Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? E-Book

Ian Dunt

• Herausgeber: Canbury
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

'Admirably brief and necessarily brutal... Highly recommended.' — NICK COHEN, THE SPECTATOR 'Compact and easily digestible. I'd encourage anyone who is confused, fascinated or frustrated by Brexit to read this book – you'll be far wiser by the end of it.' — CAROLINE LUCAS MP 'I would strongly recommend Ian Dunt's excellent guide.Dunt has taken the extraordinary step of asking a set of experts what they think. I learnt a lot.' — PHILIP COLLINS, PROSPECT Britain's departure from the European Union is riddled with myth and misinformation — yet the risks are very real. Brexit could diminish the UK's power, throw its legal system into turmoil, and lower the standard of living of 65m citizens. In this revised bestseller, Ian Dunt explains why leaving the world's largest trading bloc will leave Britain poorer and key industries like finance and pharma struggling to operate.  He argues that Brexit is unlikely to cause a big economic implosion, but will instead act like a slow puncture in the UK's national prosperity and global influence. Based on extensive interviews with trade and legal experts, Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? is a searching exploration of Brexit shorn of the wishful thinking of its supporters in the British media and Parliament. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ian Dunt is a columnist for the I newspaper and appears as a pundit on BBC TV, Sky News and Al-Jazeera. With Dorian Lynskey, he presents the Origin Story podcast and is a regular contributor to the Oh God, What Now? podcast.  His most recent book, How To Be A Liberal (Canbury, 2020), is an epic history of the spread of the ideas underpinning personal freedom.  EXTRACT What is the European project? Britain has always been deeply ignorant of the motivation behind the European project. The most common British response to European politicians is indifference, followed by frustration, followed by mockery. But without understanding Europe, you can't effectively negotiate with Europe. Ultimately, the European Union arose out of the ashes of the Second World War. In 1951, to prevent future disputes over resources, six nations agreed to trade freely in steel and coal. In 1957, the nations of the Coal and Steel Community (France, West Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg) signed the Treaty of Rome, founding the European Economic Community, which created a bigger common market and a customs union. Over time this common market attracted more nations and became the European Union. For years Britain stood outside this club. In 1951, Prime Minister Clement Attlee declined an invitation to join the Coal and Steel Community, dismissing it as 'six nations, four of whom we had to rescue from the other two.' Britain also spurned the European Economic Community in 1958. While the European states looked to each other for peace and prosperity, the UK, with its still large empire and its special relationship with the United States, gazed overseas. Britain and the Continent were divided not just by geography, but by conflict. A great deal of the British psyche derives from the fact that we have not been invaded for centuries. We went through incredible suffering during the world wars, but it fell from the sky. It did not march down the streets in jackboots. On the mainland, that trauma was and is personal: the social memory of a neighbour's betrayal, death camps, and tyranny. The EU is considered a barrier to conflict and carries an emotional weight we struggle to understand. Our MPs underestimate the resolve of Europe to preserve political unity. Extracted from Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? by Ian Dunt (Canbury Press)  

Leseprobe

BREXIT

What the Hell Happens Now?

Ian Dunt

Contents

Introduction

What was that?

What did we vote for?

What is Article 50?

What is the European project?

What is the single market?

What are the politics of the European Union?

What about freedom of movement?

What about the economy?

Norway

Switzerland

Turkey

Canada

The World Trade Organisation

How can we keep the UK together?

Scotland

Ireland

What are we going to do?

What do the Brexit ministers want?

How talented are they?

What tools do they have?

What is the context?

What happens after Brexit?

Postscript

The Experts

Acknowledgements

References

Introduction

31 March 2019

Big Ben strikes midnight and Britain is out of the European Union. The talks have fallen apart in mutual acrimony. The UK has not secured continued membership of the single market. It doesn’t even have access. It is out of the treaty which waives tax on imports and exports. It has no trade deals with Europe or anyone else. It is on its own.

