What goes around comes around...
Mrs Truss resigns, adding more confusion and no answers to the UK’s weakness – falling exports to Europe, the key market for British wares, and anemic productivity since 2008
Responsibility has to be pinned where it belongs – on the lapel of the Brexit firebrands
Departure from the European Union has been a slow-moving trainwreck
Neither a bonfire nor a brutal collapse, oxygen has been pumped out of the British Isles, little by little, as confidence in a shared future crumbled
A independent course of action should always be an option for any country, but the proponents of Brexit were not forthcoming about the facts
Steering a new course, credible and trustworthy, requires decades of hard work, not just a few years
Mrs. Truss' assumed that an ideological posture would somehow ignite the enthusiasm of the British people and dynamism in the economy
A failure but also an opportunity to bring irresponsibe parties to account, maybe ?
Rising out of the political turmoil, the slow process of rebuilding confident relations with Europe might be an anchor, not a red flag
Don't hold your breath
But Mr. Lamy, former Director General of the World Trade Organization, set out the rules, some years back
Trading with the European Single Market
The person putting the issue with great clarity in a speech delivered to the Henry Jackson Society at the House of Commons in London on 29 April 2019 has been Pascal Lamy
Mr. Lamy, former Director General of the World Trade Organization, was 'chef de cabinet' during the entire Presidency of Jacques Delors at the European Commission, 1985-1994, a decisive time of deeper integration and launch of the Single Market
While we highlight key points of Mr. Lamy's conference, the speech should be read in its entirety
Central to Mr. Lamy’s analysis is the profound difference between a customs union and the Single Market
A customs union can exist with – or without custom duties; after removing duties within Europe in the late 60’s, the custom union was still operating with internal borders as a ‘Common Market’
The change introduced during the Delors Presidency was the removal of internal borders, making trade entirely free to move across the Union in 1992 in a Single Market
In the precise wording of Mr. Lamy
We only removed borders in 1992, after a long and complex process of regulatory convergence, harmonization and mutual recognition, whatever technology you use, in order to make sure regulations do converge. This is what we did between 1985 and 1992. So that in 1992 we were able to remove borders because there was enough stock and trust that regulatory standards in every part of the European economy and, to some extent, social life were similar, or at least similar enough to be able to remove these borders
Not out of the woods yet
Besides the fact that the construct of the Single Market was a very long process of mutual trust building and harmonization of regulations, the commitment made by the member states, as price to be paid to remove borders, was political
By leaving the European Union, and departing from its Single Market, the UK is confronted with a dilemma
To benefit from a degree of economic integration, necessary for lack of true alternatives, the UK has to accept regulations governing the Single Market
- The lesser the regulations judged acceptable, the lesser the economic integration – creating a ‘thick’ border in the words of Mr. Lamy
- The more regulations are incorporated by the UK, the ‘thinner’ the border
Trust is a matter of politics
The strategy the UK will ultimately find acceptable is a political choice, which remains understandably hidden behind today’s posturing, but the reality will still have to be faced
The paradox may well turn out to be that the British people share most of the concerns underpinning the European regulatory thrust, from environmental protection to consumer health to data privacy rules and other concerns
Concluding dryly that warm words of friendship with European partners seemed more appropriate ‘for a Sunday night banquet’, Mr. Lamy suggested the path in the future relation between the UK and the Union had to be cleared, narrowing the options, what in our trade vocabulary is referred to as discussing, framing, and agreeing about “modalities”
Who will seize the moment ?