There’s only one safe way out of the EU labyrinth

Hearing our politicians interminably giving us their thoughts on Brexit recalls those lines in Hamlet where Horatio speaks of the time, just before “the mighty Julius fell”, when the “unsheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets”. As our MPs and peers squeak and gibber in the streets and halls of Westminster, they merely parade their near-complete ignorance of how the EU works, and of everything a sensible exit from it would involve.

It is generally agreed, for instance, that, once we leave the EU, we need to continue trading with it without massive disruption. But scarcely any of them seem to know the difference between the EU’s “single market”; its “customs union”; its system of “customs co-operation”; or its “common commercial policy” Yet without being aware of the crucial distinctions between each of these policies, they are doomed to circle round in a fog of total incomprehension.

The latest buzzword, as it dawns on some that extricating ourselves from the EU will be incredibly complicated, is that we may need a “transitional” arrangement, before we establish our final new relationship with it. And here we did at least hear some vaguely sensible words from Philip Hammond and David Davis last week.

As Davis put it, when questioned by an uncomprehending Commons committee, you can’t have a “transitional” arrangement unless you know what it is you are transitioning to. Before you build the bridge, he pointed out, you need to have some idea of what is at the other end of it.

In fact, there is only one conceivable way to achieve the “smooth” transition that ministers speak of, avoiding the wholly unworkable alternatives proposed by the “hard Brexiteers”: a one-off “freetrade deal”, which would take far too long to negotiate, or reliance just on those fabled “WTO rules”, which would plunge our trade into chaos. That is by rejoining the European Free Trade Area, which we ourselves set up in 1959, so that we remain in the wider European Economic Area (EEA).

This alone could enable us (a) to leave the EU and its “customs union”; (b) to continue trading “within the single market”, as Theresa May insists we must, with full “customs co-operation”; (c) to escape from its “common commercial policy”, which prevents us from striking our own trade deals with the outside world; and (d), under the EEA agreement, to regain some control of immigration from within the EU.

Since virtually none of our MPs seem to grasp the crucial differences between all these components in the jigsaw, we can only hope that at least Mrs May’s closest advisers have by now done so. We can then use it as the transitional step to working out all the rest of what a successful exit from the EU would involve. Otherwise we really are in trouble.

‘Without being aware of the distinctions between EU policies, they are doomed to circle round in a fog’