Brexit

This is a crucial year for the UK’s two most important relationships, I say in the magazine this week. If the Johnson/Biden diplomatic relationship has got off to a better start than expected, the same cannot be said of the post-Brexit UK/EU one. The alignment between Johnson and Biden on climate change, Russia and China is helping the alliance. This relationship should become closer still given the two side’s agreement on China, the most important geo-political issue of the decade. The EU will attempt, often in not particularly edifying ways, to assert itself as the bigger partner.

The EU is now insisting that AstraZeneca use vaccine produced at its UK site to make up for a shortfall in its supplies to the EU. This is likely to kick off a major row as the UK went to great trouble to ensure that it had first refusal on all the Oxford vaccine produced in the UK. Indeed, AstraZeneca’s willingness to accept that condition is a major reason why Oxford ended up partnering with them. It is not hard to see how this situation could escalate. The EU is already saying that companies should notify them before exporting vaccine out of the bloc, and the German government is going further, calling for full on export controls on vaccines.

‘All non-essential travel should be strongly discouraged both within the country and of course across borders,’ Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Commission, has said. As a result of the Covid crisis, the dream of open borders across the continent of Europe has never seemed so imperilled. Meanwhile, a post-Brexit Britain has the ability to flex its borders as much as it chooses. To some Brexiteers, this alone makes Brexit worth it. The Schengen agreement was signed in 1985 and became pan-EU in 1999, meaning that, from then on, any country without an opt-out needed to allow free movement of people from any other signatory country (almost all of the rest of the European Union).

It is petty, small-minded, mean-spirited, and childish. It is certainly not difficult to think of a few adjectives to describe the UK’s decision to refuse diplomatic status to the European Union’s mission in London. Diplomats, and European ones in particular, take matters of status, protocol and etiquette very seriously, and the snub looks, on the surface at least, designed to diminish our closest neighbour. The ambassador for, say, Mozambique, or Honduras, has full diplomatic recognition, but not the person representing the 440 million strong trading bloc on the other side of the English channel. Wars have been started over lesser slights.  But hold on. Sure, you can argue that the UK is being silly. But so is the EU.

Now that Britain has left the EU, we are no longer bound by the European Court of Justice. Some may view that as something to celebrate. Yet there may also be downsides. The ECJ is the final court of the EU. It hears lots of cases about EU member states who break EU law. It then reaches conclusions which form case law. All 27 members of the EU are bound by this, but Britain, outside the EU, is not. But here’s the catch: some of those decisions might actually be good ones. The solution is that we should borrow these good ones for ourselves. English law is a magpie. We pick up shiny bits of ‘good law’ that other places have and we make them ours. It is what lots of sensible sovereign states do, and there is nothing wrong with this. There is no copyright in law.

Keir Starmer’s keynote speech at the Fabian conference today was focused almost completely on foreign policy. The thrust of the Labour pitch was that Starmer is ‘pro-American but anti-Trump’. Given Corbyn’s tendency to see the United States at the Great Satan, this marks a huge shift in Labour’s foreign policy outlook. However, the speech was also classic Starmer and not in a good way: correcting the most obvious mistakes from the Corbyn era but going absolutely no further. I should take a moment to applaud Starmer for at least pivoting Labour back to a foreign policy position that is sensible and won’t stand in the way of the party trying to win elections again.

Of all the arguments put out against Brexit during the bitter referendum debate, one of the least convincing was that it would give a UK government the opportunity to repeal employment law, thereby impoverishing Britain and its people. Jeremy Corbyn once asserted that a Conservative government would turn the country into a 'low-wage tax haven'. That is an interesting concept, which like the chemical element Seaborgium might theoretically exist but which has yet to be discovered in the real world – most tax havens seem to be pretty wealthy, at least compared with similar countries which haven’t set the fiscal and regulatory conditions to attract businesses and wealthy individuals.

What will Brexit Britain do differently? This is going to be the most important question in our politics for the next decade. If the answer is that nothing much will change, it would be hard to argue that the disruption of the past four and a half years has been worth it. But if Brexit means the country becomes quicker at adapting to changing circumstances, then the electorate’s decision in 2016 will have been vindicated. The quick decision to remove VAT from tampons and sanitary towels is a small, early sign of how Brexit enables parliament to respond more directly to public pressure. The decision not to join the EU’s vaccine procurement programme let us move faster with immunisation: the UK has currently vaccinated more people than France, Italy and Germany put together.