Tories must make Brexit plans clear

With the Prime Minister holidaying abroad, Britain appears to be under new management. Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, speaks like a man who is bidding to take over – and who is cooking up a softer form of Brexit, described as transitional, to be put to the public at the next election. If this is the case, the Government needs to be more honest about what is going on. And those ministers who oppose Mr Hammond’s plan – for they must exist – must be weighing up whether to speak out. The EU referendum was an exercise in democracy. It would disappoint many voters if we return to the politics of backroom deals.

The case for Mr Hammond’s approach would be easy to make. The Chancellor has said that people did not vote to drive off a fiscal cliff in the 2016 referendum. Even if the Tories did think they were empowered to crash out of the EU, the general election has since clipped their wings. A divided Parliament, an uncertain economic picture and a bullish EU bolster the argument for a transitional deal that results in the softest Brexit possible: leave the EU but remain within the single market and customs union for two or three years. Thus, by the time of the next general election, Britain will be half-in and half-out. The voters can then decide if they want to complete the exit, maintain their position or even, for nothing can ever be ruled out in politics, vote to go back in.

Mr Hammond has been crystal clear on some of these points, others we are forced to infer – and that is part of the problem. Government is proceeding on a wink and a nod. Another difficulty is that if everything we have described is indeed part of the plan, it is unclear where the democratic mandate for that plan comes from. In 2016, Britons voted to leave the EU and handed the Government the task of implementing that decision. True, there are many Leavers who did not believe this meant quitting the single market. But there are many who did. At best, the latter group will be confused by this week’s news. For instance, Brandon Lewis, the immigration minister, insisted that it was still the Conservative Party’s goal to cut net migration to the tens of thousands and said free movement would end by 2019. Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, sent the opposite signal by commissioning a report asking what kind of labour market business wants after Brexit and by detailing an “implementation period”, which is essentially pro-free movement, that will last until around 2022 and is eerily similar to Mr Hammond’s transition.

Again, Mr Hammond and Ms Rudd would probably say they are only being reasonable. But the deal they appear to prefer is far from the reassertion of popular sovereignty the country voted for. Britain will lose its voting powers in Brussels but still have a form of free movement, be under the cover of the European Court of Justice, have to swallow EU laws and even pay into the EU budget for a few years. Even if these are cast as sacrifices worth taking to avoid economic chaos, Brexiteers can retort that voters were wellinformed of the risks posed by Brexit yet still backed it – and that decision ought to be respected. Some Eurosceptics will mutter that this is what happens when Remainers are in charge of implementing a Leave vote – and what happens if you enter negotiations with Brussels believing EU propaganda about Britain’s weakness. If a “stabbed in the back” myth emerges, it will divide the Tories.

There are senior Conservatives who believe that Britain can compete in the wider world whether it is inside the single market or not. There are those who think that controlling immigration is more important than sustaining growth. And there are those, surely, who are frustrated with the notion that the voters did something foolhardy by voting for Brexit – as if Brexit were a toxic spill that has to be handled with care. The Prime Minister once said that Brexit should mean Brexit. The Foreign Secretary has spoken eloquently of Britain’s tremendous economic potential. If an alternative to the Hammond plan exists, the debate needs to happen sooner rather than later.