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The big picture

Maybe we should all start taking this “full Brexit” – or, as my colleague Dan Roberts called it – “train crash Brexit” idea seriously.

Or, of course, maybe not.

Theresa May gave what many said was her clearest hint yet that Britain will leave the single market when it exits the EU, telling Sophy Ridge on Sky News that immigration control (incompatible with single market membership) would be her top priority and that she was not interested in keeping “bits of membership of the EU”.

The prime minister said she wanted “UK companies to be able to trade in and within the EU and European companies to operate and trade in the UK”, but stressed that Brexit was about “getting the right relationship” with the EU from outside the bloc:

Often people talk as if somehow we are leaving the EU but we still want to kind of keep bits of membership of the EU. We are leaving. We are coming out. We will ... have control of our borders, control of our laws.

A report from the thinktank Civitas gave the “full Brexit” idea legs, saying that while without a trade deal UK firms might face £5bn on their exports, Britain could levy £13bn on EU imports – leaving £8.8bn for an industrial policy including research credits and cash for disadvantaged regions.

But May being May, no sooner had everyone responded to what they thought she’d said – including sterling, which dipped to its lowest level since October – than she denied it, insisting on Monday it was wrong to predict a “hard Brexit”:

I’m tempted to say the people who are getting it wrong are those who print things saying I’m talking about a hard Brexit, that a hard Brexit is inevitable ... I don’t accept the terms hard or soft Brexit.

All this followed an already turbulent week in which Britain’s highly regarded (in the EU and the Foreign Office, at any rate) man in Brussels, Sir Ivan Rogers, resigned, accusing the government of “muddled thinking” and “ill-founded arguments”.

Rogers, who reportedly criticised May to her predecessor, David Cameron, before resigning and warned of the danger of a “disorderly Brexit” (in which the UK walks away from the EU without any kind of deal), was promptly replaced by another career diplomat, Sir Tim Barrow.

The view from Europe

At the start of the year in which Britain will, if all goes according to May’s plan, trigger article 50 and begin the process of leaving the EU, Joseph Muscat, prime minister of Malta – which holds the EU’s rotating presidency – said the bloc had never been more unified than in its policy towards Brexit.

I spoke and visited basically all other 26 member states and there’s a ... convergence on the attitude towards Brexit. I have never seen such a convergence within the European family.

The European commission paid tribute to Rogers, saying it regretted “the loss of a very professional, very knowledgeable, while not always easy interlocutor and diplomat” as EU observers predicted his departure would be a major loss for the UK.

Marine Le Pen, the anti-EU Front National leader who is widely expected to make it to the second round of France’s presidential elections this year, said that if she won she would demand control of France’s borders, laws and economic and monetary policy from Brussels, and then call an in/out referendum.

In news that will have little impact on the UK’s exit talks unless he actually wins (in which case he will resign as the European parliament’s chief Brexit negotiator), the veteran federalist and former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt said he would run for the presidency of the 751-seat assembly. He is though unlikely to get very far.

Meanwhile, back in Westminster

With May’s government visibly struggling over its approach to Brexit, surely this would be the time for the main opposition party to take full advantage? Not when that party is Labour, seemingly.

Interviewed on Sky News on Sunday immediately before May, Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson made the slightly eye-opening claim that it was unfair to be asked what his party’s position was on immigration after leaving the EU.

Watson did argue this was mainly because Labour – along with the rest of the country – still has no idea what sort of post-Brexit future May is seeking to chart. But his comments underline the fact that Labour is divided on what it is seeking from the Brexit process, especially over the free movement of EU nationals.

While Watson indicated he would support some new if undefined controls over immigration – a stance also espoused by Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer – that position is by no means unanimous, with the party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, still refusing to endorse any limitations on free movement.

At least the Liberal Democrats have a united front on this, though. Well, not quite any more. Party grandee Vince Cable has said he now believes a “more rational” post-Brexit immigration policy will involve controls on movements from the EU.

“There is no great argument of liberal principle for free EU movement; the economics is debatable and the politics is conclusively hostile,” Cable wrote in the New Statesman. (A Lib Dem spokesman was brutal: “Vince’s views are his own; he is not a member of parliament and does not speak for the party.”)

You should also know:

Read these:

Leading Brexiter Michael Gove argues at BrexitCentral that Britain must get on and leave the EU as cleanly and quickly as possible because “the sooner we leave, the more we can do to deliver the change people voted for”. Anything less would be a “fake Brexit”, he says:

Those supporters of the EU who still haven’t come to terms with the referendum result ... want to complicate and obfuscate the process in the hope that the public appetite for change will dissipate so they can secure a relationship with the EU which is as close as possible to the status quo. That’s why we mustn’t miss the wood for the trees. That’s why we need to deliver a Full Brexit, not settle for Fake Brexit.

In the New Statesman, George Easton says 2017 will be the year the other EU states take back control of Brexit, showing up the sovereignty conferred by the referendum for the illusion he believes it is:



It was Britain that voted to leave, but it is Europe that will decide how it does ... For this reason, Westminster, rather than obsessing over what the UK wants, should devote greater attention to what Europe wants. The irony of Brexit is that the internal affairs of EU member states have never mattered more: in 2017 it is not Britain that will take back control – it is Europe.

And for Brexit aficionados, Alex Barker’s anatomy of a Brexit transition deal – why it is necessary, what it must contain, when it must be agreed, how it could become the crunch issue, and why Rogers quit over it – in the Financial Times (paywall) is essential reading.

And if you’re in need of a little light relief after all that, my Guardian colleague Phil Daoust devised a splendidly tragicomic A-Z of Brexit that you can read right here. A brief sample to whet the appetite:



Ja Obsolete German expression. Overwhelming majority Previously known as a “slim majority”. World Trade Organisation A remote and unwieldy multinational bureaucracy – but our kind of remote and unwieldy multinational bureaucracy.

Tweet of the week:

Peter pretty much nailing it here ...