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The big picture

The more they insist they are all singing from the same Brexit hymn-sheet, the less it seems to look like it. Especially when the prime minister is on holiday.

Jeremy Hunt is the latest minister to claim the cabinet is “absolutely united” behind a gradual, business-friendly Brexit that avoids – among other things – a sudden end to EU immigration.

Along with Amber Rudd, Damian Green and other “gradualists”, the health secretary agrees with Philip Hammond that for some time after it formally leaves the bloc in March 2019, the UK’s relationship with the EU needs to be “similar in many ways” to what it is now.

With Theresa May away, the chancellor spoke last week of a “broad consensus” on the need for a two- to three-year period – possibly until the 2022 election – during which the UK would accept free movement, be part of the single market and refrain from striking trade deals with other countries.

But that hardly chimes with the cabinet’s Brexit hardliners, headed by the Brexit secretary, David Davis, and international trade secretary Liam Fox. Fox says he was not party to any discussion – and certainly didn’t agree a position – on the nature of a transitional deal:



We made it clear that control of our own borders was one of the elements we wanted in the referendum and unregulated free movement would seem to me not to keep faith with that decision.

The former Brexit minister David Jones said the cabinet gradualists were taking advantage of May’s absence to “go on manoeuvres”, while former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith urged all concerned to shut up or risk making negotiations with the EU even more difficult.

Hammond is also believed to have told business leaders he wanted a simple, off-the-shelf model for the transitional period – something Downing Street promptly ruled out, saying the precise “implementation model” was “up for negotiation”.

In all, such clear and unresolved tensions within the cabinet suggest the government still does not have a firm idea of what form it wants the UK’s departure from the EU to take. And there are now barely 18 months left on the clock.

The view from Europe

That is, at any rate, Michel Barnier’s impression. The EU commission’s chief Brexit negotiator told ambassadors to the bloc last week that article 50 negotiations were faltering because the UK’s position on many issues remains unclear.

Without “sufficient progress” on the key Brexit topics of citizens’ rights, the divorce bill and the border in Ireland, the EU will not widen negotiations to include the future relationship, which Britain wants to begin discussing by October. An EU official said:

Barnier expressed concerns that sufficient progress in October looked difficult now, mainly because Britain has no position on finances, but also because they don’t have positions on other issues as well.

Joseph Muscat, the prime minister of Malta, which has held the EU’s rotating presidency for the past six months, said Brexit may never happen:



I’m not saying the Brits have made a mistake, but the mood is changing. Doubt is creeping in. People see that their fundamentally valid vote has been given an answer that does not offer a solution. It would be good if a political leader in the UK stands up and is courageous enough to address this new situation. Someone who says: let’s put the Brexit end-deal to a popular vote.

Meanwhile, back in Westminster

If there’s one consolation for the Conservatives amid their endless splits over the best approach to Brexit, it is that Labour seem almost equally and hopelessly split.

Last week the party’s shadow trade minister, Barry Gardiner, wrote a comment piece for the Guardian explaining that departing the EU must inevitably mean also exiting the bloc’s single market and customs union.

To not do so would leave the UK “a vassal state”, and would be seen by pro-Brexiters as “a con”.

Everyone clear? Well, yes, apart from the fact it differed starkly from the official party position of focusing on outcomes, not mechanics, and leaving open the possibility of staying in the customs union and single market, however unlikely this seems.

Gardiner’s article prompted condemnation from the Labour MP Heidi Alexander, who complained that his view “could have come straight out of Tory central office”.

Then at the weekend, Labour grandees including the former leader Neil Kinnock and former shadow justice secretary Charlie Falconer called for the party to adopt a softer variant of Brexit.

Where will the battle end? No one knows. But at least Labour have the relative luxury of doing all this in opposition.

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Read this

In the New York Times Jenni Russell offers a blistering and well-referenced critique, which argues that Britain’s blind and wholly misplaced belief in its own exceptionalism means Brexit can never be anything but a disaster:

We are the nation of empire, whose ancestors once controlled a quarter of the globe; we are the mother of parliaments; we stood alone against Hitler; we have not been conquered for a thousand years. We feel remarkable. The Brexiteers convinced enough of the electorate that we needed only to be set free from Europe to become a proud, swashbuckling, dominant and richer country again. This promise is a stunning misunderstanding of who we are, what we are capable of and where we stand in the world. We don’t have the skills, the manufacturing base, the drive or the productivity we would need to take off as an independent nation. Britain is not an economic powerhouse waiting to be liberated. We are a country of mediocre education and limited skills, whose preening vanity has prevented us from seeing our failings. Our membership in the EU is not a set of restraints; it is what has been propping us up.

In the Guardian, Polly Toynbee takes Labour to task for not exploiting the government’s Brexit confusion – but instead copying it:

Labour should be smirking in clover at all this Tory disarray. It should be preparing for an all-out assault on the eight Brexit bills, as the party in power puts the nation’s economy in peril. But just as this prize is within their grasp, the band-aid on Labour’s own splits is coming unstuck … Labour’s voters and its large membership are overwhelmingly pro-EU, pro-single market and customs union: eight out of 10 members are in favour of staying as close as possible. Follow their lead on this clear-cut question of gravest national importance, so Labour fights unequivocally to do all it can to save Britain from this Tory-made calamity. Labour supporters will find it desperately frustrating if their party needlessly sinks into Tory quicksands.

Tweet of the week:

The BBC’s Nick Robinson sums up the problem with those cabinet Brexit divisions: