Brexit is about to get real. Yet we are nowhere near ready

[Ghost Dog]

... It’s as if the crew of the Titanic eyed the iceberg ahead and promptly decided to have a big squabble over whether to serve white or red.

This failure to wrestle with what’s coming goes wider. The public conversation since 23 June 2016 has barely differed from the debate before that date, each side – leave and remain – still refighting the EU referendum campaign, uncertain how to get out of the old groove.

That failing is most obvious among the Brexiteers, characterised by a refusal to own their victory and take responsibility for it. So when a voice of experience or authority dares point out the possible dangers ahead, they are either sacked, as was the fate of Michael Heseltine, attacked personally, like John Major, or else branded an “enemy of the people” who refuses to bow to the “popular will”.

Those with concerns are accused of “talking down the country” or lacking sufficient faith – as if, should Brexit make us poorer, the fault will belong to those who didn’t screw their eyes tight enough and believe. Credit to Jonn Elledge for calling this what it is: the Tinkerbell delusion...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/10/brexit-real-triggering-article-50

[Ghost Dog]

1. The Reality:

... Those close to the pre-negotiations between Britain and the remaining 27 EU states report an unwarranted hubris on the UK side that augurs ill. Too many Brexiteers cling to the campaign’s wishful thinking that we go into these talks as the stronger party, that “they need us more than we need them”, and that so long as we hang tough, the Europeans will buckle and hand us a dream deal.

Such arrogance is likely to be exposed soon. For one thing, it ignores the key structural fact that makes Britain’s negotiating prospects bleak from the start: namely, it is imperative for the EU’s own survival that the UK be left in a visibly, materially worse situation after leaving the EU than it enjoyed before. The logic is not vindictive. If the EU is to hold together it must prevent a Brexit contagion. Any divorce settlement must be ugly enough to ensure the remaining 27 stay with their spouse, no matter how loveless that marriage might feel. In four words, the European strategy for the Brexit talks has to be: pour décourager les autres.

But if British politicians are insufficiently mindful of that built-in obstacle, they are far too blithe about the sheer complexity of the undertaking that is about to begin. They are aiming to unpick 40 years of arrangements, seeking to annul them in a pact that will require the blessing of 27 other sovereign states.

To call it 27-dimensional chess understates the geometry: the final divorce settlement will have to be ratified by 38 different national and regional parliaments. To say nothing of the European parliament, commission and council. Each of these bodies has its own interests, pressures and red lines.

May will have to craft a document that satisfies every one of those competing forces, as well as both chambers of the UK parliament. She will have to do it without pushing Scotland towards a second, more winnable independence referendum or recreating a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish republic. And she has to get it done in roughly 18 months...


https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/10/brexit-real-triggering-article-50

[Denzil_DC]

2. There's also the factor that the UK's public attitude's been utterly obnoxious (thanks, Boris & co.)

Last edited Sat Mar 11, 2017, 11:27 AM - Edit history (1)

That doesn't help in diplomacy and negotiations, and the country has very few, if any, friends and allies in Europe to help soften the blow.

Scotland, on the other hand, has made enormous diplomatic efforts since the Brexit referendum to explore ways of staying in (or re-joining) the single market, if not the EU itself, and is getting encouraging noises from many quarters, some of them unexpected - like the Spanish, who contrary to myth, are going out of their way not to equate the Scottish situation with that of Catalonia. (I don't think we're under any illusions that attitudes towards Scotland among leading EU figures may be at least partly driven by a desire to stick it to May et al. and the rUK if Brexit goes ahead, but we do want EU membership if we can get it, and independence looks like being the only way to do that as things stand.)

[Ghost Dog]

5. There's sympathy for Scotland in Spain, but...

... Rajoy’s real aim is to stop Catalan independence. If that means blocking Scotland from rejoining the EU for a time, then so be it. Just as Brussels wants the UK to be worse off after leaving the EU, as a warning to others tempted to follow the Brexit path, so Madrid would want Scotland to be worse off if it set the precedent of EU members states (which the UK still is) breaking up internally. That might help dissuade Catalans, Basques and others from trying to follow the same path.

For Scots, then, the current choice is between the Spanish devil and the Brexit deep blue sea. They can belong to a depressed post-Brexit UK, or a marginalised but independent Scotland.

