This week Amber Rudd said Parliament would stop any “no deal”, and that Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement is about the best we are going to get from Europe. I do not think that is the case at all.
If sensible heads prevail, there is a way forward. There is still time and space to start afresh. If everyone had the prescience to accept that this Withdrawal Agreement is unlikely to get through Parliament and that there is a real risk of “no deal”, then we might actually come together in all our best interests to find an alternative.
Few people think that the terms of the Withdrawal Agreement currently agreed with the EU27 amount to a good way forward. A lot more people think it is about as good as we are going to get if we are determined to stay at least half in the Single Market and the Customs Union, and they are probably right.
The alternative is for Parliament to vote down the Withdrawal Agreement and then to seek a better deal. The problem is how to get there. If a “no deal” outcome is to be avoided, Parliament has to vote positively for something – for a second referendum, for a general election, for the EEA Norway option, or for a Canada-style free-trade deal.
At the moment, it does not look likely that there will be a majority for any of these ways ahead. Although Parliament will not have voted positively for this outcome, we will drift towards 29 March 2019, when the two-year Article 50 period ends and we leave the EU. The default position is that we then become a “third country” to the EU27, and, unless we agree something different, we will trade with them on World Trade Organisation terms.
Is a really hard Brexit along these lines really likely to happen? It might do so, but it probably won’t. It simply is not in the interests of either the EU27 or the UK to allow unnecessary chaotic disruption to take place. This is why it is more likely that common sense and practicality will dictate that arrangements are made to keep things ticking over.
The status quo on both trade and in many other areas, such as aviation, licensing, etc, will be maintained wherever possible, pending a new long-term deal being put in place. What is that likely to be?
It could be that a majority will emerge in Parliament in favour of a second referendum but this would then have to be not on whether we stay in the EU but whether we apply to re-join, unless Article 50 had been extended, which could well be difficult to achieve. Apart from the democratic issue of not accepting the result of the first EU referendum, inevitably producing deep divisions in the country, there would be problems of delay, agreeing the questions to be put, the terms on which the EU might be willing to have us back, and consequent uncertainty about what the result would be.
Joining the European Area (EEA) and the European Free Trade Areas (EFTA) is another possibility, although there are signs that we may not be welcome by the existing members of these organisations if this is to be seen as essentially a temporary resting place for the UK. Being in the EEA would give us access to the Single Market but at a cost in terms of control, leaving us in the same sort of subservient position to the EU as the current proposals. As Norway has found, too, temporary arrangements have a habit of becoming permanent, leaving us in an unsatisfactory limbo.
We probably won’t have another general election until 2022, because of the 2011 Fixed Parliaments Act. Even if we did, however, and a Labour government were elected to replace the Conservatives, it is hard to see how the situation would change very much in terms of the UK’s negotiating position with the EU. Essentially the same choices would still have to be faced.
This leaves probably the most likely outcome as being a free-trade agreement, along the lines recently negotiated between the EU and Canada. As the UK and the EU27 are starting in full alignment, it should be relatively easy and therefore not very time-consuming to put a free trade deal in place.
This outcome, as with the EEA, would leave the UK and the EU27 able to continue cooperation on all the wide range of issues of common interest, as of course would also happen if we were to re-join. If we were not in the Single Market, there would be slightly more trade friction, but in practice not very much.
The choice faced by the country, therefore, is whether to go along with the current Withdrawal Bill, which would give us some current certainly but at heavy costs both financially and in many other ways down the years, or to take the risk of some more uncertainty and disruption in the hope of finishing up by negotiating a more even-handed and stable deal for the long term.
At the moment, it looks as though Parliament will probably – although not certainly – reject the Withdrawal Bill. We will then find out what happens next.