Comment

Victory for Brussels is inevitable. In adopting Chequers, we have gone into battle waving the white flag

Theresa May, U.K. prime minister, left, shakes hands with Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission
'The UK has agreed to hand over £40bn for two thirds of diddly squat', writes Boris Johnson Credit:  Dario Pignatelli/ Bloomberg

So it’s ding ding! Seconds out! And we begin the final round of that international slug fest, the Brexit negotiations. Out of their corners come Dominic Raab and Michel Barnier, shrugging their shoulders and beating their chests – and I just hope you aren’t one of those trusting souls who still thinks it could really go either way. The fix is in. The whole thing is about as pre-ordained as a bout between Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy; and in this case, I am afraid, the inevitable outcome is a victory for the EU, with the UK lying flat on the canvas with 12 stars circling symbolically over our semi-conscious head.

I suppose there may be some aspects of the Chequers proposals that they pretend not to like. They may puff about “cherry picking” the single market. There may be some confected groaning and twanging of leotards when it comes to the discussion on free movement. But the reality is that in this negotiation the EU has so far taken every important trick. The UK has agreed to hand over £40 billion of taxpayers’ money for two thirds of diddly squat.

In adopting the Chequers proposals, we have gone into battle with the white flag fluttering over our leading tank. If we continue on this basis we will throw away most of the advantages of Brexit. By agreeing to a “common rulebook” with the EU – over which we have no control – we are making it impossible for the UK to be more competitive, to innovate, to deviate, to initiate, and we are ruling out major free trade deals.

If we go ahead with the Chequers proposals, we are forswearing the project of Global Britain – so splendidly articulated by the Prime Minister in her Lancaster House speech of January 17 2017 – and abandoning the notion of the UK as a proud independent economic actor. We will remain in the EU taxi; but this time locked in the boot, with absolutely no say on the destination. We won’t have taken back control – we will have lost control. We will serve as a terrible warning to any other EU country thinking of changing its relationship with Brussels: that even the UK, the fifth biggest economy in the world, was unable to break free of the gravitational pull of the EU, and forced to sue for humiliating terms.

Of course I hope that the PM will still change course – and rediscover the elan and dynamism of Lancaster House. With more than two years until the end of the implementation period, there is still ample time to save Brexit. If we are to do so, we must go back to the issue of the Northern Irish border, which has been so ingeniously manipulated – both by Brussels and parts of the UK Government – so as to keep Britain effectively in the customs union and in the single market.

Instead of really tackling the problem of the Irish border we have allowed it to be occluded by myths. It is a myth – pure nonsense – to suggest that there is “no border” today. Of course there is a border. There are two jurisdictions, and on either side you will find plenty of differences: different educational systems, different health systems, different excise duties on diesel or booze – and in so far as there are criminals who exploit those differentials, they face the full sanctions of the law, but away from the border.

It is a myth to say that you could create an effective “hard border” – not with more crossing points than the whole of eastern Europe, and not when any such infrastructure would be a target for criminals of one kind or another. You couldn’t make it work even if you wanted to; and no one does.

And above all it is a total myth to say that you need a hard border. You don’t need to check people – because we already have the Common Travel Area, and that will be unaffected by Brexit. You don’t need to check goods at the frontier, for all sorts of reasons. As it happens, the UK and Ireland are already very sparing in their checks on goods entering from outside the EU – only four per cent get checked by the UK and only one per cent by Ireland. In so far as either side might want to do checks, it could be done away from the border, not least since the volume of trade is so small. Only 5 per cent of Northern Ireland’s GDP goes to Ireland, and only 1.6 per cent of Irish exports go to Northern Ireland. There are only about 50 large companies that trade across the frontier, and their goods could be subject to spot checks in warehouses or at points of sale – not at the border. As for small traders and farmers, they should obviously be given a de minimis exemption. For every problem, there is a potential solution.

The tragedy is that as soon as the UK voted for Brexit, the Irish began working on those solutions – and were amazed, as the months went by, to find that the UK was not really interested. We seemed lost in an eternal dither about whether really to leave the customs union and single market. We couldn’t make up our minds, for month after month.

It is now clear that some in the UK Government never wanted solutions. They wanted to use that problem to stop a proper Brexit. Solving Ireland would mean a solution for Dover-Calais, and they didn’t really want that. They wanted essentially to stay in, and to create a Brexit in name only.

They have been rumbled. People can see Chequers means disaster. The answer is not to lurch for a Norway or EEA option that is actually more humiliating than Chequers: it would mean taking even more rules from Brussels (on services, for instance) – and does not fix Ireland.

The answer is to go for the one solution that both delivers Brexit and treats all the UK in the same way: a big and generous Free Trade Deal, with intimate partnerships on foreign policy, justice, and all the rest – as adumbrated at Lancaster House.

Of course that means fixing the Irish border problem. It is fixable. The scandal is not that we have failed, but that we have not even tried.

 

License this content