This is how we will make Brexit work for Britain – and ‘retain strong links with our partners’
We want our European allies to succeed — wealthy neighbours make good customers
THE Government is under pressure from all sides to deliver a strategy for the UK’s Brexit negotiations.
However, there is still disagreement over how to proceed. One Eurosceptic MEP and a chief architect of the Leave campaign has outlined his vision of what Brexit should look like in a new book. Here he outlines his argument.
THE question isn’t whether Brexit will happen – that was decided on June 23.
Nor is it how Brexit will happen. MPs were always going to have the final say, whatever the outcome of the court challenge.
No, the question is how to make Brexit a success for all sides. How can we become independent while retaining close, friendly links with our partners?
After all, we want our European allies to succeed — wealthy neighbours make good customers.
In my new book, What Next, I set out a plan for a cordial and phased withdrawal which preserves the parts of the common market that work for both sides while allowing us to take back control of other areas.
The 52 to 48 per cent Brexit vote is a mandate to leave. But it was a close result. Nearly half the country voted to stay, including two of the four nations of the UK. So we should find a compromise that most Leavers and most Remainers can at least live with.
Leaving the EU means that British laws will become supreme again on our own territory. We will scrap the 1972 European Communities Act, which orders our own courts to follow European before British laws.
We should keep some of our existing arrangements through bilateral treaties. We will still be a military ally to the EU, a security partner and a trading associate. We should stay in the tariff-free zone that covers the whole of Europe, from non-EU Iceland to non-EU Turkey.
We should also keep the ban on discriminating against products from another European state, which is the real basis of the single market.
We should withdraw from the customs union, which puts Brussels in charge of the trade of all its 28 member countries.
Britain, uniquely, sells more to non-EU than to EU states, so has always been clobbered by the EU’s common external tariff.
It is perfectly possible to remain largely within the single market while being able to strike your own trade deals. Switzerland has many more trade deals than the EU has, including with China. Yet it sells more than four times as much per head as we do to the EU.
We should quit the Common Fisheries Policy, which has wiped out what ought to be a great renewable resource off our coasts. We should extend our waters out to 200 miles or the median line, as allowed by maritime law, while recognising the historic rights of our neighbours.
We should pull out of the Common Agricultural Policy, which forces us to hand billions of pounds to Continental farmers. As a net food importer with relatively efficient farms, we are hit twice by the CAP — we pay more in and we get less out. We should instead spend the money on a British agricultural policy.
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We should, though, keep our intelligence and security links with our EU allies, as with other Western countries, and enlarge our commitment to Nato.
Why would the EU let us carry on with trade and co-operation but not political union? Asking the question that way is very revealing. Do you really think countries trade with one another out of kindness? Countries don’t really trade at all — businesses do.
No one should expect the EU to do Britain any favours. We should expect its members to act out of self-interest. It’s just that their interest, like ours, is in maximising their prosperity through the free exchange of goods and services.
What about immigration? Might that be a deal-breaker? Not if we act sensibly. It surely ought to be possible to find a compromise where the rights of EU nationals here and Brits in the EU are recognised, and where the sectors needing qualified workers can bring them in.
Simply returning to the old rule that you had to have a job offer before coming would make a huge difference. Last year 70,000 EU nationals came here looking for work.
EU students should be allowed to come to Britain without being counted as immigrants — although they should no longer get subsidised places paid for, in part, by the fees of non-EU students.
The real gain, though, will be in our relations with the world beyond Europe. No longer will we have to apply tariffs and quotas to goods from Africa, Asia and the Americas. Opening our markets will do more for developing nations than decades of Government aid.
Leaving the EU was never an end in itself. It was only ever a means to an end. The end was a freer and more prosperous Britain. We can now have exactly that — a Britain which lives under its own laws, engaging with allies on every continent, including Europe.
The real gain will be in our relations with the world beyond Europe
As well as delivering lower prices, more democracy and controlled immigration, Brexit ought to end decades of wrangling with our EU partners. Once we have left, and no longer stand in the way of the political union that the others want, relations should improve.
The EU will lose a bad tenant and gain a good neighbour.
Daniel Hannan’s new book, What Next, (Head of Zeus, £9.99) is out now.