For Catalans the choice is both starker and simpler. With Madrid refusing to contemplate a referendum, independence is simply not on the cards. A mock referendum, or “consultation”, held by the regional government in 2014 has seen the then president of Catalonia, Artur Mas, banned from holding office for two years. A second referendum pledged for later this year could end up with even more dramatic punishments for those who organise it. And a threatened unilateral declaration of independence looks very much like a bluff – which, were it to happen, could see Madrid suspend Catalonia’s current self-government. The EU will not intervene.

Rajoy would welcome a chance to demonstrate to Catalans that, were independence to happen, they would end up outside the EU and be sent to the back of the queue of countries applying for entry. That is his strongest card in trying to dampen separatist sentiment which has grown hugely since the country’s constitutional court reversed parts of a self-government statute that had already been approved at referendum...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/15/scottish-nationalists-spanish-independent-scotland-brexit-snp

[Denzil_DC]

6. And so the propaganda war starts for real.

With all due respect to Giles Tremlett, that reads like a bunch of slanted hooey from the title on (despite the weird backtracking in the last two paragraphs, saying that "If they are patient, and wait for Brexit before leaving the UK, they will have a far better chance of a quick return to the EU. Unlike other applicants, Scotland’s laws already meet all the necessary requirements. And Spain would gain very little from making life difficult for a country that became legally independent outside the EU," so maybe the sub-editor has to take the lion's share of the blame for giving it the stupid and unfounded title "Why Spain will block any attempt by Scotland to join the EU&quot , and could as well have been written a year or more ago.

We have a succession of Spanish politicians going on the record over the last year or two, and even this last week or two, reiterating again and again that they see no parallel between the situation of Scotland and that of Catalonia, and that once Scotland attained independence, all bets would be off. Here's a recent example:

Spanish MEP from ruling party: We won't veto Scotland's EU membership

SPAIN would not block a bid by Scotland to rejoin the EU, according to a senior MEP from the country’s ruling party.

Esteban Gonzalez Pons from Mariano Rajoy’s Popular Party said the Catalonian situation was “very different” to that in Scotland, and indicated concerns over the possible breakaway of the province from Spain would not be an obstacle if a newly independent Scotland wanted to join the EU.

Anti-independence campaigners in Scotland have frequently suggested Rajoy and his party would block Scotland if it tried to apply for membership of the EU after a successful independence vote because to do so would be to encourage Catalan separatists.

But in an interview for the BBC Pons said: “If Scotland wants to come back [into the EU] they have to begin the procedure as would any other country.” Asked if Spain would veto a Scottish application, Pons said: “No. If they are thinking about Scotland the Catalonian situation is very different to the Scottish situation.”

http://www.thenational.scot/news/15149387.Spanish_MEP_from_ruling_party__We_won_t_veto_Scotland_s_EU_membership/

If you read Spanish, here's El Mundo:

Link to tweet

And if that's not enough, here's a UK TV clip:

Link to tweet

Pilar Fernandez @pilaraymara

#TheSpanishVetoMyth debunked #ScotlandinEurope #Brexit #indyref2 🙂

Tremlett's also plain wrong, or deliberately misleading, on a number of other issues, like:

Foreign minister Alfonso Dastis has been crystal clear about what would happen if Scotland left the UK before Brexit. “If by mutual agreement and by virtue of constitutional change Scotland ended up being independent, our thesis is that it could not stay inside the European Union,” he said this week. “It would have to join the queue, meet the requirements, go through the recognised negotiating system and the end result will be whatever those negotiations produce.”

That's not a "no", not a threat of veto, it's a banality. There is no "queue" in the sense of "first applied, first acceded". It's a question of compliance with the requirements for membership, and we have senior EU politicians on the record this last week, saying that if Scotland gained independence and applied for entry, it could be a quick and easy negotiation because (as Tremlett concedes above) it's already legally in compliance with the main aquis strictures:

Link to tweet

Gareth Quinn @GarethBQuinn

Elmar Brok MEP, Chair of European Parliament Committee on Foreign Affairs: "Easy negotiations" if Indy Scotland wanted to join EU #ScotRef

I won't bother picking over the other myths in this article as it's not worth it, but the measure of it and the writer can be seen by its parroting of the lazy myth that Scotland would have to "join the euro". Tell that to Sweden, which acceded in 1994, doesn't use the euro, and has no plans to do so (or indeed Croatia, a more recent entrant that hasn't adopted the euro). The Maastricht Treaty says that signatory states should join the eurozone once they meet the necessary conditions, but it sets out no timescale whatsoever for doing so, and no penalties for not doing so.

