It is important to see Friday’s cabinet meeting at Chequers about Brexit policy for what it is and for what it is not. The meeting is highly significant. But it is significant not because it may set a sensible national policy towards the EU after Brexit. It is significant because it may finally settle the Conservative party’s internal argument about Brexit terms. There is a huge gulf between the two.
Ever since the vote to leave, Britain’s stance on future relations with the EU has been disabled by divisions within the Tory party. These prevent the UK from presenting a settled view on future economic, regulatory and security relations with the EU27. This internal argument now threatens to run up against the deadlines of the withdrawal process. An outline deal must be agreed by the autumn if the UK is to begin an orderly transition to a new relationship with the EU in March 2019. But that cannot happen as long as the government is at war about what that relationship should look like.
Almost all Tory MPs accept the 2016 result as a given, so this is not an argument about whether Brexit should go ahead or not. However, Theresa May and most Conservative MPs and ministers want Britain to remain workably convergent with EU rules. They want this for two reasons: because it is best for jobs and the economy; and because it helps guarantee cross-border arrangements in the Northern Ireland peace process. A minority of ministers and MPs don’t agree. They don’t care a fig about either Northern Ireland or Europe. They also believe, as faith and dogma, that there should be as few rules as possible covering Britain’s relations with the EU. Their view was succinctly expressed by Boris Johnson’s curt dismissal of business concerns.
Mrs May’s objective at Chequers is to unite her ministers around a Brexit strategy that delivers the break with the EU that Tory leavers want on terms that Tory remainers can live with. Those terms centre on maintaining the frictionless border in Ireland in a cooperative customs arrangement designed by Downing Street (crucial for keeping our word on the Good Friday agreement), maintaining single market access on manufactured goods and food, and buying access to the EU services market (crucial for business and for the chancellor, Philip Hammond).
Ministers finally received a draft of these terms on Thursday, after much haggling with and inside No 10. Early word was that the increasingly alienated Brexit secretary, David Davis, does not want them. It is hard to see how the international trade secretary, Liam Fox, can do so either, since the harmonisation proposed by Mrs May effectively means his coveted (and undesirable) bilateral trade deal with the US would be still-born. The key issue at Chequers is nevertheless whether the most committed leavers, including Mr Davis and Mr Fox, can accept these terms or something like them.
Where is the national, as opposed to the party, interest here? The answer is that it is nowhere to be found. The national interest will not be protected in the terms that emerge at Chequers. It is true that it will be less bad if Mrs May carries the day. But that is only because the alternative, continuing disabling Tory divisions over Brexit, perhaps leading to a no-deal exit in March, would be even worse. In reality, even Mrs May’s version could be highly damaging to jobs, the economy, business and public services, and could mean new uncertainties in Ireland, even if it were all to be agreed by the EU. That would not be a soft Brexit at all.
This is the heart of the Chequers disjunction. A deal within the Tory party does not mean a deal with the EU. Mrs May wants that, of course – she was in Berlin on Thursday seeking German support. But the complex bespoke arrangements that ministers are discussing at Chequers are a last minute cobble-up. They smack of desperation. So much time has been wasted that one of the least worst options now could be to park the UK’s future relationship with the EU in an EEA deal – known as “Norway for now” in the trade – while ministers hammer out the strategic approach that has been so lacking for the last two years. In a better government than this, that would have been the focus of cabinet meetings many months ago.
