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Rogers, the former chief Brussels adviser to both David Cameron and Theresa May, took aim at the prime minister’s Brexit strategy in a speech on Wednesday, but also criticised the plans of both hardline remainers and leavers, calling them “bluntly, delusional”.
In a thinly veiled attack on Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, and Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, Rogers said he despaired of “people professing themselves free traders who have only a hazy understanding about multilateral, regional and bilateral free trade deals, have never negotiated one – but know it’s straightforward, once one has left the EU.”
Rogers hinted there may still be a permanent deal to be done where the UK would drop some of its red lines in exchange for “quasi-single market membership, paying something for it, living under [European court of justice] jurisprudence and jurisdiction in goods, but disapplying the fourth fundamental freedom, free movement of people.”
He said the EU would have to weigh the cost of dividing the “four freedoms” and the benefits of a close deal with a major strategic partner.
“The sooner we realise there are no perfect choices, that there are serious trade-offs between sovereignty and market access interests … and where it is purely notional and actually a material loss of control, the better for the UK.”
Rogers, who resigned in January 2017, said all current schools of thought on Brexit, including remainers wishing to reverse the referendum result via a new vote, were “fantasies or incoherent and muddled thinking”.
He said the UK had long lost any credibility that it would walk away from negotiations with no deal, firstly because it was “self-evident” that no-deal would be vastly worse than even a standard Canada-style free trade agreement, and secondly because of the lack of any alternative regulatory preparation.
In the lecture at the University of Glasgow, Rogers said May was in danger of “mis-selling the British people” about the trade-offs Brexit would entail.
“No trade policy with third countries, however successfully aggressive, will deliver very quick results, or ones which on any serious analysis will transform the UK’s productivity performance and economic prospects,” he said. “More than 65% of all UK exports are, after all, to the EU or to countries with whom we already have a preferential deal via EU membership.”
He said the UK would not get any serious role on policy-setting from outside the bloc without May shifting her red line on the jurisdiction of the European court of justice. “That was promulgated as a red line when no serious thought at all had been given to these questions,” he said. [...]