The Political Physicist

Well, we finally have a proposed agreement by which the UK could withdraw from the EU. It’s just a pity that no one actually agrees with it. In fact, disagreeing with it is about the only thing the House of Commons can agree on.

The Situation as it Stands

OK, smart-assed comments aside, the Brexit process is in dire straights. With barely more than 100 days until Brexit, Theresa May has secured a deal which the EU insists is not up for any renegotiation. However, her MPs (and the Democratic Unionists, on whose votes she relies) won’t pass it because of the controversial “backstop” measure. Should the UK and EU fail to negotiate a post-Brexit agreement which would prevent the re-assertion of a “hard border” in Northern Ireland, the backstop will automatically enter into effect at the end of Britain’s two year “transition period”. It provides something similar to single-market membership (although with some important differences).¹ Terminating the backstop will require mutual consent of both the UK and EU, causing some to fear that the EU will trap Britain in a perpetual “Brexit in name only”.

I understand why the EU wants this. They need a guarantee the Northern Irish border will remain open. The backstop wouldn’t be able to offer that if the UK could unilaterally renege. That said, I also completely understand why MPs are uncomfortable with this; signing an agreement which you can not get out of is a risk.

For its part, the Labour Party was never going to accept any deal which the Tories brought to parliament. Their six tests were designed to be impossible to achieve from the start.² Rather than put any serious work into fleshing out what they’d like Brexit to look like, alongside various alternatives should the EU prove unforthcoming in negotiations, they’ve taken an obstructionist stance. I suspect this is in an attempt to manage the internal contradictions within the party. Its members are majority pro-EU, but a majority of its constituencies voted to leave. To get elected requires the votes of both Remainers and Leavers. The party’s current stance has proven sufficiently ambiguous that it hasn’t alienated either of these groups, but a serious discussion of how to go about Brexit would likely do just that.

So there is no way the deal is getting through parliament. However, without a deal, the UK will automatically exit the EU on 29 March. It would revert to WTO rules for trade with the EU, while Europeans living in Britain would be left in a legal limbo of being neither legal nor illegal. None of the bilateral treaties which normally facilitate commerce, trade, and travel between countries would exist and nor would the infrastructure needed to process trade without such benefits. This would likely cause massive backlogs at ports of entry which are predicted to lead to shortages of food and medicines, as well as halt any manufacturing which depends on European supply chains.

The Irish Question

The real root of the problem is Northern Ireland. Key to the Good Friday Agreement was keeping a soft border between Ireland and Ulster. However, so the logic goes, a soft border is only possible with a high degree of regulatory harmonisation and free movement of goods, people, and services, i.e. membership of the Single Market. Thus, any attempt to take the UK out of the Single Market was always going to cause problems.

In many regards this is the tail wagging the dog. A tiny region with less than 2 million people, disconnected from the country at large, is preventing the results of a referendum in which 33 million people voted from being implemented. What’s more, it’s a region which is only part of the UK due to past imperialism. In many ways, the tidiest solution would be a united Ireland (which may actually happen, depending on how Brexit proceeds, although not in time to make negotiations any more straightforward).

Anyway, barring that, there are limited options. One is to give Northern Ireland special status within the UK, so that it remains within the Single Market while Great Britain leaves. There would thus need to be customs on goods moving between the two; i.e., the hard border would lie in the Irish Sea. That is certainly much more practical to implement than a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and it is sort of the inverse of the current situation with overseas territories of EU member states (e.g., islands in the Caribbean). The EU appears to be open to this option, but it is unpopular with Unionists and has been completely ruled out by the Democratic Unionist Party supporting Theresa May in parliament.

Another option would be to accept that the border won’t be quite as soft as it has been in the past, but pursue every possible means to minimise it. This has been achieved to some degree at the Swiss border using digital systems to process customs in advance and avoid the use of checkpoints. If coupled with limited checks between Northern Ireland and Britain (e.g., for transport of animals) then this might be technically achievable. However, it doesn’t look like Ireland or the EU would consider it sufficient to meet their requirements. It’s also not clear that the Northern Irish themselves would accept it. However, if such a system could be implemented then it might conceivably represent a means to get out of the backstop.

