After the Chequers plan was ritually executed in Salzburg, we are now left to ponder what comes next. Tinkering with it to make it more acceptable to the EU is one option but risks alienating the Brexiteers. For a plan that came into being after a particularly long and difficult pregnancy I don't think the cabinet would want to have a re-run. Trying to come to a Brexit plan that combines a bit of everything is taking Europe as an à la carte menu again when the EU have stressed again and again the menu is table d'hôte only.
The EU27 called her bluff. She has a choice now to move towards a softer Brexit embracing more, if not all of the single market or to drop back to a Canada style free trade agreement. Many Brexiteers would prefer this and certainly David Davis would. However, it still would not resolve the Irish border problem and it would mean a huge climb down on her part. Having told the EU it's Chequers or nothing she would look even more ridiculous than she does now.
One has to ask what the motivation was for Chequers in the first place. The EU were happy to propose a CETA style deal and the cabinet knew it. So why stake so much on the common rule book and the facilitated customs arrangement, the two things on which the Chequers plan foundered? It is obvious that they knew the damage trading under an FTA would cause the UK economy. CETA does not deliver the frictionless trade that the car industry or food industry desperately needs and it doesn't address the Irish border problem either.
To some in the cabinet the damage was a price worth paying, and the Irish border issue to them is a myth. Hence David Davis and BoJo resigned a few days after they had endorsed the plan. However, most thought the price of a hard Brexit through CETA was too high.
So, we are left with the conclusion that she cannot get a harder Brexit past cabinet, let alone parliament. And as noted the options she has are not à la carte. The EU have set them out quite clearly for us in Barnier's stairway to Brexit. These are the options:
- CETA
- Customs Union like Turkey (no independent trade policy)
- Association Agreement like Ukraine (ECJ jurisdiction, regulatory alignment)
- Swiss style 100+ bilateral agreements (freedom of movement, payments, regulatory alignment)
- EFTA/EEA (vassal state as Brexiteers would say)
Some red lines will need to be crossed with anything other than CETA, The amazing thing is that Barnier published his stairway to Brexit in mid December 2017 and here we are ten months later still trying to find our way down five simple steps.
After Salzburg some of Donald Tusk's aides have insisted (HERE) that he had merely restated positions that the EU, and its chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, had articulated repeatedly over the more than two months since May first unveiled her proposal. The aides said that Tusk had not in any way intended to be provocative.
We are not going to get anything bespoke and the choices are the five that the EU set out last year. In the coming weeks we will be forced to do something we have been resisting for two years or more and that is finally face up to the consequences of Brexit and make the unpalatable choice that the EU, business on both sides of the Channel and the people have been asking for. At least we will then be able to begin planning.
