Brexit: the clock is ticking

The clock is ticking’ has been a well-worn phrase in Brussels, Westminster and Holyrood to express the urgency around Brexit.

With one year to go, the countdown is edging ever closer to midnight, but one of the most striking features of the negotiations to date has been the impression of a distinct lack of urgency.

David Cameron’s resignation on 24 June 2016 – the day after the Brexit vote – meant that politicians were distracted by who would replace him rather than turning their immediate attention to what the hell Britain was going to do next.

Theresa May won the bruising Conservative leadership contest on 11 July, but in many ways, the scrap never ended.

Boris Johnson withdrew from the leadership race but the spectre of Hard Brexit Boris has continued to loom over the Prime Minister ever since.

It took Theresa May eight months to trigger Article 50 – the formal declaration of a state’s intention to leave the EU – giving her an air of apparent indecisiveness and leaving others to set the agenda.

Nicola Sturgeon’s immediate preparations for a second independence referendum stood in stark contrast to the logjam at Westminster, but there were signs some of her supporters were unhappy with her pledge to take an independent Scotland back into the European Union.

Eurosceptic SNP MSP Alex Neil was among the first to warn of the potential folly of hitching another independence referendum on EU membership, and polls showed that Scottish Brexiteers willing to abandon their previous support for independence cancelled out any newfound Europhile nationalists.

Sturgeon’s decisiveness turned to dithering and she played for time with a three-pronged manifesto called ‘Scotland’s Place in Europe’, which called for the UK to stay in the European single market, or failing that, to keep Scotland in the single market, with independence relegated to the final nuclear option.

However, the nationalists were enough of a thorn in May’s side to risk another general election in June 2017 to try to silence her critics.

It all ended in tears, literally, as May lost her majority and was forced to turn to the austere Democratic Unionist Party in Ireland to prop up her government.

Constitutional experts were already warning May that it would be devilishly complicated to keep an open border on Ireland if the north was taken out of the EU, creating a 310-mile land border with the European Union, but the DUP set about resisting any attempts at regulatory convergence with the Republic of Ireland amid fears it could be a step down the road to Irish reunification.

May’s one consolation prize was the slight return of the Tories in Scotland, with 13 MPs, while the SNP lost a whopping 21 MPs.

Sturgeon was down but not out, revelling in the fact that she still won three times as many seats as the Tories but conceding that some parts of Scotland had sent her a message.

She announced a total reset of the independence strategy and dusted off ‘Scotland’s Place in Europe’, which had been dismissed out of hand by the Tories prior to the election but the surprise surge for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour gave Sturgeon a whisker of hope that she might soon have a slightly more amenable ally in Number 10.

Labour has been consistently ahead in the opinion polls since June 2017, including the latest poll by Survation that put Corbyn seven points clear as he moves Labour closer to some kind of single market membership. However, he’s not quite on the same page as Nicola Sturgeon (yet) by advocating “a single market” rather than “the single market”. 

This puts Corbyn perilously close to the ‘have cake and eat it’ policy of the Tories which the EU has firmly rejected to date.

Chancellor Philip Hammond is pushing for the financial services sector to be included in a future free trade agreement, but the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, says a trade deal including financial services “does not exist”.

Hammond insists the EU itself tried to include financial services on trade deals with the US and Canada, and the UK Government has dismissed the EU’s initial meagre offering as an opening bid in negotiations that still have a bit of time to run.

The European Council was locked in discussions over the latest Brexit offering as Holyrood went to press, but if May emerged without too much of a bruising from Brussels, it will merely be a respite as there are still several rounds to go before the final Brexit bell rings.

Tory Eurosceptics are reportedly considering a rebellion over the Taxation (Cross-Border Trade) Bill to maintain alignment with EU regulations in the Republic of Ireland.

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s European Research Group has warned “we don’t want to stay in the EU by the back door”.

The European Commission’s chief Brexit negotiator has set an October 2018 deadline for the end of Brexit talks with the UK, to give the EU time to ratify the deal in time for Britain’s exit in March 2019.

As Sir John Curtice, Britain’s leading expert in electoral maths put it: “If the Government loses the vote in October, I think it’s dead, it’s over and we’re going into another general election.”
One possible sweetener which could break the impasse would be political dynamite for the Tory party and the British union.

European Council President Donald Tusk said “reciprocal access to fishing waters and resources should be maintained” in any future trade deal, stringing up another potential tightrope for Theresa May.

Part of her recent success in north-east Scotland rested on her pledge to remove Britain from the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) which many Scottish fishermen complain has left them with a raw deal for years, but if the new trade deal has the same fishy smell as the unpopular CFP then Tory support in Scotland is likely to sink beneath the waves.

