Brexit

It was meant to be a special relationship. After the tumultuous Trump years, President Biden was planning to reset relations with the European Union, Inherently liberal, rules-based, and engaged with climate change, it would be a natural ally, and far more so than a UK still tainted by Brexit. The Biden team were no doubt looking forward to working closely with officials in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin to repair the damage of the last four years and put the world on a more rational course.  But hold on. It is not going according to plan. There are already reports that the White House is growing increasingly frustrated with the EU. And in truth, that rift is only going to get wider and wider in the months to come.

The announcement of the Brexit deal at the end of 2020 alleviated concerns over food supplies to the relief of many, not least the government. But while it is clear that food will continue to appear on shop shelves, what has been less clear, however, is how we want to feed ourselves now that we are no longer confined by European Union membership. It has been three years since Michael Gove brought Henry Dimbleby into the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to work on food policy. His report in July 2020 urged action on food poverty. But it was sidelined until footballer Marcus Rashford said the same thing. The second report is due this Spring.

Ursula von der Leyen now admits that she overreacted in the EU’s vaccine row with the UK. She has spoken of her ‘regret’ that Article 16 of the Northern Ireland border protocol was triggered by the European Commission in a Friday night fit of pique at the end of last month. But there is a sense in Brussels that the British are still trying to exploit her misstep. This claim is not entirely baseless. The UK is getting increasingly worried about the protocol, and clearly does see a chance to push for concessions now that the Commission has surrendered the moral high ground. The Northern Ireland protocol was agreed by Boris Johnson as he struggled to get a Brexit deal in time for the 2019 general election. The bureaucracy it causes is already leading to problems.

As non-apology apologies go, it was right up there with the best of them. Speaking to MEPs today, the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen accepted that some ‘mistakes had been made’ in the procurement of vaccines against Covid-19.  Apparently the Commission had been a little too late authorising some of the shots, it had been a tad too optimistic about production, and not everything had gone according to plan. But, heck, these things happen, she went on to argue. And perhaps most crucially of all, the alternative would have been far, far worse.  'I can't even imagine if a few big players had rushed to it and the others went empty-handed,' she said.

Since the outrage caused last Friday, when the European Union looked set to undermine the Northern Ireland protocol less than one month after the Brexit deal came into force, there has been little apology from those in charge. This is not terribly surprising: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has a reputation for passing the buck whenever possible. It’s also thought that last week’s mistakes are particularly hard for the EU to grapple with: desperate to prove Brexit was a mistake, it has been difficult for Brussels to watch Britain's reputation for handling the Covid crisis change so quickly for the better. Yesterday we got a hint of acknowledgement from von der Leyen that perhaps there are some benefits to being outside the EU.

The bankers would all move to Frankfurt. The hedge funds would all decamp to Zurich. The asset managers would be off to Paris and Dublin, and the lawyers, accountants and consultants would swiftly follow them.  For much of the last four years since the UK voted to leave the European Union, it has been assumed across most of the continent that one of the big prizes of Brexit would be repatriating the lucrative financial services industry out of the City of London to a series of European centres. Indeed, Paris was confidently expecting to boom on the back of all the business that would hop on the first Eurostar to make sure it stayed within the Single Market. But hold on.

The next Northern Ireland assembly election must take place by 5 May next year. The MLAs voted in then will decide whether or not to continue the Northern Ireland protocol, which requires the UK authorities to apply EU rules on various goods entering Northern Ireland. If a majority voted against (that is all that would be needed as the petition of concern, which requires a higher threshold, would not apply), then the protocol would fall. At the moment, it looks very unlikely that the election will result in an anti-protocol majority. But it would clearly be bad for stability in Northern Ireland if the campaign turned into an attempt by Unionists to rally a majority that could vote down the protocol.

Valdis Dombrovskis could probably do without his moment in the limelight. His spell as prime minister of Latvia, a country with a population of 1.9 million, was largely successful, at least until the collapse of a supermarket roof in 2014 brought his coalition to an early end.  Shunted off to Brussels, he worked quietly as commission vice-president for the euro and social dialogue– nope, I don’t know what the heck that means either – before being promoted to the slightly more important trade portfolio last year. Now it turns out he is responsible for what is rapidly turning into the biggest policy catastrophe in Europe since the Second World War, at least according to his boss.

Of all the charges made against Brexiteers, the notion that we 'don’t understand the modern world' is the one that some Remainers have most often returned to; their equivalent of the boxer’s stinging jab that relentlessly wears down an opponent. In a global system increasingly dominated by a handful of big players with huge populations and land mass – the US, China, India, Russia – being a medium-sized nation in Europe without the umbrella of the EU was supposed to be a mug’s game. In the European Parliament, that arch-federalist Guy Verhofstadt would often refer to the countries of Europe as 'dwarfs' who needed to band together to compete in such a world.

A year ago today Britain awoke to a rather muted celebration – which seemed to consist largely of a bubble car driving around Parliament Square with a Union Jack in tow – ready to face up to a brave new future outside the EU. Who would have imagined then that the Observer would mark the first anniversary by running a leading article condemning the EU as 'shambolic' and instead praising Boris Johnson’s government for something Britain did all by itself? Of course, the Observer’s judgement is only in respect to one thing: the EU’s joint vaccination procurement programme. Nevertheless, it is something rather important, on which a great number of people’s lives are dependent.

At first, it sounded like empty rage. The European Union had spent all week making wild statements about controlling vaccine exports — even challenging the notion of contract law. On Friday, it has started to act on its words and announced it will introduce controls on vaccines made in the EU — potentially giving itself the power to stop Pfizer sending Britain the vaccines it has paid for. Worse, when it made the announcement, it included Northern Ireland. The EU was set to use the ‘last resort’ mechanism in the recently-agreed Northern Ireland Protocol, Article 16, that can unilaterally impose a land border: something both the UK and EU spent years trying to avoid.