There was never any prospect of deals that would prevent our overall access and trade from falling. Other deals would be too shallow, because of the difficult choices they would throw up or sovereignty-reducing. And the non-EU world is too far away and ‘small’.
https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1440723855329226756
It’s useful to play the game of pointing out that deals they hoped for have not materialized but we shouldn’t concede the implicit point that those deals would have delivered what was claimed.
Some of the more sophisticated Leavers would argue that the iron law of trade gravity - tendency to trade much more with countries close to you - would be abolished and we would enter an era of global, weightless, digital trade.
This may well happen. But over the last 50 years of IT and digital revolution, the effect of gravity has not gone away. So at least for the foreseeable future, trade gravity is with us.
There was an economically sensible Brexit, of course. Staying in the Single Market! Such a choice might have been justified by pointing to the close referendum result and the fact that some leading leavers had limited their ambitions to exiting into the SM.
But with Remainers vanquished, SM membership was not enough to satisfy the coalition of the victors. Freedom of Movement in particular being a red line.
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