In the early morning, a lorry is loaded in Glasgow with radio equipment bound for the Czech Republic. When the lorry arrives at Calais, it is stopped by a customs official. Until today, Britain has enjoyed a seamless trading relationship with Europe. It means that European Union countries recognise UK standards and paperwork and vice-versa, allowing goods to be transported over borders without additional checks. Now the paperwork is worthless. Everything has to be checked.

The lorry is stopped and detained. Inspectors come on board and take samples to send off for testing. Everything will have to be assessed, from the information on the packaging to the environmental impact of the components. This will take several days, during which the lorry is barred from entering the European market.

Behind the Glasgow lorry, several other vehicles are taken to one side. By sunset, the bottleneck on the French side means that lorries can no longer drive onto Calais-bound ferries at Dover. They queue on the slow lane of the A2. Within a few days, the tailback stretches back to London.

For exporters of animal products, like meat or eggs, the problems are more severe. They are only allowed into the EU through specially designated entry inspection posts, but it has been so long since the UK needed them for trade with Europe that none exist. British exports of salmon, beef, and lamb collapse overnight. In Westminster, ministers demand the inspection posts be established immediately, but they have limited leverage with their European partners. A key export industry starts to rot.

The problems aren’t restricted to goods heading to the Continent. The EU has mutual recognition agreements with Australia, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, New Zealand and the United States, mimicking the bureaucracy-free trade on the Continent. British goods for the US had been verified by virtue of their EU accreditation. Now they also need to be checked. Shipments heading for America’s west coast are stopped at customs, detained and sent off for inspection.

In the complex world of freight, with one shipment arriving as the other leaves, the effect is devastating. Brexit detonates like a bomb across the world’s trade networks.

Thousands of large businesses start haemorrhaging cash, but the effect is not limited to goods going out – it hits those coming in, too. Laptop computers from China and Japan are stopped, alongside jeans from the US, French cheese and wine and chocolates from Belgium. Gaps start to appear on shop shelves.

Other bureaucratic requirements re-emerge from the past like zombies. One of them is proof of ‘country of origin’. Products entering the European Customs Union, which waives import and export duty, must be checked to ensure that they are paying the right tariffs. This is incredibly detailed and laborious. Each stage in a global manufacturing process must be accounted for. Firms need to present paperwork detailing the origin of every component part of their products.

Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs hires an army of inspectors to speed up the process, but they are trying to learn on the go. Many products don’t receive their papers in time and don’t make it to the border. They sit in the stockroom. In the first year alone, the country of origin requirement costs Britain £25 billion. By 2030 it has led to a 4.5% reduction in GDP.

Products which do make it past border control have tariffs slapped on them. For decades they had been traded freely in the single market, but those days are over. Cars heading from Britain to Europe – almost half the vehicles made in the UK – are hit by a 10% tariff. Electronic goods are badly affected, as are warships and commercial liners. British-made cigarettes, most of which head to Europe, are hit by crippling 57% tariffs.

Britain’s aerospace industry, the second largest in the world, is damaged. The rates of the tariff themselves are fairly modest, hovering between 2.7% and 7.7%, but they are being put not just on the finished product when it is sent to Europe. They are also applied to the components shipped from Europe to the UK to make the product. Shares in BAE Systems, Rolls Royce and Airbus plummet. These businesses’ costs have rocketed, and their product has shot up in price, without any of the additional revenue flowing to them.

Multiple parts of the British economy, from space stations to cakes, suffer a sudden hit. Companies that still make tangible physical products in Britain – Unilever, British American Tobacco, Imperial and Penguin among them – are the first to feel the pain.

