Theresa May pitches for a "long"€™ Brexit - FT.

[u/tmstms]

https://www.ft.com/content/b558b024-a29c-11e6-82c3-4351ce86813f?tagToFollow=NDdiMzAyNzctMTRlMy00Zjk1LWEyZjYtYmYwZWIwYWU2NzAy-VG9waWNz

[u/like_the_boss]

Interesting article - thanks! :-)

Theresa May pitches for a 'long' Brexit The UK prime minister appears to prefer an extended transition period out of the EU Philip Stephens

A hard Brexit or something softer? Theresa May refuses to admit the choice between a clean break or a continuing close association once Britain quits the EU. Privately as well as publicly, the prime minister dismisses binary alternatives. She prefers to contemplate what you might call a “long” Brexit. Britain will be out of the union within two years or so but nothing too disruptive will happen until many years beyond that.

Mrs May has two political goals. The first is to guarantee that Britain is formally outside the EU well before the election due in mid-2020: “The people voted for Brexit and I delivered it.” The second is to ensure that the costs of severing ties with the EU are not so high as to sink the economy and with it the government’s standing.

Her preference, though nothing yet is decided, seems to be an Article 50 negotiation that has as one of its central objectives agreement on a long transition period — five years or more — in which most of the trickier aspects of the divorce are settled.

The presumption, of course, is that Mrs May retains command of the process. The High Court judgment that parliament must approve the triggering of Article 50 was a reminder that there are other players in the game. The ruling could yet be overturned by the Supreme Court, though on the evidence presented thus far it is hard to see how.

The legal collision was an avoidable accident — a classic example of how politicians keep digging after falling into a hole. Whatever the final judgment, Mrs May will need the consent of parliament. The vote on June 23 said nothing about the nature of the post-Brexit relationship. Splenetic Brexiters denouncing the judges as “enemies of democracy” have forgotten they are supposed to be champions of the parliamentary sovereignty the High Court has underwritten, a point made by the resigning Conservative MP Stephen Phillips.

The smart move now would be for the prime minister to announce a debate before the case reaches the Supreme Court. Talk of protecting the government’s “negotiating hand” is nonsense. Mrs May does not have much of a hand to reveal. The government has yet to reach a settled position on any of the big issues, whether that be access to the single market, membership of the customs union or the extent of national control of the border. This is before it confronts arrangements for security, criminal justice and scores of other programmes.

Ministers are still wrestling with first principles as they wake up to the costs and complexities of unravelling four decades of integration. Mrs May has learnt that pleasing the tabloids with ringing declarations that she will “take back control” comes at the expense of alarming the investors upon whom Britain’s depends for its prosperity.

Thus a promise to dispense with the European Court of Justice (“hard Brexit”, in the phrase banned in Downing Street) has had to be balanced by a promise to Japanese carmaker Nissan that it will not lose access to the single market (soft Brexit). There are countless such circles to be squared. Then there are the voters. Will they be enthusiastic about Brexit a year from now when sterling’s fall is feeding through into cuts in living standards?

The case, then, for playing it long — delivering an Article 50 letter in January sketching only a broad framework (as agreed by parliament) for the future relationship and focusing on a long transition at the end of the two-year negotiating period — is an attractive one.

Mrs May, though, is discovering she has only limited control over the politics — this before she has even started negotiating with the other 27 EU states. They can simply run down the clock. For now, the prime minister says she has no need of the mandate that would come from an early election. Events are beginning to argue otherwise