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How Did We Get Here? the Broken Promises and Remainer Activism That Saw Brexit Cancelled a Third Time

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The United Kingdom has failed for a third time to leave the European Union on a date set by its political leaders, just the latest installment in a saga of delays and broken promises in the near three and a half years since the country voted in favor of Brexit.

October 31st 2019 is the latest in a series of dates on which the United Kingdom was meant to Brexit and leave the European Union. The first, on March 29th 2019, came some two years and nine months after the original referendum, triggered after a long period of fruitless negotiation and delay. But it was cancelled after the Remain-supporting Prime Minister Theresa May’s negotiated withdrawal agreement failed to pass Parliament.

This failure eventually brought down the May government, just as the Brexit referendum itself had brought down David Cameron. But it also kicked the Brexit can down the road, a result which Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage predicted with some prescience back in February would lead to delay after delay from that point, putting off Brexit forever.

And indeed it was so — the failure to deliver the March date led to an April 12th date, which itself gave way to October 31st. That date now passing, with the commemorative Brexit coins minted to mark it being melted down.

The next departure date dangled before the noses of the British people is January 31st — which itself will likely be cancelled in favor of another date later in 2020.

(Read more from “How Did We Get Here? the Broken Promises and Remainer Activism That Saw Brexit Cancelled a Third Time” HERE)

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Why the Brexit Deal Has Become Such a Tangled Mess

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On Tuesday, President Trump said the withdrawal agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union designed to codify Brexit “sounds like a great deal for the EU.” This reflected the majority of political thought across Great Britain over the last fortnight, which has panned the agreement Prime Minister Theresa May obtained:

At some point, negotiations with the EU always seemed destined to hit a reality check. The gap between what many British leaders want and what May could deliver has placed the United Kingdom in the midst of high-stakes political drama with a far-from-certain outcome. . .

From the outset of the treaty process, the EU held most of the negotiating cards, for two big reasons. First, British business fears the prospect of a “no-deal” Brexit. Under this scenario, the U.K. would exit the European Union next March 29—the date currently scheduled for Britain’s withdrawal—with no agreement in place governing future relations between the two entities. Overnight, border and customs checks would go into place, and tariffs would be re-imposed on British goods entering the EU and vice versa.

A no-deal Brexit has terrified the business community, ranging from the banking sector, where London’s reputation as a financial capital relies in large part on its EU ties, to concerns about supply chain interruptions. To give but one example of the uncertainty plaguing industry, the head of Britain’s Food and Drink Federation testified before a parliamentary committee on Tuesday that “warehouses around the U.K. for frozen and chilled food are ‘for all practical purposes booked out at the moment’”—businesses are stockpiling supplies to try and avoid disruptions next spring.

A no-deal Brexit also would create political uncertainties in Northern Ireland. Without an agreement governing customs between Northern Ireland (a part of the United Kingdom exiting the EU) and the Republic of Ireland (a sovereign state that will remain in the EU), a no-deal Brexit could lead to the re-imposition of a “hard border” between the two nations. (Read more from “Why the Brexit Deal Has Become Such a Tangled Mess” HERE)

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British Army Goes to Standby in Prep for “No Deal” Brexit and Ensuing Domestic Crisis

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By The Times. Ministers have drawn up plans to send in the army to deliver food, medicines and fuel in the event of shortages if Britain crashes out of the EU without a deal.

Blueprints for the armed forces to assist the civilian authorities, usually used only in civil emergencies, have been dusted down as part of the “no deal” planning.

Helicopters and army trucks would be used to ferry supplies to vulnerable people outside the southeast who were struggling to obtain the medicines they needed. (Read more from “British Army Goes to Standby in Prep for “No Deal” Brexit and Ensuing Domestic Crisis” HERE)

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Here’s What a No Deal Brexit Would Mean for the British Economy

By Business Insider. . .Writing this week, Vicky Redwood, global economist at Capital Economics, argued that while “more extreme” warnings about the economic hit of no deal are being “overblown,” a significant impact negative impact could still be expected.

“Although the more extreme warnings about the short-term impact of a ‘no-deal’ Brexit on the economy are overdone, there is little doubt that it could deal a reasonable blow to GDP growth next year,” Redwood wrote to clients.

“Whether a no-deal scenario had a good, bad, or little impact on the economy in the long run would depend on many things, including how successful the UK was at striking new trade deals and whether there was an exodus of financial institutions from the UK. But the short-run effect would surely be bad,” she told clients.

Redwood did not go into specific detail in terms of forecasts, but said that a no deal Brexit could “plausibly knock a percentage point or so off growth next year.”

One of the reasons for that, Redwood argued, is that no deal would inevitably have a major negative impact on the price of the pound. (Read more from “Here’s What a No Deal Brexit Would Mean for the British Economy” HERE)

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The Next Brexit? Italy ‘No’ Vote Empowers Populist Revolt Against Establishment

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Daniel Hannan, a British politician and a leading campaigner of Brexit, recognizes the forces that he says inspired Sunday’s referendum result in Italy, where the center-left prime minister resigned after voters rejected his proposed reforms.

