Chris Johns: Brexiteers show no grasp of EU they itch to quit

Most commentators who write or talk about Brexit have yet to get over their highly emotional response to the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union. We are as angry as we are contemptuous over the stupidity of the Leave voters.

While this is understandable – it really was an incredibly stupid act of self-harm – it is a state of mind that is not going to get us very far. We must resist the temptation to celebrate every piece of bad economic news: that is also somewhat stupid.

The fact that the UK economy has defied most mainstream predictions and has yet to fall off a cliff does not suit our angry narrative but should not be ignored. Much more importantly, we must now embrace the idea that the process needs to be managed as well as possible: we need to get over the subconscious worry that if Brexit doesn’t go too badly it will somehow vindicate the arguments of the idiots who voted to leave.

Long-term game

Could Brexit go well? Of course, nobody knows. But, so far, nobody who voted Remain has shown the slightest willingness to suggest ways that might help. We must not fall into the trap of being seen to hope for the apocalypse just to prove that we were right.

The tabloid press that played such a mendacious role in the referendum campaign has been quick to pronounce judgment on the economists who suggested Brexit was a vote for the UK to become poorer. The absence of that falling off a cliff has somehow proved, once again, the economists got it wrong. It’s an easy, lazy conclusion. It may turn out to be right (I very much doubt it) but anyone interested in the truth will have to wait years to discover it. This is a very long-term game.

The early indications of how well Brexit will be managed are not good. But we don’t know much: it is impossible to know whether Teresa May and her three musketeers – the Brexit ministers Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and David Davis – are playing a crafty negotiation game or just flailing around, completely out of their depth.

Davis, secretary of state for exiting the EU, has already displayed a woeful lack of understanding of economics and how the bloc works.

He has asserted that the UK has a strong negotiating hand because of the extent to which Europe exports to Britain. He claims the EU will not adopt a tough negotiating stance because of the likely economic damage that would be self-inflicted. He seems to have forgotten that he is in charge of a process that is epitome of self harm. At best, Brexit is a study in the primacy of politics over economics: political goals that take precedence over economic ones.

Anglo-Saxon observers of Europe have always made this mistake. In the decades leading up to the creation of the euro, countless numbers of analysts were left battered and bruised by Europe’s determination to inflict economic pain on itself to further the objective of monetary union. UK politicians never thought the euro could come into existence because of the economic costs involved. All these same people think the euro is likely to disappear.

Category error

It’s a kind of category error: believing that the reasons why Europe does what it does are primarily about economics. That has never been true.

If Davis thinks the EU’s negotiating stance will be driven purely by perceptions about economic self-interest he is deluded. And ignorant of history – indeed, that’s probably why he, and the rest of the Brexiteers, are so wrong.

Many Germans, for example, are simply fed up with decades of British opt-outs, rebates, concessions and trouble making. Many French people have concluded that de Gaulle was right in the early 1960s when he vetoed Britain’s original application to join the common market. There is very little sympathy for the British, more a growing grim determination to move on from the trouble the UK has been causing the European project ever since it joined in the early 1970s.

And that means losing interest in the British point of view, whatever that might be. Europe now has its own survival to deal with. I suspect that will not involve bending over backwards to give yet more concessions to the UK.

The exclusion of the UK from today’s EU summit in Bratislava is symptomatic of all this. The manner of Brexit is mostly a matter for the British. The EU is attempting to move on: the details of Brexit are a secondary consideration for the 27 leaders who have excluded the British from their deliberations.

That is the negotiating challenge facing Davis and his colleagues, one they have shown no sign of understanding.