As an expert I know who has written regularly on EU trade treaties said, “Whatever the Brits are smoking, I want some. Not only is it very strong, it’s clearly a hallucinogen.”
It’s astonishing to see what passes for leadership in the UK retreat into its own echo chamber and ignore the clear and consistent messages sent by EU officials, the even clearer signals of their actions in recent trade matters, the content of the various precedents that serve as points of reference for a possible Brexit deal, and the difficulties of negotiating any particular deal.
The only logic I can see behind the City pumping for a wildly unrealistic and unworkable “Swiss plus” deal, aside from sheer arrogance and stupidity, which has been on display in abundance, is that it might be a cynical ploy. Depict a plan that is destined to go nowhere as eminently fair, reasonable and achievable when it isn’t but the UK media will broadcast otherwise, then blame those evil controlling Eurocrats as the problem, as opposed to the unreasonable UK expectations.
The big problem with this charitable interpretation is how British officials get European officials to trash the UK fantasy without pulling the Article 50 trigger.
As to why the City’s plan is wildly off base, let’s start with the overview from the Financial Times:
The City of London has given up hope of universal access to the EU single market and is now seeking a bespoke deal for its different sectors to trade with Europe, with similar but stronger ties than Switzerland…
Mr [Anthony] Browne [chief executive of the British Bankers Association] cited Switzerland’s trade deals with the EU that give some sectors, such as life insurance, full two-way access to the single market via a so-called passporting deal in return for keeping its regulation at an equivalent level to that in the bloc.
Swiss banks do not benefit from any such trade deal, meaning they must do most of their EU capital markets business from their London subsidiaries.
But the City, which was overwhelmingly in favour of remaining in the bloc before the June 23 referendum, will argue that because the UK is the biggest export market for the rest of the EU it should be able to negotiate a beefed-up version of Switzerland’s arrangement…
Earlier this week, Michael Roth, Germany’s European Affairs minister, said that the UK could gain “special status” with the EU and have a bespoke deal. He repeated warnings, however, that the UK would not be able to “cherry pick” its position.
Why is this nutty?
Europan officials have made it clear that any Brexit arrangement needs to be consistent with the templates for other deals. Consistent does not mean “the same” but it means generally that it needs to be fair with respect to the gives and gets of the arrangements that other non-EU members have. In other words, even the very term “Swiss plus” which seems to reflect an expectation that the Brits can get a better arrangement that Switzerland has, is fundamentally wrong-headed. Conceptually, they could use the Swiss treaties as a starting point for formulating their relationship, but the negotiators need to expect to make tradeoffs: if they want a better deal than Switzerland on one axis, they need to make a concession on some other element.
The general tenor of the EU negotiating posture has become frostier since the UK voted for Brexit. The cheery belief that the UK will get special breaks because it is oh so important is contradicted by the consistent cool messages EU leaders have sent, and more important, their stern posture toward other trade supplicants of late. Swiss citizens in a binding referendum voted in 2014 to restrict immigration and the arrangements must be in place by early 2017. The EU has said firmly that Switzerland will lose its access to the single market if it restricts immigration. Similarly, Canada and the EU recently agreed on the terms of a trade pact which took seven years to conclude. In the wake of the Brexit vote, the European Commission threw a spanner in the works by stipulating that the pact be ratified by all the parliaments in the 28 member states. This means that any country that feels the Canadian deal will put it at a disadvantage has a veto.
Passporting rights for financial services is a huge ask. Note, as the pink paper points out, that the Swiss arrangement has passporting for life insurance only, a much smaller sector for them than banking. Recall that the EU was already trying to take a chunk out of the City by requiring that the UK be barred from Euroclearing. The only reason the EU lost that suit (in which the powerful ECB was one of the plaintiffs) was that the European Court of Justice ruled that discrimination of that sort against an EU member was not permitted. With the UK out of the EU, the Euroclearing business will need to be migrated to the Continent. We’ve also pointed out that European member states, such as France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain have large banks that are eager to take a piece of the City’s business. And even though British and American concerns that operate out of the UK can probably hold on to much of their franchises by reorganizing their operations, the UK still comes out a loser because people and activities will move out of London to other cities in the EU.
