All Brussels ever wanted was to keep the UK captive….a ‘colony’ for their exporters
I AM not optimistic. Boris Johnson has made a fair and generous offer to the EU. He can get a majority for it in the House of Commons.
It makes big concessions – on money, on treating Northern Ireland differently, on following some EU rules after leaving.
But my hunch is that Brussels will still say no. Why? Because, for the EU, the aim was never to avoid a hard border in Ireland — something these proposals plainly achieve.
The aim, rather, was to keep Britain in a subordinate position, still subject to EU law and trade policy.
Brussels was reluctant to spell this out in so many words — at least publicly.
A fly-on-the-wall documentary caught the staff of the European Parliament’s Brexit negotiator, Guy Verhofstadt, cheering when Theresa May’s Cabinet accepted the backstop.
“It took us two years,” said one, joyfully, “but we finally turned them into a colony”. Obviously, though, EU officials couldn’t take this line openly.
So, instead of owning up that their goal was to keep Britain tied to their laws, they invented a story about avoiding border checks and making sure that violence did not come back to Irish politics.
Still, there was a telling admission when the proposals first emerged earlier this week.
Reporting on the Irish government’s response, tweeted: “The main argument against this approach is that all the technology in the world is of no use if the actual customs tariff makes your cross-border business unviable, especially if you’re in agrifood.”
'They hope Britain will drop Brexit'
In other words, it’s not about the border at all. It’s about maintaining privileged access to the UK market.
At present, more than two thirds of all Irish beef exports come to the UK.
Understandably, the last thing Dublin wants is for us to switch to cheaper and better beef from Australia, Argentina and the United States — something we would be able to do outside the EU’s trade rules.
Many continental countries also want to make sure that Britain remains a captive market for their exporters.
So when it became clear that the UK had come up with a way to avoid infrastructure at the Irish border, they moved the goalposts.
What they now wanted was not an invisible border, they said, but common rules on both sides of it.
Oddly, this applies only one way. No one regarded it as a threat to peace when, for example, the Republic of Ireland left the sterling zone and joined first the ERM and then the euro. But Britain signing its own trade deals is apparently unacceptable.
To be fair to Eurocrats, the only reason they put these outrageous demands on the table was because there was a Remainer majority in both Houses of Parliament egging them on.
'Keep Britain in a subordinate position'
The concept of keeping Britain in the customs union — or of an “Irish backstop” as Brussels officials cunningly called it — only appeared in late 2017, more than a year after the referendum.
Why? Because, by then, there had been a new election in the UK and there was now a pro-EU majority in the Commons.
Labour and Lib Dem MPs told the EU, quite openly, that they would not let Britain leave except on terms agreed with Brussels — or “not without a deal” as they put it.
The EU responded by offering deliberately unpalatable terms.
It, like the opposition parties, plainly hopes that, if the terms are hard enough, Britain will drop the whole idea of Brexit.
As Michel Barnier, the Brexit negotiator, told EU leaders at the start of the process: “I’ll have done my job if, by the end, the terms are so hard that the Brits would prefer to stay in.”
What, then, will happen now? My guess is that the EU will reject Britain’s offer — even though it achieves all the things Brussels had said were important.
It will do so because it believes the alternative is not No Deal — an outcome for which Britain is far better prepared than are the 27 — but yet another postponement.
'Not about the border'
When MPs voted to make No Deal impossible, they were in fact making a deal impossible, because they were taking away from the EU any incentive to agree terms.
If I am right — if Brussels rejects the deal, and Parliament then demands another extension — we will be back where we started.
But with one critical difference. It will now be obvious to the entire country that Boris was prepared to go as far as any British leader could to find a compromise.
It will be clear that neither the EU nor its fifth columnists in our own Parliament have any interest in any outcome short of reversing the referendum.
Boris, in other words, will be able to go into a general election having demonstrated good faith.
He will have done everything possible to leave on good terms, but will have been blocked by MPs who had previously promised to respect the result.
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Labour and the Lib Dems will, by contrast, have to go into that campaign explaining why, despite their earlier pledges, they now want to drag everything out again.
Why they want months or years more of anger and broken friendships, of business uncertainty, and of Britain being made to look ridiculous before the world. No wonder they keep running away from a new election.
- Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP.
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