The Guardian view on Liz Truss and Brexit: new
chapter, same story
Editorial
Even with a will to be pragmatic, the foreign
secretary will encounter high obstacles to a better relationship with Europe
Wed 22 Dec
2021 18.25 GMT
Since her
appointment as foreign secretary in September, Liz Truss has said little about
the European Union. Her speeches exalt the UK as the broker of a global “network
of liberty”, listing alliances with scarcely any reference to the club of
democracies on Britain’s continental doorstep. That omission partly reflects
the ideological temper of the Conservative party, to which Ms Truss is highly
sensitised. It also expressed divisions of labour in the cabinet when David
Frost was in charge of post-Brexit negotiations with Brussels. But since Lord
Frost’s resignation, the European portfolio has returned to the Foreign Office.
Silence on the subject is no longer an option for the secretary of state.
Her first
intervention has been to restate Britain’s readiness to trigger article 16 of
the withdrawal agreement, suspending its operation, if grievances regarding the
Northern Ireland protocol are not satisfied. The terms demanded by Lord Frost
for a renegotiation still stand.
The
pugnacious tone disappointed those who had hoped that a change in personnel
indicated a new willingness to compromise. That prospect is not entirely lost.
Ms Truss had to signal continuity in the negotiating position. Anything else
would have caused a commotion on the Tory benches and destabilised an already
wobbly government. That does not rule out a pragmatic shift in the coming
months. The foreign secretary will not want Brexit to consume all of her
political bandwidth, and the most efficient way to avoid that is to take her
finger off the article 16 trigger.
There are
two obstacles. One is Ms Truss’s ambition, scarcely veiled, to succeed Boris
Johnson in Downing Street. That will involve pandering to Europhobic sentiment
among Tory grassroots and backbench MPs, at the expense of sound diplomacy. The
second is the disparate way that Brexit scatters its consequences across
Whitehall, beyond the institutional reach of the Foreign Office. At the
strategic level, that is the correct base for the development of European
relations, but Mr Johnson’s Brexit was drafted in defiance of strategic
thinking. He has explicitly ruled Britain out of institutionalised foreign
policy cooperation with Brussels.
Disentangling
Britain from EU membership has huge ongoing consequences for border management,
economic policy, trade, relations between Westminster government and the
devolved administrations. There are problems yet to be resolved around the replacement
of lost EU subsidies for agriculture and poorer regions. Fisheries will be a
constant headache. Lord Frost’s portfolio also included questions of regulatory
reform, exploring supposed benefits of Brexit by scrubbing the residue of
Brussels form the statute book. Taken in the round, few cabinet ministers are
unaffected, and it is unclear whether Ms Truss has the capacity or the will to
coordinate the process. Much of the day-to-day engagement with Brussels will
fall to her ministerial deputy, Chris Heaton-Harris, a hardliner who formerly
chaired the perennially dissatisfied European Research Group of MPs.
Even with
an application of pragmatic will, the structural impediments to a more sensible
European policy are great. The underlying reason is the longstanding failure in
government to understand or even engage with the full implications of leaving
the EU on the terms that Mr Johnson negotiated. Until that is fixed, the
relationship will be unbalanced and uneasy. And fixing it is more a question of
regime change than cabinet reshuffle.
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