Boris Johnson:

It is unthinkable for one of the world’s most dynamic places to pursue such a grim road to serfdom

There are times when the news seems so bad and so disheartening that you can scarcely believe it. For years now, we Tories have been pointing out the obvious – that the Marxist Jeremy Corbyn is not fit to govern this country. This is a man who still believes in the precepts of Bolivarian revolutionary socialism, even though they have reduced Venezuela to destitution. As leader of the Labour Party, he has presided over a culture of such rampant Israel-bashing that his membership is now riddled with anti-semitism. When chemical weapons were used against the innocent people of Salisbury, he pathetically refused to denounce the Kremlin. His economic policies – crushing taxation, wholesale renationalisation – would be catastrophic for this country.

If we Tories have one duty, it is to prevent this man getting anywhere near the levers of power. So it seems utterly incredible that he has now been invited into Downing Street to negotiate a Brexit deal. And it is doubly incredible that the Government is

– so we are told – willing to accede

to his terms. We are informed that there are now “no red lines” in the negotiations with Labour.

In order to get Corbyn onside, the Government is apparently willing to abandon the cardinal principle and central logic of Brexit. Jeremy Corbyn and his team have demanded that the UK must somehow leave the EU, but remain in the customs union. That is their price. If the Government were to agree, it would mean repudiating a manifesto pledge and tearing up a promise made thousands of times in Parliament and elsewhere.

But it is far worse than that. If the UK were to commit to remaining in the customs union, it would make a total and utter nonsense of the referendum result. We would be out of the EU, but in many ways still run by the EU. It would be the worst of both worlds, not just now but forever – and that is why I find the news so appalling that I don’t really believe it.

First, I don’t believe that Corbyn is negotiating in good faith, and I don’t believe that he really wants to help the Prime Minister. He sees an opportunity to cause mischief by setting conditions that he knows will cause real anger in the Tory party. He wants to cause division, and I am afraid that at present he is succeeding. He will eventually walk away from the talks, and – no matter how much flexibility is shown by No 10 – he will blame the intransigence of the Government.

And as for the Government, I don’t believe that in the end they would be quite so mad as to agree Corbyn’s terms. Try to imagine the future that Jeremy Corbyn would impose on this country. Since the birth of the European Economic Community in 1957, the customs union has been the defining feature of the project. Under the rules of the customs union, tariffs are decided in common and levied uniformly around the whole perimeter of the EU. If this country were to follow Corbyn’s approach, we would be bound to set the same tariffs as Brussels – but we would have no say in deciding them. That would mean that we had zero flexibility to do big or serious trade deals with anyone else. It would mean that Slovakia or Lithuania – to say nothing of France or Germany – would have more say over UK trade policy than London. It would mean that the British government could neither cut tariffs on food from sub-saharan Africa, nor protect British manufacturers from dumped or underpriced goods. It would be a big step to economic serfdom; and there would be far more.

By staying in the customs union, we would have to commit also to “regulatory alignment” with Brussels – being a rule-taker, and yet with no say in the making of those rules. This is simply unacceptable to any self-respecting democratic country – let alone to the fifth biggest economy in the world, and the possessor of an old and proud system of parliamentary democracy.

It is as if we have not only forgotten what Brexit was supposed to be about. In this whole shambolic process, it is as if we have forgotten what makes this country special, and what we are capable of achieving. The modern UK economy is the most fertile and creative in this hemisphere. You may hold a beautiful print edition of this paper, but there is an ever-growing likelihood that you are reading online, with some kind of hand-held device. How is that possible? Thanks to the invention not just of the internet – in read more at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion which Britain’s Sir Tim Berners-lee played a major role – but also of the lithium-ion battery that powers your machine. You may have forgotten that the key breakthrough in lithium-ion batteries took place in Oxford in 1980 but, more importantly, you may not be aware – amid the Brexit hubbub – that this country now leads the world in battery technology.

We not only have the financial capital of Europe if not the world, as well as the best universities, the most advanced tech, culture, media sectors. We lead the world in the batteries that are going to keep revolutionising our lives – from smartphones to zero-emission cars. British advances in battery technology will help beat climate change.

That is the future; and the changes those batteries will bring are far bigger and better than anything dreamt up by our friends in the European Commission. Yes, we need to be able to sell into the European markets – as do the Chinese or the Californians. But we cannot allow large parts of our domestic economy and our trading policy to be run from Brussels, and yet have no say in EU law-making. It is just not democratically sustainable for an economy as large, diverse and original as the UK.

There is still time to sort out the problems in the PM’S deal, and to escape the backstop; of course there is. It would still be far better to get out with a standstill arrangement – a managed no deal – that would give us time to negotiate a free trade deal. But to agree to be non-voting members of the EU, under the surrender proposed by Jeremy Corbyn is completely unacceptable – it cannot, must not and will not happen.