by N. Peter Kramer
It seems out of the question that the UK decides to postpone final Brexit on 31 December before the 30 June deadline. In the December 2019 campaign for the British parliamentary election the prime minister already said that he would not do this. After first eliminating pro-EU MPs in his party, he won the election with the slogan: Get Brexit done. Traditional Labour voters who voted for Brexit in the referendum in 2016 ran over to him en masse. They were fed up with much of Labour and the Liberal Democrats trying to sabotage the referendum result.
Johnson concluded a divorce agreement with the EU immediately after his election victory and since February 1, the United Kingdom is no longer an EU member. It no longer has voting rights, no EU Commissioner, no MEPs. But effectively the country is still submissive to the EU rules until at least December 31 this year. It is in the internal market, it contributes, and the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg is the highest judicial authority. By Tuesday June 30, the UK and EU have to decide whether they want to extend this situation for another year or two. This has been agreed in the divorce agreement in order to buy possibly more time to arrive at a new (trade) relationship.
The UK would like a free trade agreement with the EU as Canada already has. This would mean that virtually all goods and services without import tariffs can be shipped from the EU to the UK and vice versa. But the EU does not want this. Michel Barnier, the arrogant EU chief negotiator, declared that the UK has twice as many inhabitants as Canada and it is just around the corner and not thousands of kilometers away.
The EU will allow the United Kingdom to trade with the EU free of tariffs only if it stays under EU rules such as those on labour standards and state aid. In other words, the EU wants the UK to stick to the EU rules without having any say about them. The EU fears, for example, that labour standards in the UK will be reduced differently, that British and Northern Irish companies will receive state aid and that these advantages will lead to counterfeit competition from EU countries.
Barnier and the other Eurocrats expected that Johnson would not dare to leave the internal market after December 31 without some sort of free trade agreement. The UK would than have to trade with the EU under World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules. But everything is different due to the corona crisis. The economic damage caused by the lockdowns is so big that the alleged damage from Brexit may sometimes fail. Irish EU Commissioner Phil Hogan said: ‘They (the British) don’t want the negotiations to drag on until 2021, because they can now blame COVID for everything’.
And why not the Australian model? That country trades with the EU on the basis of WTO rules, with tariffs. However, the EU and Australia are more flexible in a number of areas. This could be an attractive model for the UK. Not strangled by the rules of the internal market, because according to French wishes the number of bans is endless and it stifles innovation and trade with non-EU countries. Since the start of the internal market in 1993, the economic growth of EU member states has lagged behind that of the US for instance, while it ran parallel before then. The country will also be freed of ‘the tentacles of the European Court of Justice’ , wrote Robert Dowsett today in the Financial Times.
Only if the UK is completely detached from the EU will it be possible to reap the benefits of freedom regained. And possibly serve as an example for other countries.
