Ministerial speeches on Brexit seem to be a bit like buses. We wait months for one to shed a bit more light on the UK’s negotiating stance, and then they all turn up at once. On Tuesday it was David Davis’s turn to visit a European city and set out the next steps on the “road to Brexit”.

I’m sure his Cabinet colleagues were delighted to hear about a lock-in at Chequers at the end of this week, set to last until they finally agree a position for the Brexit talks. A unified Cabinet is now more important than ever if the Brexit divisions, which the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, tried to bridge last week, are to be overcome. Without it, debates in Westminster and beyond about the single market, the customs union, divergence, tariffs and non-tariff barriers will just go on and on, in ever-decreasing circles.

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Successfully delivering Brexit has, in truth, always been about who would be honest enough to set out the compromises needed to actually get the UK to leave. Davis’s speech finally laid out one of those, and offered more clarity on what Brexit can’t deliver if the government really is to keep its “global Britain” promise. The key line is this: “ The future of standards and regulations – the building blocks of free trade – is increasingly global.” UK businesses won’t be relieved of the mythical EU regulations and standards that parts of our media have gone on and on about for decades, because many of them are already global– and in fact, as the secretary of state said, these serve consumers, workers and, in some cases, our environment very well.

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As reality bites, it is becoming clearer that those who voted leave because they wanted to pull up the drawbridge on the rest of the world, and because they believed that we could revert to an era when only the UK parliament made our laws, will not be able to get their way. Full marks to Davis for being pretty straight on this and putting an end to the dreams of some that Brexit would herald a low- or minimal-regulatory nirvana.

Davis’s remarks lift the lid on how the UK intends to approach a key part of leaving the single market

Davis makes the case, certainly, for intelligent regulation that supports the sectors and industries the UK wants to be expert in and which the industrial strategy has focused on. He also makes the case for us developing regulations that others, including our EU neighbours, will want to adopt, envisaging “continuing to work with other European countries to drive new standards”. This has already happened in financial services, where the UK has often led the way in shaping regulations because of our sophisticated markets.

Now the financial services sector has taken matters into its own hands, thinking through how Brexit can be shaped through the work of the International Regulatory Strategy Group. It proposes a system of mutual recognition, and suggests ways in which disputes about how regulations are judged can be decided. I hope the government takes this on board.

The group’s work is recognition that potentially one of the most damaging things for those trading across EU borders is the reimposition of non-tariff barriers such as product standards. As the government’s analyses reveal, there would be quite a difference in economic impact between something like access to the European Economic Area or a free trade agreement, and reverting to World Trade Organisation arrangements.

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Of course, mutual recognition and the desire to be a global standard-setter get us only so far in providing certainty for businesses and citizens. Tariffs matter, and that is why the government’s silence on the difference between a customs arrangement and a customs union is so significant. Those who have thought long and hard about the Irish border issue, and read the December 2017 text on phase one of the negotiations, agree that the regulatory alignment mentioned there must lead to some kind of customs deal.

Those who now say, in the interests of silencing the border questions, that the Good Friday agreement hasn’t achieved its purpose, are being deeply cavalier about the peace and security of people in Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. That really is a case of ideology prevailing over sense and practicality – something the prime minister, in her Munich security speech, seemed to want to avoid.

Davis’s remarks lift the lid on how the UK intends to approach a key part of dealing with Brexit and leaving the single market – by asking for a system of mutual recognition. We don’t yet know whether that will apply to all sectors. And, of course, putting a proposal on the table is not the same as securing agreement. But it is a valuable start and a welcome bit of clarity on the direction of travel.

• Nicky Morgan is the Conservative MP for Loughborough