SO did the soft or hard Brexiters win? Is May’s speech a “Norway minus” a “Canada plus” or just a wish list more than a credible plan? Certainly her speech was full of contradictions. The UK will leave the customs union. And it will have less access to the EU’s single market. But despite this, Mrs May wants somehow to protect integrated, cross-border supply chains and to avoid a hard border for Northern Ireland.
Yet she had nothing new to say on customs and so no new approach to the Irish border question. She repeated ideas from last summer: proposing either a complex, untested approach to “mirroring” EU tariffs for goods or, magically, streamlining customs’ co-operation to ensure no physical infrastructure on the Irish border. And, of course, there would be no border in the Irish Sea.
Mrs May promised to ask for associate membership of key EU regulatory agencies for medicines, chemicals and aviation. She wants too a relationship with Euratom. On agriculture, UK standards will be at least as high as the EU’s. On fish, she will negotiate reciprocal access to waters.
For goods, somewhat bafflingly, the UK will and won’t follow EU regulations. So the EU and UK should agree a comprehensive system of mutual recognition of regulations (unlikely) and UK regulations will aim at the same goals as EU ones but differ – but then sometimes they will be identical. This is cherry-picking big time. And the UK would retain levels of services access to the EU market quite unprecedented in other free trade deals.
May’s approach is perhaps a “Norway minus minus”. She wants almost full access to the EU’s single market but without free movement of people. This is an attempt to square the circle of the UK leaving the EU, the single market and customs union, but not really leaving it so much that it has major economic effects. It won’t wash. The EU has come up with a range of association and trade agreements. But a special, cherry-picking, “cake and it eat it”, Heath Robinson version is not on offer.
Kirsty Hughes is director at Scottish Centre on European Relations.
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