Brussels Notebook: Risk EU and GB will ‘rip each other apart’

Top of the list is the Franco German alliance that drives the EU.

Then there are the Nordic countries, the Baltic countries, the Visegrad alliance of Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia; the Mediterranean countries, Spain and Portugal – the list is historic and long, and for the most part the alliances are strong and work well.

One certainly not an alliance is the link between the UK and France.

As countries they respect each other but it does not take much for the centuries of history to come to the fore. That happened this week when France’s foreign minister suggested the UK and EU would ‘rip each other part’ in the negotiations on a trade deal. A clear example, it seemed, of the old saying ‘plus ca change...plus c’est la meme chose’.

It was France, back in the 1960s and early 1970s that blocked the UK from joining the then EEC. That was an unfair stance by its president, Charles de Gaulle. More than anyone he knew the UK in the Second World War had saved France from German occupation. Blocking EEC membership was a poor repayment of a massive debt. It made many in Britain reluctant joiners of the EEC and left the UK a less than committed player and European. Those were the seeds that 50 years later led to Brexit.

This is the latest in a line of comments from figures in EU-27 seeking to up the ante before the talks even begin. The same is happening in the UK, with ministers suggesting Britain will never align with EU standards.

That lacks logic, since negotiations will inevitably see the EU seeking to protect its standards.

The UK’s chief negotiator for the trade talks, David Frost, is cast in the role of good cop to Boris Johnson as the bad cop. He sought this week to pour some oil on troubled waters by suggesting the UK did not wants anything unique or special, but a deal based on existing free trade agreements between the EU and Japan or Canada.

One of the harsh realities the UK will face is that it is not seeking a trade deal on the same terms as a third country. It is seeking a deal as a former member state of the EU. The European Commission has to send out a signal that it is not possible to leave the bloc without losing the privileges of membership. That might have been possible if the UK had opted to align its rules with the EU-27. What London wants is some form of sweetheart deal but when the EU publishes its proposals for the negotiations next week it will be clear that its priority is to protect its own interests.

All this comes as no surprise. Negotiations at this level are always tough.

A surprise from the onset is that the UK wants to conclude a deal by the end of the year – or more realistically by the autumn to allow time for it to be approved by national governments.

This is a tall order, given that the still not ratified Mercosur trade deal between the EU and South America took twenty years.

Even a simple deal, such as one announced last week with Vietnam was agreed in principle in 2015 but it has taken since then to get the politics right for the deal to be ratified.

The UK has not concluded a trade deal for close to 50 years, since it joined the then EEC. It has to be a big cause for concern that the government is naïve about the scale of the challenge that lies ahead. What is needed on both sides are cool heads and sound judgement. Hopefully by the time the talks get going properly, around mid-March, the blood letting of now, on the UK side, and of next week on the EU side will give way to economic logic. When the French foreign ministers and Emmanuel Macron ally, Jean-Yves Le Drian, forecast that the two sides would rip each other apart he would have been well advised to remember the old Gandhi quotation that an eye for eye makes the whole world blind. That is what happens when political rhetoric trumps common sense and economic reality. If that is the outcome the only losers will be UK businesses, and that would certainly include family farms right across the UK and Ireland.