The era of the soundbite to explain Brexit is over. We have now arrived at the specifics. Several things are clear and if in the next two weeks some are not resolved we are in trouble. The biggest underlying problems are twofold. First the ardent Brexiteers, who promoted the project in the first place, never worked a plan or thought the details through. This led them into wild and optimistic assumptions which drove promises to the electorate which cannot be honoured and expectations about the EU’s responses which are plain wrong.
The second is that, once the penny began to drop that this whole Brexit deal was not a doddle but a potential disaster, the government, split on all the detail, has been united on one floored assumption. That in the end EU would allow economic self interest to trump political objectives. At the heart of this catastrophic misunderstanding lies the traditional distrust of foreigners by the British, who, as a consequence never take the trouble to understand them.
So Britain has always seen the EU as an economic structure, with an annoying clutter of political cooperation as the price it was once willing to pay to take part. But the continent of Europe has seen the EU as a political salvation from endless tribal warfare, shifting borders, diasporas and repressions in an almost unbroken stream since the fall of Rome. United, borderless and with common citizenship, with complete freedom of movement of domicile, capital and employment, it represents the greatest political achievement in 2000 years and one which nothing and nobody will be allowed to damage. Economics are the icing on the cake, but not the cake itself. It is the integrity of the cake that takes precedence overall.
So there is no meeting of minds in these negotiations, nor even a common purpose. They are like two parties agreeing to meet each other under the clock of a train station. But due to a misunderstanding they stand under clocks at different stations. The next two weeks will tell us whether they have the wits to find each other. Or whether the one, a party of 26 friends, wanders off in one direction to enjoy a shared future together and the other, on its own, wanders into uncertainty alone.