If you give notice to your landlord or your employer, you trigger a process which, if you don’t do anything else, will leave you homeless or jobless after a given period. Furthermore, even if you do take some action, the decision is still partly in the hands of others. You need to find a house you like and a landlord that will let to you or a job you like and an employer that will have you. For this reason, most people don’t give notice to their landlords without having another home to go to or notice to their employers without having another job lined up. The only people who do are those who have enough money behind them to give them other options. Or those who are extremely reckless.

Something similar applies to the triggering of Article 50. As we understand it at the moment, once triggered, Article 50 is irrevocable. It sets in train a process at the end of which, if we don’t do anything else, the UK drops out of the EU with no trade deals. That really would not be a good place to be. As the CBI concluded:

Relying on WTO rules alone would not work for the UK. Any limited advantages are easily outweighed by the significant costs to the economy as a whole.

This isn’t Remainer scaremongering. If anything, the warnings from some in the Leave camp are even more blood-curdling. The disruption to trade in goods and services from tariffs and non-tariff barriers would be horrendous. Martin Stanley, a former civil servant, explains the impact of non-tariff barriers here.

[T]he growth of ‘just in time’ manufacturing means that many firms are still very concerned that their businesses on both sides of the UK/EU border might experience significant post-Brexit impediments and delays in ports and at customs posts. I understand that one major bank has estimated that – if the UK were to lose unfettered access to the Single Market – the consequential non-tariff barriers could impose a cost on exporters equivalent to a tariff of 10-15%.

Of course, it is in everyone’s interests to reach some sort of trade agreement before this happens. The other EU countries don’t want to see their trade disrupted any more than we do. However, while a failure to reach an agreement after 2 years would be damaging for the rest of the EU, it would be catastrophic for the UK. If, on 1 April 2019, there is no deal, the rest of the EU would still have its trade agreements with the other countries in place and most of its cross-border supply chains would be intact. The UK would leave with nothing. Not even independent WTO membership.

The ‘they need us more than we need them’ argument, often trotted out by Brexiters, doesn’t stack up either. When it comes to trade, size matters. As this chart from the Economist shows, the EU’s exports to the UK are a relatively small percentage of its total exports, whereas the UK’s exports to the EU account for around half its total. Tariffs would therefore affect a relatively small proportion of France and Germany’s trade while they would hit a much larger proportion of ours.

The consequences of a failure to reach a deal after two years would be much more damaging for the UK. The time pressure therefore puts us at a disadvantage. The closer it gets to the deadline, the more attractive even a bad deal will look when compared to the alternative. Being under time pressure in negotiations is never a good place to be. If counterparties know you need to do a deal by a certain time, they are more likely to hold out and wait for you to blink. Effectively, it will be the UK against 27 other countries and the clock.

The LSE’s Thomas Sampson spelt this out a couple of weeks ago:

Bargaining power affects the outcome of trade negotiations. Countries that have little bargaining power are less likely to achieve their objectives. Unfortunately, the UK is starting from a weaker position than the EU. Because UK-EU trade accounts for a much larger share of the UK’s economy than the EU’s economy, the UK needs a deal more than the EU does. The weakness of the UK’s position is exacerbated by the two-year time limit on exit negotiations under Article 50. As the two-year limit approaches, the UK will become increasingly desperate to obtain an agreement. There are two steps that the UK should take to improve its bargaining position. First, delay triggering Article 50 until the government has decided its post-Brexit objectives and EU leaders are ready to start negotiations. Theresa May’s commitment to invoke Article 50 in early 2017 before the French and German elections weakens the UK’s position because the EU will not be able to participate in meaningful negotiations until after these elections. Second, the UK’s immediate objective after invoking Article 50 should be to neutralise the two-year time limit by agreeing a transition arrangement to govern UK-EU trade relations during the period between when the UK leaves the EU and when a longer-term agreement is concluded. Returning to the principle that you only get what you give, the UK needs to decide what it is willing to offer the EU in return for a transition agreement.

Agreeing an interim solution before we start negotiations would remove the time pressure. If no agreement was reached after two years, the UK would leave the EU but stay in the single market until such time as a deal can be agreed. That would at least avoid the severe disruption to trade and give everyone a bit more time to think. This option has been advocated by, among others, the former permanent undersecretary at the FCO, the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for European Reform and professors Damian Chalmers and Anand Menon. Most people who have been involved in trade negotiations don’t believe that the negotiations can be completed in 2 years anyway. Even the chancellor doesn’t. Surely an interim deal that lets us continue negotiations at a sensible pace would be better for everyone.

Negotiation theory 101 says you should be clear about your fallback position, or Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement (BATNA), before going into any negotiation. At the moment, the UK’s BATNA is WTO only, which would be a disaster. An interim agreement would give us a better fallback position. It would be very unwise to start the negotiations without one. The UK’s strongest card is that, at the moment, it has control over the timing of the exit process. Starting that process is not something we should be bounced into either by ideologically motivated Brexiters or by those in other EU countries who are keen to be rid of us.

