Any deal is better than no deal. But the agreement that Boris Johnson struck with the European Union on Christmas Eve is no political triumph, no diplomatic feat. It will one day surely be regarded as one of the greatest-ever deceits inflicted on the British electorate. We were told that a free trade agreement with the EU would be “one of the easiest in human history” to get, that we were “going to get a great deal”. We were told that a free trade agreement would give us “the exact same benefits” of EU membership without any of the obligations or financial costs.
Yet the deal Johnson has reached will inflict all the costs he denied it ever would. It will take some weeks to fully digest the many pages of legal text. But it is already clear that this deal will have enduring consequences for Britain in the coming decades: for the wellbeing and resilience of communities across a highly unequal nation; for the potential for the UK to be an influence for good in an increasingly unstable world; and perhaps even for the very integrity of our nation. Johnson’s act of national harm could not come at a worse time. It will set in train significant economic damage during a global pandemic that has left the NHS and economy reeling.
That we have ended up here is no great surprise. It was always in the interests of both sides to reach a deal before this week’s hard deadline. But no number of bombastic speeches from Johnson can disguise that the realpolitik of negotiation finally forced him to grapple with Brexit’s fundamental tradeoffs. The man who has spent years telling voters Britain can gorge itself on cake now and forever has agreed to pay a serious price.
First there are the costs that will be measured in pounds and pence. This trade deal is unique in erecting rather than eliminating barriers to trade. Goods will be subject to costly new customs and regulatory checks. Services – which make up 80% of the British economy – do not even get a look in. The economic consequences will be profound: the Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast that in the long term, this kind of deal will reduce Britain’s long-run GDP by 4%, dwarfing the long-run costs of the pandemic.
But, as we wrote in 2016, the EU was always much more than an economic project. It was an idealistic undertaking to prevent the continent ever again being racked by war. Decades later, we live in a world marked by new types of instability. The biggest global challenges we face – the climate crisis, global pandemics, international tax avoidance on an eyewatering scale – can be tackled only through nation states acting in concert, rather than alone.
This, together with the fact that we live in a globalised world where the most successful countries choose regulatory alignment in order to facilitate trade, puts paid to the isolationist and old-fashioned notions of national sovereignty trumpeted by the small-minded politics of the Leave campaign. The EU is not flawless – no union of 28 nations could be anything but imperfect – and it faces existential challenges of its own. But the world is a better place for it, and it is a cause for great sadness that the UK is turning its back on what it represents. Britain has not been dragged along as a reluctant passenger: from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair, generation after generation of politicians have shaped the EU from the inside. This deal will diminish the UK’s global influence not just from the perspective of our national interest but in terms of our wider international responsibilities as one of the world’s richest liberal democracies.
Rightwing ideologues
It is the internal politics of the Conservative party that made this type of hard Brexit inevitable. The vote to leave the EU could have paved the way for a softer Brexit that kept the UK in the single market and customs union. The British public is far more pragmatic than the right of the Conservative party: a citizens’ assembly in 2017 suggested that people were prepared to accept free movement of people in order to minimise the economic costs of Brexit. A responsible prime minister would have sought to unify the country by pursuing the least divisive form of Brexit.
Instead, the country has been governed by a party captured by an unholy alliance of populists and hard-right ideologues. The Vote Leave campaign misled the public by spreading racist dogwhistles about immigration and by misusing official statistics to promise that Brexit would deliver a huge boostto the NHS. These lies were endorsed by politicians like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove who both surely knew that an honest case for Brexit was not strong enough to win a popular vote. The lesson of populism through the ages is that pretending there are easy solutions to voters’ discontents, and identifying, then marginalising scapegoats for our problems, makes winning easier – if more dishonourable.
Rather than confront the public with the truth that some of the sharpest geographical inequalities in Europe, and the lack of jobs and opportunity in parts of the country, would require real and sustained investment to address, Tory Leavers made out that Brexit was the answer, while at the same time supporting drastic cuts in government support to those very areas. In the past five years, crass sloganeering has substituted for responsible government. A unifying, soft Brexit was never on offer: May’s withdrawal agreement could never bind a successor in charge of a final deal. As it turns out, Johnson, the actual successor, has proved willing to break international law, let alone agreements with opposition MPs. If a more effective leader than Jeremy Corbyn had been at the helm of the Labour party, perhaps things could have been different. But a politically dominant Conservative party led by prime ministers in hock to the European Research Group has led us inexorably towards this hard Brexit.
Deepening rifts
We will live with the consequences for decades. The economic cost is not some theoretical number: it will translate into greater hardship and fewer opportunities in areas that can least afford to bear it. It will make the urgent task of reducing the UK’s stark regional inequalities much harder. Forgive our scepticism that a Conservative government that has slashed support for low-paid parents by thousands of pounds a year, and has forced the least affluent areas to cope with the biggest cuts to public services, will do what is needed.
Any gains to a dated notion of sovereignty will come at great cost to people’s personal freedoms: to make a life, to study, to start a business or to fall in love in another country. It is a myth that these freedoms were only ever exercised by a privileged group of voters. The irony is that some of the wealthiest backers of Brexit have found ways of hanging on to them even as they expect the rest of us to give them up.
This hard Brexit will also deepen rifts within the union. Most immediately, it will give succour to the cause of Scottish independence. The Scots did not vote for Brexit and do not want it. Johnson is unpopular in Scotland, and support for independence is growing. And it is far from certain what the long-term consequences of this deal will be for Northern Ireland. The deal at least removes the need for a border in Ireland, but at the cost of a border in the Irish Sea. It disturbs the fragile political balance that the Good Friday agreement achieved and creates an uncertain future for the power-sharing arrangements that were critical to ending a bloody, decades-long conflict.
An almighty struggle ahead
The hope will be that this deal might at least herald the beginning of a more responsible politics in the UK; that it might form the basis for a return to government in the national interest, and the repair of relationships that have been damaged by the petty, childish diplomacy of the past few years. But the reality is that we are in for at least a few more years where internal Conservative party battles continue to dominate. Despite his majority, Johnson is a weak leader lacking in principles and vision. There is now likely to be an almighty struggle between those on the right of his party who always saw Brexit as the route to slashing taxes, regulatory standards and consumer protections, and those who recognise the human costs this would involve.
This deal will at least one day form the basis for a more visionary prime minister to rebuild what Johnson has forced the UK to voluntarily surrender. One day, our children and grandchildren will look back in astonishment that Britain’s governing class managed to fail the country so comprehensively. One day, politicians will feel embarrassed to admit their association with the tawdry politics of Brexit.
For now, we are consigned to government by an incompetent and unscrupulous gaggle of politicians. They will continue to wreak damage our country can ill afford. But in the wake of their eventual defeat there surely lies a better, brighter future for Britain that will one day come to pass.
The Observer