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This, it is fair to say, is a delicate moment to be penning a Brexit Briefing. After almost four years of tortuous negotiations it appears as if the EU-UK future partnership negotiations are very close to bearing fruit, limited though it may be.
Brexit-watching these days is an exhausting business; like being a seismologist monitoring a volcano on the verge of eruption — it is clear from measurements of external activity she’s about to blow, but even those with the best knowledge cannot say with certainty when the rising internal pressure will bring those wispy fumaroles exploding into life.
But there are clear signs that we are indeed closing in on that point. In London a parliamentary timetable is being fleshed out; MPs are being put on standby for lightning pre-Christmas approval of the deal; and the “pitch is being rolled” with Eurosceptics.
The level playing field arrangements being negotiated by David Frost are now in fact “freedom clauses” that will enable the UK to diverge, and EU diplomats that were frowning but two weeks ago are now happy for the British to spin the deal any way they like — so long as they sign it, and stick to it.
The devil will, of course, be in the detail into which the vast majority of people will not delve, but Boris Johnson’s overarching aim will be to have won enough to make the wider political point that on January 1 Britain will once again be fully “sovereign” and the country’s “freedom”, if it were ever lost, will have been recaptured from Brussels.
(How and why that “freedom” came to be measured by the height and breadth of the wall we are erecting between ourselves and our nearest trading partners is a question for another day. Both sides bear some responsibility, but for now both sides need to focus on the need for a deal — any deal).
To that end, the negotiations on the level playing field seem to have settled on how to manage UK divergence, essentially creating a “reactive” rather than proactive mechanism, which is a significant move from the EU’s opening position on dynamic alignment.
In fact, it is the scale of that concession that explains why — if the UK will not, for example, sign up to an “ex ante” state aid regulator for the UK’s own internal market, or grant EU companies the rights to enforcement in UK courts — the EU should want a “reactive” governance mechanism set with much more of a hair-trigger than Mr Johnson would like.
So this discussion is now not about keeping the UK in lockstep with the EU but, as one EU diplomat put it, what to do “procedurally” when either the UK or EU modernises their respective legislation. It is about balancing British lust for “freedom”, with EU demands for nimbleness of retaliatory options. The important thing is that both sides seem to have — finally — homed in on a mutually acceptable solution, even if they are still arguing over the calibration of the firing mechanism itself.
Which brings us to the issue of fish, which both sides always in general agree cannot be allowed to blow up the entire free trade agreement — fishing accounts for 1 per cent of EU gross domestic product and 0.1 per cent of the UK’s — and yet, when it comes down to the particulars of fish, diplomats on both sides caution they are still far apart.
The EU continues to want to insist on a linkage between the fishing agreement and the wider economic partnership — so that if the UK reneges on the deal and closes off access to EU boats, EU member states can retaliate in other fields. The word is that the UK continues to resist this.
The UK still doesn’t want to give the EU any access to the politically sensitive six to 12 nautical miles zone, where small boats fish in historical fishing grounds that cannot — unlike big, corporate-run deep-sea trawlers — be easily compensated for by other stocks or quotas. For France and Belgium these waters are key.
A recently introduced British demand for EU boats to land a high percentage of their catch in UK ports and moves to restrict ownership rights have caused alarm among Dutch and Spanish diplomats whose industries stand to be much more affected by such deals.
All these issues need to be finessed while, at the same time, Michel Barnier has at least as much difficulty triangulating intra-EU fishing “red lines” as he does negotiating away British ones.
There is a dangerous tendency on both sides to assume that the other would, surely, not squander a deal over fish if the FTA covering the remainder of all trade was agreed — but if both sides cling to that position, it is easy to see how this could drag on a while yet.
All of which is to say that if we do not get a deal by Friday — as some hoped earlier this week — it may well be difficult wrangles over fish access that are to blame.
Still, on the positive side, with Christmas closing in (always a driver of deals in Brussels for exhausted negotiating teams) there is a prevailing sense in London and Brussels that Mr Johnson will sign it off sooner or later.
Brexit in numbers
If we are indeed heading for a FTA with Europe, one measure of how much work will need to be done to absorb the deal was this week’s story about the huge over-subscription to the government’s Port Infrastructure Fund.
The £200m kitty for new border inspection posts that will need to be up and running on July 1 when the UK government brings in full controls on goods arriving from the EU attracted bids worth more than £450m from 54 UK ports.
Rather than find more money, the Cabinet Office winnowed the requests down, identifying 41 successful bids and then applying a 33 per cent hair cut across the board, leaving pretty much everyone unhappy, it seems.
Dover was particularly upset, receiving just £33,000 when it had bid for £33m to double the number of French passport kiosks at the port — but others like Portsmouth, which nominally “won” £17.1m of funding, was grumbling because it was still £8m short of what it needed to fund its plans.
Given that it costs £10m-£12m to build a single border control post it is not perhaps all that surprising — given the new demands on both east and west UK coasts — that £200m was not going to cover it.
Source: Economy - ft.com
