Britain has voted to leave the EU – what happens next?

Patrick Wintour

The Guardian

The UK’s historic decision to end its 43-year love-hate relationship with the European Union represents a turning point in British history to rank alongside the two world wars of the 20th century.

On the assumption there is no turning back, or collective buyer’s remorse, Britain will live with the political, constitutional, diplomatic and economic consequences for a decade or more.

The pin on the atlas marking the UK’s place in the world has shifted, as have the centres of power in the UK polity. All the familiar points of authority in London society – Downing Street, big business, economic expertise, the foreign policy establishment – have been spurned by the equivalent of a popular cluster bomb.

So what happens next?

The politics

The scale of the destruction wrought by independence day is such that one of the last redoubts of the establishment left standing – the civil service led by the cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood – will now take centre stage.

It will be his task, in conjunction with the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, and David Cameron acting as a caretaker prime minister to bring a semblance of shape to the chaos that is likely to ensue.

© REUTERS/Neil Hall The UK’s historic decision to end its 43-year love-hate relationship with the European Union represents a turning point in British history to rank alongside the two world wars of the 20th century.

Cameron insisted in his resignation statement that he would accept the instructions of the British people and will now be in his study in Downing Street surveying the wreckage of his political career.

Faced by the scale of his rebuff, he rejected the half sincere entreaties of his backbench MPs to try to stay as planned until 2019 , and instead announced that he will remain until a Conservative party leadership election in the autumn. Two old hands, the veteran Conservative Kenneth Clarke and Lord Butler, the former head of the civil service, were right to predict Cameron would be gone within hours of the defeat, arguing his political authority – and spirit – will have been destroyed.

To have tried to linger in the wake of such a cataclysmic personal misjudgement would have smacked of tone-deaf arrogance. By agreeing to stay until autumn, he at least provides time for the Conservative party to put flesh on the frankly skeletal Brexit plan set out by the official Leave campaign.

The cabinet manual is clear: the prime minister cannot leave until he can advise the Queen on the identity of his successor. Either way, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is likely to mount a confidence vote that will not pass.

However long the political machinations last, Cameron and the chancellor, George Osborne, face a dilemma.

The negotiations

Cameron had vowed during the campaign that if there was a Brexit vote, he would trigger article 50, the part of the Lisbon treaty that sets in train a two-year process whereby a member state can notify the EU council of its decision to leave.

Constitutionally, it is a decision for him alone, not parliament, since it is a matter of the royal prerogative. At the same time, nothing can stop parliament passing a motion that seeks to instruct him not to trigger article 50.

Cameron’s statement in the campaign that he would trigger article 50 immediately in the wake of a Brexit vote was made to dramatise the irreversibility of Brexit. But many sceptics, including Michael Gove, Daniel Hannan and Lord Howard, stressed it would be quite wrong to act in such haste. Once article 50 is triggered, the clock starts ticking on a two year renegotiation with the EU that must end with the UK’s ejection unless the EU member states unanimously agree to extend the negotiations.

It was significant that Cameron in his resignation statement said any exit negotiation strategy would take time to be developed, and involve consultations with the governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. He stressed “it is right the new prime minister takes the decision about when to trigger article 50 and start the formal and legal process of leaving the EU.”

The article 50 process has been constructed to give the negotiating advantage to the EU, and not the country planning to leave. If at the two years’ end neither a deal nor an extension has been agreed, the UK automatically reverts to World Trade Organisation rules, meaning the UK faces tariffs on all the goods it sells to the EU. So if the UK triggers article 50, Britain will have wilfully leaped on to a conveyor belt that could end with the EU holding all the bargaining chips.

Cameron now faces a constitutional impalement. The parliament elected in 2015, and from which he derives his authority, has through the referendum been overridden. The vast majority of MPs and peers are pro-Europeans who have been shown to have been out of step with public opinion. The sceptics may number no more than 200 MPs at most, but the referendum has shown that the minority speak for the people. It leaves the locus of political authority in dispute, as well as highlighting the anomaly of Scottish MPs committed to the union with Europe, but not with Great Britain.