The big banks in the City of London had been dreading this day. They did what they could to prepare, sacking thousands of middle and low income workers and moving their jobs to EU states. They are desperate to maintain their ‘passports’, a legal mechanism which allows them to sell financial products across Europe, but to do so they must prove to European regulators that they have a significant presence on the Continent. So they take the cheaper, back-office admin roles and move them. Anything else would be a waste of a crisis. This way they can kill two birds with one stone: minimising salary costs by transferring the jobs to countries with lower incomes and reducing the damage done by Brexit. They pack off a few high-level bankers and an executive or two to go with them.

If they are lucky, firms transferred enough functions in time for the 31 March deadline. But others got caught up in another bottleneck – this time of financial authorities. The sleepy, understaffed regulators in Paris, Warsaw, Frankfurt and Luxembourg couldn’t handle the demand for recognition from City firms. Many companies cannot now sell financial products to customers on the mainland. They lose tens of millions of pounds of sales as customers drift off to competitors.

The transfers cut the capacity of London’s financial services sector by 10%. Within a year, the City has lost 100,000 jobs and £12 billion in revenue.

The pound plunges again. The price of British government bonds rises. Foreign direct investment falls further. The deficit begins to look unsustainable.

Ironically, immigration starts to decline. Not just from Europe, where immigration controls have been introduced, but from across the world. The economy is tanking and Britain is no longer a country of opportunity.

Years pass, but 2019 comes to be seen as the start of a significant downsizing in the power of the City. Financial services don’t have a heart attack. They bleed out.

European regulators start making increased demands on the investment banks with branches in their cities. It starts with requests for more staff but soon includes additional requirements on risk management and capital investment. Firms have to divert more resources to the Continent, but gradually a political dimension develops too. If Europe is where the regulatory decisions are made, perhaps that is where they need to focus their efforts. What began as a technical requirement starts to change into a general financial migration. More and more functions are transferred to the Continent. Less and less money flows into the UK Treasury.

Nissan’s car plant in Sunderland is able to survive due to a deal with the government, in which it was offered relief for any losses it would suffer from Brexit. A deal is also offered to BMW. The symbolic effect of Minis with Union Jack roofs being produced in the Czech Republic would have been too much for ministers to bear. Jaguar Land Rover considers the location of its assembly plants in Birmingham, Halewood and Solihull and its three research and development facilities around Warwick. It’s not so much the 10% increase in the price of cars, but future regulation that is the worry. Cars are changing. Driverless technology is turning what used to be a lump of metal around some tech into a tech product with a metal shell. Regulations established now will be with producers for years and they are being made in Brussels, not London. Jaguar Land Rover needs to be whispering into the right person’s ear, but British ministers no longer have a seat at the table.

Other less prominent industries warn that they are about to go into a tailspin. Aerospace firms producing commercial and fighter planes in places like Yeovil, Bristol, Stevenage and Portsmouth start laying off workers.

UK negotiators head to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) where Brexit campaigners have long insisted they can fall back onto standard-issue trading rules. But there are no rules governing what Britain has done. They go into a meeting with WTO legal advisers who are divided on how Britain should proceed.

The UK has been trading under an EU umbrella for decades. Now it tries to extract its tariff and subsidy arrangements from the EU and lay them before the rest of the WTO. In response, the EU initiates a formal dispute. That starts an avalanche. WTO rules allow any country that feels it has been unfairly treated to trigger a dispute. Suddenly Britain’s fall-back insurance policy looks like a nightmare scenario, with 163 countries able to raise disputes against it on any aspect of its trading arrangements. Some disputes are legitimate. Others, like that made by Argentina, appear to be a way to leverage British vulnerability to regain control of the Falklands. Russia watches from the sidelines, calculating how it might benefit.

Britain argues that it is still party to an EU arrangement preventing the sale of cheap Chinese steel in Europe. Once those floodgates open, the UK knows domestic steel will be unable to compete. China reacts furiously, demanding that Britain demonstrate domestic injury and unfair trade. But the UK doesn’t have an investigating authority capable of undertaking trade remedy investigations. It cannot fight back because it doesn’t have the regulatory infrastructure. Workers in factories like Port Talbot start to fear for their livelihoods.

