Only a month after the prime minister told the world she wanted a transitional deal, she seems to have set an impossible condition. The new relationship with the EU must be fixed by next summer; otherwise we won’t have what she calls an “implementation period” to ensure the economy doesn’t fall off a cliff in March 2019.
Theresa May told Iain Duncan Smith, a hardline Tory Brexiter, in the House of Commons yesterday: “The point of the implementation period is to put in place the practical changes necessary to move to the future partnership, and in order to have that you need to know what that future partnership is going to be.” She agreed with him that the “details of the trade deal” would need to be agreed by next summer to give time for it to be ratified.
The problem is that no expert believes there is a snowball’s chance in hell of agreeing the full details of our future relationship with the EU by next summer. At best, we will sketch out the broad contours of such a deal.
The Article 50 process only provides for agreeing the “framework” of a future partnership as part of the divorce discussions. And as Michel Barnier said yesterday, it will take “several years’ to agree a full deal after that. The EU Commission’s chief negotiator will by then have moved onto other things.
What is going on?
One explanation is that our prime minister really thinks it will be possible to nail down all the details in nine months, despite the fact that we are still stuck on the divorce stage of the talks and haven’t even started talking about the future or the transitional period to get there. Perhaps she really thinks the only purpose of this phase, which she says should last “around two years”, is to implement what has been agreed on the long-term deal.
If so, May isn’t just deluded. She’s wilfully ignorant.
Another possibility is that the prime minister knows perfectly well that we will only be able to agree the framework of a future deal next summer but she doesn’t want to admit it. Perhaps she’s afraid that hardline Brexiters will refuse to let her pay any money to the EU to settle our past obligations if we are only getting a “framework” in return. Perhaps she intends to big up the framework in due course, pretending it’s the real deal.
But there’s another possibility: that our flip-flop queen is having cold feet on the whole idea of a transition and is preparing the ground for yet another u-turn. Maybe she has clocked the fact that, even if she reaches political agreement on a transition, it will only be legally binding when the whole Article 50 process is finished in, say, early 2019. By then, many more companies will have lost hope and quit the UK – so a transition won’t be of much use in stopping their relocation abroad, although it would have other benefits.
Maybe the prime minister has also clocked the fact that her implementation period of “around two years” won’t be long enough. If Barnier is right – as he almost certainly is – we will be negotiating our long-term deal well beyond 2021. What this means is that a short-term transition will merely postpone the agony and the economy will fall off a cliff about a year before the scheduled date of the next general election. That would be like rolling out the red carpet to Downing Street for Jeremy Corbyn.
If May has realised all this, she may be starting to wonder whether the transitional period was such a good idea in the first place – especially as she will probably have to double the £18 billion she has already effectively promised the EU just to get them to talk about it. And if this is what’s going through her mind, we could be heading for a really catastrophic Brexit.
The problem is that none of these explanations – delusion, deviousness or disaster – is encouraging. At the very least, the prime minister should come clean and admit that no final deal will be done for many more years. Then the public can make up their own mind what they want to do.