Theresa May has had a tough week with yet another vote in the House of Commons being rejected by large margins, this time 149 votes against. The UK has asked for a three-month extension so the question now is will the EU agree, and if so will the extension really help? Let’s take a look at what the interests are for both parties and try to speculate as to how the Brexit process is like to proceed.
As part of my 2019 predictions I’ve said that I think there will be a deal between Brussels and London, a prediction I stand by. Giving the UK an extension is in the EU’s interest as the worst-case scenario for the EU is the UK leaving without a deal. More time makes an agreement more likely which makes it unlikely that the EU wouldn’t agree to an extension. Economically a no deal Brexit is against the UK’s interests, and while the vote to leave was motivated by economic factors I don’t think the UK will actually be better off outside the single market and I’m sure that the British state knows that too. It remains to be seen whether politics will trump economics here. More time is clearly in the UK’s interest, otherwise it surely wouldn’t have asked for it. Therefore, it’s in my opinion very likely that there will be an extension.
The more interesting question to my mind is whether an extension will help. It took the UK almost two years to realise that Brexit on its preferred terms would be far more difficult than Brexiteers had predicted. The UK needs more time to make a deal but given how the UK still barely seem to have grasped that reaching a deal will be an arduous and time-consuming process I think it would need far more than three months to reach an acceptable deal. Most trade agreements take years to negotiate and as long as Whitehall won’t roll over and accept the EU’s terms, which it has demonstrated twice now that it won’t, then it will take far more time to reach a deal. How much time is reasonable? Personally, I don’t expect anything less than a year will lead to a deal that both sides can be satisfied by. Of course that’s not to say that a year is the minimum required time to reach a deal, only that if the goal is a deal where the UK doesn’t have to feel bitter over having to agree to unfavourable terms for the sake of having a deal at all that would take at least a year.
The moral of this story is that if you are serious about leaving the European Union you should have a plan of action and a list of demands and negotiating positions before you trigger article 50 to initiate the leaving process. I’m still amazed that the UK was so eager to leave that it started the process before having done all the prep work. In some ways the EU wins regardless of if there’s an extension or not. If there’s no extension and no deal then it has in a manner ‘won’ Brexit by showing London that the EU is the one holding all the cards, and if there is an extension then the EU get more time to work out a deal in which the UK is in one way or another in the EU’s orbit.
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Photo by Dominika Gregušová from Pexels
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