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It was David Cameron, when pondering the pros and cons of holding a Brexit referendum who observed that leaving the EU “could unleash demons of which ye know not”.
As we enter the third month of life after Brexit, with increasingly open name-calling between London and Brussels and growing constitutional tensions within the UK’s own Union, Cameron’s remark looks worryingly prescient.
What the former prime minister perhaps did not foresee was the extent to which a “sovereignty-first” Brexit of the kind negotiated by Boris Johnson and David Frost places such inexorable pressure on physical borders, and by extension the politics that surrounds them.
It might be tempting to think of the seemingly endless flow of “business red tape” stories as somehow separate from the wider political ructions caused by Brexit, but they are inextricably intertwined. Borders breed tension.
The decision to quit the EU single market and the customs unions, and seek zero-alignment on agrifood, while pulling out of pan-European structures governing everything from medicines, chemicals and aviation to finance and fishing have all served to build back the border.
And it is that thickening of the physical border — both in the English Channel and the Irish Sea — that in turn drives the political frictions now on show.
The EU being sticklers against British shellfish producers and mussel farmers; the EU’s ill-fated decision to threaten a border in Ireland to avoid leakage of Covid-19 vaccines; the over-zealous (as the British would see it) implementation of the Irish Sea border all work to fan the flames of confrontation.
By the same token, unilateral British actions on Northern Ireland trigger the threat of legal action from Brussels. Frost writes an article for the Sunday Telegraph promising he will be “standing up for our interests . . . as a sovereign country in full control of our own destiny” and the EU, predictably enough, bristles right back.
As one EU diplomat puts it, the impression in Europe is that Frost is choosing “enmity over co-operation” to forestall the relationship taking off. “This doesn’t go down well in other European capitals — they are sovereign as well and do not want to be stage hands in the narrative Frost is spinning.”
There will, I fear, be more and more of this — spats over fishing grounds, financial services equivalence and the provision of professional services (once Covid-19 lifts and the lack of a mobility chapter in the EU-UK trade deal starts to bite) are all waiting in the wings. All of these disputes are founded in the decision to build back the border.
Internally within the United Kingdom, the choice of a Brexit that aimed to satisfy primarily English national sentiment, is now visibly unsettling the political balance in Northern Ireland and, looking into the not too distant future, potentially Scotland and Wales too.
The trade border in the Irish Sea created by the protocol (which requires all goods flowing from Great Britain to Northern Ireland to comply with EU customs rules) offends Tory Brexiters and Unionists, who resent the division of the United Kingdom.
That resentment leads to potentially dangerous places. This week Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leader of the House, told a Conservative Home podcast that, contrary to what some might say, the UK did have a “selfish interest” in Northern Ireland.
That’s a phrase that resonates deeply in Ireland north and south, since it was the declaration by Margaret Thatcher’s Northern Ireland secretary Peter Brooke that the UK had “no selfish strategic or economic interest” in the region that signalled to Republicans that the UK was ready to engage in what became the Good Friday Agreement.
Rees-Mogg’s remarks, wittingly or otherwise, are just one example of how that physical trade border fuels the political indignation that prompts UK ministers to put their fingers in the delicate constitutional balance in Northern Ireland. Such is the power of borders to unsettle the status quo.
Scotland and Wales, in their own way, are now feeling similar forces. The hard border with Europe drives the need for creating internal market structures in the UK that — in the view of the devolved governments in Edinburgh and Cardiff — drive a coach and horses through the powers handed them by devolution.
The much closer relationship negotiated by Theresa May — rejected as we know by her party as insufficiently sovereign — would have obviated a good many of these issues, from food standards to state aid.
The Welsh government is currently engaged in a legal action to challenge the UK internal market legislation on the grounds that it effectively repealed parts of the Government of Wales Act 2006 and gives UK ministers “Henry VIII” powers that ride across the devolution settlement.
In a similar vein, this week the Scottish government produced a detailed paper arguing why it feels that UK internal market legislation is so problematic — necessitating what is emotively called a “power grab” by Westminster, as a direct function of implementing a sovereignty-first Brexit.
The ability of the British government to strike a trade deal with the US, for example, and to be able to promise that the resulting chlorinated chicken or hormone-raised beef will be sold in Scotland — which voted against Brexit and currently controls its own food standards — is just one example of the troubles that could lie ahead.
Similarly, the powers handed to ministers in Westminster to sign off spending and grants, all badged under a Union flag, clips the wings of devolved governments that decry the “funding grab” in London.
A softer, closer Brexit — and back in 2016 even hardline Brexiters were not talking overtly about leaving the single market and customs union — would have radically shrunk the structural tensions that the English government now faces on multiple fronts: with Europe, in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It is, of course, too late for that now.
It is not impossible, in theory, to manage these tensions, to contain those demons of which Cameron spoke — the Irish Sea border needs to be allowed to bed in; the Scottish and Welsh governments require a more flexible, consultative approach from London; the relationship with Brussels needs refocus on the mutual benefits of trade — but on the evidence of these first 12 weeks, the omens for pragmatism trumping politics are not good.
Brexit in numbers
It is worth pointing out that, while the Conservative party’s decision to go for the hardest possible Brexit sets in train the confrontational dynamic we are now seeing, the EU (and for that matter the Scottish National party) play their role too. In short, it takes two to tango.
On the EU side, Emmanuel Macron’s France has often worked to drive the EU’s internal conversation towards taking a harder line with the UK, both during last year’s negotiations and since.
A recent YouGov poll showing that the French public reckons that the British might get a good deal out of Brexit perhaps goes some way to explain the positioning in Paris.
As Mujtaba Rahman, the head of EU policy at the Eurasia Group consultancy, who is a close observer of Elysée politics, puts it: “Next year’s election will again be a contest between Macron’s Europeanism and centrism and Le Pen’s national populism. There’s no benefit to him in the perception that the UK has succeeded on the outside.”
Yet one more reason to fear that rough waters lie ahead.
Source: Economy - ft.com
