Get set for the next round of Britain's Brexit brinkmanship

This week’s reports that Britain could leave the EU transition period without a deal elicited a thumbs-up emoji from Tory Eurosceptic MP Andrea Jenkyns, a leading light of the European Research Group. When I say light, I want you to picture a single bulb swinging from the ceiling of an empty woodshed. Or, as Andrea put it of the prospect of trading on terms disdained these days even by Mauritania: “WTO here we come!”

Can it really be just three agonisingly long, internationally embarrassing and painfully inept years since Theresa May’s then trade secretary, Liam Fox, announced: “The free trade agreement that we will have to do with the European Union should be one of the easiest in human history”? I rather think it can. Two weeks ago, Boris Johnson’s government alighted upon Liam as their nominee to lead the WTO, and described him as the “ideal candidate” for the job. Which offers the usual inspirational glimpse into How These Things Work.

Related: Russian intervention didn't sway the Brexit referendum – our rightwing press did | Owen Jones

Even so, I wish I was the sort of person who could draw economic reassurance from emojis posted by Andrea Jenkyns. That feels like the nirvana of confidence – like feeling relaxed about your children being babysat by a woodchipper. The alternative view is that the UK is headed for nirvana, just in the Kurt Cobain sense. It’s as if the government has decided to personally address the looming content shortage precipitated by the fact that lockdown suspended filming on any number of TV productions. If we press ahead with no deal on the back of a pandemic, viewers all over the world will be tuning in to our national soap opera every week, just to see what crazy shit we’ll do to ourselves next.

When coronavirus first hit, there were those who thought it might prompt the government to extend the transition period until a sensible deal was struck, on the basis that people’s appetite for kicking off 2021 by fighting over bog roll would have been sated by having spent much of spring 2020 doing it already. Instead, certain elements in government seem to have doubled down on their insistence on leaving with or without a deal on 31 December, perhaps gambling that they would now be able to hide the no-deal Brexit economic damage with the coronavirus economic damage. This is a bit like trying to cover up your Nigel Farage neck tattoo by getting a slightly bigger Boris Johnson one on top of it.

The only bright spot is that all the no-deal talk this week seems to be the subject of briefing and counter-briefing. What sounds distinctly ominous one day is nervously rowed back on the next. This could well all be part of the brinkmanship the UK has spent the past four years showing itself so famously expert at – which is to say, we withdraw from the brink, we cede ownership of the brink to the other side, and we redraw a new brink down the middle of the Irish sea. Thanks to the Brexit bent of many of our newspapers, this process is typically characterised in headlines as “EU on the brink”.

Perhaps the most boggling thing, for all the concessions and rumoured concessions on either side, is that fishing is still the issue on which the whole UK-EU deal could fall. Even by our own standards in recent years, you really would have to marvel at a country that effectively went no-deal over an industry that employs 24,000 people, and ended up putting many, many times that number out of work in a whole host of other sectors as a result. None of which is to say the jobs of those in the fishing industry are unimportant, or that the immense hardships they have faced are immaterial.

Incidentally, in terms of numbers and reach, it’s notable to think how desperately little the government has done in recent months to help, say, arts and culture, which contributes almost £11bn to the economy and is that incredibly rare thing: an area in which the UK can genuinely be said to be world-beating. Performing arts alone employs 286,000 people – or did, before coronavirus.

This week, the commons culture committee published a report confirming that the government’s rescue package for the arts came “too late for many”, and was not enough “to stop mass redundancies and the permanent closure of our cultural infrastructure”. The committee chair, the Tory MP Julian Knight, warned: “We are in danger, if we are not careful, of becoming a bit of a cultural wasteland … We are a world leader when it comes to culture and the damage that is being done ... if it is not confidently and promptly addressed, could lead to widespread destruction of our cultural and sporting infrastructure.”

Elsewhere, as parliament heads into recess, one plotline to keep an eye on is how – even before its Brexit triumph has come to fruition stage – the European Research Group seems to be morphing into what we might call the China Research Group. That is, except for the fact that that name has already been taken by a rival faction of Tory Sinosceptics led by Tom Tugendhat (Splitters!, etc).

Last week, the ERG’s leading lights were leading-lighting it all over the news, with the likes of Iain Duncan Smith and David Davis switching seamlessly from demanding we pull up the drawbridge against the EU to demanding we pull up the drawbridge against China. Again, they seem to have had some success, securing policy U-turns both on Huawei and the UK’s extradition treaty with Hong Kong.

As it goes, I’m a “strongly agree” as far as not cosying up to China goes. And yet, oddly, the crimes against humanity being perpetrated by the Chinese state on its Uighur minority seem somewhat low down on this particular faction’s list of give-a-tosses. You hear a lot more about that red herring of the cybersecurity threat posed by Huawei’s 5G role, which tends to be focused on by men so tech-cognisant that their secretaries print out copies of their emails.

Related: Chinese ambassador: UK ban on Huawei would damage trust

Still, it does unwittingly convey Britain’s drastically commuted sense of the sharp end of international espionage. A role once played in exotic locations by James Bond is now filled by a phone engineer in suburbia, wearily ripping up some wiring he’s been told to lay a few months before. Excitement-wise, it’s possible you may have concerns about On Her Majesty’s Broadband Service, though there’s talk of a stunt with a wifi router in the second reel.

In the end, perhaps it would be quicker for the Conservatives’ endlessly resurgent Eurosceptics to come up with a list of the countries they reckon we ARE going to be doing business with in their brave new world. The ERG is still pushing for striking no deal with the most successful trading bloc in the world, and now seems dead set against trade with the largest trading nation in the world.

At this rate, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get a sense of what the artists formerly known as Eurosceptics mean every time they say “global trading nation”. Four years after the vote to leave the EU, perhaps they could spend this parliamentary recess fleshing their single idea out.