Theresa May – no running commentary on Brexit
A new Prime Minister: her first ever statement to the Commons as Prime Minister; on international affairs in the wake of the most momentous change in British foreign policy in several generations; you might expect a packed, tense, expectant House of Commons?
Not a bit of it.
After Prime Minister’s Questions, as the PM gathered her papers ready to report on her first international summit and Brexit, the Commons started to empty. By the time Theresa May finished her statement I counted only 5 Tory backbench MPs in the chamber (even the “payroll” MPs only mustered an additional 6: 3 ministers, 2 parliamentary aides and 1 whip).
Those that were there won’t have rushed out afterwards to crow to colleagues about what they’d missed.
This was less an electrifying moment of political theatre, more a sleepy county cricket game, a few heads in the stands nodding off in floppy white hats.
That won’t bother Theresa May. She is happy to be seen as a slogger. She once revealed that her childhood pin-up was Geoffrey Boycott.
The main balls she had to bat away were Opposition MPs trying to get her to commit to the Single Market. David Davis, Brexit Secretary, breezily let slip in his statement to the Commons on Monday that membership of the Single Market was probably out the window given the controls Britain wanted on immigration. The EU sees the four freedoms of the Single Market as of a piece: goods, workers, services and capital. Theresa May doesn’t want to give up in public on a deal that allows Britain to pick, choose and trim. When I asked her in Hangzhou on Monday about whether she accepted she might have to lose some economic/trade benefits to win some control on migration she insisted she was “ambitious.”
The only person to have got the EU to budge on the unity of the 4 Single Market pillars is none other than her predecessor. David Cameron’s renegotiation squeezed the other 27 back a bit with protections for the City and restrictions on benefits for EU workers. Is it really likely that after the UK’s Brexit vote the remaining EU members will grant the UK something more generous?
Some in Whitehall talk of how there could be a trade-off as the UK gives preferential rights to EU citizens wanting to work in the UK, an automatic right of entry if you have a job. On top of that the UK could engage in some other cooperation (on justice, say, on security, perhaps sending a ship or two to patrol the Med) and thereby get a bespoke hybrid deal, a “cake and eat it” deal.
Jeremy Corbyn didn’t share what seemed to be his backbenchers’ main pre-occupation. He dismissed obsessive free trade mania and after he’d finished speaking his aide briefed that Mr Corbyn would not be fighting for full membership of the Single Market. He regards it as flawed, loaded against state intervention and can’t support it in its current form.
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