The Financial Times story points out that passporting is important to the provision of quite a few services:
Both the BBA [British Bankers Association] and [chair of Sandater UK] Ms [Shriti] Vadera’s task force — known as the European Financial Services Chairman’s Advisory Committee — have spent hours examining what access the City would have to the single market without a bilateral trade deal to replace EU membership.
They have found that many areas of the industry — such as cross-border lending and corporate deposit-taking — would be left without access to EU customers. Their work mirrors a parallel assessment being made by the Treasury.
What could the UK possibly give up in return for such an enormous concession? I can’t come up with any fix save a ginormous bribe, um, annual contribution, which would be anathema to British voters.
The UK will not get concessions on immigration if it is to have access to the single market. European leaders have been completely consistent on this issue, and with good reason. It would be political suicide for them to let the obstreperous UK get a special break when EU members allow freedom of movement. The tough posture towards the Swiss was a warning shot. The Financial Times acknowledges this issue but weirdly downplays it:
A likely obstacle to achieving the type of bespoke trade treaty that many in the City are pushing for could be an EU demand that the UK accepts freedom of movement of people from the bloc as a condition of keeping any single market access.
Given how passionately many Brexit supporters want to control immigration, they are unlikely to accept the type of arrangement that Switzerland and Norway have in effect accepted by joining the Schengen passport-free travel area.
A Swiss-type deal would be nightmarishly complex to negotiate. Due to competing duties, we’ve been remiss of late in not writing up the huge difficulties the UK is having in assembling a remotely competent and sufficiently adequate in size team to handle Brexit talks. The UK has not had to handle any meaningful trade talks in decades, so it has no one with relevant skills in house. To make matters worse, has severely hollowed out its Foreign Office, so it is even lacking in generalist negotiators. The difficulties in getting a team include: no one wants to accept government pay when they can make a multiple of that getting hired through a mercenary like an outside law or accounting firm; those firms tend to have siloed experts (usually by industry), making it hard to make tradeoff across issues and areas; the sort of negotiators that the Brits might be able to tease out of retirement or poach from Brussels are pro-EU and will not be philosophically aligned with UK objectives.
One analysis warned that one of the major objectives of the deal, for the UK to have more national sovereignty, was almost certain not to be realized in practice. Why? UK officials at all levels would be so taxed by a Brexit (recall that many UK rules and regulations that reference EU agreements would need to be redone as well) that they would almost certainly revert to copying and pasting existing provisions!
A Swiss type deal makes all those difficulties vastly worse because it is not one deal (as say, the TPP and the TTIP are) but a huge raft of separate treaties. As Lee Sheppard of Tax Notes explained in early July (no online source):
Switzerland has more than 100 separate agreements with the EU, which it negotiates sector by sector. Switzerland has to accept free movement of people from the EU, which threatened to throw it out of the trading area when it proposed to restrict immigration from the EU. The EU is trying to persuade Switzerland to abide by CJEU decisions. Switzerland also contributes to the EU budget. So even though Switzerland has a pretty good deal, it still gets pushed around a lot, as its recent concessions on bank secrecy demonstrate…
Despite having a lot of bilateral agreements with the EU, Switzerland does not enjoy the extensive market access that the UK would need. Switzerland lacks the financial services passport but can sell insurance in the EU. For those privileges it follows EU rules and contributes to the EU budget.
Reality check: it took Canada seven years to negotiate a vastly simpler, less contentious agreement. Its approval was expected to take a minimum of a year before the European Commission got cute and imposed a 28-parliament signoff requirement. The Financial Times admits this might be a wee problem:
There are fears that even if an acceptable deal is struck between the UK and Brussels, it could be scuppered if one of the 27 member states rejects it, as happened in April when the Netherlands voted in a referendum to rebuff a planned EU free-trade accord with Ukraine.
