Britain is slowly moving towards accepting harsh truths about Brexit

FOR months, as the clock has ticked towards a two-year deadline for Britain to leave the European Union in March 2019, Theresa May's government has been criticised for being ill-prepared, divided and unrealistic in its approach to Brexit. And rightly so. However, this week it took a belated step towards reality in the first two of a series of Brexit papers, on future customs arrangements and on Northern Ireland. It accepted explicitly, for the first time, that a temporary transition, or interim period, will be necessary to avert a damaging cliff-edge exit in March 2019, and that in this interim period Britain should be in a customs union with the EU.That is a big step forward. It is all the more surprising, because it came just days after Philip Hammond, the chancellor, and Liam Fox, the trade secretary, promised in a newspaper article that, even in an interim period, Britain would be out of the EU's single market and customs union. The official Brexit paper acknowledges that this may...Continue reading
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