Theresa May routinely overestimates her capabilities as a broker of Brexit truces, both in her government and the country. She sees herself as a unifying figure, but in reality the process has been shaped by her own divisive choices. In 2016, she rejected participation in the EU’s customs union and single market. She then avoided an honest account of the costs incurred by that choice – until today.
In a speech advertised as a blueprint for future EU-UK relations, the prime minister conceded that Brexit has material downsides. Having once pretended that she could secure “the exact same benefits” as are available from EU membership, she admitted market access will be reduced. She also accepted that the UK needs “associate membership” of some EU institutions and must pay for the privilege. Much of the speech was a paean to European integration. She played down the prospect of regulatory divergence and stressed common interests. With few changes, the same arguments could have been deployed as a case for abandoning Brexit all together. But there was no chance of Mrs May taking that route. So she is forced to seek complex technical workarounds from behind red lines drawn 18 months ago. Her grasp of the issues is clearly better now.
There are many reasons why Mrs May painted herself into this corner, but two fundamental elements have most influenced her view of what Brexit must mean: border control and trade beyond the EU. She saw anxiety about immigration as the major driver of support for the leave campaign and concluded that free movement of labour – a condition of the single market – must end. But since then she has also understood that the easy transfer of workers across borders is a necessary feature of modern global commerce. And so on Friday she hinted at a preferential migration regime for EU citizens, called an “appropriate labour mobility framework”. As for trade deals with non-EU countries, the prime minister repeated that this prize was the incentive for leaving the customs union, before assuring her audience that elaborate technical mechanisms can keep the UK-EU border in as frictionless a state as possible – in a “customs partnership”.
The trade deals that Britain will strike post-Brexit are the holy grail for Tory leavers. David Davis once ludicrously boasted that many would be in place even before the article 50 negotiating period had expired. Liam Fox has been on a rolling tour of the globe that has yielded nothing but polite statements of goodwill from potential partners. The reality is that what other countries most want to know is the terms of Britain’s relationship with the EU. Mrs May described her ambition for that relationship as a partnership “covering more sectors and cooperating more fully than any free trade agreement anywhere in the world today” – a description of the single market.
Meanwhile, a free trade deal with the US, promised as a swift Brexit bonus, has never looked less likely. Donald Trump this week stated his intention to impose punitive tariffs on all steel imports, reinforcing his economic aggression with the observation that “trade wars are good”. The collective security and leverage afforded by a pan-European trading bloc has rarely looked so enticing. Mrs May hinted at unwelcome developments across the Atlantic in a pointed reference to a “worrying rise in protectionism” around the globe. That was just one of many moments in the speech that expressed tension between the prime minister’s former belief in what Brexit might allow and her current recognition of the compromises it requires. She lacks the political will to cross old red lines, but has at least grasped the imperative of blurring them.
While the speech ostensibly reinforced the government’s commitment to familiar hard Brexit terms, it offers a glimmer of comfort to remainers. The prime minister conceded that Britain’s economic future is best served by close integration with the EU, because its rules and institutions have served the country well. Her tortured and convoluted answer to the question of what Brexit should look like implicitly posed the question of why such a costly and self-defeating task is worth doing at all.
