Crib sheet for Brexit discussions – December 2019

 

  • Labour promises a new referendum on Brexit. This is justified because Brexit bears no resemblance to what was promised by Boris Johnson and the leave campaign three and a half years ago:
    • They said it would be easy – it’s throwing up all kinds of problems they never told us about
    • They said it would save loads of money (which would all go to the NHS) –  it’s costing a fortune
    • They said it would be good for the economy and jobs – the opposite is true
  • It’s like when you buy a house: you say “I’ll have that“. But when the survey comes back and it has shaky foundations, cracked walls and a leaky roof, you have the right to reconsider and either say “no thanks” or “I’ll have that anyway, it’s a brilliant location“.

 

 

 

  • Not holding a referendum on the outcome is tantamount to saying to the public: “you had your say three and a half years ago, now you must shut up and accept whatever the government comes up with”. That applies equally to those who want to proceed with a damaging Brexit and to those who want to simply stop Brexit without going back to the people for them to have the final say.

 

 

 

  • As David Davis (of all people) said: “If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy“.

 

 

 

  • Three years ago, many people expected that the public would rally behind the result of the 2016 referendum This hasn’t happened, and public opinion even appears, according to most polls, to have shifted the other way. It would be wrong to proceed with Brexit on the grounds that it is the “will of the people” without checking that it still is.

 

 

 

  • Proceeding with Brexit involves difficult choices:

 

  • EITHER we leave the customs union and the single market as well, causing huge damage to the economy
  • OR we stay in the customs union and single market, but then have to follow the rules without having a say on them anymore

Neither is good for Britain, although the second is less damaging.

 

  • It’s the same difficult choice on security:

 

      • EITHER we leave the joint police databases, the shared criminal records, the common efforts to find and catch cross-border gangs, traffickers and terrorists, etc.
      • OR we ask the EU to let us stay in them anyway, but without a say anymore on how they’re run or the rules and safeguards that apply

      Again, neither is good for Britain.

    • And it’s the same choice again on the EU technical agencies where we currently pool resources to cut costs on things like the testing of medicines (European Medicines Agency), of chemicals (European Chemicals Agency) or of aircraft (European Air Safety Agency).

 

  • EITHER we set up our own separate agencies, at great cost, recruiting the necessary expertise, duplicating work already done and getting them recognised across the world
  • OR we ask if we can stay in the EU agencies anyway, but without a say anymore on how they’re run or the standards they apply

Once again, neither is good for Britain.

 

  • Not to mention the tensions Brexit is creating for the UK in:
    • Northern Ireland, with the creation of a customs border causing immense practical and political difficulties
    • Scotland, where proceeding with Brexit will help the SNP to argue for secession
    • Gibraltar, whose status is legally safeguarded in the EU, but weakened outside it

     

  • So, all in all, it’s not surprising that Brexit is proving difficult. On top of that, we’ve had:
    • An incompetent government, which started negotiations before having a plan on what it wanted (remember David Davis at the first meeting with no document on the table)
    • Bitter divisions among Brexit supporters about what Brexit means. For example, Johnson voted against May’s deal, and Farage opposes Johnson’s deal

     

  • The Johnson deal does not “Get Brexit done”. It’s simply the end of the first, easier, phase ahead of the negotiations on the future relationship. It means years more wrangling, arguments and division. If you’re BOB – bored of Brexit – the best way out is to stop it.

 

  • The Johnson deal is particularly bad — worse than May’s — as it puts customs checks down the Irish sea, removes the level playing field commitments on workers’ rights, environmental and consumer protection rules, and would inflict huge extra costs on businesses trading with Europe, disrupting our supply chains and our exports.

