Especially now, the UK needs the EU more than the other way around

Editorial: Michel Barnier cannot be expected to allow the British to dictate their terms and cherry-pick what they would like from the trade talks

It is peculiar to hear Michael Gove ask the EU for more ‘flexibility’ (Reuters)

Perhaps Michael Gove has lost his sense of irony, but it is strange to hear the politician in charge of Britain’s stuttering trade negotiations with the European Union asking the other side to show “flexibility”. When the British government has been seized, as if in some coup d’etat, by a gang of ideological Brexit absolutists, for whom national sovereignty is absolute, inviolable and non-negotiable, it is at least odd to hear a call for the Europeans to be a bit more easygoing.

While it is true that Michel Barnier, the EU’s well-seasoned chief negotiator, has his mandate, and has shown signs of impatience with the slow progress of the talks, it is also true that he cannot allow the British to dictate their terms and cherry-pick what they would like from the talks. The British can squeal all they like that the EU is not offering the UK an appetising amalgam of the deals that Brussels concluded with Canada and Norway, but it will do no good, even if it was a fair argument.

The EU is under no obligation to follow its own precedents, in any case. The reality of economic diplomacy is that size matters. The EU economy is roughly five times the size of Britain’s, and its exports to the UK, while lucrative, represent a far smaller proportion of their GDP than do the UK’s exports to the EU. A sudden loss of markets would cost many jobs in the UK and again proportionately more than the EU would suffer in a no-win, hard Brexit. Britain needs Europe more than it realises, and more than the EU needs the UK.