Anne-Marie Trevelyan

My father was a Canadian journalist who came to the UK as a student and became a leading voice against the UK’s proposed accession to the EEC. He died before the first referendum result took us into our four decades long intertwinement with the EU. He would be pleased to see that the second referendum resulted in a decision to leave what has become all too clearly a supra-national organisation driving to a single superstate of Europe.

I am still struggling to get my head around the idea promoted by those who would prefer that we remain, that a similar free trade deal to Canada’s for the UK would be a “hard” or “extreme” version of Brexit, and that those who make a case for it are “right wing nationalists”.

The British people voted in 2016 to take back control of our laws, borders, money and trade and to see a fundamental change to the way that we are governed. They recognised that around 90 per cent of global economic growth will come from outside the EU in the years ahead, and want to be part of that under our own steam. Brexit gives us a rare, brief and historic opportunity to change our country’s future and for us to become, once again, a self-governing, free-trading nation. So the deal we strike with the EU must ensure that the UK’s regulations and trade relations become truly independent.

I continue to be concerned that the Chequers proposal could not give us this regulatory freedom and trade independence. It would tie us to EU regulations and limit our control of tariff schedules and regulatory policy through the Facilitated Customs Arrangement (FCA) and “common rule book”.

I have waited to see how the PM gets on, since I was never convinced that the EU would accept it anyway, and consider it to be the opening lines of a conversation.

I remain concerned that we simply won’t be seen as a credible trading partner by non-EU nations if we don’t have control over these things. In any trade negotiation, countries need to know that their trading partner genuinely has the ability to grant “concessions” so that trade-offs can be made and so that a deal can be reached.

And the idea of remaining in the customs union – even if it is called a “temporary customs arrangement” – after the end of the transition period, into the 2020s, means simply delaying Brexit and causing the 17.4million people who voted for it to lose faith in our democracy, and in our democratic and legal institutions. As my French grandfather always used to tell me “il n’y a que le provisoire qui dure” …a wartime view of making do with the temporary solutions however unsatisfactory, which become familiar and then never get sorted out properly. I fear that we would be in a permanent temporary customs union over which we had no control of the escape mechanism.

CETA is a comprehensive blueprint for responsible economic co-operation and I hope that the Prime Minister – who presented Chequers as her opening bid in part due to the Northern Ireland backstop problem – can get us to a similar progressive trade agenda for the whole of the UK.

It would unite the party, command a majority in Parliament, find support in the country and the EU has said how keen it is to strike this sort of deal. May the voice of reason for mutual success be heard and acted upon.

‘The deal we strike with the EU must ensure that the UK’s regulations and trade become truly independent’