Imagine describing the current scene during the referendum campaign. Four and a half years after winning a vote on promises of prosperity, sovereignty and glory, we are nine days from crashing out of the EU’s economic and political instruments with nothing to replace them. Dozens of countries have closed their borders to the UK, while a devastatingly infectious disease rips through the south-east and cuts off England’s supply lines. The Prime Minister laughs on live television when asked if he will sign a basic trade deal with our closest allies and commercial partners. In the meantime, Christmas has been banned and millions of people forcibly confined to their homes. At what point will we have had enough?
The government cannot be blamed for the new strain of Covid-19. Some may even be minded to forgive its shambolic handling of the recent restrictions and weekend U-turn on Christmas. But one thing would simply be unforgivable: to proceed with the next phase of Brexit, as it stands, on 31st December.
Let us remember that we still don’t know—even now—whether or not there will be a deal. A much-hyped statement by EU negotiator Michel Barnier on Tuesday turned out to be more remarks on “giving it a final push.” All the Brexiters’ promises about “the easiest deal in history” and “Britain holding all the cards” were lies.
But the problem is not just that the clock has run out and we need more negotiating time. It is not just that there is no time for viable parliamentary scrutiny of a deal in either Brussels or London—in itself a profound democratic insult—and that the House of Commons would have to be recalled with great chaos during the Christmas recess. It is not even that the two sides ought to be finalising a deal while movement between borders is running smoothly—not halted for an entirely different reason. It is that, even with a deal technically in place, there is no time for any implementation. In all circumstances we can expect a brief period of de facto no-deal after 31st December.
It is worth recalling the genesis of the transition. Theresa May agreed it as a 21-month implementation period, allowing businesses to enact the negotiated deal. It ends in five working days and that deal does not yet exist. This level of chaos constitutes an outward decimation of the national interest in the service of xenophobic nationalism. And in Britain, the self-appointed bedrock of pragmatism and good governance, it has now been fully normalised.
When the transition period was first agreed by May, all the experts stressed that it allowed insufficient time to agree a comprehensive deal. When Boris Johnson slashed the 21 months to 11, the experts insisted again on the difficulty. So when, just a few weeks after our formal exit, the country was overrun by the pandemic, it was obvious to anyone with any knowledge that the deadline was no longer remotely credible. Even in normal times, this refusal to delay would be a scandal. These times are anything but.
Nobody suggests that delaying Brexit at this stage would be easy. It is no longer possible to alter the withdrawal agreement, so the two sides would have to agree on a new legal instrument—perhaps a new, time-limited transition period. We have seen on multiple occasions, on either side of the Channel, that changes can be adopted at lightning speed with political resolve and maximum urgency.
The fundamental problem is that most of Britain’s political leaders do not have those qualities. While Scotland’s First minister Nicola Sturgeon has called for an urgent extension, on Monday Labour leader Keir Starmer declared, “I do not want an extension to the transition period.” The only response must be: why not? What possible advantages are there in implementing profound, sudden changes to our economic infrastructure at the precise moment a new viral strain has effectively closed Britain to the world? A majority of the population has always been in favour of extending the transition. Leavers, like everyone else, can now see that the new strain is causing unprecedented problems at the worst time. Who does Starmer think he is appealing to?
Backing an extension would not be an Opposition or Remainer plot. Even some Conservative MPs have endorsed it. It is an emergency measure to avoid compounding a unique health and geopolitical emergency with a voluntary economic one.
But the ultimate responsibility lies with Johnson. The deepest scandal is that the Prime Minister ever let us reach this point. The EU didn’t want to devote vital bandwidth to Brexit while fighting a once-in-a-century pandemic. British civil servants almost certainly didn’t either. Brussels repeatedly suggested extending the deadline. But dogma triumphed over reason. Brexit would be one of the only global events whose timetable would remain completely unchanged.
The government had plenty of time to avoid the current debacle. When the pandemic hit in the spring there was every reason to assume that it might be just as bad or worse in midwinter. Any government acting in the interests of its citizens should have assumed the worst-case scenario might happen and intervened accordingly. We should have predicted that the pandemic was unpredictable. Refusing such a reality was a dereliction of duty.
That is why the Scottish and Welsh governments and Northern Ireland Assembly all called for an extension. That is why the public supported one. That is why even some Leavers endorsed one. We left the EU in January and are not returning any time soon. Here was a chance to safeguard the fundamental blocks of our economy during the greatest recession in 300 years—and the government flatly refused.
Could anything, in the end, be more important than Brexit? Could anything even be serious enough to change Brexit’s timing? Like 29th March and 31st October 2019, 31st December has become an arbitrary date invested with biblical meaning. But it remains just a date, like any other. It has no intrinsic significance. People’s lives and livelihoods matter more. At the moment of our greatest national emergency since the Battle of Britain, the Prime Minister who cancelled Christmas won’t even postpone economic collapse.