[Ghost Dog]

7. Interesting, thanks. I don't think much of Tremlett.

Spain's rightist government is interested​ in the Catalan issue (and being an important EU player) above all.

[Denzil_DC]

8. Yeah, well,

I don't know much about Tremlett except his association with the Guardian, and maybe I was a little harsh on him (it's not a good article, but a tiny bit better than the inexplicable headline might indicate), but the Scottish Parliament hasn't even voted on whether to seek a referendum yet, and already I can't turn anywhere online without seeing the same old claptrap cited as Gospel when it's readily debunked, and has been for ages (any ire you may have detected was spurred by and directed at that, not you, Ghost Dog).

If we do decide to go for it, it's going to be long, exhausting couple of years or so (following on from several long, exhausting years ...), and meanwhile, the crapfest that is Brexit will roll on, and we in Scotland will no doubt be used as a scapegoat/punchbag to release and diffuse the tension it's causing.

As I've said before, the Scottish Government sprang into quite a diplomatic onslaught once the Brexit vote happened, and the response from major EU figures has been better than I'd have expected. I'm hard put to find any significant European politician who's recently been anything but positive (or at least guardedly neutral) about an independent Scotland's prospects of joining the EU if that's how things pan out.

Let me know if Tremlett writes anything about Gibraltar ...

[Ghost Dog]

9. Good to hear about Scottish diplomacy in action.

Tremlett tends to specialise in filing largely frivolous stories from Spain, infotainment, rather than cover serious stuff in any depth.

Catalonia's situation is not very directly comparable to that of Scotland. The voluntary Union of the two Nation States, two Kingdoms, can be revised and even dissolved. Catalonia was never a Nation State in the formal sense in the last millennium (although politically it was always different, with more power for the bourgeoisie and local councils in relation to the aristocracy than in the rest of Spain). The two Kingdoms that combined were those of Castille and Aragon (including Sardinia, Naples, Sicily for a time)... The third Kingdom (leaving aside Portugal) was that of Granada... It really would be best, imho, for evolved, devolved Spain including Catalans, to hold together, and together sweep away all the corruption in power almost everywhere, including perhaps above all in Catalonia as well as in Madrid.

I agree that independent Scotland will of course be able to join the EU. Not sure how long the wait will have to be.

As for Gibraltar... What a canker.

[Denzil_DC]

10. Sounds like Tremlett's got a nice gig, as long as it lasts!

If the rUK's politicians had behaved with a fraction of the decorum, charm and diplomacy toward the EU that's Scotland's politicians have been displaying, we wouldn't be in this bloody awful situation in the first place.

As for Catalonia, it feels a little disloyal for the Scottish Yes (to independence) campaign to abandon them (there's been a lot of Scottish-Catalonian solidarity in the past), but if (big IF at the moment) things pan out and Scotland does become a full EU member, it can do more within it to promote the Catalan cause than it can as a non-member.

Independence isn't the Scottish Government's only option - EFTA and EEA membership have been mentioned as possible fudges - but there's no alternative to the status quo that wouldn't be even more complicated than a clean break.

Meanwhile, May's just said "no" to another referendum, patted us on the head, and told us all to focus on pulling together full-speed toward the Reichenbach Falls. This will end well ...

Ironically, so far Gibraltar - whatever you think of it as an enclave - is one area of concern where the Spanish Government has definitely said it will veto any Brexit deal that doesn't include an accommodation it approves of!

There might not even end up being a deal to veto, of course.

[Ghost Dog]

3. Ian McEwan:

Last edited Mon Mar 13, 2017, 09:44 AM - Edit history (1)

... “Sixteen million Britons wanted to stay in the EU and 17 million wanted to leave, but there exists a small and very energetic political group made up of opaque and impatient people who are driving the process and who speak as though half the country were the entire country,” he said according to El País (in Catalonia).

“It’s also serious because Great Britain works on the basis of a parliamentary democracy and not through plebiscites, which remind me of the Third Reich.”

According to the newspaper, he added that the politicians claiming to speak on behalf of the people tended to “react violently” to those who did not share their views.

“Their militant wing, the tabloid press, has started to look into the lives of the judges who rule that Brexit could result in the loss of human rights to see whether they’re homosexual or something. It’s reminiscent of Robespierre and the terror of the French revolution. The air in my country is very foul.”...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/12/ian-mcewan-decision-on-brexit-vote-reminds-me-of-the-third-reich

[Ghost Dog]

4. Finisterre