Most Scottish Conservative MPs who benefitted from the Tory surge in June have yet to display any willingness to rebel on Brexit, but leader Ruth Davidson and UK Environment Secretary Michael Gove – the Edinburgh-born arch Brexiteer – issued a joint statement challenging May to “deliver a fairer allocation for the British fleet in our own waters”.

The SNP has feasted heartily over the years on a declassified UK Government briefing on negotiations to enter the CFP in the 1970s which advised that “in the wider UK context, the fishermen must be regarded as expendable”.

If Scotland’s fishermen are served up to Brussels on a plate in exchange for better access for financial markets, Fishing for Leave and the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation will be apoplectic.

One consolation for the Tories is that Sturgeon has yet to explain how her policy of independence in the European Union – in which the CFP is a key pillar – will solve the piscine problem.

While Sturgeon insists she remains fully committed to keeping Scotland in the EU, her immediate strategy is focused on keeping Scotland in the single market and customs union, which isn’t quite the same thing.

Many nationalists have been glancing admiringly at EFTA (European Free Trade Association), the tiny trading bloc comprising Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland which is in the single market but crucially outside the CFP. Scottish Brexit Minister Mike Russell has said EFTA is “not a bad place to hold yourself if you actually want to re-enter” the EU.

The Scottish Government is doing all it can to maintain regulatory convergence with the EU, and has potentially set itself up for a date with the Supreme Court with its decision to press ahead with its EU Continuity Bill against the advice of Holyrood’s Presiding Officer Ken Macintosh.

The bill is designed to resist an alleged “power grab” of devolved competences after Brexit. Britain will repatriate 111 powers that touch on devolved areas, and the UK Government intends to wield a veto over 24 powers – including fisheries, environmental protections, food regulation and animal welfare – to ensure there is no regulatory divergence in different parts of the UK.

The Scottish Government has thus far refused to recommend legislative consent for the EU Withdrawal Bill until they are satisfied that the “power grab” has been loosened.

The UK Government has offered to “consult” the Scottish Government on UK frameworks, but Russell wants the veto to work the other way. Russell said: “The problem that exists is on the single word ‘agree’.” However, it is unlikely May’s Scotch headache will be soothed for good by changing a single word. The Scottish Conservatives suspect the looming legal row over the Continuity Bill is a dry run for a potential “wildcat” independence referendum.

Sturgeon has pledged to outline her plans for a second independence referendum in the autumn, once the picture of a post-Brexit Britain becomes clearer, but she is more likely to be assessing the shape of her own party and the mood of the Scottish nation.

The SNP was reduced to a minority administration in 2016 and will be forced to rely on the Greens to get any future referendum through the Scottish Parliament, which is unlikely to present a problem and allows Sturgeon to insist that there remains a “pro-independence mandate” in the Scottish Parliament. However, that mandate took a further battering when she lost 21 MPs in June.

Ruth Davidson, who advises May closely on Scottish matters, has set three arguably unachievable tests the nationalists would have to meet before London would agree to another referendum: evidence that Scotland wants one, some sort of constitutional trigger, and an explanation for breaking the pledge that the 2014 referendum would be “once in a generation”.

Support for independence has remained stubbornly static in the polls since 2014 but it has not decreased so there is scope for it to rise if Brexit descends further into chaos, an event that Sturgeon could claim as a trigger for a rerun.

However, it’s safe to say the Tories will never accept any nationalist argument for holding two independence referendums in less than a decade so the prospect of meeting all three tests for another Edinburgh Agreement in the current Scottish Parliament, which ends in 2021, are practically zero.

If Sturgeon somehow manages to meet the first two tests – and it would be a major coup in itself if nationalist sentiment rises consistently above 50 per cent in the polls – one option would be an “advisory” referendum without London’s support.

However, the international indifference from world leaders to Catalonia’s wildcat referendum, despite the brutal crackdown by Spain, will no doubt give the Scottish nationalists pause for thought.

Sturgeon could also bet the house and engineer another Scottish Parliament election, to try to regain some momentum similar to the SNP landslide in 2011 which triggered the independence referendum. That strategy didn’t work out so well for Theresa May, who was punished by a vote-weary electorate.

To borrow a phrase from the Russian revolution: “What is to be done?”. 

The Scottish answer at the moment appears to be: “Ah dinnae ken!”

Brexit is currently a whole bag of nuts that seem near impossible to crack, but with Britain due to leave the EU on 29 March 2019, somebody is going to have to come out with a pretty big hammer – and soon.