May might kick can, Canada +++ style

To avoid splits in her cabinet over what Brexit means, the prime minister seems likely to back a fantasy plan – what David Davis calls “Canada, plus, plus, plus”. The snag is that the EU won’t agree.

Theresa May is finally on Tuesday holding her first cabinet meeting to discuss what trading arrangement we want with the EU post-Brexit. Just reflect on that for a moment. It has taken 18 months since the referendum to start discussing the issue. What on earth have they been up to?

It’s actually pretty obvious. The prime minister is so desperate to hold her fractious party together that she has been avoiding the central topic of where we want to end up. Instead, she has been making one u-turn after another on the divorce deal in order to persuade the EU to give her a two-year transition so the economy doesn’t fall off a cliff in 2019 – which of course merely delays the cliff to 2021.

Talking turkey? You must be joking.

So now, in the run-up to Christmas, the cabinet is finally going to talk turkey, right? Not so fast. Yes, they will talk – and perhaps May will even achieve a consensus. But this will be a meaningless and unrealistic one.

The bulk of the cabinet backs Davis’ desire for “Canada plus, plus, plus”, some ministers have told the Guardian. But what exactly does “Canada plus, plus, plus” mean?

It’s all in the eye of the beholder. Boris Johnson and his merry band of Brexiters will see it as a new way of having their cake and eating it.

A so-called “Canada Dry” deal would severely damage our economy. It does very little for our financial services industry, which would otherwise get thwacked. So let’s add that to the deal – the first “plus”. Nor does Canada’s deal do much for aviation and electricity. So that’s another plus. And it does precious little for other services such as culture and audiovisual services. So there’s your third plus. All bloody important given that our world-beating services industries account for 80% of our economy.

But how will the EU view “Canada, plus, plus, plus”? It won’t want us “cherry picking” the bits of the single market May likes and avoiding the bits she doesn’t.

So its first plus will be that we follow all the EU rules without a say in making them. Our prime minister has already virtually agreed that with her promise of “full alignment” with a large chunk of the EU rulebook if she can’t find a magical way of avoiding a land border in Ireland. The EU’s second plus will be free movement of people. And its third will be that we keep paying into its budget forever.

Now how does that version of “Canada, plus, plus, plus” sound to Brexiters? They’ll have a conniption. Turning our proud country into Ruletaker Britannia won’t please many pro-Europeans either.

May’s plan: keep it vague.

So May’s path of least resistance will be to keep everything vague for as long as possible. She won’t want to confront the issue at Tuesday’s cabinet. She won’t want to tackle it in the New Year – or even in the spring or summer. If she can get away with it, she may even try to kick the can Canada +++ style until after we quit the EU – agreeing as part of our divorce a fairly meaningless political declaration on to which all parties can project their fantasies.

The other EU countries may even be up for that. They know they will have us over a barrel and, come Brexit day, we’ll be pleading for a deal on their terms.

But this would not be in the national interest. Sensible Tories, opposition parties, business and the unions must force the government to spell out a realistic detailed post-Brexit vision as early as possible – and certainly before we quit. The public can then look at it – and, if they don’t like it, cancel Brexit.

The headline was updated on Dec 18 to change Canada to Canada +++.  A similar change was made to the third last paragraph.