Theresa May will never go ahead with her Brexit plan – it offers all the EU negatives with none of the positives

Chequers leaves us with one foot in and one foot out of the EU. It doesn’t deliver the referendum result, take back control or bring us the benefits of Brexit

There are two ironies about the prime minister’s Chequers “deal”.

First, there will never be a deal on the basis of Chequers because the country has practically become united in opposing it. It doesn’t find support in the Conservative Party, opposition parties, the country or even the EU.

The second irony is that even if a Chequers-type agreement were possible, it would be inferior to every other option: worse than a “no-deal” and far worse than a free trade deal. It’d make us rule takers rather than rule makers and it would be the worst possible outcome from the negotiations for our country, our democracy, the Conservative Party and the millions who voted to leave the EU in 2016.

One of the core elements of Chequers is that we would have to sign up to what’s called a “common rulebook”. Essentially, we would leave the EU in March next year whilst at the same time signing up to the very rules that caused people to vote to leave in the first place. And this set of common rules, regulations and taxes would not be British rules; they’d be the EU’s rules.

Worse still, unlike now where we can help draft the rules or even veto them if they don’t suit us, we wouldn’t be able to do that in future. We’d be signing up to a set of rules whilst giving up our seat at the negotiating table and removing our stake in helping to draft the laws that bind us. We would be taking even more dictation than ever from Brussels.

This is why even the uber-Remainers can’t support Chequers. It is plain – even to them – that Chequers leaves us with one foot in and one foot out of the EU. It doesn’t deliver the referendum result, take back control or bring us the benefits of Brexit. It chops us off at the knees, abandons any control we have over the regulation of our domestic economy and it will have major consequences for our external trade and prosperity.

The other big problem with Chequers is that by tying ourselves to the letter of EU law in the form of the “common rulebook”, we will have forgone any chance we might have had in developing our own, independent trade and regulatory policy – one of the huge “prizes” Brexit was supposed to bring about.

We will be unable to pursue trade deals with non-EU countries and we would not be permitted to import goods from states that have equally high standards but slightly different laws to what might be found in the EU’s set of rules.

The strange thing about all this is that there’s a perfectly workable, much better alternative. The EU has already offered us a Canada-type, zero tariffs trade agreement, covering all sectors. For some reason, No 10 has completely ignored this offer and hascome up with this mystical recreation of the EU’s single market in the form of Chequers.

But most of all, Chequers would be two fingers up to democracy: 17.4 million people voted to leave in 2016, parliament voted by 498 to 114 to leave the EU and 84 per cent of people voted for parties in the 2017 election who promised to give effect to Brexit.

If we try to delude people into thinking they’ve got Brexit when all we’ve really delivered is a cosmetic repackaging of the status quo, we won’t be able to look the electorate in the eye.

I am passionately of the view that we can build a stronger and more prosperous future outside the EU. The British people voted to take back control of our laws, borders, money and trade and to see a fundamental change to the way that we are governed.

We must keep faith with our voters, our democracy, the Conservative Party and the country.

Maria Caulfield is the Conservative MP for Lewes