On the Max Fac question (1 or 2 it makes no difference) Brexit Central (HERE) have an article continuing to press for the Brexiteers preferred solution even though Phillip Hammond is reported to have said the EU have rejected it anyway HERE. But notwithstanding it's a bit academic, the article now seeks to make the point that nobody ever said Max Fac was frictionless, only that it would be as frictionless as possible. There would be some additional costs but these would be outweighed by the "massive" gains from the UK having its own trade policy.
I confess to being a remainer and a supporter of the EU ideal - even ever closer union doesn't bother me at all - and over the years I have listened to UKIP and the Eurosceptics droning on in the way one hears a bluebottle buzzing around in the background. However, I cannot honestly recall anybody ever putting quite so much weight, indeed any weight at all, on Britain having an independent trade policy.
I really don't think the leave campaign ever used this as a significant reason to get out of the EU.
Now it's almost the main objective. So much so that it's worth risking the troubles in Ireland being sparked off again plus damaging trade with our largest and closest (and richest) market.
Trade has become a cipher for the Brexiteers visceral mistrust of Brussels and something they are now clinging to as a justification for the immense difficulties posed by Brexit. As if increased trade is the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Indeed George Eaton makes this point in The New Statesman HERE and quotes the studiously impartial Robert Chote of the OBR. Eaton says:
"The ideological and sentimental appeal of this project to Conservatives is obvious. But the economic appeal is not. As Robert Chote, the head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, emphasised when I interviewed him earlier this year, “most of the work that trade economists have done” suggests that "the reduction in openness likely with the EU [the destination of 44 per cent of British exports] is likely to outweigh any increase elsewhere." Indeed, the government's own analysis suggests that the UK would lose between 2 per cent and 8 per cent of GDP over 15 years from a “hard Brexit” (withdrawal from the single market and the customs union), while new deals with the US and others would add no more than 0.6 per cent".
Yet Brexit Central is still trying to make the economic case for Brexit based on trade.
Max Fac must be the strangest policy ever drafted anywhere. It has been rejected by the EU even before it's presented. The HMRC has said it won't be ready in time anyway and would cost business £20 billion a year to operate. The Irish PM say it won't prevent a hard border in Ireland which is what it's designed to do. The Engineering Employers Federation (EEF) say it's "naive and wholly unrealistic" (HERE). And to boot, it will cost the nation dearly in loss of openness to trade, as the OBR point out.
In spite of all this, it is said to be the preferred option by Johnson, Gove and other Brexiteers in cabinet. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at this last point. It is like Brexit itself, a delusion pursued by the delusional.
We are almost two years on from the referendum, fourteen months after triggering Article 50 and ten months away from leaving the EU but we are still at the fundamental choice stage and kicking around options that won't work anyway. We should have been at this point in August or September 2016.