So as we’ve said before, the UK expects to get a pony in its Brexit talks. Good luck with that.
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One of the great aspects of this site has been the authority of the coverage of EU matters. As a Brit I fear you are on the button here too. It has been quite eye-opening to see how completely clueless our top politicians are on EU issues, and added to that most of the journalists holding them to account.
The people spoke, their lives are not better under the EU, and they want out. The populist vote lives, and will live. This is the first US election in memory, where there is a non-establishment candidate which won a major party primary, and it has the establishment pulling out all the stops to get their candidate elected. Look for a November surprise, which may topple the establishment.
Amen.
Disclaimer: My late wife’s immediate and extended family are all working class.
Much as I admire the NC commentariat, an unfortunate majority totally don’t seem to “get” the lives of others outside the MSM propaganda and/or Southeast England and how savaged the 99% been by neoliberalism.. Americans especially do not grasp that members of Parliament can “stand” for an election and not only live nowhere near their electoral district but visit it only infrequently. No wonder politicians are completely out of touch with with the struggles of their constituency.
A vote for Brexit, as a vote for Trump, is a classic “Ham Sandwich” reaction vote against neoliberalism.
IMHO.
Ps. Regarding the City’s flailing about and how critical they are to the economy, cannot recommend today’s post, “Finance Is Not the Economy,” high enough.
I wonder if there is an ‘everyone is on holiday’ element to it, but I’ve been astonished at the general reaction in the UK to the Brexit vote. Many of my friends there are horrified, and you need only go to the comments sections in various newspapers to see the upset, but the latest figures show hardly any impact on consumer behaviour (I was convinced there would be a major reigning in of spending as people took a ‘wait and see’ approach) and real panic in the City and in Industry. Its as if nothing has happened at all. There seems to be something of an echo chamber among the right wing media that its all going to be fine – while plenty of City types buy the FT, I suspect its the Telegraph and Times they really read for their broader political opinions.
While I think Yves is right that many in the establishment don’t, deep down, actually think its going to happen, there is no doubt that there is some feverish activity under the surface, mostly by banks/insurers who will need an EU base if it all goes through (I’ve heard plenty of stories of quite high level scouting groups looking at property here in Dublin).
My guess is that it will be after the summer, when internal reports are written up and internally circulated and everyone is back in the office that it will slowly sink in just what mammoth task it will be for UK business to get through this. The government is so inept it will take I think many more months (and probably quite a few meetings with various business reps and with the EU) for it to realise that it is in very serious trouble. Its one thing to see a task intellectually, its quite another to really grasp what it means. And what the UK establishment has not really grasped is that it has no friends whatever in Europe or EFTA (and in this context, none anywhere else) – nobody has an interest in making this easy. Even with full co-operation it would be a huge, damaging task. With the EU deciding to extract maximum blood from the UK, it will be horrendous, a massive self inflicted wound.
I smell “experts” that were totally against Brexit at work. They are of course totally disappointed that the roof did not fall in AS THEY PREDICTED. So what do they do now? Instead of admitting that they completely overstated the dangers they now double down and MAKE MORE PREDICTIONS! These “experts” have forgotten what J.K. Galbraith said about this: “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”
For example, these “experts”like to pretend that banking is just like any other business and can be moved around at will – say to Madrid. Fact: it´s NOT. Banking is in the end all about CONNECTIONS and the London establishment have the greatest connections in the world. Everything will be fine, just like it is now.
Lets consider Asset Management. Not hedge fund management but good old boring asset management. A business which has paid the mortgage on quite a few places in Hampstead, Chelsea, Earl Court, Belsize Park etc.