What Should We Want?

So far I’ve been discussing this purely in terms of what can get through parliament as it stands now. However, there is also the question of what the Left would like as an outcome. Most supported Remain and would thus prefer to simply revoke Brexit and stay in the EU. As such, there has been a lot of demand for a second referendum on the final terms of the deal. However, many other Remainers are worried about that, feeling that we need to respect the democratic decision of the original referendum and fearing not doing so could massively embolden the reactionary Right. And then there are those, such as myself, who think that pursuing socialism will be impossible within the EU and would thus like a Brexit which gets the UK out of Single Market rules which inhibit state aid, enforce open competition, and forbid capital controls.

This entails a relatively hard Brexit. While I don’t object in principle to Labour’s desire for a customs union with the EU which nonetheless would not bind the UK to neoliberal EU policy, I don’t think such a deal is likely to be forthcoming. Given that, the UK should have told Northern Ireland that one way or another Britain will be leaving the Single Market and the customs union. It would then have been up to them whether this would mean a united Ireland, special status for Northern Ireland within the UK, or some hardening of the Northern Irish border. Of course, it would be necessary to evaluate whether any or all of these outcomes would be likely to restart the Troubles (although I’m inclined to doubt they would). Assuming they wouldn’t, these choices could be put to the Northern Irish people in a ranked-choice referendum.

The UK would then get to work establishing a framework to leave the Single Market. This wouldn’t happen immediately and would require at least a couple years of transition period, during which the UK is outside of the EU but inside the Single Market. This would provide time to negotiate the agreements necessary for a hard Brexit to work. These would not necessarily be free trade agreements in the sense of eliminating tariffs; with the exception of a few sectors, tariffs would probably be low enough to be manageable. The real issue is all the other barriers to trade such as regulatory inspections, paperwork around customs, sanitary provisions for the export of live animals, etc.³ Agreements exist with other countries which would harmonise and expedite all of this sufficiently to allow relatively smooth trade. However, it would take time to negotiate and implement these for the UK, hence the need of a transitional period within the Single Market. This could potentially take the form of a phased withdrawal, with different aspects of Single Market membership being dropped over time (assuming the EU would agree, of course). For example, liberalisation directives for railways might be dropped immediately, on the condition that UK rail companies would no longer be eligible to bid for EU operating contracts. This would allow Labour to immediately begin the process of taking the railways back into public ownership.

There’s not guarantee that these negotiations would be easy and at least some aspects of them would probably drag on for many years. However, it at the very least seems like a more reality-based plan than what the Labour Party is currently calling for. However, now we are at a point where there is no time to negotiate such an agreement.

The Options Before Us

At this point, there are really only three plausible options:

1. The deal which the EU has offered (or something very similar).
2. No deal.
3. Remaining.

Labour continues to call for a general election to resolve the parliamentary deadlock and while I would be pleased with anything which would get the Tories out of government, whoever succeeds them will face the same set of choices as we do now. Unfortunately, publicly at least, Labour has not realised that. At a recent Constituency Labour Party meeting I asked the local MP (who is in the Shadow Treasury Team) what Labour would like to change about the existing deal and it basically came down wanting a commitment a permanent customs union. I’m given to understand that the EU is not willing to negotiate such agreements at this point,⁴ but even if that’s not the case there is simply no time to negotiate a customs union before Brexit day. Perhaps the EU could be convinced to extend the negotiation period, but it would require all 27 other member states to agree and this is by no means guaranteed.