“The obvious parallel with these elections is you carry a tremendous handicap if you are associated with the old regime in any sense,” Hannan told The Daily Signal. “Voters understandably feel patronized and lied to and ignored and disdained and they responded in this way.”

In a year when Britons voted to leave the European Union and Americans chose Donald Trump as president, the global populist movement claimed its latest victim Sunday when Prime Minister Matteo Renzi resigned after Italian voters rejected constitutional changes backed by his government.

Renzi had proposed to reduce the power of the Senate, the upper house of Parliament, to streamline the political system, create more stability, and accelerate growth in Europe’s fourth-largest economy. Italy has had 63 governments in 70 years.

But critics, empowered by an opposition campaign waged by the upstart, euroskeptic Five Star Movement party, said Renzi’s plan would put too much power in the prime minister’s hands.

The opposition capitalized on similar discontent that fueled the results in Britain and the U.S.

Italy is plagued by low growth, and its banking system has been in crisis for a decade. The country’s youth unemployment rate is around 35 percent, and young people soundly rejected Renzi’s reforms.

Italy is also contending with a tide of refugees and migrants from North Africa (more than 170,000 people have arrived in Italy so far in 2016).

While Renzi’s fall will not lead to the immediate takeover of Italy by a populist figure or party like the Five Star Movement, experts say the result of the election will reverberate across a European Union already shaken by anti-establishment anger.

“I certainly think there are common elements here,” said Robert Kahn, a senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, in an interview with The Daily Signal, adding:

This populist wave we are seeing—by which I mean frustration, alienation, and rejection of mainstream politicians and institutions—was certainly part of the ‘no’ vote. While there are a constellation of factors, part of this is Italians using the referendum to lodge a protest vote against their government and policies. In that sense, it does rhyme with Brexit.

Change in Italy will be slow in coming since Renzi’s center-left Democratic Party remains in control of Parliament and national elections do not have to be called until 2018.

Though the Five Star Movement—which leans left, not right—advocates a referendum to determine whether Italy should give up its eurozone membership, observers say it would be difficult for the party to gain the power to make that happen. That’s because Italy’s mainstream political parties may aim to change voting laws to make it tougher to rule without a wide coalition.

The Five Star Movement and its leader, Beppe Grillo, a comedian-turned-politician, have said they won’t govern in a coalition government with traditional political parties.

Yet even without an immediate shake-up in Italy, 2017 promises to be an important year in determining the future of the European concept of integration.

European Union members Germany, France, and the Netherlands have elections next year with euroskeptic and populist candidates in the running.

Last week, President Francois Hollande of France, a socialist, said he won’t seek re-election in 2017, opening up the race to succeed him, which will include Marine Le Pen of the rising far-right populist National Front party.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has presided over Europe’s strongest economy since 2005, will run for a fourth term in next year’s election. But she and her Christian Democratic Union party are under siege because of her decision to accept almost 1 million refugees and migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries.

“In France and even in Germany, you have alternative parties that have extremely different visions of what Europe should be,” Kahn said. “It’s dramatic, it’s scary, and it’s threatening to the current union.”

Some say there are limits to the influence of anti-establishment anger.

They point to another election result on Sunday, where a center-left presidential candidate in Austria easily defeated his far-right challenger.

Andrea Montanino, director of the Global Business and Economics Program at the Atlantic Council and a former board member of the International Monetary Fund, says talk of Italy leaving the euro and the downfall of the union is premature.

“It’s important to differentiate this event from the rest,” Montanino told The Daily Signal in an interview. “This is part of the Italian normal legislative process. It will of course impose some instability for a while, but this is not a Brexit.”

On Monday, the day after the referendum in Italy, financial markets recovered from an initial scare that Renzi’s departure would lead to political stability, with stocks and the euro both rebounding in value.

Hannan, one of the architects of Brexit, said “there are too many uncertainties” to predict Italy will leave the euro.

But he said voters, like in Britain, sent a powerful message.

“The lesson is if you give people a choice between corporatist euro technocrats and angry populists, you aren’t going to like their verdict,” Hannan said. (For more from the author of “The Next Brexit? Italy ‘No’ Vote Empowers Populist Revolt Against Establishment” please click HERE)

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The Next Steps on the Road to Brexit

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Britain’s vote to leave the European Union on June 23 was a milestone in the history of the United Kingdom, and of the defense of British freedom and sovereignty. But it was also just the start of securing Britain’s independence. It is one thing to vote to stand on your own two feet, it is another thing to do it.

Since the vote, Britain has put in place a new government, led by Prime Minister Theresa May, with many prominent leaders of the “leave” campaign—including former London Mayor Boris Johnson and former Defense Secretary Liam Fox—in key positions, with Johnson taking the foreign secretary job.

Fox’s position, as the head of the new ministry for international trade, is particularly significant. Ever since it joined the EU in 1973, Britain hasn’t been able to negotiate its own trade treaties. When Britain leaves the EU, it will recover that right.

