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A year ago, all of this had been something huge. British newspapers had followed all the movements of the ongoing negotiations. Now you are busier with covid-19. Will the government shut down the country again during the fall holidays? What about pubs? Will it be forbidden to meet the family this Christmas? Right now, it’s primarily the international currency markets that are worrying about the impending Brexit collapse. This is, of course, the paradox itself: Brexit has perhaps never been more dramatic. But Brexit is no longer front-page news.
The EU has tried to downplay all of Boris Johnson’s emphasis on October 15. Of course, an agreement must be reached in the coming weeks, otherwise it will not be ratified in time, but Brussels is ready to negotiate until November. Boris Johnson is that? If not. Why not?
Britain formally left the EU on January 31 of this year. The Brexit parties celebrated in the rain in Parliament Square in London, but when they woke up in the morning, nothing was different. The UK has continued to comply with all EU rules throughout the year, pending the conclusion of a free trade agreement. The idea was that this would take effect from January 1, 2021, when the UK would also effectively leave the common market and the EU customs union.
The problem is that the trade agreement is not ready.
Of course, it didn’t help that both UK and EU Brexit negotiators managed to catch Covid-19 this spring or that Boris Johnson himself nearly died of the same disease. There is currently no physical negotiating table for Boris Johnson to leave: he spoke with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, on Wednesday in a video conference. If Boris Johnson wants to end the negotiations this week, there will be no dramatic physical outburst in front of the flashing cameras. It will be more a matter of turning off the computer and saying thanks and saying goodbye to four decades of free trade with Europe.
Above all, there are two issues that the UK and the EU have been unable to agree so far. One is fishing: France wants to continue the same access to British waters that it has today. Britain refuses. The second concerns the UK’s right to provide state aid to British companies and how it should be controlled. The EU will likely have to reach a compromise on fisheries and the UK on state aid for the negotiations to end.
But who should start to commit?
In a sense, it may seem crazy that Boris Johnson even considers leaving the negotiating table this week. Which prime minister voluntarily chooses to pull his country out of a trading bloc amid the worst economic crisis of our lives? A non-contractual Brexit in January, in addition to major disruptions to border trade and traffic, would mean things like 50 percent import tariffs on cheddar cheese and 10 percent on cars. All of this would happen at the same time that the UK introduced visa requirements for EU labor immigration and the huge British service sector with its lawyers, recruiters, architects and advertisers lost their access to the EU single market.
Brexitists are, of course, convinced that divorce will be financially beneficial for the UK in the long run. But not even the most fervent Brexitist denies that there will be sweat, tears, red tape and expensive cheese at first. Why would Boris Johnson be willing to take all this danger in order to say that he “kept his word to leave the negotiating table on October 15”? Because it is hardly the case that this particular date is set by the gods.
But it is that the circle around the Prime Minister has become radicalized. When there was a referendum on Brexit in the UK in the summer of 2016, no one even breathed that a non-contractual Brexit of the kind currently being discussed was even a possibility. Most Brexitists didn’t even want to leave the EU common market. EU only. Today, however, they are ready, not just to leave the EU single market, they are ready to exit it amid a global pandemic with a British economy falling almost 20% in the second quarter of this year. Personally, I don’t think Boris Johnson is bragging. And that, therefore, this week will be crucial.
Whether Brexit is front-page news right now or not.
Read more: In case of Brexit chaos, park here
