The UK will have no say in EU policy after Brexit, yet still be governed by it

If the UK is to leave the EU but remain in the single market and the customs union it will neither be able to restrict migration from EU and other single market nation states, nor sign trade deals with America, China, India or anyone else

Michel Barnier, Europe's Chief Brexit negotiator (EPA)

If what Michel Barnier, the chief negotiator of the European Commission, says is correct – and there is no reason to doubt his sincerity – the UK will find itself in a uniquely disadvantaged position in its “transition period” after leaving the European Union. The EU and the UK, it is argued by Barnier, should minimise the disruption to trade, industry and commerce by the UK retaining membership of the Single Market and the EU customs union, whilst giving up any political role in the decision making processes of the EU. The UK will become a “third party” in the EU’s jargon, or a “vassal state” in the more lurid terminology of arch-Brexiteers such as Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Whatever it is labelled, it will be a deeply unsatisfactory relationship – the British who have historically been rule makers rather than rule takers, reduced to the sort of status – as an objective fact – that the British Colonial Office used to exercise over the fate British crown colonies and other dependencies (including Malta and Cyprus, now full EU member states and soon-to be part-governors of Britain). The UK would become, between March 2019 and December 2020 the European Union’s first dependent territory. This is often dignified by the notion that it is the same status as enjoyed by Norway, where these sorts of procedures have prevailed since the 1970s, and are known, a little quaintly now, as “government by fax”, after the way EU directives in which Norway has no say land in government offices to be implemented by the Norwegian civil service. Britain might be asked its views “by invitation”. Nigel Farage will no longer be present to put them more forcefully in the European Parliament.

Yet the Norwegians in fact have a superior relationship to the EU than the one Britain is destined to have. For Norway is outside the EU but is a member of the single market (the European Economic Area) but not of the customs union, and so can conclude trade treaties freely with other nations. Much the same goes for Iceland. Contrariwise, nations such as Turkey and Moldova are in the EU customs union, but not the single market, so they (and the EU) retain their freedom to restrict freedom of movement of people, for example.

If the UK is to leave the EU but remain in the single market and the customs union it will neither be able to restrict migration from EU and other single market nation states, nor sign trade deals with America, China, India or anyone else. No other nation state in Europe is in this unenviable position, with the possible exception of the Vatican, Monaco, San Marino and Andorra (though they are all in the eurozone, and the pontiff has his own deep and special relationship with a higher authority than Jean-Claude Juncker).

Switzerland would be closest to the UK, but is a member of the Schengen area, so guaranteeing visa-free movement with the EU, and of the European free trade area, which at least gives it some say in the policies of fellow Efta members Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein. The United Kingdom, sixth biggest economy in the world, wouldn’t even have that level of formal influence.

As President Trump put in his own inimitable way to Piers Morgan, in his ITV interview, the 2019-2020 transition means: “You have a very strong lack of being able to do things.”

The argument, then, between the soft Brexit and hard Brexit factions among the Brexit camp – which represents more or less the pro- and anti-Boris factions of the Conservative Party – is about two things. First, whether becoming a “vassal state” or EU colony or “third party” for a period of a little less than two years is “worth it” in order to reach the chimera of unfettered sovereignty.

For some, the less swivel-eyed some might say, it is a short interregnum in Britain’s long island story, and the pain of this humiliation will eventually pass. Only those with a truly ideological, near-religious zeal in their mission to expunge this land of the European Court of Justice might be prepared to bring down their own government in protests.

The more substantial argument is between those who see the “vassal state” solution as the best that can be made of the disastrous decision taken by referendum in 2016, a price worth paying for Britain’s continued access to the largest and most prosperous economic zone in the world, with all that entails for employment, investment and living standards.

This is where the fault line on Europe currently lies in the Conservative Party. For if, as Philip Hammond said at Davos, conditions for post-Brexit Britain will only be modestly different to those obtaining today, then many in his own party, emotionally driven, will see this as a “betrayal”. The question of “transition”, then, really raises the question: “Transition to what?”

Theresa May and her remaining loyal supporters are caught in the crossfire of an increasingly bitter civil war in the Tory party, the acrid smell of a dying Government overwhelming all else. May, as ever, doesn’t know what to do. Perhaps there is nothing that can be done. Britain is in precisely the same quandary as she and the country as a whole has been in since June 2016, and indeed more or less since the end of the Second World War: what will Britain’s relationship with its closest friends and neighbours be? Europe, at least, has some answer to that.