The WTO disputes mount up, all demanding high degrees of technical expertise and negotiating experience. British teams do their best, but they are beset by problems from every angle.

In European cities across the Continent, British professionals find they are unable to practise because their qualifications are no longer recognised. Insurance firms, veterinary clinics, lawyers, medical professionals, architects and countless others find they have to shut down their company and return to the UK.

No deal has been put in place for legal rulings, so countries across Europe stop recognising court decisions on divorce and child maintenance and other issues made in London. Unseen and mostly unreported, hundreds of single mothers in the UK go without payments from their former partners. A British man who divorced his wife and married again in Italy suddenly finds that the papers are no longer recognised. He is in a state of marital limbo. A hefty chunk of the work done by London’s once-thriving lawyers vanishes.

Regulation fails. Britain did not have time to set up all the authorities required to manage industries ranging from patents to medicine. Pharmaceutical firms are thrown into chaos. British regulators are unable to take on the full workload of the European Medicines Agency, so cannot authorise the sale of anti-inflammatory pills, eczema lotions and other treatments to UK patients. British pharmaceutical development slumps into a state of regulatory bafflement.

Regulations across society are in flux. Emergency provisions are made for Single European Sky — which ensures jets fly safely and efficiently — to maintain regulatory authority over UK airspace. But other areas fall into disrepair, causing uncertainty across production lines to complement the chaos in the trading networks.

Against this backdrop, Britain seeks trade deals with its closest allies: Australia and the US. Both countries are wary of talking to the UK without knowing its final status with Europe or the WTO, but they agree to open initial negotiations.

Ahead of talks, the UK prime minister and the US president hold a joint press conference. Theresa May says it shows countries are still keen to trade with the UK, while her American counterpart confirms the US commitment to the special relationship. Then the doors of the negotiating room close and the two leaders are replaced by grim-faced trade experts.

Britain had a chronic shortage of negotiators during the EU talks and the situation has not improved. The ones facing the American team are those who are not required to fight the fires at the WTO. Many are civil servants who have had to read up on trade in the years since Brexit. They face highly specialised trade experts who have been doing this their entire careers.

The public rhetoric disappears. It is replaced by hard-headed demands. US trade officials inform their British counterparts of the reality of the situation. The UK is in a position of unique and historic vulnerability. Investor confidence has dissolved. Its economy is facing its most significant shock since the Second World War. It has no time. It has no negotiating capacity. But Washington wants to help. It is prepared to rush a trade deal through Congress. It could take less than two years. But for this to be achievable, the UK needs to accept all of its demands. The Americans slide a piece of paper across the desk. The British team read the demands: they are horrendous. Consumer protections are reduced across the board, along with environmental regulations and safeguards for the NHS.

UK civil servants have little option but to capitulate. The only way to protect what remains of the British economy is to sell off British sovereignty. The control wrestled from Brussels is now sold off to the highest bidder, behind closed doors, in a conference room in Washington.

What was that?

That was the worst case scenario. It is also Britain’s current destination.

It does not need to happen, even now. These are not the consequences of Brexit itself. They are the consequences of a chaotic, hard Brexit. They are what happens when there is insufficient planning, insufficient thinking and a preference for emotion over reason.

Britain can prevent this from happening. All it requires is an intelligent ministerial team, a workable timetable, hundreds of trade experts, a restrained political debate and economic calm.

Britain currently has none of these things.

How did we get here? How did one of the world’s most sophisticated political and economic powers find itself driving towards a cliff edge? How did the UK become so lost in rhetoric that this scenario would even be conceivable?

At the core of Britain’s current dilemma is a refusal to engage with objective fact. The debate about Brexit was lost, almost as soon as it began, in a tribal and emotional dogfight which bore little relation to reality. That approach continued when the Conservative Party fell apart after the vote and was put back together by Theresa May.

