Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

Despite reports last week that the British and Irish governments were close to reaching a deal to solve the problem of the Irish border backstop, as Brexit talks resume in secretive “tunnel” mode this week, it is clear that the issue remains the main stumbling block to progress.

The EU may, it seems, be prepared to accept an all-UK customs union, with some “deeper” clauses, to replace its proposed Northern Ireland-specific one – but that would require acceptance by Downing Street that the customs union was effectively permanent, which Brexiters are unlikely to accept.

And so with Dublin and the EU27 adamant that the backstop cannot be time-limited, EU officials put at “50-50” the chances of Theresa May striking a border deal with Brussels that she can sell to her cabinet and parliament: the two sides’ competing red lines are still “incompatible” in key areas.

The government strongly denied a report that a deal on financial services had been reached, and fishing re-emerged as a major bone of contention, with a number of EU states objecting to any all-UK customs deal without agreement that their fleets can continue to operate in British waters.

Away from the talks, the drama centred on Arron Banks, whose donation to the unofficial leave campaign was the biggest in UK politics. The Electoral Commission said the National Crime Agency would investigate multiple possible criminal offences by the insurance millionaire, prompting calls for Brexit to be suspended.

Banks may not have been “the true source” of £8m in funding to Leave.EU, it is suspected. Separately, new allegations emerged that he may have misled parliament, with leaked emails showing that – despite his denials – his insurance staff worked on the Leave.EU campaign from their company offices.

Controversially, he appeared on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show to insist there was “no Russian money, no interference” and it was all his own dosh – but refused to disclose which of his many companies had generated it.

This is complicated stuff (the arcane nature of his companies’ dealings confused even Banks, let alone Marr), but my colleagues Peter Walker and David Pegg have written two fine explainers on why Banks is being investigated and what questions he has to answer.

All this put more wind in the sails of the campaign for a second referendum, with 1,500 of the UK’s top lawyers and more than 70 business leaders signing open letters to the prime minister calling for a “people’s vote” amid warnings from the credit ratings agency S&P that a no-deal Brexit would trigger a lengthy UK recession.

What next?
While parliament goes into recess this week, the government wants “decisive progress” made on the Irish border backstop question by Friday in the hope that Donald Tusk, the president of the European council, can then call an extraordinary Brexit summit, possibly on 22 November, to seal a possible deal.

A cabinet meeting on Tuesday may see some progress on the UK side, potentially clearing the way for the withdrawal agreement to be sorted by December. That would give parliament the necessary time to ratify it (which it is by no means certain to do). None of the above, of course, is in any sense guaranteed to happen.

[...]For Channel 4’s live programme on Monday night “Brexit: What The Nation Really Thinks” the polling company Survation interviewed 20,000 people online across every constituency in the UK from October 20th - November 2nd. The biggest independent survey of its kind on Brexit.

Data from the survey was used to drive a powerful Multi-level and post-stratification model to predict the result of an in/our referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. This MRP technique has previously been used to successfully predict the outcome of the 2017 General Election and the 2016 EU Referendum. From the predictions from this model, we can see how public opinion has shifted across the UK since the 2016 EU referendum.


Using this technique, we now estimate that the UK would vote to remain in the EU by a majority of 54% to 46% and that 105 local authorities in the UK that saw a majority of voters vote leave in 2016 would now vote Remain. This includes Birmingham, from where Channel 4’s show is broadcasting live, which voted 50.4% in favour of leave in 2016 but which is now predicted to vote 41.8% leave.
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A deal between Britain and the EU on the Irish border is not “close” despite hopes of a breakthrough, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator has warned.

Michel Barnier said there was “still a real point of divergence” on the Northern Ireland issue, after Theresa May called for a “review” mechanism to be attached to the EU’s planned backstop that would guarantee no hard border.

The Northern Ireland border issue is the main final stumbling block to a withdrawal agreement – though the delay resolving it also mean negotiators have not worked out even an outline of a trade deal either.
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Afternoon summary
Theresa May has edged her cabinet closer to a Brexit deal after a chairing a meeting where ministers discussed a compromise plan for the Irish backstop. According to some reports, Geoffrey Cox, the leave-voting attorney general who is trusted by Brexiters to vet any deal for acceptability, gave tentative backing to a plan for the UK as a whole to remain in a customs union as a backstop, with withdrawal only by mutual agreement. The cabinet meeting did not decide anything, but there were no walk-outs, and ministers were told they may be summoned to another meeting very soon where they may be asked to endorse a plan. The EU would still have to agree, but Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, said today that what was holding up progress was the UK government’s failure so far to make choices. (See 3.32pm.) The cabinet meeting finished around five hours ago but since then the hardcore Tory Brexiters have been largely silent - which may indicate that they are currently undecided as to how to respond to developments.
The Brexit campaign group Leave.EU and an insurance company owned by Arron Banks face fines totalling £135,000 over breaches of data laws, a report from the information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, has confirmed.
Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister, has expressed enthusiasm for May’s proposal for a review clause in the Brexit deal over the Irish border saying it could be to Ireland’s “advantage”.
John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, has signalled that Labour will not vote for a Brexit deal that would keep the UK in the customs union temporarily as a backstop measure after the transition.

"ever closer union" is a phrase that has outlived its practical usefulness

It appears to me that, though there is still some resistance in the UK to Brexit, no real movement towards a repeat of the plebiscite exists.

Solemn Declaration on European Union

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said on Wednesday that Europe must respond to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda of tighter borders, protectionist economic policies and unilateralist diplomacy, with “Europe United”.

He said he expected U.S. Democrats, who in Tuesday’s midterm elections won control of the U.S. House of Representatives, to use their newfound power to more heavily influence Trump’s policies.

