Fraser Nelson:
The PM’S plan does deliver many Brexit promises, but she has utterly failed to sell it to her membership
It was rather cruel of Theresa May to send Liam Fox to meet Donald Trump when he landed at Stansted Airport yesterday. For ages, the International Trade Secretary has been boasting to officials in Washington that Britain is eager to agree a major free-trade deal; indeed, the presidential visit had been planned with this in mind.
But Dr Fox will have had to inform his guest that there has been a change of plan, that Britain wants to stay far closer to Europe than was originally envisaged, and that a free trade deal between the United Kingdom and the United States is unlikely to happen. Mr Trump may leave wondering why he bothered to turn up.
Dr Fox might wonder the same after reading yesterday’s White Paper. Why turn up for work in a Department for International Trade given that Britain has decided to handicap itself in pursuit of international trade?
The idea of Brexit was to go out, and into the world. Dr Fox has been to Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, New Zealand, Vietnam, even Uganda in the hope of assembling the world’s largest free-trade bloc. But given that Mrs May’s new Brexit plan involves sticking to EU rules for goods and foods, it will be hard – in some cases, impossible – to (for example) buy American.
As the only world leader who backed Brexit from start, Mr Trump had been keen to offer his help – promising “a very, very big deal, a very powerful” trade deal that could be “done very, very quickly.” It was the stuff of Brexiteers’ fantasy, which Mrs May certainly encouraged. And this, perhaps, is where it started to go wrong for her.
No 10 was saying, yesterday, that the Prime Minister wants a Brexit that will allow her to look 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit in the eye and say: I have delivered what you voted for. Many in her party say she proposes no such thing, but that’s rather harsh.
Why did people vote to leave the European Union? To end the free movement of people? Her plan does that. The £10 billion-a-year payments to Brussels? They would be cut to almost nothing. We’d be free from both the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy. If the White Paper is a Brexit sell-out in disguise, it seems to be a pretty good disguise.
The White Paper even passes the Steve Hilton test. When he started out as David Cameron’s chief adviser, he could not work out why officials seemed so busy yet nothing seemed to get done.
He conducted a study and found, to his shock, that only a third of work was related to the government’s agenda – while about half was processing edicts from Brussels. Under Mrs May’s plan, this will end: there will be no new edicts, according to No 10. A few refinements of product standards, it says, but almost all British laws would be made in Britain. Legislation is coming home.
Of course, it’s all still a proposal – to be changed, or rejected outright, by Michel Barnier. But even Douglas Carswell, who defected from the Conservatives to Ukip before giving up his seat at the last general election, says that the White Paper is proper Brexit. Why, he asks, can’t Brexiteers accept it? Are they so used to losing for 30 years that they can’t recognise a win when they see it? Why risk the whole process in a deranged pursuit of perfection?
Had Mrs May said from the outset that she would stick to European rules on goods, but not services, she might have won the overall argument. But she instead raised hopes of a much bolder Brexit: cutting completely free from European rules, courts and diktats.
Now, with time running out, she is softening her position and has retreated – while pretending that she hasn’t. This is what creates a sense of betrayal – and a feeling among party members that they are being taken for fools. Her allies say the choice is between her White Paper or no Brexit at all. With the parliamentary arithmetic as it now is (thanks to her botched election), they may be right.
While Dr Fox and Michael Gove might be sanguine about this, Tory party members are not. The incandescence of the Daily Telegraph letters page in recent days offers a sample of the heat that Conservative MPS have been feeling from their constituencies.
One Cabinet member told me recently that having European rules cover 20 per cent of the economy (goods) but regaining freedom on 80 per cent of the economy (services) was a clear victory for Brexit. “But my constituency see it as complete betrayal. They’ll either come for me or vote for Ukip,” the Honourable Member said.
Things will likely get worse. The White Paper proposes to “maintain high standards” on environmental rules, for example, which may lock in EU regulation and kill off any hope of a new, more sensible energy policy.
In disputes between Britain and the EU, meanwhile, there is to be an “arbitration panel” which – according to Martin Howe QC – will give control to the European Court of Justice through the back door. There are more such horrors, for those with an eye to see them.
Some of those around Mrs May are selling her White Paper as a staging post, a compromise to be agreed now – tactically – so that a proper Brexit can be pursued later. No one’s heart will leap at this prospect. If we sign a new “association agreement” with Brussels, how would we get out of it? Will there be another referendum, a Project Fear 3.0 with populists and party splits? Given that Mrs May can pass her plan only with support from moderates in the Labour Party – and might need dozens of them – might this split be happening already?
Last week, Jacob Rees-mogg warned in these pages that the Tory party may break up over Brexit, as it did after the Corn Law debacle. The better analogy is with the Irish Question, which split the Liberal party and then defined British politics for years to come.
Before he left for Britain, Mr Trump said that Mrs May is now “taking a different route” on Brexit. “I don’t know if that is what they voted for.” Mrs May thinks that it is. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the future of the Conservative Party might depend on whether the Prime Minister is right.