Triggering Article 50

When Sir Tim Barrow, the UK’s representative to the European Union, handed the formal declaration to Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, he responded grimly: “So, here it is. Six pages,” adding, “there is no reason to pretend this is a happy day.” With that, the challenges of Brexit become real.

The twin pressures on the Prime Minister, from her own party and from other European Union countries, risk smashing apart all the careful calculations of the past nine months, rendering some options out of reach. The question is whether the Government can still find a survivable route through these hazards to deliver a deal.

The UK has spent those nine months since the referendum in a curious technocratic conversation, as British ministers and officials, MPs and the public, debated what Britain should demand of the EU, how it might trade with the rest of the world, and what capacity government might need to deliver it. Often it has sounded as if the most contentious question was merely whether the country had enough experienced trade lawyers, and the worst insult that could be hurled at David Davis, Secretary of State for Exiting the EU, was that he had not fully considered the complexity of the task.

Theresa May has sustained the tone of that conversation. Only Nicola Sturgeon, jumping the gun of a race that Downing Street hoped it wasn’t in, with her demand for a new referendum on Scottish independence, has injected a sense of the ways in which the exercise is not fully under the Westminster Government’s control.

The choice of when to trigger Article 50 was the most important step of the process entirely under Britain’s control. That done, the initiative now passes to the Prime Minister’s antagonists, on the Continent and at home, and the wrangling begins.

The politics of Europe

In Brussels, the first row will be over the mooted “exit bill” and even before that, when this will be decided: in parallel with exit talks (as Britain wants) or in advance (as the EU will demand). There is a risk that the talks will become fractious at this early stage – not a high risk, if only because it is obvious and neither side wants it, but still real.

On the EU side, there is a danger that politicians are still so disbelieving that Brexit will happen, privately sustaining the hope that the British public will change its mind, that they underestimate the chance that Britain will walk out.

On the British side, there has been a tendency to underestimate how important the survival of the European project is to the main EU countries – above all Germany, regardless of its concerns for the exports of its car industry. David Cameron and Theresa May have racked up a short but substantial record between them of overestimating what Germany will do for Britain in an EU context on the basis of warm one-to-one talks with Angela Merkel.

Theresa May’s language in her statement to the Commons, emphasising that Britain shared European values at a time when those are under threat, and explicitly that those values were “liberal democratic”, was a deliberate and well-judged attempt to bridge that gulf.

There is room for further misunderstanding, though, on many fronts. It has become commonplace among British ministers and officials to say that it is obvious that it will take longer than the two years permitted under Article 50 to sort out some arrangements. That is not, so far at least, the Prime Minister’s position; she has talked only of a period of implementation of a trade deal, but stuck to the position that all exit negotiations will be concluded within two years.

Many European officials acknowledge the force of the argument for more time in some sense, too. “But what you British seem not to understand,” said one senior German official to me recently, “is that a request for more time will need approval from the 27 remaining countries, and they will want to know what Britain will give in return.” In short, everything is a deal.

The attitude that some British officials appear to hold – that because an outcome is “rational” or is a “win-win”, the other side will embrace it too – is likely to run up against the hard reality that this is a negotiation. There are simply too many interests in play on the EU side to make the outcome predictable.

The politics of the Conservative Party

And that is before considering the impact of Conservative MPs on the range of negotiating options. The Prime Minister has chosen to narrow the options available to protect the priorities of controlling immigration and stepping out from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. She set aside membership of the Single Market and the Customs Union in her speech early this year.

Yet her room for manoeuvre may be even narrower than that suggests. Earlier this month, her backbenchers cost her the Budget, forcing a climbdown within days on the proposal to raise national insurance contributions for the self-employed. In broad terms, that reversal and with it, the obligation to stick to the manifesto commitment not to raise income tax or national insurance has deprived the Government of most of its means of raising money for the next three years, other than by raising borrowing.

As one well-placed Westminster observer says: “She has to keep throwing them scraps of red meat – like Lord Heseltine [sacked earlier this month from five government advisory roles for backing the call for a parliamentary vote on the final Brexit deal] or even offering a free vote on the refurbishment of the Palace of Westminster.”

If with a majority of 17 she cannot secure the passage of a Budget which had considerable support from dispassionate commentators, it is hard to see how she can be sure of getting the much more contentious realities of a deal with the EU through Parliament even though Parliament is offered only a “take it or leave it vote”. There are around 50 Conservative MPs who appear unwilling to accept any compromise at all on controls on immigration or sovereignty, and indifferent in comparison to the effect on the economy.

The politics of the UK

At the referendum, there was a 52-48 majority for leaving the EU. That did not represent a majority for any one version of an exit deal, and what is true of the UK is even more true of the Conservative Party. That may render many options and potential compromises inaccessible; the question is whether enough room remains to enable a deal to be done – and accepted in the UK.

The questions about how the UK manages the technical complexity of this are real and forceful. The IfG has offered extensive comment on these over the past nine months, and will continue to do so. The broad answer is that they can be managed, given time.

But it would be wrong to pretend that this is merely a managerial exercise or that those technical questions constitute the first and greatest difficulties.

The politics on all sides will make the process hard to control, and the reality of that starts today.