Krdytkyu

Britain held a referendum on EU membership in 2016, Leave won, some other stuff happened, there was and is load of a drama and the UK is possible maybe who knows perhaps due to leave in March of next year, with future arrangements still very much up in the air.

The consensus appears to be that the whole affair—from the bottom-of-the-barrel campaigning from both sides during the referendum to the vote of confidence against the Prime Minister after she offered a disappointing but EU-approved deal to Parliament last week—has been a bit of a shambles.

What I don't understand though, is why the UK and the EU found themselves in a position where they had only couple of vague lines (Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union (TEU)) to go on when beginning to work out their post-Brexit arrangements. The TEU has been in force since 2009, and the UK has had a turbulent relationship with the EU (and its antecedents) since the 1970s, so surely somebody could have seen this coming and planned appropriately?

Rather than waiting until the UK had already decided to leave, running the risk of having burnt some bridges, being made an example of and having to bargain from a weakened position, why did the UK not introduce any sort of contingency plans over the past 9–46 years, when the going was good?

Whether these would have been unilateral deals with individual countries (EU members or otherwise) that would take effect in the event of loss of EU membership, like this one the UK signed the other day with Switzerland, or even deals in place with the EU has a whole, it seems like a very obvious move to make that nobody seems to have.

They say you should ‘hope for the best, but plan for the worst’, so why doesn't Britain seem to have done any such planning pre-2016?

One major issue was that, technically, the EU is responsible for all trade agreements of its member countries. They can not on their own negotiate such arrangements. The EU leadership has flat out denied any member country from meeting with the UK to even discuss such things. Since the EU has also tied immigration to trade, that pretty much drags many of the most important topics off the negotiating table. So even if there had been some magical way of predicting exactly that the UK was going to vote to leave, they wouldn't really have been able to do much in preparation beforehand anyway, atleast not in the way of signed agreements.

• It would have been difficult to agree deals with the EU before the referendum and the Article 50 declaration, because the EU would have been put in a spot dealing with hypotheticals. They had no mandate to negotiate anything for the EU27 back then.


• It would have been both difficult and possibly illegal to agree deals outside the EU for post-Brexit trade because as an EU member the UK was not supposed to negotiate trade, and had no more staff experienced at it.


• It would have been extremely helpful if the UK government had found a consensus negotiating strategy supported by a majority of parliament in the time between the referendum and the formal Article 50 declaration. Failing to do that looks quite inexcusable.

Two years should have been enough to negotiate a Brexit deal, to get a decent start on the post-Brexit relationship, and a transition deal to link the two. But that would have required a majority for any one future in the UK. All they had was a slim majority against the status quo. Compared to that, the need for the EU27 to define their position was easy.

(Consider the difference between a constructive vote of no confidence and a motion of no confidence. One requires a majority for the new government, the other just a majority against the old one.)

The Cameron government backed a "remain" vote, and from everything that can be known or inferred, expected a "remain" vote, and were unprepared for a "leave" vote.

The referendum was apparently intended as either a way to strengthen the legitimacy of the EU institutions in the UK by showing popular support for them, or to put pressure onto the EU institutions by showing a very important minority (but not a majority) of the UK population was intolerant of them.

Should the government have prepared for a "leave" vote despite believing it was not practically possible for "leave" to win? I believe so, absolutely, as without any belief that "leave" was possible, a referendum should not even have been indicted. However, hindsight is great, but the fact is that the government was, as the case often is, unprepared for what they weren't expecting to happen.

Quite apart from the illegality under EU law of an EU member negotiating a trade agreement with another country, it would simply have been impossible. The eventual long-term agreement between the UK and EU is certain to involve the retention of some EU rules and regulations, and no other trade deal can be negotiated until the UK knows exactly what those rules and regulations are. There’s no point, for example, in entering into complex negotiations with the US on relaxing food standards to allow easier imports of food from the US if there’s a good chance that the UK will then have to agree to keep following EU rules in order to be able to export food to the EU.

Concrete contingency plans with third countries would have been strictly worse

Part of the Brexit sales pitch was that the UK could have achieved better deals outside the EU. This turns out to be false, and indeed part of the point of being in the EU is to secure better deals.

Some attempts were made, but with no real success. India were not in a hurry. India wanted more migration access to go with any trade deal, and this was obviously a non-starter in today's UK.

No negotiation before notification

The EU simply refused to enter into such negotiation on grounds of principle.

No clear mandate

Prepare what, exactly? There have always been multiple conflicting "visions" of how Brexit should be done.

The whole thing was directly opposite to the way in which the Scottish Indyref was carried out, in which there was the SNP in power in the Scottish Parliament with a large clear manifesto on how it should be done. If that had been a success it was fairly clear what the plan was and who would be carrying it out.

The same was not true of Leave. Most of the key campaigners have never been in elected roles. UKIP have only ever had a couple of short-lived MPs. Moreover, there was no surge to UKIP in the 2017 snap election. Not only that, there were two "independent" Leave campaigns (although this may turn out to have been an attempt to cheat spending rules).

The Three Brexiteers

What a lot of people were expecting was that one of Gove, Davis, or Johnson would have taken over in the post-Cameron leadership election. They did not enter as candidates. This left May, a Remainer, to implement a plan she had no support for.

Tory Syriza

You cannot hold a referendum that obliges other countries to give you things.

Greece tried this at terrible cost and was ultimately unsuccessful. If there is a country with a case for leaving the EU, it is Greece, not the UK; but ultimately at the crunch time they decided they would have been worse off out.