It’s been two weeks since the last update on this blog (although the podcast has been filling the gaps), and a week since the surprise announcement of a general election on June 8th. This will inevitably be a Brexit –focused election, but the possible ramifications on the Brexit process are not yet clear. Theresa May’s reasoning for the announcement was that there is division in Whitehall over Brexit, but the election will also mean that there is no other GE before 2022 – the year in which the A50 negotiations and any transition arrangement are expected to be over. This will in effect give whoever is elected full control over the massively important first stages of the Brexit process. From the Conservatives point of view, they are hoping (and expected) to secure a larger majority than they have currently, allowing them to claim a larger mandate for their Brexit plan. There is already some disagreement about what this means as to the strategy. Initially, some commentators were suggesting that a larger tory majority could lead to a softer Brexit, as this would weaken the voice of the strongest euro-sceptics in the party who currently have May’s ear. This might lead May – who campaigned for remain, to take a more moderate and pragmatic approach to Brexit. The trouble is, I do not expect us to learn much about any individual party’s Brexit strategy in the upcoming manifestos, I expect us to just see broad objectives and direction, without much about the process of getting to the final destination. In the case of the Conservatives, the manifesto is unlikely to deviate from or give much more detail than the “Plan for Britain” speech, the accommodating white paper and the 12 key areas already highlighted by the party.

This point extends to the other parties too. The Liberal Democrats were fast out the blocks on a “stop hard Brexit” campaign line, and Labour are likely to say something similar. But considering this is undoubtedly going to be a Brexit-focussed election, and that Brexit will see potentially 5 years of negotiation between ourselves and 27 other countries, it is difficult to see what promises can be made. We have already told the other side what our overall objectives are and they have broadly agreed with them, so what wiggle room is there to change tack? The Lib Dems in particular look poised to run on a pro-free movement, pro-single market platform, which immediately brings the idea of EEA/EFTA membership to mind. This route is something which is being mentioned increasingly by representatives from Europe, too, particularly as transitional arrangement but potentially as a basis for a longer-term relationship. Campaigning explicitly on this strategy would be a clever and bold move by the Lib Dems, and whilst they are not expected to see enormous gains, this would certainly pique the interest of voters on both sides of the Brexit debate. The problem would persist however, of only being able to point to objectives, as the parties will be wary of making promises in their manifestos that may come back to haunt them.

All of this is kind of irrelevant though, given just how much this is the Conservatives’ election to lose, and in reality, the election itself is unlikely to either give us more detail about our future or to affect the Brexit process much, if at all. As more comes out from the parties and the final manifestos are released we’ll get analysis done of the Brexit side of things up here on this site. In the meantime, there’s some much wider debate around the election and other related issues like the French elections happening in our podcast (Episodes 9 onwards for election coverage). If this blog is failing to quench your thirst please have a listen, subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes if you can.

alex.davies@gmchamber.co.uk

@GMCC_Alex

So there we have it. The letter notifying the triggering of Article 50 was delivered to EU Council president Donald Tusk on Wednesday, and the Brexit process is officially underway. The letter itself can be read in full here. Following Tusk’s immediate announcement, which had particularly sombre tone, the attention turned to the suggestion that Theresa may was threatening the EU with the prospect of withdrawing or reducing security cooperation. This was a sign of how every single aspect of this process can potentially be whipped into an unnecessary frenzy, and wasn’t the only case of this from last week. The fact is, that under a ‘no deal’ scenario, there would be no legal precedent as to our ongoing security cooperation with the EU, in terms of delivering security itself but also the sharing of data to help fight crime and terrorism (of which we are an integral player). It wasn’t a threat, the idea of which is extremely silly given our history within the EU and NATO and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance and everything else. Instead, Theresa May was simply saying look, if we can’t come to an agreement then security cooperation is going to be one of many things that will suddenly become very unclear in a legal sense. I actually see this as the government admitting that ‘no deal’ is certainly something they want to avoid, a much more productive stance than ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’. Of course this was blown up into a news story over here, but the immediate response from the other side was that it was a perfectly sensible thing to point out and not a threat at all.

