FT /Martin Wolf — The two speeches made by Mrs May at the party conference last week make a hard Brexit by far the most probable outcome. That is so for both procedural and substantive reasons.
The procedural reason is that she has decided to trigger the EU’s Article 50 exit procedure by no later than March next year. This would give the initiative to the other members and focus the negotiations on a divorce, to be finalised within just two years. Given the complexity of EU decision-making, this is too short for negotiating a bespoke deal.
The substantive reason why a hard Brexit is overwhelmingly likely is that the prime minister has also ruled out all but such a bespoke deal.
In her words, “We are going to be a fully independent, sovereign country, a country that is no longer part of a political union with supranational institutions that can override national parliaments and courts … So it is not going to a ‘Norway model’. It’s not going to be a ‘Switzerland model’. It is going to be an agreement between an independent, sovereign United Kingdom and the EU.”
Unwise words have consequences. The UK government’s extreme goals are now clear. Investors have duly marked down the value of the country’s assets in the simplest way, by selling the pound.
The government would then learn the limits of sovereignty in an open economy. The views of Philip Hammond, chancellor of the exchequer, who reminded his party last week that the British people did not vote on June 23 “to become poorer, or less secure”, might then count for more, and those of the Brexiters in the cabinet for less. In a crisis, the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
Triggering Article 50 without parliamentary approval might be impossible. It surely ought to be impossible. By a thin margin the country voted for some kind of Brexit. But the government has no mandate for the rather extreme version it is choosing. Moreover, Brexiters insist that their goal is to restore parliamentary sovereignty. Why then does the government plan to ignore parliament when these decisions are taken?
What drove Leavers was, we are also told, “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK”. The currency markets demonstrate the emptiness of that principle. Britain’s EU partners are about to do the same. The premise of the Leave campaign was false: a host of decisions that affect the UK will always be taken outside it. But this truth is unlikely to stop the train towards a complete Brexit from departing on its timetabled journey. Stopping it would take a miracle, or rather a crisis. Is that likely? No. Is it possible? Yes.
