Brexit 2017: The Year in Review

The year 2017 has been as interesting as it has been frustrating for Brexiters and Bremainers alike. Article 50 was triggered and a snap election was held in the UK, but instead of giving direction and a strong mandate to the negotiations, the exact opposite has happened.

The snap election on June 8 was supposed to give the Conservative Party an increased majority in Parliament and a strong mandate for the negotiations with the European Union. When Theresa May announced the election on April 18, the Tories seemed to have an amazing 20 percent lead over the Labour Party and its all but anonymous leader Jeremy Corbyn. A few subsequent polls even suggested a 24-25 percent lead and a 50 percent share of the vote for the Conservatives. However, the Tory campaign was by all accounts poorly managed, and not even two cowardly terrorist attacks in Manchester and London, events that often increase support for a national leader, did anything to bolster the Conservative vote.

In the end, the Conservative Party actually did manage to get an increased share of the vote – an increase from 37,8%. to 43,5%, but this seemed to be largely due to the total collapse of UKIP, whose share fell from 12,9% to just 1,9%. With the Brexit referendum being over and done with, the party didn’t really have much else to offer, and its voters seemed to return to the party from whence they came. The Labour Party, however, saw an even bigger increase, from its disastrous 31,2% vote at the 2015 election to an impressive 41%, just 2,5% behind the Conservatives.

So instead of winning an increased majority, May now faced a hung parliament without a clear majority to any of the major parties. Instead, the Conservatives had to make an agreement with the Northern Irish DUP, a party dubbed extremist by some and with a history of Euroscepticism and religious conservatism. As a further result of the election, May lost her closest aides, as her loyal but unpopular joint chiefs of staff, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, were forced to resign.

In the end, May had lost much of her power base inside the party, and it has been discussed ever since how much power she really holds, even in her own Cabinet. Repeated calls to sack her maverick Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson have gone unheeded, and she has appeared unable to mediate and/or to lay a lid on the ongoing battle between the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip Hammond, who voted Remain in the referendum, and the Brexit-wing inside the Cabinet, which is dominated by Johnson and the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, David Davis. To make matters worse, she lost her closest remaining associate in Cabinet, the First Secretary of State Damian Green, as a result of a completely unrelated pornography scandal on December 20, suggesting that she is going to face an even harder 2018.

So even without taking the actual negotiations and the positions of the other EU member states into consideration, it is safe to say, that 2017 has not been a good year for Brexit.

The negotiations

But some negotiations have taken place. The so-called Article 50 was invoked by the UK’s Permanent Representative to the EU, Sir Tim Barrow, on March 29, and this set things into motion. Article 50 is, in a way, like activating a time bomb. When the time is out, so are you, and this is also the case with the UK in relation to the European Union. On March 30, 2019, the UK will be out of the EU regardless of whether an agreement has been finalised; it may be possible, however, to negotiate an extension. Even so, the decision to invoke Article 50 puts a bit of pressure on the negotiators as the clock is now ticking and there is a fairly firm deadline in place. One would expect this to lead to some progress in the negotiations between the parties, but it seems that it has required a lot of effort to reach even preliminary agreements concerning just a few matters.

The negotiations are split up into two phases. The major questions to be dealt with in the first phase are the “Divorce bill”, the rights of EU citizens living in the UK, and the question of how to deal with the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. The latter was always a bit of a head-scratcher, and it hasn’t made things easier that the British government now relies on the Democratic Ulster Party for their majority.

A breakthrough seemed imminent when, on December 4, Theresa May was expected to announce an agreement on these issues, including provisions on Northern Ireland, so that the negotiations could move forward to the so-called Phase 2, which is about the future relationship between the UK and the EU. Instead, her weakness was exposed to all, as her dependence on the small, sectarian DUP forced her to postpone the expected announcement and to backtrack on what seemed to have been agreed concerning the Irish border.

When eventually an agreement was struck, considered by leading EU and Ireland negotiators to be bullet-proof and ironclad, who else but the Minister for Brexit, David Davis, went on the BBC saying that it was all really just a statement of intent and that if the UK wasn’t happy with the outcome of Phase 2, what had been agreed on during Phase 1 didn’t actually count. Amazingly, Davis later made it clear that intelligence wasn’t needed in his job, telling the listeners on LBC Radio that

“What’s the requirement of my job? I don’t have to be very clever, I don’t have to know that much, I do just have to be calm.”
(Source: “David Davis: I don’t have to be clever to do my job“)

Eventually, the mess was cleared up, the UK Government admitted that, naturally, what had been agreed was more than just statements of intent, and the European Council gave the go-ahead for Phase 2 to commence, which it will in the first half of 2018. It has to be said, however, that the Phase 1 questions have not actually been resolved, rather, in the disconcerting words of Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, “sufficient progress has been made“.

So, 18 months after a small majority of those who voted in the Brexit referendum opted for leaving the EU, surprisingly little has happened. Precious little has been agreed upon. The UK government has no strong mandate for the negotiations. It looks increasingly unlikely that the person who was chosen by her party to lead the UK out of Europe will even be in government, once the deadline set by the triggering of Article 50 expires in March, 2019. Europe shouldn’t be happy about this either. There is absolutely nothing to be won by having a paralysed UK Government, and Europe and the United Kingdom need each other – although, there are signs that the UK is beginning to realise that perhaps it needs Europe more than it thought just 12 months ago.