We can't decide for others

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The pro-Brexit Daily Express got itself quite excited yesterday about the apparent hint from Michel Barnier of a super-duper extra-special Brexit deal for the UK the like of which has never been seen before.  It seems however that they have just not been paying attention – as the Guardian reported, this is nothing new, he’s been saying the same thing all along.  The EU27 have been keen from the outset to maintain strong links with the UK and have always been willing to negotiate a bespoke deal.  What they have not been willing to do, however, is to change the single market rules to suit a departing member; the obstacle to that super-duper deal isn’t in Brussels, it’s in London.

That fact was underlined by the attempt by David Lidington, effectively the deputy to the Prime Minister, to issue an ultimatum to the EU27 – agree to what we want or we walk.  Ultimatums have never been a particularly brilliant way of negotiating anything, and when they’re being issued by the weaker party to the stronger, and when following through on them damages the weaker party more than the stronger, then the stronger party can surely be excused for scratching its collective head and saying ‘OK, go on then’.  The ‘ultimatum’ amounts to a demand that the EU27 not only give the UK all its current benefits, but also start dismantling key aspects of the single market in order to do so.

That’s something to which they were never and are never going to agree; a deal is on the table any time the UK is prepared to drop its red lines.  Whether that is ‘proper’ Brexit or not is another question, but it would at least buy enough time for the UK to decide what it really wants (and offer an easy way back in if sanity is ever restored).  But the underlying reality – that it is the UK which has made the decision to leave, and it is the UK which must bear the consequences of that – was neatly summed up by the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, when he said that Brexit “…is what the British people have chosen for themselves, not for others …”.  That encapsulates the problem at the heart of the Anglo-British nationalism driving the Brexit project – the belief that a vote by the UK electorate not only binds the UK government, but also somehow mandates the rest of the EU to comply with whatever the UK wants.  The old-style imperialists still don't understand the modern world.  Ultimatums, like gunboats, belong to the diplomacy of the past, not the present.

Myths and fairy godmothers

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I’m sure that the Prime Minister would have preferred that no-one asked Macron about Brexit at their press conference yesterday.  And her second preference would have been that, if asked, he would have declined to answer.  However, her fairy godmother appears to have gone AWOL for the day (well, actually, she seems to have been AWOL for some time now), and the question was not only asked, but answered in very blunt and direct terms.

Fortunately for her – albeit not for the rest of us - in the parallel universe inhabited by May and her team, this apparent answer isn’t an answer at all; it’s merely a negotiating position.  When the French president says exactly what the President of the EU Commission, the President of the EU Council, and the EU Chief Negotiator have reiterated time and again (in essence, that they too want a good deal with the UK, but they’re not going to undermine the single market to get it), what the Brexiteers actually hear is that they need us more than we need them, and of course they’re going to compromise on the single market rules, it’s just a matter of time and negotiating skill, both of which they believe – despite all the evidence to the contrary – that the UK possesses aplenty.

There is a sense in which the EU team are as deluded as the UK team in this process – the EU team actually seem to believe that spelling out mere facts clearly, explicitly and repeatedly is going to make a difference.  I’m not sure what other strategy they could reasonably be expected to follow, but depending on facts and evidence is doomed to fail when dealing with a UK leadership which remains mired in romantic historical myth.  Insofar as I see any potential benefit coming out of all of this, it is that that myth is inevitably, and at long last, going to be shattered.