U.K. set to choose sharp break from EU

Prime Minister likely to choose to exit single market.

LONDON — If British plans for leaving the European Union have been a dance of the seven veils, the British government removed one of them on Sunday, letting slip to media that Prime Minister Theresa May is likely to choose to exit Europe’s single market and its customs union — a so- c alled hard Brexit.

May is scheduled to make a long-awaited speech on her plans Tuesday, but the British weekend papers and Sunday news programs were briefed by Downing Street about the main lines of the policy, and some published selected quotations of what May is scheduled to say.

Offifficially, a government spokesman on Sunday called the reports “speculation” and emphasized only the extracts of the speech that were leaked by Downing Street itself, with May calling for British unity “to make a success of Brexit and build a truly global Britain.”

Those extracts were not explicit on the single market or the customs union, but the Sunday newspapers, which receive their own briefifings from the government before publication, took much the same line: that Britain is headed for a sharp break with Europe after a transitional period.

Downing Street dislikes the term “hard Brexit,” but an outcome along those lines is not unexpected, because it flflows logically from the priorities May has set out, par- ticularly about controlling the country’s borders.

Being outside the single market could damage Britain’s important fifinancial services sector and is likely to hit the value of the pound again, at least temporarily.

A week ago, May said in a television interview that post-Brexit Britain would not be able to keep “bits” of its EU membership.

That, too, was interpreted as a break with the single marke t , whi c h r e q u i r e s freedom of movement and labor for all citizens of the bloc.