Back in June, during what turned out to be his final weeks in the job, Boris Johnson, then the British Foreign Secretary, was recorded speaking at what he thought was a private dinner.
“Imagine Trump doing Brexit,” declared the classical scholar excitedly. “He’d go in bloody hard. There’d be all sorts of breakdowns, all sorts of chaos. Everyone would think he’d gone mad. But actually you might get somewhere. It’s a very, very good thought.”
Who can doubt, in retrospect, that Boris was right? I’ve said some hard things on this page about the 45th president, but credit where it’s due: He’d never have come back with the miserable deal that Prime Minister Theresa May is trying to sell to an incredulous British public. The famous dealmaker saw right away what had happened. “It sounds like a good deal — for the European Union,” he told reporters as details emerged.
For once, Donald Trump was guilty of understatement. This is the sort of deal that a country signs when it has lost a war. Under its terms, Britain will remain subject to all the costs and obligations of EU membership, but will give up its vote, its voice and its veto. In Brussels, they crow that the sole change, for at least two and probably four years, will be that the U.K. loses its Commissioner, its Members of the European Parliament and its vote when the EU makes decisions. If the remaining 27 members now pass a measure deliberately designed to harm British interests — to shift business from London to Frankfurt, say — the U.K. will have to apply it.
And at the end of that “implementation period”? The original idea, as the name “implementation period” suggests, was that the U.K. and the EU would use it implement a comprehensive trade relationship. In practice, they haven’t begun work on such a relationship, and the EU now has no incentive even to start.
Why? Because of the so-called “Northern Ireland backstop.” Unbelievably, British negotiators have agreed that they will remain within the EU’s tariff walls, and contract out their trade policy to Brussels, unless and until the EU side is satisfied that there don’t need to be physical checks at the Irish border. To be clear, the issue is not whether there will be infrastructure on the British side of the line — it was obvious from the beginning that that wouldn’t happen. The issue is whether the EU reckons that it doesn’t need any checks on its side either.
Why should the EU ever admit to reaching such a conclusion? What could be better, from its point of view, than hanging on to Britain as a non-voting member? As long as the U.K. is gripped in the clamp of its customs union, EU exporters will enjoy privileged access to the world’s fifth-largest economy. They won’t need to worry about world competition. Ford cars imported into Britain will still be subject to the EU’s 10 percent tariff. Beef from Oklahoma and Nebraska will still be kept out on grounds of the bogus health scare about growth hormones.
“As the Brexit agreement stands,” Trump said, “the U.K. may not be able to trade with the U.S.”. What he means, of course, is not that we couldn’t trade, but that we wouldn’t be able to sign a trade deal. Tragically, he’s right.
If anyone wondered whether there was still such a thing as the British Establishment, no doubt can now remain. In the two-and-a-half years since the referendum, civil servants, politicians, financiers and politically-connected business cartels have worked assiduously to overturn to result. It wasn’t a conspiracy — though we might quote H.G. Wells and call it “an open conspiracy,” in the sense that its agents never hid what they were doing. Some, including George Soros and Tony Blair, sought to overturn the result outright with a new referendum. Others, more craftily, sought instead to ensure that, while something technically called Brexit may happen, nothing actually changes.
Sadly, they have achieved something far worse than no change. Their deal — Theresa May’s deal — will leave Britain in a more disadvantageous place than either leaving cleanly or staying put. It keeps the burdens of EU membership but junks the advantages. And, unlike EU membership, it has no exit mechanism: the backstop stays until the EU decides to lift it.
The same self-serving Establishment that, in past centuries, opposed the removal of corn tariffs, the extension of the franchise and parliamentary self-government for the American colonies, has set its face against Brexit. You’ll notice from that list that it tends to lose in the end. It will lose this time, too.