It’s vital that Britain rebuild the necessary negotiating expertise, and equally vital that this job be held by an outward-looking and senior figure in the governing Conservative Party, who, like Fox, fully backed Britain’s exit from the EU.

So far, prominent government officials or business leaders in at least 27 nations—including eight of the 10 largest economies in the world—have backed negotiating a trade deal with Britain. And the British economy, far from collapsing in the aftermath of the vote, has seen unemployment fall and sales surge.

But though Britain has voted to leave the EU, it has yet to take the necessary first formal step: to invoke Article 50 of the Treaty of European Union, and commence formal negotiations on the terms of Britain’s withdrawal. It’s now possible that Article 50 might not be invoked until mid-2017, a worrying delay.

Then, as Britain negotiates, it will need to repeal the British laws that brought Britain into the EU in the first place. Finally, it will have to establish a mechanism to review the entire body of EU law that now operates in Britain. There’s so much of this that Parliament will have to find a way to streamline the process—conducting a line-by-line review would take an eternity.

Then there are a host of vital questions for particular sectors of the economy. The British government has already announced that it will continue to pay farming and scientific subsidies until 2020, but what happens after that is still unclear. Similarly, there is the issue of what should happen to the EU citizens who were legally employed in Britain on June 23, and the reciprocal question about the rights of British subjects who were working on, or who retired to, the Continent.

Beyond all these questions is a final, vital one: What kind of relationship should Britain seek to have with the EU after it leaves? Some Brexit supporters want to stay in the European Economic Area, which would allow Britain to keep its current access to the EU’s single market.

Others, however, point out that being in the European Economic Area means being subject to the EU’s rules, contributing to the EU’s budget, and allowing free movement of labor from the EU. In other words, it means keeping most of the things that British voters rejected on June 23. The alternative, therefore, is for Britain to become completely independent, and to negotiate a trade deal with the EU from outside the economic area.

In short, many uncertainties remain. But believers in free markets and free peoples have been thinking about these problems for years. Indeed, in 2013, the Institute of Economic Affairs, a leading free-market think tank in London, held a competition to find the best plan for Britain after Brexit.

We are delighted to welcome the joint authors of one of the prize-winning essays from the Institute of Economic Affairs’ competition, Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Rory Broomfield of the Freedom Association and its Better Off Out campaign, to The Heritage Foundation to present an updated edition of their plan, “Cutting the Gordian Knot: A Road Map for British Exit from the European Union,” on Wednesday, Aug. 24, at 1 p.m.

Joining the authors will be Marian L. Tupy, of the Cato Institute, who will comment on the plan, and Victoria Coates, national security adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who will offer Capitol Hill’s perspective on Brexit and the future of Anglo-American relations after June 23.

Please join us on Wednesday for a look, from both British and American perspectives, at the next steps in achieving Britain’s independence from the EU and making Brexit a reality. (For more from the author of “The Next Steps on the Road to Brexit” please click HERE)

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How Congress Should Seize the Brexit Opportunity

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This week, the people of Britain won a major victory for democracy and sovereignty by voting to leave the European Union.

Many on the left, along with their allies in the media, are predicting that this Brexit will lead to economic disaster for Britain, if not all of Europe and the rest of the world. These doomsayers should take a deep breath and a fresh look at the reality of the situation beyond the initial disruptions caused by this momentous decision.

To hear many American elites talk about the Brexit decision, you would think the EU is the equivalent of Europe’s version of the North American Free Trade Agreement—a liberalized commercial area for a small group of foreign nations in close geographic proximity designed to facilitate economic cooperation. But it is much more than that.

By submitting to the EU, Britons have been subjected to the laws, decisions, and regulations of a centralized legislature, court, and bureaucracy located in a distant capital and out of touch with the local needs and priorities of the people—an arrangement that many Americans would recognize as similar to our own over-centralized, unaccountable federal government.

Moreover, the Brexit vote only begins the process of Britain leaving the EU. When announcing his resignation, Prime Minister David Cameron said his successor should decide when and how to trigger Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union. And even after the next prime minister is elected, Article 50 provides a two-year process for Britain to negotiate both its own terms for leaving the EU and new trade deals with the rest of the world, including the United States.

That is what the United States should be doing now to support the people of Britain as they continue the work of disentangling themselves from the clutches of the EU’s centralized power structure in Brussels. We should be doing everything we can to negotiate new treaties with Britain to ensure a smooth, prosperous, and secure transition for both countries.

Prior to the Brexit vote, President Barack Obama indicated he wants to go a different path. Earlier this year, he threatened Britain that they would have to go to “the back of the queue” in any trade negotiations with the United States if they were to vote to leave the EU. This threat was ill-advised at the time and would be harmful to both countries if adhered to going forward.

Instead, Congress should pass new legislation both requiring the United States to honor our current agreements with the United Kingdom until new bilateral agreements can be negotiated, and directing the U.S. trade representative to begin negotiations on new bilateral agreements as soon as possible. There is no better way to honor America’s special relationship with Great Britain. (For more from the author of “How Congress Should Seize the Brexit Opportunity” please click HERE)

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