The leading figures in the ministerial team handling Brexit do not seem to understand the obstacles they must overcome, or the profound consequences of failure. They have misunderstood the EU, misunderstood Article 50, misunderstood the WTO, misunderstood the economy and misunderstood the legal framework in which they must now operate.

This book is an attempt to address that. Based on extensive research and discussions with leading experts in politics, the law, markets and Europe, it maps the road ahead, with its many hazards and dangers. It is a short, readable guide to the biggest story of the decade.

The first step towards preventing a catastrophe is understanding that one is looming.

What did we vote for?

The starting point for our current difficulties lies in the referendum question itself.

On 23 June 2016, voters in the UK were asked: ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union.’ The results were:

Remain 16,141,241 (48.1%)

Leave 17,410,742 (51.9%)

Over one million more people wanted to leave. Unless there is a sudden and unexpected change in the political weather, Britain is leaving. But there are many different ways to leave the EU.

You don’t have to be in the European Union to be part of the customs union mentioned in the last chapter. Nor do you have to be in the European Union to be in the single market.

The single market is the big trading arrangement that allows member states to sell and buy each other’s goods and services as if they were in the same country. Most of the members are in the EU, but there are ways Britain can leave the EU and retain the benefits of the single market – like Norway does.

There are some other European organisations that Britain could join instead of being in the EU. One of these is the European Free Trade Association. This is an independent grouping of non-EU nations who are mostly members of the single market.

These are a few of the options the government could take:

Leave the EU and stay in the single market and the customs union

Leave the single market but stay in the customs union

Stay in the single market but leave the customs union

Leave all three

Leave with a trade deal

Leave without one

Join the European Free Trade Association and stay in the single market.

Join the European Free Trade Association and leave the single market

Leave everything but maintain all existing policing and security arrangements as well as European coordination on disease control

End every single aspect of European cooperation and retreat behind the cliffs of Dover.

This mind-boggling list goes to the heart of the problem. The referendum settled a question. It did not shape the answer.

Instead we are forced to try and extrapolate a particular type of Brexit from the result and the arguments made during the campaign. It’s a messy, frustrating process, but it’s all we have.

Take the central slogan of the Leave campaign: ‘We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead.’ The £350 million figure was misleading. It failed to mention the rebate negotiated by Margaret Thatcher or the amount Britain gets back from Europe in funding.

The NHS promise was brazenly dropped straight after the vote. But put that to one side for a moment. Politically, what does the success of a campaign trading on that £350 million slogan mean? That Britain must not send any money to the EU? Or just pay less?

There is a big difference between the two positions. If Britain left the EU but stayed in the single market, it would cut its contribution to the EU budget but not end it. Is this enough? Or would it need to make sure that not a single penny went to the EU?

For many Leave voters, money was less important than sovereignty. Polling by the businessman Lord Ashcroft released shortly after the vote found the belief that ‘decisions about the UK should be made in the UK’ was the most popular argument among those who opted for Brexit. And it’s undeniable that the Leave campaign’s ‘Take back control’ slogan was effective. It encapsulated all sorts of issues, from financial contributions to the primacy of Parliament to border controls.

Others interpreted the result in a different way, saying it was a consequence of workers’ sense of anger over stagnant wages since the financial crash in 2008. And it was true that most Labour constituencies voted Leave, although it is worth remembering that two-thirds of Labour voters backed Remain.

Ultimately, these were all symptoms of an underlying condition; of something much bigger and more profound. In one of the concluding paragraphs of Well You Did Ask, Ashcroft’s book on the referendum, he says:

‘Above all, whatever was printed on the ballot paper, the question large numbers of voters heard, and the reply they gave, was nothing much to do with the European Union. People tried to wrestle with such facts as were available, and to make sense of the competing promises and claims. But ultimately, the question many saw was: ‘Are you happy with the way things are and the way they seem to be going?’ And their answer was: ‘Well, since you ask… no’.’

