Any EU trade deal could come unstuck over the UK’s wish to have its cake and eat it

Editorial: The government remains stubbornly determined to the idea of a free trade agreement but with no meaningful binding commitments to ensure a level playing field

Johnson’s previously breezy tone is already shifting (AP)

No sooner have the hangovers from Friday night dissipated than a weary nation discovers that the prime minister didn’t actually “get Brexit done” after all when the ersatz bongs of Big Ben rang out across Westminster.

Welcome back, then, to Brexit and to the trickier bits of disentangling the UK from a half-century or so of economic integration. The withdrawal agreement, which took two general elections and two prime ministers to get through, was the easy part.

Time to sober up. The ministerial line is already changing. Where once there was breezy talk about a new UK-EU economic relationship being the easiest thing to achieve, now ministers openly admit of checks and border controls. Only a few weeks ago Boris Johnson toured the country promising a “fantastic” trade deal with “our European friends”. Recently there has been a more sombre, less promising tone. The chancellor insists that the UK will diverge from EU rules where it sees fit. The word from Downing Street is that the whole point of Brexit is for the UK to take back control and make rules and laws for its own economic, social or environmental advantage. Michael Gove argues such obstacles to European trade are a price worth paying for the global opportunities afforded by Brexit.

There have been aggressive briefings about Brussels supposedly reneging on existing agreements, made in the UK-EU political declaration. A glance at the document, as our reporting proves, suggests the opposite, but the truth matters less and less in these debates. The declaration is of course not legally binding in any event.

The Irish prime minister now asks the British not to be petty and nationalistic, and the president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, politely reminds the British that they cannot enjoy all the advantages of the EU without accepting some obligations. She is not being listened to, or taken seriously. It does not feel like the deep and special relationship post-Brexit that had hoped been for. It sounds more like the early skirmishes in an economic war.

The debate is around a simple trade-off. The more access the UK is allowed to enjoy in EU markets, the more free movement British citizens and businesses have in the EU and the more cooperation there is on security, crime and other matters, the more the British will be expected to align and accept EU laws and regulations. It is a spectrum, and one area may be traded off with another – fishing access for financial services. But there will be no concessions without counter conversations. Most fundamentally the British will need to accept the principle of the “level playing field” as a constant obligation. It means the UK will find it difficult to out-compete Europe through deregulation.

If, say, the UK wanted to abolish the EU Working Time Directive and replace it with some supposedly equivalent law, the EU would need to be satisfied that it would in reality erode British workers’ rights and amount to “social dumping”. If it was so judged, then the EU would wish to level the playing field back up, and apply pressure on other areas to do so – say by withdrawing access for certain service sectors, or making access to Gibraltar harder, or tightening checks at the new economic border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Economic warfare and escalation would then easily ensue.

It need not be so. As the EU has long made clear, an ambitious free trade agreement across goods and services, with added security and political dimensions with the UK would be very welcome. It is sometimes called “Canada +” or “++” or “+++”, depending on how comprehensive it can be made, copying the shape of the recent EU-Canada deal. The British favour such an arrangement too, though the alternative of a looser model based on the 2008 EU-Australian Partnership Framework is being floated.

In any case, both sides accept that British membership of the EU customs union or the EU single market is not realistic. But the British remain stubbornly determined to the idea of a free trade agreement but with no meaningful binding commitments on the “level playing field”. The government claims it has no wish to erode labour laws, environmental protection or consumers’ interests – but who can say what any new post Brexit laws will mean. A Conservative can quite happily argue that new laws against strikes on the railways enhance an individual employee’s freedom to work and to extend the rights of passengers.

More crucially, even, it seems unlikely that this government would accept any “dynamic” alignment. So a new social chapter for the single market produced by the EU in a few years’ time, or a new set of banking rules, would not simply and automatically be transposed into British laws. The mooted solution to that is to have a series of sector-by-sector trade deals, with periodic reviews. This is how the Swiss, outside the union, run their complicated partial access to the EU single market. However, the EU is finding this unique arrangement, even with a relatively small neighbour, increasingly irksome. It will probably not be the answer for the UK, and certainly not by 31 December 2020 – the new cliff-edge date for a no-deal Brexit.

And so Brexit and the European question is far from over. From the very first British application to join the then European Community in 1961, through 47 years of mostly grumpily demanding membership, right through to the Brexit talks now, the abiding theme is that the British always wish to have their cake and eat it. This desire cannot ever be satisfied, logically or politically. It is a truth that the British are destined never to accept, and much further acrimony and disappointment awaits.