Kevin’s article in the Irish Times is excellent. In the post below I make some of the same points and some others.
The farce on Monday highlighted Theresa May’s political weakness. It has also, yet again, revealed that many of the Brexiteers (and also many commentators) simply do not understand what is going on.
Various UK commentators and politicians have called on the EU to compromise. For example the BBC reported that “David Davis has said the EU must be willing to give ground too if further progress in Brexit talks is to be made.” This seems to stem from a belief that the so called phase 1 ‘negotiations’ are conducted in the usual way of political negotiations, where each side gives in a little, and in the end some clever form of words is found whereby each side can claim they got their way. This is simply not the case here.
The Article 50 process is about establishing what the UK is going to do regarding their financial liabilities, citizens rights (here the UK will also want to establish what the EU intends to do), whether a hard border on the island of Ireland will be necessitated by the future actions of the UK and whether the Good Friday Agreement, an internationally binding agreement can be maintained.
It is important to remember that it is the UK that wants to deviate from the status quo, so it is up to the UK to spell out in detail what it wants to change. The EU will determine if this is satisfactory for them to move to phase 2 where the future relationship between the UK and the EU will be negotiated.
Determining whether the UK proposals on these Article 50 issues are satisfactory is a technical matter not a political one. Either regulations in the UK (or Northern Ireland) will differ or they won’t, either the UK will end up agreeing to tariffs with third countries that deviate from those in the Customs Union or they don’t. If the UK wants to move in a direction where an open border would undermine the integrity of the EU Single Market and Customs Union, then border controls will be necessary.
Whatever is agreed will need to stand up to legal challenge, e.g. when the first lorry load of chlorinated chicken or beef that entered the UK at lower tariffs than are due in the EU, rolls across the border – so some clever form of words won’t do. There can be no compromise or a la carte approach here.
What can be offered to ease some of the unfounded DUP fears, are assurances regarding the status of Northern Ireland as a part of the UK (unless of course, as is provided for in the Good Friday Agreement, a majority decide to change that).
The plea for some give from the EU side reveals another misconception among Brexiteers and that is that the UK is an equal partner in this. Instead it is by a long way the junior partner in the process.
The latest World Bank World Development Indicators shows that the UK is the 6th largest economy in the world. It slipped a place, at least in part due to Brexit, making France the 5th largest economy, but importantly the EU excluding the UK is almost six times larger than the UK in economic terms. The potential losses of a failure to agree a trade deal are also considerably more significant for the UK than the EU – over four and a half times those suffered by the EU (based on Lawless and Morgenroth, 2016, I also have estimates that put this seven times). Of course Ireland is something of an outlier but even here the impact on total trade is less than half that potentially suffered by the UK.
This coupled with the fact that the EU is the UKs largest trading partner, means that walking away from the process is a strategy that would maximise the self-harm to the UK economy, as this would mean that the UK will not get a trade deal with the EU. Of course a trade deal with the EU would be the quickest one to put in place and of course it would also cover the largest share of UK trade so it is also the most important one.