The fallout of coronavirus only adds to Britain’s problems as the country tries to extricate itself from 40 years of EU membership. We already know that Boris Johnson, rather than taking the easy route and remaining part of institutions which can ensure air travel safety or facilitate approval of new medicines – at least until such institutions can be created anew in the UK – is risking the most extreme version of Brexit imaginable. Even British membership of the European Convention on Human Rights, has been thrown into doubt by Johnson’s team, an institution which has nothing to do with the EU, and in fact includes Russia and Turkey.
Johnson has said he wants a ‘Canada style’ trade deal with the EU, but he wants such a shallow relationship with the EU that he will accept a no deal Brexit (now referred to as an ‘Australian option’) if that falls through. By the government's own reckoning this would wipe between 5% off the UK economy in the government’s best case scenario, and up to 9% in the event of no deal.
Not content with negotiating one immense deal this year, Johnson has set himself a second mammoth objective – a trade deal with the USA. Some suggest that this is a negotiating ploy – to play off the world’s two biggest trading blocks against one another in their desire for a deal with Britain. Sinn Fein pointed out the “glaring contradictions” in “publishing their objectives for parallel talks with the US”. They’re right in that it isn’t possible to do deep trade deals with both the EU and US – let alone in a year. That’s because modern trade deals are less about the tariff reductions most people associate with ‘free trade’, and far more to do with how a government regulates its economy. EU and US regulations are very different, and as a relatively small country, broadly speaking, Britain needs to decide which system it will adopt, which block it wants to be closer to.
