Boiling the Brexit frogs

There was a time “when the Government’s ineptitude over Brexit was almost funny”, said The Guardian. “There is nothing funny about it now.” For 15 months, Theresa May has tried, and failed, to reconcile her party’s “Europe-loathers” with its “Europe-pragmatists”. Having reached an impasse between the members of her Cabinet who want a customs partnership – keeping Britain half inside the EU’S customs union – and those who want to be fully out, May has come up with a new wheeze: the so-called backstop or time-limited goods arrangement. Essentially, this means keeping the UK within the customs union after Brexit until it can come up with an effective technological alternative to a hard border with Ireland. Her Brexit “war cabinet” has apparently accepted this – though grudgingly, in the case of the Brexiteers. Jacob Rees-mogg, meanwhile, condemns it as “perpetual purgatory”. And Brussels has reportedly already rejected it out of hand.

Actually, this is a step in the right direction, said John Rentoul in The Independent. The PM is “boiling the Brexiteer frogs”: raising the temperature so slowly that they don’t realise they’re being cooked alive. Faced with deadlock at the last meeting of the Brexit cabinet, May simply asked what would happen if an agreement couldn’t be reached in time. Boris Johnson reluctantly accepted that the UK would stay in the customs union until a new arrangement was ready. Johnson, along with Michael Gove, Liam Fox and David Davis, has “accepted reality”: in all likelihood, we’re staying in the customs union until after the next election, and almost certainly, in the long run, headed for a “soft Brexit”. Exactly, said Robert Hardman in the Daily Mail: the whole business about customs and the Irish border is “alarmist nonsense” cooked up by the EU and Remainers to keep Britain tied to the bloc indefinitely. If you don’t believe me, go to Felixstowe in Suffolk, Britain’s largest container port. It deals with £80bn of trade per year – £77bn more than the entire Irish border, most of it from outside the EU – without a glitch or “a customs officer in sight”. Everything is done using an automated customs system – digital tracking, barcodes, scanners – which runs like clockwork.

True enough, said Alex Barker in the FT. But setting up a post-brexit customs arrangement will take time; it will “be a process that stretches into the mid-2020s”. Jon Thompson, chief executive of HM Revenue & Customs, thinks he will need three to five years, whatever model of UK-EU trade is decided on. And of course, that decision needs to be taken first. The Government can’t kick this down the road indefinitely. The Cabinet is inching towards a sensible strategy on customs, said The Times. At this point, May’s “backstop” option seems inevitable. The EU has, of course, reacted to the plan with scepticism, but it will have to be “creative”. “For Brussels, flexibility on timing would be a small price to pay for an orderly Brexit when the alternative may well be chaos.”