Doing Brexit right

From the start of the European Union referendum campaign, competing visions of Brexit have been advocated. To Nigel Farage, the case for leaving the European Union was all about what we did not like (the diktats, the immigration, etc). This played into the caricature cleverly presented by the Remain campaign: the shaking fist of Little England, a country that had had enough of foreigners and the tolerance that the European project represented. Then came the vision put to Britain by the Vote Leave campaign, articulated by Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. It was of a globally minded Britain, fed up with the EU’s parochialism. A country itching to go out and into the world.

Theresa May has now firmly endorsed the Boris Johnson vision. Her speech this week about a ‘global Britain’ taking advantage of Brexit to build — not diminish — trading and other links with the rest of the world places the government where it should have been all along. She has made a clear statement: that Britain is leaving this supranational organisation not because it is too big and too open but because it is too small and too closed. She will not attempt to stitch up some deal whereby Britain remains half in the single market, but will instead seek a free-trade agreement with the EU — exactly as she will do with economies outside the EU.

With the new US President stating his desire for a quick bilateral trade deal with the EU, it is now highly likely that Britain will establish free trade with the world’s largest economy sooner than the EU does — a reversal of how it might have seemed a year ago when Barack Obama told us we would be ‘at the back of the queue’.