For the next few months Cameron will be operating largely at the sufferance of the Brexit wing of his party. That wing is disunited to the point of dysfunction and will need time to absorb their unexpected victory. Some Brexiters have for months quietly pointed out the referendum is advisory and asks voters’ views only on whether to leave the EU. It is silent on the form of the departure. An Irish referendum, by contrast, posed very specific legal questions, giving clear instructions to the politicians.

So Brexiters will face a choice between maintaining their pledge to withdraw from the single market and so ending the free movement of people, or whether instead to seek what has been described as purgatory – the kind of half-in, half-out arrangement enjoyed by Norway.

Eurosceptic MEP Daniel Hannan has argued Brexit should be viewed as a process, not a single moment of departure, and a Norway arrangement for the UK might be a stepping off point before the final rupture in years to come.

If the Brexiters are too leisurely in seeking to leave the EU, the electorate may become impatient, the pro-EU Commons majority start to mobilise against Brexit, and the vista of a fresh general election, providing new political mandates, becomes more imminent. It is not inconceivable that a new election, possibly contested by new leaders in both main parties and focused on Europe, could see a call to revisit the referendum decision.

© Provided by Guardian News Michael Gove and his wife Sarah Vine leave a polling station

The EU

In all these calculations, the UK parliament will not be the only actor. The EU, faced by centrifugal forces, will try to act decisively, something it rarely does. The German chancellor Angela Merkel has invited the EU Council president Donald Tusk, the French president François Hollande, and the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi to Berlin on Monday. There will be an EU council meeting in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The majority EU view is clearly that negotiations over the terms of UK membership finished in February, and that ship has sailed. The commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, said before the vote: “Cameron got the maximum he could receive and we gave the maximum we could give. So there will be no renegotiation, not on the agreement we found in February, nor as far as any kind of treaty negotiations are concerned.”

The priority instead would be to prevent what has been described as the psychology of a bank run gripping the EU, as the calls for parallel referenda proliferate in the Netherlands, France, Poland and Hungary. That, after all, has been the explicit goal of some leave campaigners. Michael Gove, for instance, called for the “liberation of Europe”. Once those demands grow, the whole EU project could slip from paralysis to disintegration.

Diplomats say a few months ago they thought the dominant European response to a Brexit was likely to have been calls for greater integration, but they say that mood has receded, partly under the influence of Tusk. The EU president is determined that Brussels be seen to be learning the right lessons.

Instead the focus in Berlin is making sure the UK decoupling from the EU starts in an orderly way. The finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble has reportedly prepared an eight-page paper looking at UK withdrawal from the European Investment Bank, the rights and obligations of EU households of relations and whether the UK can act as presidents of the Council of the EU next year as scheduled. The paper raises the possibility of associated status for the UK, and says there can be no automatic assumption that the EU will give the UK access to the single market. It also accepts that the way in which the UK negotiation is handled will determine the degree to which there is an attempt to imitate the UK in other countries. The EU can afford to give the UK an easy ride in the negotiations. Those talks will take time to organise, and delineate. The presidents of the European commission and the European Council want the ‘divorce settlement’ to be kept apart from an agreement on future EU-UK trading relations.

The divorce settlement would focus on mundane budgetary issues such as pension liabilities, properties and other assets. It would also cover the rights of EU nationals based in the UK and vice versa.

Separately, the higher-stake trade talks will look at whether the UK rejoins the existing European free trade agreement, so enjoying access to the single market, or instead strikes outside on a free trade treaty of its own.

Beyond that, talks with the Irish government, the Commonwealth, Nato and innumerable other bodies await. The success of these complex negotiations will depend on the chemistry of the relationship between the UK and Europe post-Brexit, and whether the triumphalists or the pragmatists in the Brexit camp hold sway.

That in turn will depend on whether Cameron can restore relations with the two old friends that have laid him so low – Gove and Boris Johnson. After the events of the past two months, all the actors know they travel without maps.

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