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[...] It frees the UK’s main opposition party from its submissiveness and potentially opens the way to a different Brexit outcome. The question is whether Labour’s commitment will hold and succeed in creating a head of steam in parliament.
Most importantly the move exposes the sheer impracticality and lack of grasp by Theresa May’s government in imagining that Britain, having left the single market and customs union in March 2019, could negotiate by then an alternative transitional deal with the EU as a precursor to negotiating a further bespoke relationship in the years to come. What it wants will not be on offer from Brussels and in its present political straitjacket the UK government would be incapable of negotiating it anyway.
It would, in any case, prolong the uncertainty for businesses, which would have to adjust not once but twice to changes in their export and import arrangements in their biggest market. It would create a raft of complex and expensive new customs procedures to replace the existing frictionless trade we have in place. And, because the EU will never offer equivalent terms to those we have at the moment in the single market, Britain would end up paying through the nose for an inferior arrangement that would then be replaced by an equally suboptimal one.
That is what leaving the single market would mean and therefore Labour is right to say that the starting point should be to stay in it for the foreseeable future and take time in working out what, if anything, would be acceptable to replace our present membership.
The Labour shift also exposes the false promise of the government that, in the words of David Davis, Britain’s chief Brexit negotiator, Britain will have “the exact same benefits” in European trade that it has now. The only basis on which this might ever be possible is for Britain to remain in the single market and the customs union, rejection of which is the only thing that unites the Cabinet.
[...]Instead of using a transitional period merely to postpone the inevitable cliff edge following departure from the EU, as Philip Hammond, the chancellor, and Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, say they agree on, it is now possible to maintain the stability of the status quo, as Labour is proposing, while constructing a mutually beneficial long-term partnership with the EU.
This will buy much needed time but it will not remove Britain’s difficult choices, at the heart of which is that anything that approximates to the same trade in goods and services we have at present in Europe will bring with it broadly the same conditions, rules and legal demands that exist now — except without the same influence over them once we leave the EU.
For Brexiters who do not care about the economic costs, because for them “taking back control” is more important, the conundrum is easily solved — just leave and let the future look after itself. Yet for Labour, and those in other parties who care about jobs and the consequences for the less-protected in society, the dilemma is more acute. They want to prioritise the economy but worry about becoming in effect a satellite jurisdiction of the EU.
This is particularly irksome to many City interests and some prominent figures in the Bank of England who want free passage of services into Europe but want to retain regulatory autonomy as well. But it is the price of leaving the EU without foregoing much of our trade. [...]
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