Against this background, the Brexit policies of the opposition parties make no sense. Jo Maugham has written an excellent piece taking Labour’s incoherent stance apart. As he says, waving Article 50 through removes any chance parliament might have to influence the deal. Once Article 50 is triggered, John McDonnell can bang on all he likes about red lines and moral pressure but it won’t make a scrap of difference. The country’s fate will be in the hands of government negotiators and their EU counterparts. Parliament will be irrelevant.

Almost as illogical is the Liberal Democrats’ policy which seems to be to vote for Article 50 with the condition that the government agrees to a second referendum on the final deal. By then it will be too late. With the clock running down, the British people will be offered the choice between whatever is on the table and no deal at all. To go back to my housing analogy, that’s like giving notice to your landlord then saying to your family, ‘We’ve got 3 days left in this house. We can either take this hovel we have been offered or be out on the street. What do you reckon, folks?’

No, the time to put up a fight on the terms of Brexit is now. If MPs want to determine the shape of Britain’s exit from the EU, they need to do so before Article 50 is triggered.

Of course, it might be that Article 50 isn’t irrevocable after all. The Lisbon Treaty is deliberately vague. But this raises another question. If we understand so little about what Article 50 does, should MPs be voting for it at all? Shouldn’t they get legal clarification on what Article 50 actually means before they vote for it?

MPs have a duty to act in the national interest as well as considering what they believe their constituents’ wishes to be. That’s what representative democracy is about. Before triggering Article 50, they need to know three things:

Whether or not Article 50 is revocable; That there is a fallback deal in place should the negotiations extend beyond 2 years; What the government’s starting position will be.

For MPs to vote for Article 50 without establishing these facts would be utterly reckless and a dereliction of duty. It would set the country on a highly uncertain and potentially dangerous course. History will judge them harshly if they do.

Update

There’s a further problem. It’s not even clear whether trade negotiations can be run in parallel with negotiations about the UK’s exit from the EU. The EU trade commissioner has insisted that it is against EU law for any trade agreement to be negotiated until after the UK leaves the EU. All that can be negotiated in the two years following Article 50, she argues, is the terms of the divorce, the withdrawal agreement covering short-term issues such as the relocation of EU agencies based in the UK, the rights of EU and UK citizens and cross border security arrangements. (There’s a detailed discussion of the difference between the withdrawal agreement and the longer-term relationship agreement, which covers trade, in this Institute for Government paper.)

Under this scenario, the UK would have to leave the EU and default to WTO only terms before it could even started negotiating its trade relationships.

Not everyone agrees with this interpretation and certainly most of the public discussion about the negotiating period assumes that we will be conducting both the withdrawal agreement and the trade negotiations in parallel. David Davis insisted that we can run both negotiations in parallel, while also admitting that defaulting to the WTO only option would be a disaster.

Luis González García of Matrix Chambers says:

This is a rather strict interpretation of Article 50 of the TFEU. In my opinion, such an interpretation would be contrary to the purpose of Article 50. The broad reference to ‘framework’ should be interpreted broadly in a way which ensures future stable and predictable trade rules to the benefit of businesses, investors, citizens and consumers of the UK and the EU after the UK exit from the EU. This means that the UK and the EU should enter into parallel negotiations of a free trade agreement.

This legal analysis from Sussex University comes to a similar conclusion.

Article 50(2) TEU addresses the content of the withdrawal agreement. It is open-ended, stating that ‘the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with [the UK], setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union.’ This does not preclude trade talks forming part of the Article 50 TEU withdrawal agreement or taking place in parallel. In practice, as Article 50 TEU has never been implemented before, legal debates about whether the UK faces restrictions in pursuing trade talks are highly politicised. But the important point about all this is that it is yet another aspect of the withdrawal process that is not yet clear; another potential pitfall hidden in the fog of Article 50. As Chatham House director Robin Niblett warned: After invoking Article 50, UK negotiating leverage with the EU is greatly reduced. The approach that would offer greatest certainty for all sides, therefore, would involve interlocking the Article 50 process of negotiating Britain’s withdrawal with the process of determining the framework for its new relationship with the EU. In fact, the government should not trigger Article 50 until EU governments have stated collectively that they will negotiate, in parallel, this framework and instructed the Commission accordingly. After all, Article 50 states that, “the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking into account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. So, to the 3 questions I suggested above, we can now add a 4th. Before triggering Article 50, MPs need to know: Whether or not Article 50 is revocable; That there is a fallback deal in place should the negotiations extend beyond 2 years; What the government’s starting position will be; That the other EU governments have agreed to negotiate the withdrawal and future relationship agreements in parallel. Without this clarity, voting to trigger Article 50 would be an act of sheer recklessness.