John Humphrys - Brexit: Now the Real Battle Begins

March 30, 2017, 2:37 PM GMT+0

It was called ‘the phoney war’. The period since last June’s referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union was marked by positioning, skirmishing, optimism, pessimism and much else. But there was no real ‘fighting’, no victories won, battles lost or casualties taken. Now, with the triggering of Article 50, the real engagement begins. The complexity of the detail will be daunting. The collapse of the negotiations may frequently seem imminent. But where, in outline, do we want to end up? And how much of a say, if any, do we, the public, want in deciding whether to accept or reject any deal that finally emerges?

From the start Theresa May seems to have interpreted the referendum result as requiring what has been dubbed a ‘hard Brexit’. In particular the Prime Minister concluded that the message of the Brexiters that most resonated with the public was the phrase ‘take back control’. So, in order not to be accused of betraying the 52% who voted for Brexit, and to honour her own dictum that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, she made ‘control’ the yardstick of her approach.

In specific terms that means Britain must make its own laws; that it should extricate itself from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, the EU’s highest court; it must take back control of immigration; and it must free itself to negotiate its own trade deals. The consequence is that she has brushed aside as unrealistic the suggestion of some Brexit campaigners who claimed Britain could leave the EU yet still remain a member of the single market and the customs union. The Prime Minister has concluded that Britain must leave both: hence the claim she is pursuing a ‘hard Brexit’.

But Mrs May has also gone out of her way to deny that she sees Brexit merely in negative terms. On the contrary, she says that Brexit provides the opportunity for Britain to forge a new, positive, maximally cooperative relationship with the bloc of 27 countries constituting the remaining EU. The whole tone of her Article 50 letter and of her statement to the House of Commons on Wednesday was intended to reassure our soon-to-be former partners that an independent Britain wants the EU not to break up but to be strong and for us to have a close, cooperative relationship with it.

In particular, she wants Britain to negotiate as free a trade deal as possible with the EU. She has also acknowledged that in order to minimise disruption Britain will import wholesale the thousands of EU laws and regulations currently in force, incorporating them in British law via the Great Repeal Bill, a draft of which was published on Thursday, leaving power with ministers to amend or repeal them at their leisure. She has hinted too that Britain may remain a member of various EU agencies to save us the bother of setting up our own.

In short, it could be a long time before things start to look very different. As experts seem to agree that it will take years to settle on a lasting trade deal, the final shape of Britain’s new relationship with the EU is likely to emerge so far ahead that it is now anyone’s guess what it will ultimately look like.

In the meantime, the clock is ticking. Having triggered Article 50, Britain is committed to leaving in two years’ time. The focus will be on the urgent issues that must be settled before then. How they are handled will affect not only the final outcome but also public opinion and with it the political climate in which the Prime Minister will find herself negotiating.

That climate could turn dramatically. Any one of several pressing issues might change the mood in Britain both for and against Brexit.

First, there is a fundamental disagreement about how the negotiations should even proceed. EU negotiators, backed by the most powerful figure in the EU, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, are insisting that the terms of our leaving should be settled before anyone turns to what the new relationship should be. Britain wants the two talked about in tandem. Only on the issue of the rights of existing EU citizens living in the UK and British citizens living in EU countries does the British government agree that a deal should be sorted out first. A bust-up on this ‘process’ issue could scupper the negotiations before they have really get started.

Secondly, there’s the ‘bill’ for Brexit. Some sources claim the EU will demand up to €60 billion from Britain for the privilege of leaving. Some hard-line Brexiters (including UKIP) say the bill should be zero and that the EU ought actually to hand back some assets. The government has let it be known that it has secured a legal opinion to the effect that there is no obligation to pay any form of leaving bill (a view endorsed by a House of Lords committee), but Mrs May is playing her cards close to her chest and it’s thought she may offer money to lubricate a broader deal. This may incense hardliners. The public may think any such payment is a very long way from the extra £350m a week for the NHS they thought they were promised during the referendum campaign.

