The Brexit shambles: time is running out

There has been no neater comment on where we have got to on Brexit than the two pictures on the cover of the current issue of The first, labelled “Then”, showed that grandiose bus hired by the Leave campaign, carrying the claim that, by pulling out of the EU, we could give an extra £350 million a week to the NHS. The second, captioned “Now”, showed a clapped-out, windowless bus stuck in a field, going nowhere.

Our progress towards invoking Article 50 does indeed look ever more of a shambles. The real problem, as it has always been, is that so few people really understand the incredible complexity of what a successfully negotiated Brexit would involve. Neither side in the referendum campaign was remotely prepared for it: the Remainers because they relied on their absurd Project Fear to ensure that the problem would never arise; the Leavers by deliberately refusing to work out any practical exit plan, believing that they could wing it on vapid little makebelieve slogans such as the one blazoned on the side of that silly bus.

But five months later, here we are with the general debate no further forward or better informed, except for the dawning realisation by ministers that it really is turning out to be far more complicated than any of them ever realised, and that we have nothing like enough civil servants to cope with it all.

The Prime Minister, Theresa May, continues to keep her cards almost invisibly close to her chest, except for insisting that we must continue trading fully “within” the single market (because anything else would be a disaster), while staying hung up on how this could be made compatible with her wish to “control immigration”. This tension is why she added last week that we cannot be hoping for an “off-the-shelf ” solution.

Whatever she intended that to mean, there is only one way we can hope to achieve a deal that meets her primary requirement. Only if, on leaving the EU, we nevertheless remain within the wider European Economic Area (EEA) can we hope to continue trading “within” the single market much as we do now. But this would also allow us, outside the EU, to escape from the three quarters of its 20,000 laws that cover issues other than trade. It would even, under the “safeguarding” clauses of the EEA Agreement, give us limited control over internal EU immigration.

Whether or not Mrs May would regard this as the kind of “off-theshelf ” solution she now seems to be rejecting, its other immense advantage is that it would enable us, in the short time available for these negotiations, to focus on all those countless other issues that will need to be settled as part of our disentanglement from the rest of the EU system of government.

Look at the 35 different policy areas set out in the template for a treaty of accession to the EU and we can see just what will have to be unravelled in reverse, in the “Secession Treaty” that will be needed at the end of our negotiations. Only six of these 35 categories cover trade. But our talks will also have to resolve the 29 other areas, such as what is to be done about our involvements in the EU’s common foreign and defence policies, its policies on justice and home affairs, our relations with the EU’s 27 different agencies, and a whole host more – including, heaven help us, the unbelievably tricky questions of how we manage to extricate ourselves from the common agricultural and fisheries policies.

All this has so far been scarcely mentioned in the public debate, although it does help to explain why some are now suggesting that we may need to recruit 30,000 more civil servants just to cope with the myriad further issues needing to be resolved, including those ongoing financial commitments to the EU which, over a decade or more ahead, could amount to a staggering £60 billion.

The truth is that, in all directions, we are still hopelessly unprepared for what we let ourselves in for on June 23. And the time left to get our act together is now fast running out.