For around a year I’ve been calling for a major update to the Government’s Brexit plans. We have had some progress but always too slowly and too little. How can we still not know what our proposed end state is to look like? We are just days from the JUNE Council meeting 🤯
1) We need also a decision on customs and a decision on the backstop. The Customs Partnership plan is a silly proposal but to coin a phrase - a policy is better than no policy. It’s way past making your mind up time.
2) Then on the backstop, it is futile to argue that we shouldn't have agreed to one. We have. We need a way of defining it and making sure it remains a backstop. Obviously it shouldn't apply just to NI so it will have to be UK wide.
3) I don't particularly care about a new white paper per se but delay in publishing one is emblematic of the constipated decision making in Whitehall. It's hard for departments, or anyone else, to plan for things without knowing what the plan is or the possible scenarios are.
4) Meanwhile the one area where the Government can be doing preparation and planning without knowing the end state - on No Deal which remains a slim but possible scenario - is doing what sometimes looks like a deliberate go slow.
5) It has almost escaped everyone's notice that Brussels has still not started discussing our future relationship because the talks are stuck in a cul-de-sac on the Irish issue etc
6) Meanwhile it's impossible for Government to put Labour or Brussels or extreme remainers on spot about their plans or contradictions. Viz today's PMQs. Tory remainers who started year wanting to move on from Brexit are siding with rebels because they smell the absence of a plan
7) We could all write long books about the mistakes made in the negotiations and there will be a time for that (or you can just read @ShippersUnbound next volume) but "coulda woulda shoulda" doesn't get you out of a hole.
8) So rather than trying to bounce the S & N committee into an agreement it's long past time for that Cabinet committee to go away and sit down somewhere - try Chequers again? - and stay there until a plan is agreed. Nothing is more important.
9) And that plan is going to have to be a compromise. One that both sides can live with and which has a chance of getting through the Commons and being negotiable with EU member states
10/10) OpenEurope has put forward one such proposal - align on goods, divergence on services, leave Customs Union and end free movement. It may not be perfect but unless someone else has a better plan which is deliverable it's the sort of thing the Government needs to get behind
