analyst at the European Center for International Political Economy.
But Britain also limited what it sought in the deal to a few key areas, making the emergence of a bare-bones agreement almost inevitable, analysts said.
Next to a no-deal split, involving enormous logjams at the borders and deep uncertainty for businesses, the agreement was a salve. But even with such a deal, the path forward is uncertain.
