David Davis tells Commons’ Brexit select committee there are still ‘quite a few decisions to be made’ as Labour gradually shuffles towards a coherent strategy

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The big picture

This is the last Guardian weekly Brexit briefing of the year (we’ll be back in the first week of January). It’s almost six months since the referendum. And still no one knows what “Brexit means Brexit” will actually mean.

Appearing before the Commons’ new Brexit select committee last week, David Davis said there were still “quite a few decisions to be made” about the government plan, which would be published as soon as possible but “certainly not next month”.

The Brexit secretary said he was supremely confident the talks, which he apparently hopes will combine the article 50 negotiations and discussion of a future trade deal, could be wrapped up in 18 months.

That’s despite the fact that, by his own admission, pretty much “everything is negotiable” except Britain taking full control of immigration: in or out of the customs union (there are four broad options), transitional deal (only if necessary and once the future relationship is clear), payment for market access (maybe).

(Theresa May, reporting back to the Commons on her brief trip to Brussels last week – of which more below – said even less, if that’s possible, although she did repeat her wish that a deal guaranteeing the rights of EU nationals living in Britain and vice versa be agreed “early on”).

Meanwhile, the House of Lords released half a dozen reports, some highlighting potentially alarming consequences of Brexit – and of the government’s continuing uncertainty about what it means.

The peers said an interim deal on single market access was urgently needed to prevent the loss of tens of thousands of City jobs, and warned new immigration laws could cost London its lead in financial services and start-up technologies.

They added that the government had also underestimated the shortcomings in its expertise and the relative weakness of its negotiating position, and was frankly naive to expect a “free lunch” in trade negotiations:

The notion that a country can have complete regulatory sovereignty while engaging in comprehensive free trade with partners is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of free trade.

Helena Kennedy, the chair of the Lords’ subcommittee looking into acquired rights, warned of “deep anxiety” among EU citizens in the UK and British nationals living on the continent – and called for a unilateral British undertaking to immediately guarantee the rights of the former.

The government will presumably now get a brief respite for the Christmas break. But the calls for greater clarity – and for a few fundamental decisions to be taken – will return, louder and more urgent, in the New Year.

With Theresa May saying she is determined to trigger article 50 before the end of March, the first three months of 2017 won’t be comfortable.



The view from Europe

The view from Europe was perhaps never clearer than in a rather sad video from last week’s Brussels summit in which EU 27 leaders laughed, chatted and embraced, while May appeared alone, friendless and with no one to talk to.

The image showed once more that the EU 27 have other things on their mind besides Brexit, which featured so high up their agenda that they devoted all of 20 minutes to discussing it at an evening dinner to which May was not invited.

To be fair, that’s partly because there’s not a lot they can discuss until article 50 is triggered and the UK says what it wants. Once that happens, many of them reckon – according to the UK’s ambassador to Brussels, Sir Ivan Rogers – that a final EU-UK trade deal could take a decade or more to negotiate, and still fail.

An influential German official, meanwhile, said it was “a little bit naive” and “very ambitious” to expect, as some in the government appear to do, that a trade deal can be concluded within two years.

Meanwhile, back in Westminster

As so often, Westminster’s Brexit week consisted largely of Labour gradually shuffling towards a coherent strategy while government ministers tried to explain as little as possible.

David Davis’s appearance before the Brexit select committee (see above) was a fine example of the latter. On the former, the main Labour contribution came a few miles to the east, where his shadow minister Keir Starmer chose the London HQ of Bloomberg – scene of David Cameron’s 2013 announcement that he would hold an EU referendum – to outline his party’s position.

It was a tough brief. Labour’s stance on free movement is, to say the least, a broad church, and the best previous explanation of how the party planned to hold the government’s feet to the fire while simultaneously promising to back an article 50 vote whatever happened was by applying “moral pressure”.

But, as you might expect from a former barrister and director of public prosecutions, Starmer gave it a good go. Labour had to be the party offering a consensus way between the government’s push towards a hard Brexit and the Lib Dems’ appeal to disaffected remainers, he insisted.

This was, he said, “the battle of our times”, and Labour had to do its best to shape Brexit policy using “real opposition in real time”. There are still flaws, but it was the best explanation of the party’s policy yet. Just in time for Christmas, too.

You should also know:

Read these:

In the Observer, Nick Cohen has an eloquent go at the anger and aggressiveness of some Leavers, the “sore winners... They have the victory, the field is theirs, but still they scream bitter abuse” at Remainers:

Why are the Leave campaigners so angry? Because they fear the demagogic rage and charlatan tricks they have used against others will one day be used against them.

Andrew Rawnsley reckons a long-drawn-out exit – a “half-in, half-out deal” – would probably suit Britain best, but no one can yet bring themselves to admit it:

It would be devilishly difficult to negotiate, but it wouldn’t be inconsistent with the will of a people almost evenly divided by the referendum ... Theresa May probably intuits already that is where she will end up. She just doesn’t dare say so yet.

And Aditya Chakrabortty says a “Brexit betrayal” is coming and asks what Leave voters will do when “the broken promises of Brexit” start to pile up. He points to “a multitude of frustrations, pushed through a binary vote” and wonders:

What happens when [Leave] voters realise that their vote for change – however loosely defined – means more of the same? When that call to take back control ends up with them playing the same old captive market, there to be ripped off by multinational capital. Who will take the blame then?

Tweet of the week:

Happy Christmas, one and all, courtesy of Nick Brown MP. See you next year...