So right now they can passport their business with clients in Continental Europe. In two years time, they wont be able to if Brexit goes ahead. You wont see any loss of business right now but you will either have to open offices in the countries concerned or you will have enormous loss of business. And frankly who is going to award a new mandate to a company which may have to be reawarded in 2 years time?
So even if you havnt seen any damage yet, there will be damage to the comfortably off classes in London. Couldnt happen to a nicer bunch.
Big deal. In the worst case they will open a small crappy office in Dublin/Malta, get licensed, and market out of it into Europe. Sure, it’s some more overhead, and they might have to stick a trader and risk manager there, but this is not the end of the world. And the managers, the guys who have the house in Hampstead, Chelsea and Earls Court? Those guys make the big money and they will stay in London.
Relax. This is business. It doesn’t stand still. It evolves.
Apparently, Yves believes it is foolish for any Monetarily Sovereign nation not to be a member of the EU, for that is the essence of her article.
Being Monetarily Sovereign, and having the unlimited ability not only to pay any bill of any size, the UK also has the unlimited ability to support all UK businesses and to control the value of the pound.
It doesn’t need special deals with the EU any more than the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, China, Russia, Japan, and the dozens of other non-EU nations do.
Brexit should be exit. Not partial exit, not sort of exit, not almost exit.
The UK simply should free itself from the tentacles of the EU bankers, whose sole goal is to control nations for personal profit. The UK survived very nicely for hundreds of years, without the “beneficent guidance” of the EU, and if it is wise, it will continue to survive very nicely.
It was wise not to turn over its sovereign currency to the EU, and that wisdom can provide an easy means to implement Braxit.
Not true although I am sympathetic.
The lie we are always told about neoliberalism is TINA. If you buck the market the punters will go elsewhere. However in this case its obviously a lie. The problem we have in the UK is an access problem. We may not have access to the EU and they may lose easy access to us. In fact it turns out we could always have applied the same threat to transfer pricers like Google or Starbucks with their Irish profit washing.
Lots of business the London capuccino-class rely on, are dependent on EU market access. Maybe others will grow to fill the gap. But I dont think that process is frictionless. Perhaps british agribusiness should invest in greenhouses like the Dutch and Russians?
And while the UK can choose to make itself unpopular and devalue the pound, why dont you show me how the BoE can choose to appreciate the pound if others lose confidence in it? Its not immediately apparent to me.
Good grief.
Are you just uneducated, trolling, or something else? Do you realise that EU is NOT EURozone? Have you ever heard about such thing as pound sterling??? I’d suggest you educate yourself in a few basic facts about Europe before you start writing drivel. This may help as well as this
He’s been “advertising” his own blog this way for years, with the same pomposity and semi-coherency, though it seems he’s gotten a different — cleverer — url. Guess he likes his role?
“Guess he likes his role?”
Wandering the desert will all those that would follow…..
Disheveled Marsupial…. its a personality thingy…
You misunderstand monetary sovereignty and fiat currencies. It is true that the UK govt can pay any bill, but the means it uses to do that simply redistributes flows between sectors of the economy. If the UK economy suffers because of Brexit then the pie will be smaller and real productivity will have to pay for these bills. While you can print money to pay bills you can’t magic up economic prosperity.
Yves,
Is this a typo?
The only reason the UK lost that suit
It seems from the context that it should read “…the EU lost ….”
Great article as always. The UK on Brexit resembles the classic story of the man who jumped off the 100th floor balcony only to be convinced by the time he passes the 60th floor that the naysayers were wrong and all will end well. Sigh.
P
Thanks, will fix!
Or, as the Sperm Whale called into existence several miles above Magrathea, said about the ground it was heading for … “… I hope it will be friendly”.
Really good presentation of important perspectives.
The question begins to resolve itself: is neoliberal, global corporate capitalism compatible with anything other than itself? What politics, what spirit, what philosophy, what art, what use is this infernal machine they’ve created?