 

  • Leaving the Customs Union would not just damage trade with Europe (our main trading partners with many vital cross-border supply chains), but damage our trade with the rest of the world.
        • We would drop out of all the trade deals with countries across the planet that we had previously negotiated jointly as members of the EU, with the clout and leverage of the world’s largest market
        • We would have to replace them with new agreements in a hurry, negotiating just as Britain, without the clout of Europe behind us
        • People are already afraid of what a trade deal with the USA would bring in terms of having to accept US food products with lower standards than ours, including chlorinated chicken etc, or conceding privileged access to the NHS for American pharmaceutical and health companies

         

      • The government repeats again and again that Brexit means we’d “take back control” of our borders, our laws and our money  In fact we’d have less control of all three:
        • Borders: we’d drop out of the EU’s cross-border policing arrangements and shared data on criminals that help us police our borders
        • Laws: as a sovereign country, we already adopt our own laws, it’s just that we choose to adopt some laws jointly with our neighbours when we think that’s useful, mostly the common rules for the common market. This comes to about one-tenth of our laws. If we leave the EU, we’d have no say on common European laws, many of which will affect us anyway
        • Money: 98% of public spending is national. The 2% of public spending that we do jointly at EU level is often on items where doing things jointly saves money by avoiding duplication, such as on research programmes.  In any case, the magnitude of this is far smaller than the costs of Brexit to our economy and our exchequer

     

    • Brexiters often play the “immigration” card, claiming we can’t control migration to Britain while we’re in the EU. In fact:
      • Most migration to Britain comes from outside the EU, entirely under our own national rules, so we can be as liberal or as restrictive as we want
      • The EU’s internal freedom of movement is a reciprocal right with up to 2 million Brits in other EU countries who now risk losing their rights and protections if Brexit happens
      • EU freedom of movement is subject to conditions such as finding work within a short period, and not being a burden on the exchequer, which Britain chose not to fully enforce, but could if it wanted to
      • EU citizens in the UK pay one-third more to Britain in taxes than they take out in services or as benefits.
      • Until we train enough nurses and doctors, we need EU citizens desperately in our NHS.
    • Some claim we can’t re-nationalise our railways because of EU rules. This is not true: Article 345 of the treaty specifies that ownership is a national matter.
    • Perhaps we should remind ourselves of why almost every country in Europe belongs to the EU, or has a close association with it.  There are three reasons: idealistic, pragmatic and selfish:
      • Idealistic goes back to the origins of the EU, after the War. In a continent where every generation from the fall of the Roman Empire until 1945 had slaughtered each other on the battlefields, we had to find a better way of doing things. We still have our arguments, but they are now across the negotiating table or the debating chamber. It’s somewhat better!  And that’s why the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
      • Pragmatic derives from the fact that we are a group of small and medium-sized neighbouring countries that, like it or not, are highly interdependent economically, environmentally and in other ways. We simply have to work together to find common solutions to cross-border problems
      • Selfish, because we are trading nations and the bulk of our trade is with or via the EU. Millions of jobs and livelihoods depend on this working smoothly
    • Of course, the EU is not perfect. No international structure is, nor indeed is any national political body. It needs improving and reforming. In practice, it is a non-stop reform process because it is a constant negotiation among neighbouring countries grappling with shared problems. It should do more on:
        • Climate change: the EU currently aims at reducing CO2 emissions across the whole of Europe by 40% by 2030. This needs to be raised to 55%. Joint action is more effective than national action.
        • Fighting tax avoidance: the EU has belatedly started to agree measures to avoid multinational companies avoiding tax by transferring their profits to tax havens. It should do more.
        • Workers’ rights: the EU’s single market is a market with rules: rules to protect consumers, workers and the environment (that indeed is why it is the neo-liberal right that has driven Brexit: they want a corporate free-for-all where companies are unrestricted by health and safety requirements, workplace rights and so on). But, these rules need strengthening, especially as regards workers’ rights. The EU is now looking at strengthening rights for workers in the gig economy

       

      • Democracy: all EU legislation requires a double democratic check: approval by the Council, which is composed of ministers from each country, each accountable to their national parliament, and approval by the directly elected European Parliament. But, in Britain, the accountability of our ministers attending Council meetings is minimal.  We should do what many EU countries do: require any minister attending Council to get an explicit mandate form Parliament before setting off, not just telling Parliament about it afterwards
    • A Labour government will renegotiate Johnson’s disastrous Brexit deal to secure a Brexit deal that does the least damage to the economy, and put it to the people a choice between that and remaining in the EU. It will be sorted within six months.
    • For further information, see my: