Steve Baker, the junior of resigned Brexit Secretary David Davis, interprets the White Paper as a stitch-up from the top. He argues that the Brexit office was a Potemkin village designed to distract people while the Cabinet Office’s Europe Unit got on with developing a soft Brexit plan. This is congruent with long-standing Brexit complaints that the higher civil service is an anti-Brexit fifth column. Indeed, they have long complained that effective control of the process of withdrawal has been ceded to this treacherous group. [...]
Most businesses want to be tied down by EU rules, and Brexiteers just don’t see why. If middle-class “free market” ideology had minimal descriptive accuracy, that shouldn’t happen. Businesses should be queueing up for tax cuts and deregulation.
And if British capitalism is as globally important as the Brexit Right think, then China and India ought to have been eager to offer British businesses access to expanding export markets — as was necessary to support domestic austerity and wage cuts. In fact, India seemed mildly embarrassed by the approach, while China was politely indifferent.
Part of the problem is that British capitalism no longer exists in the way it once did. Earlier this year, businesses in the European Round Table of Industry threatened Theresa May with what amounts to an investment strike if she failed to secure a frictionless customs union. The fact that they could make such a threat demonstrates just how much the British economy is imbricated with the rest of Europe. [...]
The EU seems to have understood this. For all that it has worried about “unfair competition” from UK tax cuts, it is also concerned about the “distortive effects of subsidies on investment, trade and competition.” Thus, the steel cage of special sanctions being devised for the United Kingdom in any future trade deal is intended to uphold “state aid” rules as much as anything else. One of the reasons why pro-EU Tories are so incandescently angry with Brexiteers is that they risk unintentionally creating opportunities for a future Corbyn government.
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