Insight
Ten reflections on a sovereignty-first Brexit by Charles Grant 28 December 2020
The UK-EU trade deal prioritises sovereignty over economics. Politicians will soon be talking about how to improve the deal. Very little about the UK’s long-term relationship with the EU has been settled. One particular comment that I heard during the Brexit negotiations has lodged in my memory. In September 2020, a senior EU official working on Brexit said to me, with exasperation: “What is so weird about the British approach to Brexit is that when you talk to the guys in Number 10, they just don’t care about the economy; freedom from EU rules and courts is all that matters to them.” That denigration of economics helps to explain why the Trade and Co-operation Agreement (TCA), finalised by Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen on Christmas Eve, promises to deliver such a hard – or sovereigntyfirst – Brexit. The good news about the TCA is that the alternative of no deal would have been much worse for both the EU and the UK. The bad news is that the deal will diminish not just Britain’s economic ties to the continent, but also security, educational and human connections. Here are ten reflections on the Brexit process. 1. Achieving a free trade agreement (FTA) in ten months is unusually quick. Normally it takes the EU around five to seven years to negotiate an FTA. David Frost, Michel Barnier and their respective teams deserve congratulations for their perseverance and hard work. In one respect, the UK’s refusal to extend the transitional period beyond the end of 2020 may have helped, by concentrating minds. But in another respect that decision was questionable, since businesses have faced massive uncertainty and now have just a few days to adjust to new arrangements. It is inconceivable that everyone will be following the new rules on January 1st 2021. One reason why the deal was done quite speedily is that political leaders were more engaged than is common in FTA talks. But the negotiators could probably have moved even faster, had their political masters allowed them: much of the past three months has involved posturing for the benefit of domestic audiences. It probably suited both camps to leave the final compromises until the last moment, to show those audiences that they were fighting tenaciously, and to minimise the time for potentially awkward scrutiny in the UK and European Parliaments. CER INSIGHT: Ten reflections on a sovereignty-first Brexit 28DECEMBER 2020
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