Brexit: a "no deal" crash-out is becoming less likely | thearticle

Reading Brexit negotiations is a mug’s game. But the tom-toms do seem to be beating out softly, very softly, a signal that Britain is not heading for the crash-out “No Deal” that many feared

and some wished for. It looks as if there will be no final Götterdämmerung moment of total destruction in Britain’s links with Europe. Boris Johnson and Michel Barnier are involved in a

stately minuet in which each claims to be dancing to his own music. But they are more in step than is realised. The Remainers have failed in their campaign to get Johnson to ask for an

extension. The prime minister simply said No. He had little choice, given all the other Covid management problems he faces as well as his own post-intensive care frailty. Had he requested an

extension by the legal deadline of the end of June, Tory Party activists and MPs would have exploded with fury. Boris Johnson is being helped by Keir Starmer who has stamped on Labour a

policy of: “See no Europe. Hear no Europe. Speak no Europe.” His only policy on Brexit is — the worse the better. The more Johnson messes up, the more business and the now clear opinion poll

majority for Remain will turn to Labour. So the last thing the Prime Minister will want to do is fall into Labour’s Brexit trap. Hence his talks with the presidents of the EU Commission,

Council and Parliament as well as a handily-timed discussion with President Macron on the 80th anniversary of General de Gaulle’s June 1940 appeal from London via the BBC for France to keep

fighting. There have been clear de-escalation signals from Johnson. He has abandoned the earlier pledge to take back control of the borders with tough customs and other checks on vehicles

coming into the UK via Dover, Folkestone and other ports. The official line is that this is only for six months, but it buries the rhetoric about a 1st January 2021 deadline. The UK has

rolled over on accepted EU rules for data exchange on criminal records. If it’s good enough for crims why not on data exchange between people and firms? People movement is the big one, but

Covid is forcing a big rethink about the need to know who is in the country, where they are, and what they do. Apply that to the broader labour market and you have a regime for management

and control of Europeans in or entering the UK. Many of them do essential work. But there is no need for some giant new bureaucracy. Pascal Lamy, the former WTO chief, an EU Commissioner,

and chief aide to Jacques Delors told the _Aberdeen Press and Journal_, where Michael Gove began work as a journalist after Oxford, that the best way to solve the fishing issue was to let

the fishing communities sort it out themselves. Well before the EEC of 1957, French, British, Danish, Dutch, Spanish and other fishing communities negotiated these problems with catch and

quota regulations commonly agreed. (There is lot of pointless talk about the UK “self-imposing” punitive quotas if it breaches existing EU rules.) It is possible for Johnson to announce that

the new relations with the EU will be decided by the House of Commons but will evolve over time, step by step. The EU could buy something like that as the ideological Brexit desired by the

Farage lobby would be so enormously damaging. Johnson meanwhile is giving red meat to his hardline base by merging DfID with the FCO, sending out more tweets about statues than about Covid,

bringing in the new/old black passport and imposing quarantines on foreigners who are impertinent enough to visit England. The signals remain mixed, not to say indecipherable. But there is a

distinct lowering of the Brexit negotiation temperature in London and endlessly repeated claims from Brussels, Paris, Berlin and other capitals that a deal is possible. As indeed it is. A

full-scale New Year’s Day crisis is bad politics for Johnson and bad economic for a Covid-struck Britain.