On Monday, we got the border operating model setting out all the new barriers to trade the government intends to erect next year between the UK and our largest export market as a result of Brexit. Three days later, a white paper was published extolling the benefits of a barrier-free UK single market and declaring that “open markets enable frictionless trade that supports efficiency and productivity, increases business certainty and facilitates better investment decisions.”
It is as if barrier-free trade is both undesirable and desirable at the same time. Single deeply integrated markets are acceptable apparently, as long as they have London at the centre and not Brussels.
The foreword by Business Secretary Alok Sharma could, with a couple of minor changes (substituting EU for UK for example), have been written by Jacques Delors and delivered by Guy Verhofstadt and no one in Europe would have batted an eyelid. This is Sharma’s quite shameless opening sentence:
“For centuries the UK’s Internal Market has been the bedrock of our shared prosperity, with people, products, ideas and investment moving seamlessly between our nations. As a Union, we are greater than the sum of our parts.”
Peter Foster, public policy editor at the FT tweeted:
Today the UK govt publishes a UK internal market White Paper that extols the virtues of ‘frictionless trade’ and free movement: boosting wages, productivity, investment, business certainty and lowering prices.
— Peter Foster (@pmdfoster) July 16, 2020
Irony so bitter it makes your eyes bleed. https://t.co/u7bS5csKJm pic.twitter.com/1yW3JGQi3q
Writing in The Times: Bouncing back means working as one union, Sharma says without a trace of irony:
“From food production and labelling, to the parts used in manufacturing and engineering, the idea of businesses having to expand resources and costs adapting to different regulations across different parts of the UK is completely unthinkable.”
The word “frictionless” is so important it appears ten times throughout the document but only in the context of intra-UK trade. Frictionless trade with the EU27, worth over £600bn a year, is not mentioned and isn’t even a negotiating objective in the present trade talks.
The government openly admits it wants the “ability to rapidly and flexibly develop regulation that works best for citizens in every part of the UK” and says it is committed “to retaining high regulatory standards (such as animal welfare) – but exceeding the various protections offered by the EU”, ignoring the fact that this could have done this at any time in the last 45 years. EU regulations are the minimum, not the maximum.
Eliminating barriers is apparently vital “to protect the interests of businesses and consumers by ensuring they can continue to do business in all parts of the UK without unnecessary barriers. Such barriers, if allowed to emerge, could increase business costs, in some cases passed onto consumers, or reduce consumer choice. In some instances, they could add up if multiple areas of regulation are affected.”
Staggering. Or how about this one (paragraph 76) setting out the benefits we enjoy through a single market:
“The Government’s stakeholder discussions have revealed the importance of a seamless Internal Market to allow business to develop efficient supply and distribution chains for goods. Having consistent regulation throughout the UK was seen as a way of reducing business complexity and cost and unlocking efficiencies and economies of scale, which in turn increases international competitiveness.”
Other articles by Anthony Robinson:
- Gove’s new border plan: the longest suicide note in history?
- EU launches its own shock and awe campaign early
- Four years on: the ignorance and the idiocy
The problem for the government is that it is continuing to claim two contradictory things. Firstly, that British national sovereignty overrides the economic cost of leaving the EU. On the other hand, for Scotland the opposite is true and the economic facts of life are far more important than sovereignty.
One of the reasons given for Brexit was that the UK was occasionally outvoted in the council of ministers, or in the EU parliament, and this was somehow so egregious an insult to us that Brexit was inevitable. Yet Scotland is invariably outvoted in Westminster – as it was in the 2016 referendum – but instead of seeking independence from a dominant England, they must accept the democratic will of the people.
It is clear now that those original arguments used in the referendum are breaking down, to reveal that Brexit is more about Europhobia, English nationalism and the sense that we are an exception to every rule. Sovereignty and economics were really only minor issues by comparison. We actually want an integrated market and a level playing field with common rules, just not the EU version of it.
The Northern Ireland (NI) protocol creates a special conundrum for the government’s plan for an internal UK market, as this article by Katy Hayward, a political sociologist and senior fellow at UK in Changing Europe, explains.
All goods produced or existing in NI must comply with EU product and other technical regulations, meaning that certification, authorisation, assessments, registration and approval are all affected. Yet those goods will then have “unfettered access” to the UK internal market by means of “mutual recognition and non-discrimination” and other separate legislative provisions (paragraph 146 of the internal market white paper).
In essence the UK will unilaterally recognise and accept EU standards in the UK internal market while the EU will not recognise ours. It is not obvious then what advantage there will be to any UK manufacture to adopt new British regulations.
As Sharma himself says, asking businesses to “expand resources and costs adapting to different regulations” is unthinkable, so they probably won’t.
