The UK may have only left the European Union last Friday, but its next opportunity to stagger blindly off a cliff is just 20 weeks away.
The current Brexit transition period is due to expire on December 31. Between now and then, both the UK and Brussels hope to reach an agreement on their future relationship. Failure to do so would mean no formal agreement and the immediate cessation of all current arrangements, causing untold chaos and disruption.
And while the transition period can be extended, the UK needs to decide whether it wishes to do so before July 1. That, according to international law, really is the point of no return and potentially the new economic cliff edge. Boris Johnson has said that he has absolutely no intention of extending.
Given that it took nearly four years to reach an agreement with Brussels that avoided the first cliff edge, you’d think this might be cause for alarm in London.
However, since Brexit Day, Westminster has been eerily quiet on the single most important issue facing the United Kingdom in 2020.
Johnson’s Conservatives are swaggering around with the confidence you might expect of a government that recently won a landslide victory in the most important general election of a generation. Gone are the days of deadlock; Johnson’s government is now free to pursue whatever agenda it likes in this post-EU reality.
Locking horns
Right now, what it seems to like doing most is picking fights.
In the past week alone, Downing Street tried to play divide and rule with the British press, excluding some reporters from news outlets deemed to be critical of its policies from government briefings – including those given by impartial civil servants.
It also announced plans that pave the way to removing the BBC’s public funding model. Johnson’s government has been locking horns with the BBC virtually since he came to power over the summer, and many in his inner team believe that the national broadcaster has an anti-Brexit, anti-Johnson bias.
And he’s setting himself up to have a nasty screaming match with human rights lawyers later this month. Johnson’s government is putting forward controversial legislation that would change how and when people convicted of terror offenses are released from prison. It’s possible that these plans are illegal under human rights law.
The question is, why is a PM with such a huge task ahead of him so willfully poking so many hornets’ nests? “This government obviously likes conflict. I don’t think they are particularly bothered by people seeing them as being at war with the BBC or in conflict with judges over keeping suspected terrorists in prison via retrospective legislation. And if it serves as a distraction from the government’s Brexit strategy, so much the better,” says Anand Menon, director of the UK in a changing EU think tank.
Whether it’s a deliberate distraction strategy or not, Boris Johnson’s government is becoming defined by its propensity for combat. Civil servants who had served previous administrations complain that Johnson’s political advisers are “arrogant,” “overly confident” and deliberately creating an “us versus them culture.”
However, many of these civil servants are not seeing much beyond the bluster. Despite having the mandate to pursue whatever agenda it likes, Johnson’s government seems fixated on telling people how much they want to change the country without doing all that much about it.
Which somewhat lends weight to the theory that Johnson’s government is eager that the national conversation be on any subject other than Brexit. And that could be down to the fact that the UK’s current Brexit strategy appears to be sitting tight, not saying very much and letting the clock run down. And many are worried that this is because the government’s real strategy is to leave at the end of this year with no formal future relationship in place.
“The government is existing day-to-day at the moment … I think with all things added up, it’s becoming very likely we are going to leave on December 31 without a deal,” says Chris Bryant, an opposition Labour Party lawmaker.
Earlier in the week Johnson talked about the UK’s future relationship with Europe being like Australia’s. Phil Hogan, the EU’s trade commissioner, quickly pointed out that Australia has no formal trading relationship with the EU, and that he believed it was code for “no deal.” When asked for its response to Hogan’s comments, the government told CNN that Australia has several bilateral agreements with the EU, and that it already has a deal with t