Dr Nicholas Whyte: Brexit as seen from Brussels

Nicholas Whyte is a familiar figure on Slugger O’Toole writing about boundaries and election trends as well as popping up on local TV screens during coverage of election counts. He’s the brains behind the figures at ARK’s election site and the senior director at the Brussels office of consultancy APCO Worldwide.

Wearing his hat as visiting professor at Ulster University, in an event organised by the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences and Slugger O’Toole, Whyte delivered a lecture on Brexit as seen from Brussels, and fielded questions from the politically-interested audience.

His talk reflected on how the UK’s Brexit process has been perceived at the heart of the EU, noting that “Brussels may seem rather far from Belfast, but Belfast is increasingly visible in Brussels”.

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To what extent has the EU got itself to blame for Brexit?

“It has been much easier to blame it on the peculiarities of the British political environment. But Luuk van Middelaar, in his new book Alarums and Excursions, makes the very good point that the EU system was not built to include internal constructive opposition. The EU was deliberately and politically constructed as a massive peace project, removing the incentives for future conflict in Europe through economic co-operation.

“A very senior British EU official once said to me that the triumph of the system is to convert exciting political issues into dull technical ones. The EU works by consensus, expertise, technocracy, and grand coalitions. Even though almost all decisions by member states in the Council of Ministers are theoretically taken by qualified majority, in fact there are very few votes; there is a strong incentive to find a consensus. The same is true in the European Parliament, where unlike in a national parliament there is no group of members representing a potential alternate government.

“It’s therefore rather difficult to explain to voters how their vote for one candidate or party rather than another at European Parliament elections will change their lives. It’s not surprising that protest parties and candidates tend to do much better in European elections than in elections for national parliaments. Looking locally, some of you will remember that Ian Paisley stunned everyone except his own supporters by getting almost 30% in the first European Parliament elections here in 1979. Apart from European elections, the DUP has only once exceeded that level of support – not in Ian Paisley’s lifetime, but in the most recent election, the Westminster vote of 2017. Tomorrow of course is another day. (Though I don’t think it will be another record-breaker.)

“And what the EU does is often rather complex and difficult to explain. A friend of mine used to be the foreign minister of one of the Balkan countries. I asked him once how his negotiations with the EU were going. He replied, ‘You know what the difference is between the EU and the mafia? The mafia makes you an offer you cannot refuse. The EU makes you an offer you cannot understand.’”

Whyte mused about the turning point at which Brexit became inevitable. John Major negotiating the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 only to find that Margaret Thatcher and the Eurosceptics were eroding his authority and sabotaging the process?

  • Michael Heseltine’s decision not to run for the Conservative Party leadership in 1997 leaving William Hague to defeat Kenneth Clarkeon an openly anti-EU platform, normalising Euroscepticism?
  • David Cameron’s promise to withdraw the Conservatives from the European People’s Party when he in turn was elected leader in 2005?
  • The relentless and “cheap” campaign against Europe run by the British media over many years?
  • The EU’s handling of the 2008 financial crisis and the apparent removal of elected Greek and Italian governments from power and the austerity inflicted on Ireland, Greece and Cyprus by the euro zone?
  • The December 2011 EU summit when the eurozone member states were trying to establish a fiscal mechanism to make future bailouts easier to handle?
  • Cameron’s 2015 election pledge of an in/out referendum on EU membership if he won it, and if he got satisfaction from the EU in negotiating terms?

“Alastair Campbell gave a very good summary of some of the most blatant lies in the UK media in his evidence to the Leveson Enquiry on the media in 2011: ‘Several of our national daily titles – The Sun, The Express, The Star, The Mail, The Telegraph in particular – are broadly anti-European. At various times, readers of these and other newspapers may have read that “Europe” or “Brussels” or “the EU superstate” has banned, or is intending to ban kilts, curries, mushy peas, paper rounds, Caerphilly cheese, charity shops, bulldogs, bent sausages and cucumbers, the British Army, lollipop ladies, British loaves, British made lavatories, the passport crest, lorry drivers who wear glasses, and many more. In addition, if the Eurosceptic press is to be believed, Britain is going to be forced to unite as a single country with France, Church schools are being forced to hire atheist teachers, Scotch whisky is being classified as an inflammable liquid, British soldiers must take orders in French, the price of chips is being raised by Brussels, Europe is insisting on one size fits all condoms, new laws are being proposed on how to climb a ladder, it will be a criminal offence to criticise Europe, Number 10 must fly the European flag, and finally, Europe is brainwashing our children with pro-European propaganda!’