Then there’s the issue of trade. The EU seems likely to demand that if Britain wants to leave the single market yet still have access to it, then it will have to accept that it will still be subject to the European Court of Justice as settler of disputes. The EU is likely to insist too on some degree of free movement of labour as a price of access. Both would cut against Mrs May’s aim of ‘taking back control’.

But the Prime Minister seems to think she has a strong bargaining chip. In her Commons statement she caused an intake of breath around Europe by linking the trade issue to security matters. She said: “A failure to reach agreement means our cooperation in the fight against crime and terrorism would be in question.” This was widely interpreted as an attempt at blackmail: if you don’t give us the trade deal we want, we’ll withdraw our security and intelligence help in fighting crime and terrorism. Many in Europe expressed outrage at this implied threat, not least because it is as much in Britain’s interests to cooperate on terrorism as it is Europe’s. David Davis, the Brexit secretary, denied there was any blackmail threat involved, telling me on the Today programme that it was simply a fact that if no deal was agreed, existing EU-based arrangements would lapse without replacement once Britain left.

So, as we all know, there is a huge amount to be settled. The Prime Minister has said that she’d prefer no deal to a bad deal. But that would put paid to her ambition to forge a positive new relationship with the EU. And she has a reputation for stubbornness. That suggests she’ll keep negotiating for as long as she can. But that in turn implies that she could well end up agreeing to compromises that please neither side. Some supporters of Brexit might start taking a tougher line, saying Britain shouldn’t put up with any of this and simply walk away. Gerard Batten, UKIP’s Brexit spokesman, said this week that Article 50 negotiations were a ‘trap’: “two years of jaw-jaw will just allow the EU to work out how to do us over”. Eurosceptic Tory backbenchers might start to agree; so might the public. Equally, others might conclude that the emerging price of leaving isn’t worth the candle and start switching to the Remain side. Either could produce a difficult climate for Mrs May.

Public opinion may shift far and unpredictably from where it has remained during the ‘phoney war’. That raises the question of whether it should be consulted again in some way once the outlines of a final settlement (or non-settlement) emerge.

The Prime Minister has said that Parliament will have its say but that brings risks for her, given her small majority. Labour has respected the referendum result in principle (refusing, for example, to block the triggering of Article 50). But it hasn’t given the government a blank cheque. Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, this week laid down six conditions for continued support, including the demand that the final deal will provide the ‘exact same benefits’ as remaining in the single market and customs union provide. That looks like a tall order (David Davis says it’s the government’s aim, not its promise), paving the way for Labour to vote against a final Brexit deal. The party’s haemorrhaging of pro-EU members on the issue gives it an incentive to start opposing Brexit, or at least Mrs May’s version of it. Pro-EU Tory backbenchers have also hinted that they might vote against the Great Repeal Bill (which includes repeal of the 1972 Accession Act) if they think the negotiations are going in a harmful direction.

The Liberal Democrats continue to insist that the whole business of leaving the EU is a ‘calamity’ and are demanding a second referendum on the grounds that if it was right for there to be a referendum on the principle of Brexit, there ought to be another on the final specifics: the public should be allowed to change its mind. The former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Butler, seemed to endorse this when, in a letter to the Times last week, he pointed out that the Prime Minister’s argument that it would be unfair for the Scottish people to face a referendum on Scottish independence before they knew the terms of the final Brexit deal, applied more widely to the British people and Brexit itself: they had voted last June before they could know those terms so it would only be fair to have another vote once they did know them.

The Prime Minister is resisting a second referendum now but who knows what she may think if public opinion changes.

So what should Britain be aiming for now that battle has been joined? Is ‘taking back control’ over immigration and extricating ourselves from the jurisdiction of the ECJ more or less important than securing a trade deal with the EU and forging a positive new relationship with our old partners? Should we use cooperation on security as a bargaining chip to secure a good trade deal? Should we be prepared to pay an exit bill or not? Is no deal better than a bad deal? And should the public be offered a second referendum, allowing us the option of remaining in the EU after all?

What’s your view? Let us know.