What the commentators said
It’s painfully evident, said Rafael Behr in The Guardian, that the Government is still clinging to the “unfeasible” idea that Britain will be able to keep all the benefits of EU membership after leaving the bloc and setting itself up in competition to it – a model that amounts to “having our cake, eating our cake and asking our dining partners to be patient while we order more cake”. The customs plans are an exercise in “magical unrealism”, agreed Ben Chu in The Independent. Even if we can agree tariff arrangements with the EU, there will still be major trade frictions owing to the need to comply with EU standards. Turkey has a customs union with the EU but its imports still have to be checked, which leads to long lorry queues at the Turkish-bulgarian border. Innovations could help minimise these impediments – some standards checks could be performed at factories, for instance – but the system will never be seamless.
The Irish border problem does gives Britain some “leverage”, said Oliver Wright in The Times. Brussels is worried about Ireland becoming a back door into EU markets for goods that haven’t paid the external EU tariff, but it also doesn’t want to be accused of sabotaging the peace process by imposing a controversial hard customs border. The message from London to EU negotiators this week was: we’re not going to impose customs posts on the border – “and if you do it’s on your own head”.
“Remoaners” are still desperately hoping that we won’t leave the EU customs union at all, and that a second referendum will miraculously restore the status quo ante, said Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail. David Miliband added his voice to those calls last week, calling Brexit “an unparalleled act of economic self-harm”. These people are wasting their breath. Even Hammond has now conceded that the UK will exit the EU in March 2019. “Any referendum thereafter about EU membership would not be on the basis of our previous terms.” We would have to apply as a new member, agree a timetable for joining the euro, and do without our current rebate. “Good luck selling that to the British people, Mr Miliband.”
What next?
Up to 12 position papers will be published before October, when the European Council is due to rule on whether withdrawal talks – covering migrants’ rights, the UK’S exit bill and the Irish border – have made sufficient progress to proceed to the next phase: agreeing the UK’S future relationship with the EU.
EU negotiators have insisted that they won’t budge on the sequencing of talks, but by publishing its proposals on customs arrangements and the Irish border this week, the UK is hoping to highlight how withdrawal issues are inextricably linked to the future relationship.