“We’ll see to what extent that has an impact. We hope that this cooperation will be constructive and lead to constructive results in international politics,” Maas said.

Theresa May has invited ministers in to start reading the text of a proposed Brexit agreement ahead of a crunch cabinet meeting.

Members of her top team will have the chance to view the almost complete draft withdrawal agreement, but it will not include the crucial section on how Ms May will address the highly contentious issue of the Irish border.

The prime minister is likely to focus on this final element at a critical cabinet get together which will likely be held next week, as she pushes to get the Brexit deal locked in.

The Independent reported last night that the cabinet is edging towards an agreed position on the withdrawal deal, with Downing Street confident that if the final issue holding it – the so-called Irish backstop – can be solved, then a deal including outline future trading relations could be sealed with the EU and voted on by MPs before the Christmas break.

One cabinet source told The Independent: “They’ve been offered the chance to go in and read it. But it won’t include the backstop.”

The individual said a date is yet to be confirmed for the showdown cabinet meeting at which Ms May will seek broad agreement on all aspects of the withdrawal deal, but added that ministers were primed for something to take place next week.

[...]
The sticking point has not changed for months: how to ensure a frictionless Irish border when the UK wants to leave the single market and the customs union. The solution, as was long ago apparent, is to stay in a customs union after all. That will be the basis of any withdrawal agreement that Mrs May puts before parliament, with the promise of an upgrade to a wider trade agreement, to be finalised in the transition period. But transition ends in 2020 and free trade agreements usually take longer than two years to negotiate. The missing element is a mechanism for the UK to extricate itself from what will be sold to Conservative MPs as a “temporary” customs union.

Hard Brexiters demand an escape hatch so that they can embark on the journey of deregulation and dismantling of European social protections that was their reason for wanting to leave the EU in the first place. But any such clause would frighten off former remainers who envisage a more pro-European future. Labour MPs could never endorse a Brexit that gave succour to the neo-Thatcherite ambitions of the Tory right. The EU, meanwhile, will not agree to anything that allows the UK to coast along with near-current levels of European market access, then pivot into a rival set of global trading arrangements with the Irish border issue still unresolved.

For all the talk of an imminent deal, and the theatre of inviting cabinet ministers to see the work in progress, a definitive text that is acceptable both to Brussels and a majority in parliament still eludes Mrs May. That is because she has never had the courage to choose between irreconcilable propositions: a future harmonised with the EU or founded in hostility to it. She claims to want the former, but fails to repudiate the faction of her party that is steeped in the latter.

If the prime minister is lucky she will alight on some formula that postpones once again the critical strategic choice or, more likely, smuggles it into the small print of the withdrawal agreement. She might effectively lock the UK into an open-ended trade regime, obviously inferior to EU membership, while telling Tory Brexit fundamentalists that their ideological dreams might yet come true. Under the circumstances, pulling off that manoeuvre would probably feel like success to Mrs May, but, in all probability, it would not be a good deal for the country.

A crucial cabinet meeting to agree the UK’s Brexit negotiating position has been pushed back from Thursday to the weekend or early next week amid a row over whether to provide the full legal advice on the backstop to senior ministers.

Some ministers had believed the cabinet could have met late on Thursday afternoon to sign off Theresa May’s Brexit plan but No 10 indicated that the crunch meeting would not now take place on Thursday or Friday.

Downing Street insisted late on Wednesday that the meeting had not been delayed, although ministers abroad such as Greg Clark, the business secretary who is in Japan, and Sajid Javid, the home secretary who is in Seattle, were ready to fly back at short notice.
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Scotland’s highest court has refused the UK government leave to appeal its referral of a case to the European court of justice that seeks to establish whether the UK can unilaterally stop Brexit. This paves the way for the case to be heard in Luxembourg later this month.

The case has been brought by a cross-party group of six Scottish MPs, MEPs and MSPs, along with Jolyon Maugham QC, the director of the Good Law Project, who helped arrange the case after a crowdfunding appeal. They want the ECJ to offer a definitive ruling on whether the UK can halt the article 50 process without needing the approval of the 27 other EU member states.

At the court of session in Edinburgh on Thursday, Lord Carloway, Scotland’s most senior judge, rejected the arguments put by the advocate general, Lord Keen, on behalf of the UK government to appeal the decision before the supreme court in London.

Carloway said that if the ECJ was required to await the decision of the supreme court, then there would be “little prospect” of the hearing taking place in advance of the Commons “meaningful vote” on Brexit, rendering the entire exercise “academic”.

He added that he believed that the UK government could still seek to appeal following the ECJ hearing: “This court does not consider that its decision fetters the options open to parliament or freedom of speech within its walls.”

Article 50 is silent on whether the member state that triggered it unilaterally can also cancel it unilaterally. UK ministers and the European commission have indicated they believe that withdrawing an article 50 application requires the consent of the 27 other EU member states.

Carloway was one of three judges to refer the case to the ECJ in September. He then noted that the Commons would be required to vote on whether to ratify any Brexit deal before 29 March 2019, and that a judgment from the ECJ would “have the effect of clarifying the options open to MPs in the lead-up to what is now an inevitable vote”.

The Scottish Green party MSP Andy Wightman, who led the group of politicians, welcomed the decision, saying that “the UK government has failed in its attempts to frustrate our successful referral to the court of justice”.

The SNP’s Joanna Cherry, the only MP in Wightman’s group after warnings from the government that the action was breaching parliamentary privilege, added: “MPs need to know the answer to this question. The choice is not ‘whatever deal Theresa May can get’ or ‘no deal’. The UK government will not now succeed in its ruse to keep parliament in the dark.”

The Department for Exiting the EU said: “The government has made submissions to the CJEU. In any event, the government will not be revoking Article 50.”