At some point the Brexit penny will drop with an almighty clang. Perhaps negotiations will collapse and the cliff edge will beckon. Or the economy will take a nosedive. Or the government will be forced to make compromises incompatible with UK national pride and/or implied referendum promises. The question then is: who gets the blame for Brexit falling apart?
It won’t be the 17 million voters who opted for Leave last year – that was democracy, the will of the people. You might expect a large portion of the blame to be heaped on the Tory government, for its impractical red lines, distracting infighting and unrealistic, dogmatic Brexit vision. Hapless Prime Minister Theresa May makes an obvious scapegoat.
For the eurosceptic press, however, the blame game has already begun, with sights squarely trained on Brussels. Take the editorial in today’s Telegraph headlined: “Who do those arrogant EU apparatchiks Juncker and Barnier think they are?” The article responded to comments by the European Commission’s president and chief negotiator saying the UK’s position papers were “not satisfactory” and that both sides needed to start negotiating “seriously”. For the Telegraph this was an example of “all the unaccountable arrogance that has put so many people off the EU”. It concluded that the pair “could cause irreparable diplomatic damage unless they are brought to heel” by elected European leaders.
Yet Jean-Claude Juncker’s and Michel Barnier’s comments ring true. The recent UK position paper on a new EU-UK customs relationship promises “innovative and untested” solutions, but raises far more questions than answers. Similarly, proposals on the Irish border would heap bureaucracy on legitimate businesses, give smugglers an easier ride and do nothing to “control our borders” as Brexiters promised. Other (elected) European leaders have pointed out the same contradictions in the British position, most notably Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar – a man with every motivation to find a workable solution and avoid petty squabbling.
Another Telegraph article promises to reveal “how (the) EU uses ‘dirty tricks’ on social media to wage Brexit war on Britain”. The paper’s gripe is that top EU officials post tweets about the negotiations saying things like: “#EU positions clear and transparent since day one”; “More ambition, clarity and guarantees needed than in today’s UK position”; and “Our duty is to minimise uncertainty, disruption caused by Brexit”.
As the Telegraph admits, this is hardly akin to “Donald Trump’s impulsive megaphone diplomacy” – but apparently that’s what makes it “potentially far more deadly”. The article goes on to note David Davis’s “relatively benign tone” on Twitter, saying he’s “rarely tweeted since starting his job” as Brexit secretary. But does this not back up Brussels’s point on transparency? The EU laid out its negotiating position months ago, while the silence emanating from Downing Street – at least until the recent position papers – has been deafening.
This week the Telegraph also “revealed” that Barnier’s salary was “£72,000 a year more” than Davis’s. Although top EU officials’ salaries are public knowledge, the Telegraph headline declared the sum was “sparking outrage”. The only sign of this outrage in the article, however, was a quote from Nigel Farage.
The tone of the pro-Brexit press plays well for the government. Anonymous British officials can call Barnier “unhelpful” and get a front-page splash. The newspapers will print the government’s demand that the EU should be “flexible and imaginative”, a phrase carefully ignoring the way many British proposals are half-finished or don’t make sense. The government counters the refusal of the Davis team to outline a sum or methodology for Britain’s ‘divorce bill’ with the argument that the EU hasn’t proposed anything on Northern Ireland yet – despite the cost of withdrawal clearly being the most contentious issue on the table. This will all help the government offset the blame when things go sour.
True to form, the right-wing press is abiding by its decades-old rule: if something’s going wrong, blame Brussels. It was this kind of pernicious messaging which got us into Brexit in the first place. Sadly it persists and could yet make things worse.