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[...]The British people would hate being neither in nor fully out, cast into a legal and political no man’s land in which, desperate to maintain trade in goods, we would have to agree to follow EU rules with no say in making them. This goes beyond the much-contested Irish backstop (with or without its cosmetic adjustment). It is because, quite simply, we would end up akin to a regulatory satellite of the EU without recourse to any balanced system of legal rights or protections.
Some argue that this is a necessary sacrifice to secure our present trade. As a former trade commissioner I am naturally sympathetic to this. But in pursuit of this goal we would be forced to give up more and more control of domestic policy where this affected competition with Europe. Governments of either party would dislike and resist this. We would live a life of never-ending dispute between Britain and the EU, wrangling over what we could or could not do and over the enforcement of one new European law after another, with endless arbitration and courts of appeal.
Perhaps because I have worked in Brussels I understand the system better than most and how frustrating and belittling it would be for a country of Britain’s size and status to have to keep going cap in hand to Brussels for this exemption or that forgiveness.
Rather than stabilise relations, it is more likely to sour them further. Instead of producing business certainty it would generate perpetual tension in our trading relations, leaving business and investors in suspense over what conditions will apply in the future.
My firm conclusion, therefore, is that MPs should refuse to be bullied into supporting something that is manifestly against Britain’s national interest and which they would quickly come to regret. The so-called Norway solution, which once seemed attractive, is simply a more institutionalised version of the same deal and would now be very difficult to negotiate. Once in, if it happened, Britain unlike Norway would never stop pushing up against its boundaries, trying and failing to expand our rights and prerogatives in Europe’s tightly drawn economic area.
This is not what anyone voted for in 2016, and it is a long way from the promises of frictionless trade in goods and services and equal treatment made by Mrs May since then. Just as empty are her promises that, from March, we will be free to negotiate global trade agreements — her deal would stop Britain pursuing an independent trade policy — or end freedom of movement. This will continue for years to come and perhaps indefinitely, depending on what is finally agreed with the EU. [...]
One thing I am sure about is that the public is not going to vote for Britain to be left dangling by a thread inside the EU’s regulatory perimeter, without being able to determine the decisions affecting our destiny. Any party defending such a deal in a general election would be, rightly, decimated. Its consequences would not only diminish control over our economy but would reduce our standing in the world.
Going it alone, on the other hand, in some sort of no-deal Brexit would, almost literally, mean wholesale reinvention of our economy, given how far it has been shaped over nearly half a century by our integration into Europe’s single market. It might work eventually, but the shock and its impact on jobs, living standards and particularly the poorest would be considerable.
Faced with the ignominy of Mrs May’s halfway house or the risky economic reinvention required by a no deal should be enough to make anyone pause to reconsider Brexit’s very viability. Either way, the existential choice now faced by Britain can no longer be ducked. Every MP has to rise to the challenge of making this choice or, better still, allowing the public to make it for themselves.