A remarkable and alarming feature of the Brexit process so far is the way deadlines that ought to force the government to make difficult choices come and go with critical decisions stubbornly untaken.
A cabinet committee meeting on Wednesday was billed as a crunch point on the question of a customs union. But, as different Tory factions lobbied Theresa May with increasing urgency, the crunch was deferred.
The broad choice is between invisible borders, but with compromise on the UK’s ability to determine aspects of external trade policy, and freedom to diverge from EU rules, but at the cost of friction at the border.
This is a choice Mrs May seems incapable of making, because the customs union has become the proxy for a deeper Tory schism. Two technical options have been on the table. One is a “customs partnership”, which involves a simulation of existing EU arrangements, but with rebates on offer for businesses wanting to enjoy UK-specific tariffs. A second idea, preferred by hard Brexiters, is “maximum facilitation” (max-fac, in the jargon), which concedes the return of border infrastructure, but imagines it being minimal, thanks to “trusted trader” schemes and hi-tech enforcement.
These ideas are problematic in their own ways. The customs partnership would put in place a bureaucratic labyrinth. Max-fac relies on technology that no one has identified, let alone tested. And the restoration of border posts, even discreet digital ones, risks reneging on Mrs May’s promises of an invisible frontier in Northern Ireland. The EU side is sceptical of both models.
Not for the first time, Mrs May appears to be organising Brexit around the fixations of a small clique of Tory MPs, without regard for what is available in Brussels. Simpler routes are possible: a majority in the Commons would support a customs union; the Lords has already voted in support of one.
The whole debate is suffused with dishonesty. Those who push for softer Brexit options are attached to the customs union because they see the whole exercise in terms of damage limitation. They know that the logic of keeping cross-border trade frictionless is also a case for staying in the single market, for which the best available terms are the ones Britain enjoys now, as an EU member state.
On the other side, hard Brexiters are desperate to leave the customs union because regulatory alignment with the EU spoils their ambitions for a purgative transformation of the UK along ultra-Thatcherite lines – a frenzy of creative economic destruction, as they see it. But they do not make that agenda too explicit, because there is no great public appetite for it. Also, the prime minister insists that Brexit is not a threat to labour or environmental protections. Those who itch to light a bonfire of European regulation need Mrs May’s reassurances as cover under which they smuggle their matches.
These are ideological battles being artificially channelled through minute technical differences of emphasis on one aspect of Brexit. They raise profound questions about the UK’s destiny and express incompatible notions of what it means to be a Conservative in the 21st century. But Mrs May lacks the reserves of political capital or intellectual energy to referee that argument, let alone shape it to her own will. So she postpones the difficult choices. This has proved to be an effective technique for deferring crises, but it is a fundamentally dishonest way to govern. And, while survival on these terms suits the prime minister, it is not clear who else’s interests are really being served.