The most important point about the draft Brexit withdrawal agreement is that, once it is ratified, the United Kingdom will have no legal route out of it unless the EU agrees to let us out and replace it with another agreement. This makes it unique among trade treaties (including the EU’s), which always contain clauses allowing each party to withdraw on notice. Politicians who claim that this is just a bad treaty — one we can get out of later — are being ignorant or disingenuous.
Halfway through the 585-page document, we find Art. 185, which states a Northern Ireland Protocol ‘shall apply as from the end of the transition period’. Once the Protocol is in force, the UK cannot leave it except by ‘joint’ decision of the UK and the EU. This gives the EU a right of veto over the UK’s exit. In agreeing to this clause, the government has caved in over seeking a right to leave.
Indeed, the Protocol — which has become known as the ‘backstop’ — locks the whole UK into a customs union with the EU with no decision-making power. Annex 2 Art. 3(4) states that the UK shall be ‘informed’ of any decision by the EU to amend the Common Customs Tariff ‘in sufficient time for it to align itself with that decision’.
The EU has a huge (£95 billion) surplus in goods trade with the UK. This customs union gives the EU tariff-free access for its export goods into the UK market. It also forces the UK to maintain the EU’s high tariffs against competing goods from other countries. As one might expect, this is advantageous to EU exporters but catastrophically damaging to the UK. It prevents us from lowering tariffs if we want to in order to benefit our consumers. More importantly, it kills stone dead the possibility of forging trade deals with fast-growing economies around the world.
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