Why the UK keeps failing to negotiate a Brexit deal ...Middle East

In the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum, Britain faced a formidable task in extracting itself from more than four decades within the European Union.

It lacked a clear plan, it was divided politically, it had little leverage against an economic player that was six times its size, and it had almost no trade negotiators to speak of.

That last element, the lack of negotiating capacity, proved a huge obstacle in the subsequent talks before the UK left the EU – and it is still hampering Britain’s approach to trade today, officials say.

The reason for Britain’s negotiating void was simple: trade is what is known as an ‘exclusive EU competence’: European Commission officials negotiated on behalf of the member states.

The UK and others would scrutinise resulting agreements, vote to accept or reject them, and then ratify them in their national parliaments, but they would not be involved in the tricky negotiations.

It effectively made British trade negotiators redundant. So, when it came to the post-referendum talks between the EU and the UK, there were no experienced British trade negotiators to speak of – nor had there been any for decades.

“People in Britain don’t realise that the Commission represented them in trade. Of course, the Department of Trade and Industry and the departments that followed it had very competent people, but they were not involved in negotiations,” said Sir Jonathan Faull, a British former Commission Director General.

The EU has long been a formidable force in global trade talks, backed by a highly experienced and well-resourced Commission team that successfully brokered numerous complex agreements over the years.

By contrast, post-Brexit Britain had to scramble to assemble a team almost from scratch. 

This asymmetry in negotiating experience, institutional knowledge and economic leverage helped give the EU an upper hand over the UK.

“You need experience to be a trade negotiator, and the more you do it, the better you become, as you know where the bodies are buried,” says Faull. 

Faull, who represented the Commission in the renegotiation of Britain’s EU membership ahead of the 2016 referendum, says strategic blunders also hurt the UK.

Sir Leon Brittan was trade commissioner from 1993-95; Peter Mandelson, 2004-2008 and Christopher Soames from 1973-1978. (Photos by Georges Merillon/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images; Ben Stansall/AFP; Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“The UK went through turmoil, with no plan, a succession of ministers and prime ministers, and lots of promises that were made and not met,” he said. 

An additional problem was power. With a GDP of some £17 trillion and a market of nearly 450 million consumers, the EU represents one of the largest trading blocs in the world.

The UK, with an economy of £3 trillion and a population of 68 million is relatively small by comparison.

“Britain cannot match the clout of the EU as a whole,” Faull added. “Even if Britain had Metternich or Kissinger leading its negotiations, its smaller market means it does not have bargaining power.”

Ironically, Britain was the source of some of the EU’s top trade officials. Christopher Soames, Sir Leon Brittan and Peter Mandelson were all Trade Commissioners, while Lord Cockfield is widely credited as an architect of the bloc’s Single Market programme. 

“When I joined Whitehall in 1979, so membership plus six (ie six years after the UK joined the then European Economic Community), the Department of Trade and Industry had already lost its direct tariff negotiating knowledge,” said Robert Madelin, a former UK civil servant and later Director General at the European Commission, who was involved in many major trade negotiations. 

Crash course for officials

After the Brexit referendum, the UK set up training programmes and invited British passport holders like Madelin to teach vital skills to the people who would become trade negotiators.

“They recognised there was a problem and sent head-hunters to Brussels and other places,” Madelin said. “It was like the Baltic states after they got independence from the collapsing Soviet Union – it was the same problem of capacity.”

However, there is still a lack of senior officials and ministers with hardened experience. Since Brexit, the UK has struggled to negotiate deals that match the benefits it enjoyed as an EU member.

Many of its new agreements, such as those with Australia and New Zealand, have been criticised for offering minimal economic gains while potentially harming domestic industries.  

Madelin added that the government was too hasty, setting up the Department for International Trade in 2016 before it had any negotiating plans.

“Firstly, they effectively had nothing to do immediately after the referendum, so they slightly rushed their fences,” he said. “And secondly, having this thing sitting there, it had to prove it was doing things. And of course, that was all visible to the other side. So being, being over-eager is never a good recipe in negotiations.”

Even with a crash training course, the new UK officials lacked the battle experience that negotiators talk of.

“The main training was training on the job,” said Roderick Abbott, another former British official who moved to Brussels, eventually rising to the position of the Commission Deputy Director General. “You became better when you did the work. And we did a lot of work.”

UK ‘held all the cards’

Abbott adds that the UK was hampered by political confusion about its strategic aims. “At the political level, at the level of ministers, clearly, they hadn’t really understood exactly what was going to be involved, that it was going to be involved in a detailed negotiation of how, bit-by-bit, you would disconnect,” he said.

After the referendum, top government and Conservative Party figures insisted that the UK “holds all the cards” in talks with the EU, but the resulting negotiations proved the opposite.

The EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier demanded that the UK settle its bills with the rest of the bloc and settle the rights of EU citizens in Britain before talks on future trade relations could even begin. He insisted on a two-year time limit for the exit under the Article 50 talks, which worked to the EU’s advantage.

And his ‘no cherry-picking’ mantra meant that the UK could not extract any special treatment for the financial services based in the City of London. In the event, the UK twice pleaded to extend the deadline for the end of the negotiations. 

Officials say experience also helped when the negotiations hit a rough patch. When then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson threatened in 2019 to leave the EU without a deal – which he still trumpets as a victory in brinkmanship – it did not fool Brussels, where officials saw it as a negotiating ploy.

“The UK had far more to lose,” says one official. “Seasoned best negotiators know the real red lines of their counterparts and can see when they are bluffing.”

When it comes to negotiating the Brexit deal, UK observers would point to the fractious political situation in the UK at the time, with multiple factions including hardline Brexiteers, needing to be onside in order to vote a deal through.

Theresa May suffered three Commons defeats on her Brexit deal, and ultimately had to resign.

Difficulties over negotiations – particularly with the issue of immigration – persist as Keir Starmer attempts to negotiate a Brexit ‘reset’.

While formal talks have not yet started, the EU has made it clear it wants movement on youth migrations, something the government has so far ruled out.

There is also the thorny issue of the unique status of Northern Ireland under the Northern Ireland Protocol. The Good Friday Agreement assures an open border with the Republic of Ireland, meaning Northern Ireland remains in the EU Single Market, which puts a customs border with the UK essentially in the Irish Sea.

Despite the successful negotiation of the Windsor Framework by Rishi Sunak in 2023 to ease custom arrangements some difficulties remain over trade due to the divergence of EU and UK rules.

Since the UK left the bloc, the subsequent disputes over the Northern Ireland Protocol have shown that Brussels remains in the driver’s seat, dictating terms.

As Prime Minister Keir Starmer pushes Britain’s reset with the EU, these disparities in experience and capacity may have shrunk, but they are likely to remain a defining feature of negotiations.

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