Mrs May hints she is on the right track for Brexit
It needed the skills of an old-time Kremlinologist to decipher the various enigmatic, very carefully worded clues Theresa May gave us last week as to her thinking on Brexit.
Wishing, for instance, to throw a bone to her more rabid followers, she promised a “Great Repeal” of the European Communities Act. But of course this told us nothing new, since it would inevitably be part of our leaving the EU once terms had been agreed. And she did rightly add that much of the law we have been subjected to over the past 43 years would have to remain in place transformed into UK law, while we gradually work through which bits of it can sensibly be replaced.
She very carefully avoided saying that we would once again “control our borders” – only that we would take steps to “control immigration” – because she is well aware that much of our immigration is determined by other international treaties that are not linked to our membership of the EU. And she was equally careful to emphasise that everything we do in becoming “an independent, sovereign country” must nevertheless remain “subject to international agreements and treaties with other countries”.
Most interesting of all, however, were the clues she gave to her thinking on the crucial issue of our trade with the EU. Without openly giving away her negotiating stance, she was more careful than ever to insist that our Brexit agreement must continue “to involve free trade in goods and services” with the EU.
She did rule out Britain adopting a “Norway model” or a “Switzerland model”. But if she really means that Britain must continue to enjoy “free trade in goods and services” with the EU, this can only mean that, on leaving, we must in some way remain part of the wider European Economic Area (EEA), subject to the single market’s rules.
Anything else would be far too complicated to negotiate in the time available. And anything short of that – such as naively hoping to rely just on “WTO rules” – would result in precisely the disruption and chaos of which so many business interests, from the City of London to the owners of our largely foreignowned motor industry, have been so firmly warning. Continuing as members of the EEA would not only give us the kind of access to the single market that would dissuade Nissan and Jaguar Land Rover from moving their operations abroad, and those “passporting” rights for financial services which City firms are so fearful of losing. It would even give us some limited right to that “control over immigration” from the EU that Mrs May promises.
In other words, if we have read the runes aright, the Prime Minister is steering the only course which could minimise our problems on getting extricated from what she described as the “supranational government” we have increasingly been ruled by for four decades.
At least last week she gave us some clue that she has begun to realise just what a complicated process this will be – but that she is determined to find the most sensible way to do it.