Some three decades ago, you were cool if you could figure out how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Apparently, the secret was knowing the sequence in when and how to move the different interconnecting coloured squares at just the right time.
Some Rubik wizards could even do it behind their backs. Me? I’d consider it a major victory if I could get even just one face of the six with all 16 squares the same colour. And from what I can remember, it wasn’t often that indeed happened.
I think that the Eurocrats in the Berlaymont Building in Brussels must feel as if they’re dealing with a Rubik’s cube in which all the pieces keep moving and nothing stays in place when it comes to Britain and Brexit. If they were surgeons, it’s be like trying to do open heart surgery which the patient is still awake.
As someone remarked recently, it’d be a lot easier if the Brits knew exactly what it meant when they voted No, and what they were voting No to. With nine months left before some sort of a Brexit deal is supposed to happen — or just four months before some sort of a Brexit deal is supposed to be concluded, no one in Brussels, and much less so in Britain where they voted for it, has any idea of what it all means.
It’s a mess. And with the European Union leaders and the Commission meeting in three weeks time, the two biggest hurdles of all — in this whole befuddled, bemuddled, bemused, confused, convoluted behemoth of a dystopian divorce from Europe — still sit on the table. The customs union and the Irish border.
These are the pair of elephants in the cabinet room in 10 Downing Street, and no one sees them. Or more rightly, they’re not looking at them and are hoping they will just somehow go away. As it sits right now, and with those two political pachyderms squatting there, there is no Brexit deal. And it’s about time the Brits realised that.
Michel Barnier, the former French minister and the man responsible for leading the EU in the Brexit talks, uses the language of the British playing “hide and seek” and claims that the UK’s Prime Minister, Theresa May, is attempting to pin the blame for any damaging consequences due to a lack of progress on Brussels.
Sir Ivan Rogers, a sage and savvy squire who was Whitehall’s former chief diplomat at the EU, puts it another, equally disparaging but more revealing way — and in words that pull few diplomatic punches — Britain is being misled by the “buccaneering blather” of hard Brexiters rather than facing the reality that a customs deal had to be done.
Sir Ivan can say these things now that he is retired, is no longer constrained by the niceties of his office, nor by control from political masters. He was both the chief Brussels adviser to David Cameron and Theresa May — and if she needs to get a Brexit deal done, done quickly, and done with a framework that will cause minimal damage to the British economy, Sir Ivan should be brought back in, sat at the table, and get on with getting the whole thing done and dusted.
But May this June day is in no position to make such a decision — she sits at the head of a cabinet so riven by divides that no move is better than any.
Damage to the economy?
Last week, the Bank of England issued a report that the Brexit mess so far had cost every family in the UK some £900 (Dh4,390) so far — the cost of a week’s all-inclusive family holiday in Spain or Greece. Nope, the British tabloid press that so adamantly backs Brexit didn’t run those headlines: “Brexit horror! Bo Jo’s follies steals your jollies”, or “No Place in the Sun for Eu!”
And we’re just getting started.
Sir Ivan has said he despairs of “people professing themselves free traders who have only a hazy understanding about multilateral, regional and bilateral free trade deals, have never negotiated one — but know it’s straightforward, once one has left the EU.”
And just who are those deals going to be made with? The US?
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, trade negotiators from Canada, Mexico and the US sat down and talked long and hard on the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). It’s worked well for decades, so well indeed that the likes of the Big Three automakers of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler had seamless operations across the borders. Parts came from plants in Mexico, were shipped north, and the Big Three liked that Canada’s health care system lowered labour costs — US health insurance premiums are prohibitive.
There were more cars made in Ontario in some quarters, for example, than there were south across the border in Michigan. It, Nafta, worked well until someone in Washington decided otherwise at the drop of a tweet. And that’s who hardline Brexiters would like to do business with.
As far as Sir Ivan is concerned, if only May would drop some of her red lines, there’s a decent deal to be done.
He sees some sort of quasi-single market deal, paying something for it, living with the European Court of Justice and its jurisprudence and jurisdiction in goods for the Brits. In return, the EU might give a little when it comes to disapplying the freedom of movement principle. That’s the same one that allows thousands of east Europeans to work cleaning cars and flipping burgers in Britain while sending high-value euros back to their low-value home nations.
Here’s the thing too. Remember all those refugees that three summers ago trudged from the Middle East and made their way to Munich and Mannheim, Paris and Prague? The EU leadership found a politically expedient way to end that whole freedom of movement thing. So, let’s not talk about principles then.
If Britain wants a deal done, it has little time to make that happen. But for that to happen, the prime minister has to lead. And that hasn’t happened yet.
