British Prime Minister Theresa May is hoping to declare victory at the European Council summit because she will secure a “transition” deal. In fact, it is a miserable step on the way to a Brexit that damages Britain’s pride, power and prosperity.
Just consider for a minute why the country needs this transition at all. Without it, the UK economy would fall off a cliff next year. It would also lose access to valuable tools to fight crime and terrorism including membership of Europol and use of the European arrest warrant. If it’s so important to hang on to these things for another 21 months, one may well ask why it’s such a good idea to quit the EU at all.
The prime minister realises that tearing us abruptly out of Europe would be madness, so she is trying to cushion the blow. That’s why she has bent over backwards to secure a transition period.
May has relented on virtually every red line she previously drew — with the result that we are losing, not taking back control.
The climbdown that has grabbed headlines is that we won’t have control over fish quotas during the transition. The attention given to this issue is bizarre, because fishing is responsible for only 0.05 per cent of the UK economy.
But equally, it is right to focus on how May has sold the fishing industry down the river. If she can’t protect a sector that is so symbolically important for Brexiters, what chance does she have to fight for economically more significant parts of the economy, such as finance?
The fishing concession symbolises the tail-between-our-legs Brexit that the prime minister is negotiating. During the transition, we will follow all the EU’s rules without a vote on them.
We will become, for that period, what UK Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Boris Johnson and British lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg call a “vassal state”. How is that good for national pride?
But the biggest climbdowns are yet to come. To get the transition deal, the prime minister has committed that either Northern Ireland or the whole of the UK could need to follow the rules of big chunks of the EU’s single market and customs union — not just during the transition but afterwards.
May still pretends she can come up with some magical technology that will keep the Irish border open without the need for such “regulatory alignment”. But if she doesn’t come up with this technical fix soon, the EU is going to force her to choose between two lousy options: allowing Northern Ireland to become a quasi-province of the Republic of Ireland, or agreeing to regulatory alignment for the whole UK.
Following the rules of the single market without a vote on them would turn us into rule-takers. That would be an astonishing blow for our proud nation.
We, after all, virtually invented the single market and helped write most of its regulations. Meanwhile, by staying in the customs union, we would have to follow meekly any new trade deals the EU cuts with other countries — China and the US, for example — whether they are in our interests or not.
Of course, May’s current plan to leave the single market and customs union is economically foolish. It would be bad for jobs and bad for public services, such as the NHS, because we would have less tax revenue to pay for them. But surrendering our role as a powerful European nation is against the national interest too.
The final deal May is likely to cut is going to hurt the UK on both fronts, because she won’t keep us in the whole of the single market even if parliament forces her to stay in some form of customs union. As a result, our services industries will get clobbered. But to hang on to even bits of the single market, we’ll lose control.
To avoid getting stuck with such a miserable deal, pro-Europeans need to attack it on both fronts — and explain why the only good option is to cancel Brexit. Concentrating just on the economic damage won’t be enough. It could sound too much like a rerun of David Cameron’s “project fear” campaign two years ago.
We also need to go in hard on how Brexit will mean a loss of power and a loss of pride. This language may not come naturally to some pro-Europeans, as such talk feels like it’s associated with Rees-Mogg and his ilk. But with the exception of their fishy stunts, the hardline Brexiters are now zipping their lips. They have concluded that any deal, however bad, is worthwhile so long as we quit the EU.
We must not let the Brexiters have a monopoly over sovereignty, power and patriotism. It’s time for us to take off the gloves and call them out for selling our whole country, not just fishing, down the river.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Hugo Dixon is chairman and editor-in-chief of infacts.org, a journalistic enterprise making the fact-based case for Britain to stay in the EU.
