All of the good bits and none of the bad bits... please

Bernard Jenkin MP, chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee in the Commons, was quoted this morning as saying "It would be utterly perverse for the EU to impose tariffs on trade between the UK and the European Union and I don't think they would be so destructive [as] to do that".

He was interviewed with Ken Clarke (there to play the soft Brexit to Jenkin's hard) on the Radio 4 Today programme about a letter from the British Chamber of Commerce. The BCC's Director General Adam Marshall was warning the prime minister that "patience is wearing thin" - business is exasperated by the lack of a unified government position on a future UK-EU relationship.

The current live issue is customs, with May rejecting future membership of either the current EU customs union or a possible alternative customs union such as the EU has with Turkey or a smaller country like Andorra. She will happily discuss a customs arrangement or a customs partnership of course, as discussed in a paper the government published last August (it was labelled "magical thinking" by EU commentators and seemed to be quietly forgotten, but has been rediscovered with a new year).

Swiss borders with EU countries -
much of regular trade is handled digitally
but there are still checks. 

Jenkin's point is frequently argued - if a barrier to trade follows Brexit it's the EU's fault, because the UK has no intention of doing anything against our joint interests. Two points there:

• None of this would be happening without a decision to leave the EU; it's May's Article 50 letter that started it all.
• What would bring about barriers to trade would be failure to reach an agreement which eliminates them, plus the automatic operation of WTO rules. If there is no UK-EU Free Trade Agreement, the EU is duty bound to apply the same tariffs, quotas etc as it does to any other country with Most Favoured Nation status.

Then there's the Irish border, which Brexiters claim will be exactly as easy and open as it is now unless the Republic or, more likely, "the EU" decide to make it difficult.

But again, we started it, and May intends to take us out of the legal system which makes the border no more than a notional line on a map. All sorts of organisational and technological wheezes could be used to ease the waits, but without an agreement otherwise there will be a border, and EU law and WTO rules will require it to be managed.

Moving beyond tariffs, there are non-tariff barriers (NTBs) - differences in regulation and Rules of Origin. If May's customs arrangement, partnership or wotsit doesn't cover how UK-made and EU-made products are counted for onward export, and if she insists on retaining the right to diverge from EU rules, or fails to reach an agreement at all, there will be barriers. Who will have raised them? The EU won't have changed anything but we'll have become a third country, we'll have put ourselves outside the walls.

Everybody's looking to barriers between the UK and EU, but there are also hundreds of agreements we have with other countries as a member of the EU. Some are full Free Trade Agreements (like the one which guarantees Dan Hannan his tariff-free Chilean wine) and some just harmonisation of testing standards, but many of them are there to ease trade. As Fionna O'Leary points out, there are 142 with our largest single trading partner, the USA, of which around 50 have an impact on trade. If we fail to carry those over, by agreement with the EU and the US as necessary, are we going to blame the US for "erecting barriers to trade"?

We do NOT trade with the rest of the world solely on WTO terms.  That is factually inaccurate and if you do not know that by now you are just plain negligent.  The EU has 759 Treaties with 168 3rd countries that reduce or eliminate some of those far bigger barriers to trade. NTBs pic.twitter.com/IG7hI5hKjX

— Fionna O'Leary #FBPE #BrexitBetraysBritain #ABTV (@fascinatorfun) January 27, 2018