Blithely walking into the Brexit elephant trap

What is truly terrifying, as the days tick away to Theresa May’s triggering of Article 50, is how little those in charge have any grasp of what they will be facing. By deciding to leave the single market and the European Economic Area, we are seemingly left with only two options: one that we can negotiate a unique “free trade deal” with the EU; the other that we just walk out, on the basis, in Mrs May’s words, that “no deal is better than a bad deal”.

When David Davis, our minister for “exiting the European Union”, met a committee of MPs last week, headlines centred on his admission that he still hasn’t asked his officials to produce any estimate of the cost of “no deal”. He did at least concede that our financial services would lose their “passporting” rights to continue operating in the EU, that we would lose our EU health cards and drop out of the EU-US “open skies” agreement.

But he also admitted that “trading delays” were “potentially as big a problem as tariffs” (although the MPs, obsessed with tariffs, failed to follow up on what this could involve). Davis hoped we might be given an extension of the “electronic, light-touch customs checks” that allow 10,000 of our trucks a day to move goods anywhere in the EU without border controls.

What he still doesn’t seem have grasped is that the moment we leave the EU (and the European Economic Area) to become a “third country”, we are automatically excluded from this electronic system: to be faced with all the need for paper documentation and inspection procedures which could soon have lorries backing up from Dover to London and beyond.

Davis did, in passing, mention the need for “phytosanitary” (plant health) checks, but not the rules for veterinary inspection of our exports of live animals and “animal products”, including cheese and eggs, which would now have to be diverted to an EU “border Inspection Post”. The nearest, at Dunkirk, is so small that it would require massive expansion, and an army of new inspectors, with trucks waiting days for clearance.

Davis blithely hoped that we can somehow secure “mitigation” of all the rules and customs procedures which are the very essence of the EU (although it is hard to imagine how we could negotiate “mitigation” through a deal we walk away from). But what beggars belief further is the idea that we could negotiate all this and far more in just two years.

His ally, Lord Ridley, tried to come to his aid in by assuring us that trade deals can all be agreed in a matter of months. But he didn’t seem aware, for instance, that talks about a trade deal between the EU and South Korea, far less complex than that we will be asking for, began in 1993 and didn’t come into force, with 1,400 pages of documents, until 2011.

As for the fond belief that, without any deal, we could continue to trade with the EU just “under WTO rules” – those still suggesting this are clearly unaware that not a single developed country relies just on “WTO rules” to trade. The EU treaty database shows that it alone has no fewer than 880 bilateral trading arrangements with almost every country in the world, including 20 with the US and 67 with China; all of which we would drop out of by leaving the EU.

The horrifying fact is that our politicians are heading for these negotiations without any real idea of what a mighty elephant trap awaits them – which could have been avoided if only we had been clued-up enough to leave the EU but remain in the European Economic Area. Alas, we have preferred the elephant trap.