Then, on Thursday we had the first government white paper on the Great Repeal Bill. The paper laid out the broad objectives and strategy for bringing EU law over onto our statute books, including the repeal of the 1972 European Communities Act. The consensus from law experts on twitter was that it was a bit thin on detail, and whilst the white paper confirmed that the interpretation of EU laws post-Brexit will be that of the Court of Justice of the European Union going forward, it raised questions around what happens as said EU laws or regulations change beyond then – do the changes apply to us too? I am a legal novice and thus struggled with this a fair deal, but twitter came to the rescue, and I would recommend following the thread below started by Professor of Public Law at Cambridge, Mark Elliott:

Soon after the A50 letter was delivered we received the first response from the European Council outlining their early negotiating strategy. This actually followed a much bigger document which leaked before last Wednesday.  The documents were reasonable overall, but included a few interesting points. The response first set out some things we all know but are worth reiterating, such as the fact that the EU27 will now go away and agree on a joint negotiating stance without us in the room, before coming back to negotiate as a whole, rather than as member states. It also mentioned that the UK will not be a member of the single market come the end of all this, and that this was always going to be the case in the eyes of the Council. There were positive messages around the divorce, and the position was made clear that the EU does not want this to be messy. The intention it seems is to disentangle things like our settlement bill and the rights of citizens first before moving onto trade matters, but also that a trade deal can be signed whilst we are still members – something which many has suggested couldn’t happen. Perhaps the most interesting point however, was that the EU are more than happy to offer us a transitional arrangement, but any such arrangement will be time-limited to 3 years, meaning we would have to move on by the end of March, 2022. I find this to be an interesting development because one of the key arguments against going down something like the Norway route – using EEA membership to maintain single market membership for the time being – was that we would get stuck there. If any interim stage is time-limited however, this argument fails. I certainly called for EEA membership to be a part of our exit strategy, because it would essentially take trade matters completely off the table for the Article 50 negotiation period, and would allow us to take our time with the FTA after we have officially left the Union. It would ensure the most-stress free Brexit possible. The time limit strengthens this case, because it could no longer be argued that we would then be in a state of quasi-membership for an extended amount of time. I for one hope this conversation is reignited.

Then, right at the end, there was a short clause about Gibraltar, simply stating that Spain would be required to consent to any future UK-EU deals covering the British Overseas Territory and its 30,000 people. The inclusion of this paragraph is pretty odd however, as it states something that would be a given anyway - EU FTAs require unanimity giving any member state a veto. So why is it there? I’m guessing it’s because Spain asked for it to be there. There’s been reports that mentioning Gibraltar in the Article 50 negotiation letter was repeatedly fired around within government but was rejected, and it could be argued that including it at the end of their immediate response was a bit of a naughty negotiating tool by the EU, who could be seen to have turned the people of Gibraltar into a bargaining chip. Alas, it seems there are many old-timey politicians who are literally bursting to mention the Falklands at every opportunity, and so all of a sudden we’re all talking about going to war with Spain or something, and there are articles in serious newspapers about how our navy could destroy Spain’s; then a Spanish MEP accused Britain of ‘losing its cool’; then the chief minister of Gibraltar accused the EU of ‘behaving like a cuckolded husband’ who were being ‘bullied’ by Spain; then we had Boris and EU diplomats on TV talking about the future of Gibraltar; then we had people pointing out the irony that 4 days after notifying the EU we wanted to leave we’re all talking about a potential war, one of the things that the EU was created to stop. All of this happened and became a very serious international affairs matter essentially because the EU allowed Spain to troll a forgotten politician into saying something silly and despite the fact we all laughed at him. Bring on the next two (or five, or ten) years.

alex.davies@gmchamber.co.uk

@GMCC_Alex