“Lord Leveson, in his report, refers to this passage and comments that Alastair Campbell must have been exaggerating. But he was not.”

Whyte noted how the EU reacted quickly to the UK’s referendum result “with Tusk sending agreed lines to take to all EU leaders at 7.22 on the morning after the vote, and by the Tuesday after the vote had agreed a co-ordinated response to the effect that they regretted the outcome, but they would handle Brexit according to the treaties – the EU27 would negotiate as a bloc, and there would be no negotiation without notification of the UK’s intent to withdraw, though they hoped that the UK would remain a close partner with the EU after Brexit.”

He added:

“It’s worth noting here a couple of dogs that did not bark. Spain has grumbled from time to time about Gibraltar, but basically having asked for and got a veto on future EU relations with the Rock, has been satisfied with it. There has been no discernible difference between Sanchez and Rajoy on this. Michael Howard’s threat of military action did not impress anyone who has looked at a map recently. I would also point out that in case of what we used to call a cliff-edge Brexit and now call a no-deal scnario, Belgium stands to lose as much in trade as any country other than Ireland – actually more by some calculations. There has been no hint of Belgium disrupting the EU line on this, and there is a good paper by Alexander Mattelaer on the subject.

“The other dog that barked in a direction that the British did not expect was Germany. Brexiters famously predicted that German industry would force Chancellor Merkel to offer the UK good trade terms for the sake of continued sales of German cars here. Considering how little attention the Brexiters were paying to British industry, it’s weird that they thought this dynamic was a serious possibility. When David Davies went to Germany and lectured industrialists about putting politics ahead of prosperity, he was openly laughed at. German industry made its strategic choice decades ago, and it is for the European single market; it can be no coincidence that trade talks between the EU and India, with its growing market for luxury cars, warmed up just as Brexit was getting under way.”

When the UK finally began negotiating “there can be few more symbolic pictures than the shot of Barnier and his team with large dossiers in front of them, and David Davies and his team empty-handed.”

“He almost immediately agreed to the EU’s sequencing – withdrawal agreement first, then future relationship – despite having vowed that this would be the row of the summer. Davies was jovial enough as an interlocutor, but never seemed to be on top of his brief, and more than once had to withdraw unhelpful comments that he had made. Two different senior Conservatives complained to me that he was simply lazy, and if they were saying that to me, heaven knows what they were saying internally.

“Barnier took control December 2017, everything from EU since then based on his steps diagram. This was really the moment from which the process took its subsequent shape. The British were left in the position of actually negotiating a softer Brexit than the EU was prepared to offer, which ran contrary to the full-blooded rhetoric of the ERG.”

Look forward, Whyte predicted that “if there is another referendum or another election, the EU will reluctantly grant a further extension to see it through. But make no mistake, the EU just wants this to be over – a future without the UK has been priced into future calculations. If the UK revokes Article 50, there will be a general sigh of ‘Oh god they’re back.’”

Whyte saw three lessons the UK could learn, and one for the EU.

  • It might have been smarter to set the negotiating position before starting negotiations.
  • It might have been better to work cross-party (despite Corbnyn).
  • It might have been better to take Ireland seriously, which interesting is what I see from most Bregretters.
  • The EU needs to reconnect with people. The CXitizens Assembly concept is spreading across Europe.

During the 50 minutes of questions, Whyte was asked whether English would continue as the common language across Europe (yes), heard a pitch from European election candidate Jane Morris, and pondered some of the weaknesses of EU action against its own members.

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