ALLISTER HEATH

If Mrs May has her way, we will be left in the control of a hostile power, with no voice and no legal way out

In business and in life, contracts always come with a break clause. The rules are clear, and go to the heart of what modern, liberal Western societies consider to be natural justice. Either side can choose to leave; a deal that is done can also be undone; and nobody can force somebody to keep doing something they no longer want to do. A contracting party seeking to quit may have to give notice, but they cannot be forced to stay in a relationship they no longer wish to be part of. They don’t need to beg. They just need to inform the other side, and follow a set of clear, pre-agreed rules.

This is why we can quit our jobs. We can leave our rented property. We can get a divorce, a process that will soon become even easier. We can even buy our way out of financial contracts, from mortgages to mobile phones, by paying back any money owed. We are – and remain – free, sovereign agents.

It is her inability to understand such a basic point that makes Theresa May’s so-called Brexit deal so shocking. There are many reasons why it will be remembered for decades to come as a catastrophic failure of judgment and diplomacy, but the most immediate is that her “Withdrawal” Agreement would lock us into a subordinate relationship with the EU, with no legal way out.

The “backstop” comes with many onerous, anti-democratic obligations, yet – astonishingly – no unilateral way to withdraw from it. You may think that Article 50 is bad enough, but this would be far worse. We would no longer be a freely contracting, sovereign nation, albeit one that is unhappily part of an ever-centralising union. Instead, we would have become a vassal, semi-autonomous state, with swathes of our public policy controlled by a hostile power, with no legal input from us whatsoever.

Once we entered the backstop, probably in 2021 or 2022, we would be trapped, possibly until the early 2030s, during which time the EU would drag out its “trade” negotiations with us. We would be forced, during that time, to remain part of the customs union, and to sign up to endless EU rules to ensure a “level playing field” – in other words, to prevent us from pursuing a pro-growth, pro-free market policy to bolster our competitiveness. The Thatcherite Eurosceptic agenda would be dead, even under a new, pro-capitalist prime minister: it would be an intolerable prison sentence.

The Government will have signed us up to much else besides, from advanced military cooperation (with an EU that is now committed to a Euro army) to endless other ventures where we give more than we take. Our only recourse, were we finally to seek to leave this charade, would be to appeal to an ideologically unsympathetic arbitration panel, but we would have to prove that the EU was not acting in good faith – an impossible task. We would either have to lump it, or break away from an international treaty in an extra-legal fashion, for the first time in our modern history as a nation state.

As an EU member, the UK has only a small share of the vote in every decision in the Council of Ministers and European Parliament; and, to make matters worse, our representatives in Brussels and Strasbourg are almost entirely disconnected from voters back home. The public has virtually no control, which is one key reason why I, and so many, voted to Leave.

The backstop appears to allow the UK to regain its independence in a few areas, but at the cost of an even worse problem in other areas. We will end up with taxation and regulation without representation.

This treaty will be unlike all other international agreements: a member state can leave Nato with one year’s notice, for example, and they can give notice to leave all other international bodies, as the US has recently shown with the Iran nuclear treaty. It is therefore a preposterous absurdity, a blatantly unethical deal that no UK government with any self-respect should ever consider signing up to.

In fact, if this deal were a private contract, it would undoubtedly be deemed unenforceable by a judge. It is too one-sided, and fails the simplest test: it has no real exit mechanism. It resembles the sort of contract that people sign under duress: when the frail or the vulnerable are cajoled and coerced into rewriting their will.

Cabinet ministers should have been given many hours to read the document, and should have been able to request the assistance of their own lawyers and policy analysts to go through every detail. The Attorney General’s advice, while useful, would never be deemed enough in ordinary commercial circumstances. If the Government were an insurance company, it would be done for mis-selling and forced to pay vast sums in compensation.

One should never over-emphasise historic comparisons, but the Withdrawal Agreement is reminiscent of what used to be called a “treaty of submission”, or even what the Chinese dub an “unequal treaty”. These take place when a weak country capitulates to a stronger one, and surrenders power and influence to it.

The EU hopes, presumably, to buy time, to debilitate the UK for a few years, perhaps to ensure the election of a hard-left government, which would wreak yet more chaos in Britain. The EU is an empire built on technocratic power exercised by a nomenklatura; it rules via treaty and judicial activism, not by democratic consent. This is crucial: it doesn’t care about even elevated levels of dissent, as long as it retains control. It hates secessionist regimes: it even helped Spain put down its Catalonian rebellion, in an outrageous crackdown that saw opposition leaders jailed.

Its only mission is to preserve its own territory and consolidate its control. It probably now half-accepts that the UK will leave – but if it can keep the country subjugated, extracting cash and making sure it doesn’t become too competitive, then it will at least have preserved influence over its “near abroad”.

Britain cannot accept this horrific, humiliating surrender. It would toxify our politics for a generation, break both main parties and encourage new, perhaps demagogic political entrepreneurs to stoke up populist sentiment. The deal is unsustainable: it doesn’t represent a workable, final settlement, and it doesn’t contain a plausible, politically acceptable path towards one. Every side will hate it and all parties will pledge to overturn it.

What was Mrs May thinking? If they truly care about democracy and the future of this country, her MPS must reject it while there is still time.

FOLLOW Allister Heath on Twitter @Allisterheath; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion