E D'S RANT
A VERY BRITISH AFFAIR Westminster’s contentious trading relationship with Europe might soon be heading toward a TV-drama resolution, says Michael Wilson, but does that mean that London’s financial operators can afford to relax?
W
ill she, won’t she? Resign, that is, or get removed, or win her point, or lose it, or call an election, or a second referendum, or call it all off? Or will Theresa May run the clock down again, or swear eternal brotherhood with the leader of the Labour Party, whoever that might happen to be at the time? If I seem to have been uncharacteristically quiet on the accursed Brexit topic for the last several months, you can blame that mostly on the pressures of time itself. Like one of those addictively gripping political dramas on TV, the plot turns itself inside out with every improbable twist and revelation, and anything that any journalist writes on the subject is condemned to look stupidly dated within weeks, if not days. Which wouldn’t be so bad if this semi-comic series were called Yes Prime Minister, it’s a Very British House of Cards in the Thick of It. But unfortunately, it’s real life. Not just for the long-suffering British public, who seem to have abandoned all hope and trust in the political establishment, and who are currently drifting like the crew on the Raft of the Medusa, waiting for whatever cruel fate decides to throw at them, and wondering who’s going to be next on the menu? Not just for the fund managers who’ve recently had to battle valiantly against flailingly awful UK sentiment, heavy investor withdrawals and badly disappointing growth fundamentals. But most of all, perhaps, for UK exporters who are having to cope with the uncertainty of the trade and tariff situations. How exactly do you put your goods onto a ship to the
8
Far East when you don’t know what tariffs will apply by the time it docks? How do you encourage foreign investors to put money into your expansion plans when you can’t say whether you’ll be inside the Customs Union in six months, or outside it, or alternatively in a special relationship with Albania and the United States? How do you run a just-intime manufacturing process when you don’t know whether your trucks will be spending hours or even days at Dover or Tilbury? 27 YEARS OF THE SINGLE MARKET Ah yes, the Customs Union. What is it exactly, and how does it differ from the Single European Market? Mrs May seems to be suggesting that we can leave the European Union and still be part of the Customs Union. The European Research Group insists that we can’t, because that would be a complete sell-out of Britain’s ability to negotiate its own trade deals. Like Norway or Switzerland, it argues, we’d be paying into the EU’s coffers without any right to representation. We’d be forced to obey European laws without any ability to query them, or to distance ourselves from any part of them. The difference between the two is more than we might think, and not just because some people are trying to tell us otherwise. The Single European Market, which Britain acceded to in 1992, is a trading bloc which does all