This Deal

No one on the Left likes the current deal. It would lock the UK into Single Market rules (including all of the neoliberal ones) without having any say over them, at least until the backstop is over. The attached (non-binding) political declaration indicates a desire for any future agreement negotiated by the Tories to do much the same around issues of state aid and competition. As such, not only Remainers object to the current settlement, but most left-Leavers too. However, Chris Bickerton (a left-Leaver and European scholar who wrote The European Union: A Citizen’s Guide) has argued that at this point it is the best we are going to get, that the EU has ample incentive not to keep the UK trapped in the backstop, and that it represents something from which we can negotiate improvements.⁵

No Deal

For the most part, only the Right has flirted with the prospect of No Deal, believing it would give them carte blanche to turn the UK into a libertarian free-trade hellhole. Most people reject it out of hand, given the projection of shortages, planes being grounded, and Kent being turned into a car-park for lorries that aren’t being allowed into Calais. Nonetheless, at least one left-Leaver has suggested that we should take this option, viewing it as the option least likely to constrain a future socialist government.⁶ A number of pro-Brexit sources have sought to downplay fears around No Deal, although many of them are based on arguments of how other countries trade with the EU while ignoring the numerous treaties which they have negotiated to make this possible.⁷

While some contingency plans have been agreed between the UK and EU in case of a No Deal outcome and both parties have made some unilateral preparations, these hardly appear sufficient to avoid at least some disruption. As far as I can tell, what would be likely to occur in the event of No Deal would be a failure to enforce the usual rules of international trade. Britain would likely continue to treat trade entering the country the same was as the day before, despite the fact this would technically violate WTO rules (as they would be favouring some nations over others, without having free trade agreements). It’s harder to predict the actions of the EU, as they’d be less affected by the cessation of trade and would thus have less incentive to bend rules. It appears only minimal air service would be permitted. It seems clear that neither the UK nor Ireland have any plan of enforcing the Northern Irish border in the event of No Deal, so who knows what the legal status of trade would be there. The best that could be hoped for in this outcome is that basic trade would be allowed to prevent the UK from collapsing and that the chaos would force the EU and UK to rush through the agreements necessary to make trade possible. All things considered, to me this does not sound like an outcome the Left should permit.

Remain

The Labour Party is divided on the prospect of a second referendum (in Oxford, a motion calling on the leadership to call for one and campaign for remain passed by only a few votes). As a solution, it comes with an awful lot of practical problems of its own. There is the issue of what exactly the question would be and what options would be available. May’s deal and no deal? May’s deal and remain? All three? It would also almost certainly be impossible to pass the requisite legislation and hold the legally-required campaign prior to Brexit Day and very difficult to do so before the coming spring’s EU elections (by which time the EU wants the UK to have left). But, without another referendum, Remaining could massively undermine the legitimacy of the UK’s democratic institutions (and they aren’t in great shape already). I suppose the UK could withdraw its invocation of Article 50, thus cancelling Brexit, and then reactivate it should Leave win the referendum, but I’d imagine this would be a tough sell.

There is also the question of whether Labour could implement its policies within the EU. Lots of people claim it can, but they don’t seem to know about the 4th Railway Package which insists that in future all routes either be put out to tender or be open to competition from other operators. This would seem to limit Labour’s pledge to renationalise the railways to having a public operator compete for franchises, as was party policy under Ed Miliband. At the time this was seen by the Left as a half measure meant to avoid talk of nationalisation. The other major issue is capital controls. While Labour hasn’t really talked about these, historically the Post-War Consensus relied on such controls and capital flight has often been able to undermine radical Left governments. The real issue, though, is that even if Labour’s last manifesto may have been permitted under EU law, more radical policy (which we should be pushing towards) would not.⁸

Some suggest, with varying degrees of reluctance or excitement, a “Remain and Reform” position.⁹ I think this is naive about prospects for reform. Despite the rhetoric you sometimes hear about uniting with other socialists within Europe, this usually means social democrats that I do not believe will work for the policies required. I’ve yet to see a serious strategy for how to go about achieving reforms, given the massive democratic deficit inherent in EU bodies and the lack of any European demos.¹⁰ If we are to pursue this approach then it seems to me that the only practical policy is “Remain and Rebel”, knowingly and wilfully violating neoliberal EU directives and refusing to obey ECJ rulings against the UK. We’d have to hope this would expose the EU for the neoliberal machine it is and create a movement for reform, before any retaliatory sanctions become too unbearable. Unfortunately, hardly anyone in Labour conceives of Remain this way and I have serious doubts that it could work. As circumstances change, that may yet become the best strategy, but I don’t think we’re there yet.

