After Brexit: the UK will need to renegotiate at least 759 treaties with other countries

[muriel_volestrangler]

Forty-six years on, when Britain leaves the EU in 2019, the UK stands to lose far more than it brought over to Brussels that day. The treaty chest has swollen into a small archive of EU agreements, running to hundreds of thousands of pages and spanning 168 non-EU countries. Within them are covered almost every external function of a modern economy, from flying planes to America and trading sows with Iceland to fishing in far-flung seas.

On Brexit day, that will all fall away. By law Britain will overnight be excluded from those EU arrangements with “third countries”, entering the equivalent of a legal void in key parts of its external commercial relations. Some British officials are even peering into the pre-1973 chest again to see whether some seemingly obsolete treaties might gain a new lease of life from a disorderly Brexit. “It is dusty in there,” jokes one Whitehall official.

It poses a formidable and little-understood challenge for Britain’s prime minister after the June 8 election. While Brexit is often cast as an affair between Brussels and London, in practice Britain’s exit will open more than 750 separate time-pressured mini-negotiations worldwide, according to Financial Times research. And there are no obvious shortcuts: even a basic transition after 2019 requires not just EU-UK approval, but the deal-by-deal authorisation of every third country involved.

“The nearest precedent you can think of is a cessation of a country — you are almost starting from scratch,” says Andrew Hood, a former UK government lawyer now at Dechert. “It will be a very difficult, iterative process.”

https://www.ft.com/content/f1435a8e-372b-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0fd2e?mhq5j=e6

It's not that they'll all be difficult to renegotiate; in many cases, the other countries may be happy to say "yes, same terms as we agreed with the EU as a whole, no problem". But they've got to do more than one a day. And sometimes, the other countries may want to change things. On our side, of course, we have the crack deal-making team of Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox - each of whom are capable of turning a piss-up in a brewery into a major international incident. You just hope that all the politicians stay out of it, and make sure the competent Whitehall officials are able to do their massive job.

[shenmue]

1. Yipes

[Denzil_DC]

2. "... the politicians stay out of it, and ... the competent Whitehall officials ... do their ... job.

I suspect there's fat chance of the first happening - I'm not clear how much of the Henry VIII changes proposed would involve areas of international trade, but the main rationale for granting the sweeping, unaccountable powers under whatever survives of the EU Withdrawal Bill has been that decisions will have to be made and enacted very quickly in the immediate run-up to and aftermath of final Brexit. If some of those mean compromising inherited (and currently embodied in UK law) EU standards, I'd guess that would happen.

As for the second, unless there's been some massive hiring campaign I haven't heard of, the last news was that our civil service had next to no expertise in international trade agreements because we'd so long relied on EU negotiators to take care of all that for us. Hiring in such qualified and experienced help as the government's been able to find so far sounds like it's been very expensive.

The problems with "yes, same terms as we agreed with the EU as a whole, no problem" are at least threefold:

(1) EU regulations get continually revised (triggering like clockwork our RW media) - do the agreements get amended to keep in step?

(2) If we depart from adherence with any EU regulations to accommodate other trade partners (I imagine it would be to downgrade, not enhance them), we may find ourselves locked out of EU markets - we could also get caught in the situation of countries like the current US administration trying to use us a Trojan horse into the EU market, which isn't going to help our diplomatic efforts or post-Brexit relationships with the EU.

(3) We will have no say (in Brexitbotspeak: even less than we do now) in the shaping of these EU regulations.

[LeftishBrit]

3. This is going to be a nightmare

At best, it is going to involve more bureaucracy, time and expense than the EU ever did. At worst, it is going to seriously mess up our trading and economy, and make us the only country other than Mauritania that trades solely under WTF, I mean WTO, rules, and is not a member of any other trading organization.