Brexit climbdown is not what leaving the EU was meant to look like

As the scale of the Brexit climbdown takes shape this weekend, one thing is already becoming clear: this wasn’t what leaving the EU was meant to look like. Ahead of Monday’s crunch meeting between Theresa May and commission president, Jean Claude-Juncker, the comparison between what is on the table in Brussels and what British voters were promised is striking.

The first disappointment is that the UK government is not even talking about the things it really wants yet. The concessions Britain is being pressed to finalise – on money, regulation and legal independence – are simply to begin the process of discussing a trade deal. The same Brexit enthusiasts who once insisted it would be ours for the taking now argue the cost is so high we need to steel ourselves for living without it.

“Getting out of the EU can be quick and easy,” insisted John Redwood shortly after the June 2016 referendum. “The UK holds most of the cards in any negotiation,” he wrote. In the run up to the vote, fellow Tory cheerleader Owen Paterson promised it was “inconceivable we won’t come to a satisfactory trade deal”. Yet six weeks ago, Paterson declared it was now “inevitable” that we wouldn’t and Redwood said the door had “slammed shut”.

Then there is the question of the type of trade deal that the government is working so furiously to obtain. It was long an article of faith among Brexiters that it was not necessary to be a member of the EU in order to maintain all the economic benefits. It was the central tenet of Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech, announcing in January that Britain would leave the market but retain “frictionless access”.

“Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market,” said the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan when the referendum was first announced. “No one has ever suggested in Brussels, and I have been here for 16 years, that if we withdrew from the union we would be excluded from the single market.”

Yet the “cake-and-eat-it” position has now been comprehensively ruled out by every European leader. Two weeks ago, a leaked policy paper in Brussels made clear that unless Britain remained inside the single market, the only access to it would come via a much more limited goods trade agreement such as that the EU has with Canada.

So what are we paying for this privilege already extended for free to other third party countries? Leaks this week suggest a net divorce settlement equivalent to between £53bn and £58bn (€60bn to €65bn) will be agreed on Monday.

This too is in stark contrast to the promise made to voters. Most famously expressed on a big red bus in misleading gross terms of £350m a week, even the net figure was never qualified with talk of a corresponding divorce bill. “We can take back control of huge sums of money – £10.6bn net per year – and spend it on our priorities,” said Boris Johnson, long before telling the EU it could “go whistle” if it wanted an “extortionate” divorce settlement.

There are other one-off surprises. Chancellor Philip Hammond just announced £3bn of new spending to prepare Britain for exit, with thousands of new civil servants for customs and regulatory agencies, on top of £700m already spent. Though the immediate economic impact of isolation is less than some remainers feared, a recent study by the Centre for Economic Policy Research estimated that Britain’s slower relative growth since the referendum has already cost £20bn, or £300m a week, while Europe booms.

Many non-financial concessions now look inevitable too. To reach agreement on citizens’ rights, the cabinet is said to be ready to allow UK courts to “refer up” to the European court of justice, blurring another of May’s red lines. In order to avoid a hard border between the EU and Northern Ireland, Britain is said to be considering harmonising existing local regulations indefinitely.

Faced with a backlash from the DUP, who are worried about divergence from the UK mainland, it is quite possible the only answer is for the whole country to retain many existing EU regulations.

Either way, it’s a long way from the claims of those like David Davis who said Brexit would end “the flood of new regulation from Europe” in a post-referendum essay for Conservative Home that now makes for uncomfortable reading.

Among its many promises was the claim that Britain could also immediately strike new trade deals with other countries. Instead, prized talks with the US are overshadowed by the latest spat with Donald Trump and nothing can be implemented until at least 2021 in a transition phase. Even then, US commerce secretary Wilbur Ross has made clear Britain would simply be swapping EU rules for controversial US regulations on products like chicken and beef.

Another tarnished promise is that Brexit would avoid harming Britain’s cultural and diplomatic influence. “There will still be intense and intensifying European cooperation and partnership in a huge number of fields: the arts, the sciences, the universities, and on improving the environment,” wrote Johnson, with no mention of the recent news that Britain would lose its right to propose European capitals of culture.

John Redwood’s boast that the “the UK will retake her seat at the top tables of the world where the EU has replaced us” also looks hollow as the UK just lost the right to appoint a judge to the international court of justice for the first time in 71 years. Similarly, he wrongly assured the City of London it had no reason to fear losing so-called passporting rights.

Above all, they claimed, it would be the EU feeling the pain by now, not Britain. “The real risk is to the general morale of Europe,” wrote Johnson ahead of the referendum. “EU politicians would be banging down the door for a trade deal on Friday,” he added.