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Have you been wondering why there are so many contradictory customs unions comments recently? And - if you understand what a CU is - so many wrong ones? Here’s why: a disastrous trilogy (thread)
Part 1: The topic. Have you seen anything about CUs in your civics textbook? Ever heard about them before two years ago? If you are not a trade geek - you haven’t.
Even most EU lawyers never had to bother. The CUs been around since the 60s. Yeah, there’s Turkey, but that’s for the trade geeks and Thanksgiving (yes, that’s my idea of a pun)
Rules of origin, sort of a vital concept for CUs, are so poorly explained in trade textbooks that everyone just goes ‘oh and then...’. I once was looking for experts on the WTO RoO Agreement and there was really just one academic interested. (He’s awesome, btw)
To end part I: CUs are so technical, it is the area people turn to when suffering from insomnia. Even trade geeks found RoOs too geeky. So: experts never had to communicate to the public. Because the public could not have cared less. Trying to get a tv gig on CUs? Ha ha ha.
Part 2: politics. Politicians need to communicate to and with the public. But how does that work given problem 1? Until a short time ago neither the former nor the latter had heard or cared about CUs.
And suddenly it’s not just important, it’s vital. And to build support political communication needs to generalise, make things more interesting, be bold.
So ‘this releases us from RoOs?’ not a winner. We get free movement of goods? Yup. Winner (also: wrong) but the same on the other side:
‘We cannot set tariffs, which causes an alignment issue in FTAs’ - too technical. We will be a rule-taker in the agricultural and fisheries policies - winner (also: wrong)
To end part 2: a technical topic only obscure experts know about meets politics, with its need for 1 minute sound bites, grand narratives, large claims. And with politicians who never had to know about CUs.
Which brings us to part 3: how can politicians get informed about CUs? Where do they get their information from - given that the number of CU experts in Parliament pre-Brexit was limited?
Part 3 is entitled ‘the revolution’
Politicians would often get the expertise through hearings, civil service, experts, on trade matters (EU competence) often contacts with the EU.
Part of the current process is that many regard many of these sources as tainted. That’s a problem.
And it doesn’t improve if your business is trying to convince people of your position. So ‘The SM grants economic advantages in return for being bound by its rules’ should not be controversial, but...
... that’s no good if you want to convince people of the benefits of leaving it. Saying ‘we are willing to forego these advantages to avoid being bound by those rules’ somehow does not seem enough
Just like ‘remain in the current eu’ strangely is often then modified by ‘and then we change it to be precisely like we want’.
