Britain already is beyond Brexit

Photo Reuters
Photo Reuters

Summary

  • Despite tough talks over a trade deal with Brussels, the real excitement in the U.K. is now domestic.

London

Not that anyone can tell from this month’s excitement about negotiations for a Brexit trade deal, but Britain’s departure from the European Union is already done. It’s done in the technical sense that the U.K. left the bloc on Jan. 31. More important, it’s done as a political issue—and British politicians increasingly seem to realize it.

It’s sometimes hard to see this evolution when Europe is preoccupied with the spectacle of yet another round of trade talks going down to the wire. The transitional trade agreement effected on Britain’s Jan. 31 departure will expire Dec. 31, and Brussels and London haven’t agreed on what will come after it. The high but confusing drama of the moment concerns whether the parties can devise a long-term trade deal that eliminates tariffs and loosens regulatory red tape at the borders.

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Such an agreement is important from an economic standpoint. It would limit trade disruption to both sides at a time when they need to focus on recovery from the pandemic. That said, and without minimizing the potential for severe short-term pain if the talks fail, much of the drama surrounding these negotiations has a manufactured feel.

The alternative to a comprehensive deal is to revert to the more common sort of trade arrangements one normally expects between two sovereign economies, with tariffs and regulations governed by World Trade Organization rules. Since “two sovereign economies" is what the U.K. and EU have been since Jan. 31, this possibility was easy to foresee.

But it isn’t obvious why the discrete negotiating process now on a knife’s edge would be the last word on EU-U.K. relations. Nothing is forever in the global economy. Britain’s 1973 entry into the European Economic Community—the EU’s forerunner—turns out not to have been permanent, and neither was the exclusion from the EU of Eastern European states that were in the Soviet sphere (which itself was not so permanent) when the EEC was created. The North American Free Trade Agreement was renegotiated under President Trump; the Bretton Woods agreement governing currencies in an earlier era collapsed.

What will be permanent about Brexit is the phase the two sides are in now, not whatever deal they strike next: a phase when trading relations between them are always open to reinspection and renegotiation. This is why British politics is moving on from Brexit at speed to find whatever political issue will come next.

The economy is an obvious place to start. The magnitude of the pandemic emergency, with rising unemployment, falling output and fiscal disarray, dwarfs whatever ills a no-trade-deal post-Brexit regime might bring. This crisis also implicates directly many of the fault lines and contentions Brexit raised only obliquely.

It’s taken for granted, for instance, that the Brexit vote exposed political strains between the prosperous south of England and the de-industrializing north. But that’s nothing like the fissures the pandemic is opening. Northern politicians such as Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham of the Labour Party are now waging open warfare against the national government in London concerning apportionment of pandemic relief funds and, more recently, over why northern regions were placed under more stringent lockdown restrictions than London and why those restrictions haven’t been lifted sooner.

Another flashpoint is cultural. Brexit was said to reveal divisions between urban, pro-European progressive elites and more traditionally minded voters. True enough. But debates within both major parties are emerging now that tackle these issues more directly.

In Labour, this takes the form of a fight to the death between the ultraprogressive wing attached to failed and deposed party leader Jeremy Corbyn and the more moderate and restrained centrist wing of new leader Keir Starmer. Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, meanwhile, battle over whether they want to be the party of an eco-conscious landed gentry (Mr. Johnson’s wing) or of small shopkeepers like Margaret Thatcher’s father once was.

Both parties are realizing these matters transcend Brexit. Labour was scored throughout the 2016 Brexit referendum and subsequent general elections for its failure to take a position on Brexit, which allegedly cost it votes. Under Mr. Starmer, Labour is taking even less of a position on Brexit than it did before—and appears to be gaining support as Mr. Starmer rebuilds Labour’s credibility on other issues. Mr. Johnson for his part took time out of supposedly make-or-break Brexit negotiations over the weekend to speak at a global climate conference.

The task, as elsewhere, is to manage the tensions between an electorate and a governing class that don’t like each other very much. Brexit activated this process but has not, and cannot, conclude it. The thought should offer some perspective on whatever emerges from last-ditch trade talks in days to come.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.

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