It has happened. Tory Brexiteers have finally come to an agreement with the EU – but perhaps not in the way one might have hoped for. Their point of agreement is that Theresa May’s Chequers offer – her attempt to thread the needle between their opposing demands – is not good enough and should be chucked out.
This should not come as a surprise, the theme of the Brexit negotiations so far has been that each side is moving further from compromise. It is not a positive development.
Hard Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson, who said the prime minister’s plan would lead to “vassalage, satrapy, colony status for the UK”, will be looking smug. In a press conference on Thursday, the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, refused to accept May’s proposal for a facilitated customs arrangement. This was the central idea of the Chequers plan – that the UK would hold on to some crucial trade deals with the EU by keeping all the same rules and regulations, while also technically being outside the customs union.
But Barnier wasn’t having any of it – the task of sticking to rules and regulations could not be trusted, he said, to “a non-member who would not be subject to the EU’s governance structures”. May’s attempts to woo EU heads of state already seems dead in the water – what is there to discuss when she meets Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš today?
This lands the UK in a mess. What do we do now? We could opt to stay in the customs union – Barnier’s preferred course – but the Tory party will not accept that. We could sign up to a “max fac” arrangement, with some border friction, but that wouldn’t solve the problem of the hard Irish border that would result. We could agree on a UK-wide backstop to cope with the Irish border question – but the Tory party wouldn’t accept that either, as it would mean continued payments and free movement of labour, as well as regulatory alignment.
It is clear the Tory Brexiteers should start to compromise. It is also clear they aren’t going to. Right now there is much political capital to be made from sticking doggedly to your guns – those who want to protect the Brexit “dream” – and almost none for those who wish to make concessions.
On the one hand, we have May – history’s biggest scapegoat since Larkin’s mum and dad – suffering near-daily humiliations as she tries to find a workable solution. On the other, we have Johnson, who grows less compromising by the hour, climbing in the popularity polls.
Our current politics does not reward those who want to find ground in the middle – only those moving further to the edge. Brexit has changed this country’s politics, chemically. It has, as it were, increased its entropy – politics is moving towards extremes in all directions. There is no reversing the process. And it does not bode well for a final deal.
• Martha Gill is a freelance political journalist and former lobby correspondent
