May’s fall-back plan to avoid a hard border in Ireland includes a “bare-bones” customs union requiring the UK to adhere to a regulatory “level playing field” to prevent unfair competition with the EU. This would restrict the UK’s ability to negotiate ambitious free trade deals, and keep UK businesses bound by EU regulations while making us a rule-taker rather than a rule-maker.

This is the opposite of the “Singapore-on-Thames” desire of extreme Brexiters to dump EU regulations and slash taxes after Brexit. May is going to face a bumpy ride getting agreement to this through Parliament.

The EU has always been clear that any trade agreement with the UK must “ensure a level playing field”. This is both because we do a lot of trade with the EU and we physically neighbour it. If businesses could cut their taxes and regulatory burden after Brexit by moving to the UK, they might abandon the EU.

To prevent this, the EU wants to make sure that the UK cannot increase its business subsidies, cut taxes and scrap social and environmental regulations to reduce business costs. The EU has already included such “level playing field” clauses in its trade agreements with other neighbouring countries, such as Ukraine.

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But, say many Brexiters, what is the point of leaving the EU if you still continue to be bound by these sorts of rules? Well, yes indeed. To get round this, Brexiter ministers have been arguing that the customs union, which would come into force on 1 January 2021 if the UK and EU had failed to agree a trade treaty by then, should be time-limited. But that isn’t acceptable to the Irish government or the rest of the EU.

For the Brexiters, there could be worse to come. If the UK wants to stay in the customs union beyond 2020, the EU is likely to demand continuing access for EU fishing vessels. That’s not what Brexiter fisheries minister Michael Gove has promised the fishermen. But if he opposed it, May’s whole deal might come crashing down.

And there’s more. The issue of the level playing field will be central to the trade negotiations after Brexit. The greater the access the UK wants to the single market, the more it will have to concede on accepting EU rules. The more EU rules it retains, the greater the difficulty in getting trade deals with the US, China and other countries who want the UK to adopt their (usually lower) standards.

Aware of the strength of feeling in the EU on this, May’s messy Chequers plan promised that the UK would stick with EU competition rules as part of a proposed “common rule book” and that it wouldn’t scrap social and environmental protection either. But, as with the bare-bones customs union plan, the EU will want those promises written in a legally binding treaty.

The only easy way around this conundrum is to stay in the EU and continue to influence its rules to the UK’s benefit, as we have been doing for over 40 years. That’s why we need a People’s Vote.

Edited by Luke Lythgoe