By insisting that it wants to keep both immigration controls and free trade, Britain will have a difficult time negotiating an easy exit from the European Union (EU), whose members insist that free movement of goods and people is fundamental to the single market. Nonetheless, this week, Britain announced that it will formally give notice on March 29 of its intention to leave the EU.
Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative government will become the first ever to invoke Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon in what will be a fraught process. It will be all the more difficult because the mechanisms for first agreeing to the terms and then implementing the departure have never been tested. So neither side will have a clear guide for the decision-making process. But in addition to its departure from the EU, Britain will also be anxious to negotiate a new relationship with the EU, where it has spent 40 years developing huge amounts of trade and economic benefits, as well as major social and security processes, all of which Britain should not want to see crumble into nothing.
May’s challenge is that regardless of her dramatic speeches in London, which offered good headlines to the British newspapers, the real negotiation will be with 27 other European countries who will not want to make it easy for Britain. And she will be fighting on two fronts because she has refused to develop a national consensus in Britain on the meaning of Brexit. Foolish rhetoric like “it will be a red, white and blue Brexit” did not help anyone understand what she planned, but it did make clear that May has made a priority of immigration over trade.
By playing entirely to the extreme wing of her own party and giving them control of what Brexit might entail, she has ignored large swathes of public and political opinion, which could have helped her manage a calmer process.
Instead, May has chosen to tackle Brexit in the most confrontational manner possible. She has not reached out to some of the more thoughtful sections of her own party who are deeply concerned over the gratuitous damage that her focus on immigration will do. She has refused to plan a cross-party consensus with what is left of the Labour Party, or the Liberal Democrats or Scottish Nationalists. By going it alone, she bears the full responsibility for the mess that she will create.
