At the eleventh hour...

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With a matter of hours to go before the UK formally leaves the EU, the PM has finally admitted something which most of us have known all along, but which he and his fellow Brexiteers have spent more than three years denying – leaving the single market and the customs union means border checks on goods passing between the UK and the EU.  He isn’t quite putting it in those terms (he wouldn’t be Boris if he did) but is stating rather that the UK ‘is willing to accept’ border checks, as though we ever had any choice in the matter.  His stated reason for this latest climbdown is that it’s the only way that he can deliver on the promises made about this strange thing called ‘sovereignty’.  Reuters puts it more bluntly, reporting that he will also say that ‘sovereignty is more important than frictionless trade’.

The admission that there is – and was always going to be – a trade-off between ‘sovereignty’ and ‘free trade’ is hardly a revelation.  It’s a simple fact that all trade deals between countries involve such a trade-off; the question is always about how much sovereignty a country agrees to share in order to reach joint decisions (and ‘share’ rather then ‘cede’ is the correct term, despite what the Brexiteers have consistently argued), and in return for what economic or other benefits.  Had the Brexiteers been willing to debate it in such terms at the time of the referendum and since, I would have had more respect for their position, but they have, right up until the eleventh hour (almost literally), repeated ad nauseam that we could have frictionless trade without having to agree to any joint rules or regulations.  They might still have won the referendum, of course, because trade and economics were only part of the debate.  It was probably the part, however, on which their argument was shakiest, so they chose instead to lie repeatedly.

To some extent, that is now water under the bridge; the UK will formally leave later today, and accepting that there is a cost in terms of trade attached to the sort of future relationship which the UK will have with the EU is simply a necessary precondition to any sort of negotiation on the detail.  What they have yet to admit (but it will surely come when reality can no longer be denied) is that the same issue will arise in relation to any and every other trade deal that they attempt to negotiate – the closeness of the deal and the degree of friction in terms of tariffs, checks and bureaucracy are directly related to the willingness or otherwise of the UK government to agree to share sovereignty and agree some rules and process (and their enforcement) jointly with other countries and trading blocs.

It’s an issue of which most Welsh independentistas are more aware than the Anglo-British nationalists driving Brexit and is part of the reason why so many of us preferred to avoid the term ‘independence’ for so many years.  In a modern, globally connected world, no country can really ‘stand alone’ and exercise total sovereignty over all aspects of its own affairs.  To even attempt to do so requires either great size or almost complete isolation.  The question facing any state is always ‘how much, and in what areas, and in what institutions are we prepared to share sovereignty and make joint decisions?’.  The EU was never the perfect answer to that question but attempting to pretend that there isn’t even a need to ask the question isn’t a sensible response.  I’ve long hoped that, if there were to be a positive side to Brexit it would be in helping those who run the UK to realise, at last, that the UK is, as the Irish Taoiseach put it last week, a “small country”.  It looks like being a long process though.