One final note on this. The EU has a history of repeating, or outright ignoring, referenda which went against further integration. I admit that part of my resistance to another referendum is the feeling that it continues this dangerous and undemocratic history. This despite the fact that the arguments for a second referendum in this case are far better than those in previous ones. I’m not saying this is a strong argument on my part, but it is there in the back of my mind nonetheless. More important is that this would perpetuate the whole narrative that There Is No Alternative to the EU. I’m deeply uncomfortable with creating a precedent which suggests leaving the EU is impossible.

So, What’s the Best Choice?

No, I’m not going to borrow that old cliche from Lenin… Nonetheless, clearly the Left needs some sort of strategy going forward. For what it’s worth, I think that the best choice is accepting something like the current deal. It’s not a good deal, but I found Bickerton’s arguments for it far more convincing than arguments for No Deal and I’m not at the point yet where I think we should go for Remain.

Were I leading the Parliamentary Labour Party, I would go through the agreement with a fine-toothed comb and find exactly what the most problematic aspects of it are. I would then write up a series of amendments I would like to see. At present I can think of a few:

• Make the backstop only apply to Northern Ireland, which the EU was open to in the past
• If that proves possible, add a referendum in Northern Ireland as a way of ending the backstop
• Removal of commitments in the political declaration (which details plans for negotiation future agreements) dealing with maintaining EU rules on state aid, competition, etc. If the Tories won’t agree to that, then ask them to leave these in as only a possible path.
• Clarification that, should there be a change of government prior to finalising the post-Brexit agreements, the new administration can change its negotiating priorities
• A commitment that all future agreements can be will be open to renegotiation and will not lock in either party in perpetuity

Labour would then offer to help Theresa May pass her Brexit agreement if she can get these amendments and commits to triggering a general election immediately afterwords. The first of these would, of course, alienate the Democratic Unionists and a good number of Tories, but hopefully Labour would be able to marshal sufficient numbers in parliament that this would not be a problem. Should May then try to renege on holding a general election, the Unionists could almost certainly be relied upon to give a vote of no confidence against her, bringing the government down anyway.

Of course, the EU probably won’t agree to all demands. They’re insisting that the deal is now closed. The first demand is something they’ve proposed in the past themselves, though, so if changes can be made it would be that one. The penultimate point wouldn’t require reopening the withdrawal agreement and would likely just be an annex to the political declaration (which is itself non-binding), so it should be achievable. This is the commitment which I think should be an absolute red line. If Labour can’t get that out of either the Tories or the EU then it is time to start thinking about Remain as an option.

There are, of course, risks to this approach. If Theresa May or the EU won’t apply the backstop only to Northern Ireland then there is nothing to ensure she’ll stick to her promise to hold new elections. Or, Labour might lose those elections. This, of course, is the risk of democracy: sometimes people disagree with you. Elections could also yield a similarly unworkable parliament. However, in that case the backstop would kick in, so there wouldn’t be an immediate threat to the economy like now. It would essentially stabilise us on the status quo. Labour’s capacity to fight to change the EU rules would be little changed from what it is now (i.e., extremely limited) and rebelling would be about equally effective. If that really is the best we can achieve then we could consider trying to transfer to EFTA/EEA membership, which would likely have some minor advantages over the backstop.¹¹

The final question is whether this would be seen as Labour conspiring with the Tories, causing a wave of anti-establishment disgust with the party. I hope that demanding amendments to the agreement would help to mitigate this. Even without those amendments, however, I don’t see the risks as being any worse than those of backing another referendum to Remain.

Final Thoughts

Brexit looks set to be the defining issue in UK politics for the foreseeable future. As an issue it is uniquely polarising and one about which few have shown any ability to hold informed discussion. Both of the major parties are deeply divided on the issue and it will be incredibly difficult for either of them to pursue a coherant policy. Although I hope I’m wrong, at this point it is starting to feel inevitable that there will be another referendum. Though I think there is little prospect of it being adopted, I hope something like my strategy might provide a way to keep Labour relatively united, avoid alienating too many voters on either side, and prevent any serious economic damage. At the same time, it would keep open the possibility of negotiating a permanent deal which would allow a Left government to begin to challenge capitalism in the UK.