How do you respond to that mandate? What’s the policy response to a fundamental rejection of the status quo? One thing is certain: politicians should not be trusted with such big, messy questions. They are, by their nature, ideologically self-serving. They will interpret events in a way which justifies whatever opinions they hold.

And that is precisely what happened. After the referendum, Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, said voters had given a mandate to a points-based system for immigration. This went far beyond suggesting there was a mandate for ending or reforming free movement and into the realm of saying there was a mandate on the precise system the public wanted to see it replaced with, which happened to be the one favoured by Nigel Farage. It served to demonstrate how enthusiastically politicians were suddenly ascribing a swell of popular support to whatever policy they happened to like that morning.

Meanwhile, Britain’s newly installed Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, David Davis, was claiming mandates for all sorts of things while unceremoniously dumping the £350 million NHS pledge which had been on the side of the campaign bus. Politicians had found a big old pot of electoral mandate and they were going to use it to paint any picture they damn well pleased.

Britain entered a political world with very few certainties, lots of emotions and a widespread feeling of democratic mission. It is a dangerous mix.

There had been a similar mixture of emotions and historic entitlement following the Scottish independence vote, but in that case, at least there had been a detailed white paper put out by the SNP making clear exactly what it would do in the case of victory. In the case of Brexit there was nothing but a collection of inaccurate and mutually incompatible statements made by various Brexiters.

One thing, though, was agreed by almost everyone. The Brexit vote had been a comprehensive rejection of freedom of movement: the right of citizens from any EU state to settle in the UK. This indeed was the main message the new prime minister, Theresa May, took from the result and there was much cross-party consensus to support her. Labour MPs reported there was rage about free movement on predominantly white council estates, just as Tory MPs returned from the shires with similar demands from the country golf club ringing in their ears. Very quickly a view took hold in the political class: the free movement of people was a symbol of a public sense of powerlessness. It must be ended.

In actual fact, even this conclusion is questionable. Once you drill down into the Brexit mandate, something interesting happens: there is a split between those who want immigration reduced no matter the cost, and those who only want immigration reduced if there is no economic cost. That is potentially important, because ending free movement will almost certainly entail leaving the single market. And leaving the single market is forecast by the overwhelming majority of experts to damage the British economy.

In April, an Ipsos Mori poll for Newsnight found 20% of Leave voters agreed with the statement:

‘Britain should continue to allow European Union citizens to come to live and work in Britain in return for access to the EU single market.’

A June poll by YouGov for the Adam Smith Institute found 42% of Leave voters thought Britain should pursue a Norway-style model inside the single market. An Ashcroft poll in the same month with a sample size of 12,000 found 21% of Leave voters thought immigration was a cause for good. These results remained broadly the same after the referendum. An Ipsos Mori poll published in mid-October found 45% of Britons wanted single market membership prioritised in negotiations with the EU, over 39% who wanted immigration prioritised.

You find the same results in poll after poll after poll: somewhere between 20% and 40% of Leave voters are either indifferent to levels of immigration or would not be prepared to see them cut if hurts the economy, or refuse to support an exit from the single market.

Take that 20%-40% support away and Leave would not have won. Add it to the Remain vote and you have no mandate to end the free movement of people. So even here, in the one measure which is treated as unarguable, there is no clear mandate.

But regardless of its objective legitimacy, the immigration mandate was the most common interpretation of the Brexit vote. It was accepted by most MPs in the main parties (although not by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership team) and enthusiastically embraced by anti-immigration tabloids. It has become received wisdom that something must be done about freedom of movement. It is a non-negotiable ‘red line’.

The consequence is that Britain either has to convince its EU partners to reform the rules on freedom of movement or leave the single market. It is arguably the biggest decision Britain has made since the end of the Second World War.

We mentioned several possible approaches to Brexit earlier, but in truth only one distinction matters: do we stay in the single market or not? That is the choice behind a soft or hard Brexit.