PM Theresa May must stop Remoaner Hammond’s customs union fantasy and focus on Britain’s post-Brexit future
Controlling our own borders while retaining access to EU markets seems like a dream - but is a huge obstacle to talks
IMAGINE the UK could get a deal where we’d control our own borders – and our goods would still have tariff-free access to the EU market without having to jump through any extra hoops.
To top it all, this deal could be in place by the next General Election, in 2020.
To many, it’s a dream — the best bit of the EU without the immigration diktats. And it’s a dream that has seduced many in Whitehall.
Their plan is to have Britain leave the EU single market but STAY in the customs union.
But they’re wrong. This would be a bad deal for Britain, a kind of fake Brexit that is fundamentally unsuited to this country’s needs.
You can have a free hand to make your own trade deals or you can be in a customs union. You can’t have both. As one Cabinet minister warns, staying in the customs union “does screw up your other trade talks”.
Compounding this problem: The customs union doesn’t cover the sector that makes up close to 80 per cent of the British economy — services.
So there would still need to be separate deals negotiated for the City of London and the rest.
As long as the UK is in the customs union, this country will be penned in by the EU’s iniquitous “common external tariff”.
This is designed to protect the EU’s most politically sensitive industries by making goods from outside more expensive.
The result? Cars from outside face a ten per cent tariff, clothes an 11.5 per cent one, and there are far higher rates for food.
And who pays? We do, through higher prices.
For all Theresa May’s talk, Britain cannot be a global leader in free trade if it stays inside the customs union.
But if Britain left it, the Government could cut trade deals that would see tariffs slashed on consumer goods imported from the workshops of the world in exchange for our service industries getting access to these markets.
It would be good for consumers and the country.
Mrs May likes to say that Britain must not think about what bits of EU membership it wants to keep — but instead cut an entirely new deal.
If our PM is to be true to this, she must tell ministers and officials to drop this halfway- house idea of staying in the customs union.
But unless the PM gives this instruction, Whitehall will not abandon the idea.
As one minister points out: “The Treasury never gives up.”
Mrs May might be reluctant to irritate the Treasury at the moment. I am told that Chancellor Philip Hammond was not best pleased by her criticisms of the Bank of England’s monetary policy in her conference speech.
“That line on monetary policy has caused serious trouble with the Chancellor,” one senior figure inside Government tells me.
But it is past time for some clear direction on this subject.
One of the great benefits of leaving the European Union is to head out into the world and do deals with the fast-growing economies of the 21st Century.
Stuck in the customs union, Britain cannot do that.
Build on green belt to make housing work
THE biggest test of Theresa May’s pledge to make the economy work for everyone is housing.
For home ownership is now at its lowest level in 30 years – and the Tory dream of the property-owning democracy is in danger of dying.
In 40 per cent of local authorities, the average property is worth more than ten times what the typical person earns.
Given that people can borrow up to four times their income, this means that buying a home is out of the reach of those who don’t have large savings or aren’t receiving help from the bank of Mum and Dad.
This is entrenching privilege.
The solution to this problem has to be to build a lot more houses – and build them where people want to live.
Sajid Javid, the new Communities Secretary, set out his thoughts on how to do this to the Cabinet on Tuesday, and the Government will publish its plans in the next two months.
One of those present for the briefing said that the Government’s target for how many houses need to be built is pretty much being met in both the North and the Midlands but “it is the South that is the problem”.
Dealing with this southern problem is, the source says, “going to mean impinging on the green belt”.
There will be vocal objections if the Government does allow building on the green belt, including hostility from Tory MPs and local councillors.
But the housing problem has now become so big that there is no way to solve it without doing this.
Also, much of the green belt is actually ugly scrubland, not beautiful fields.
If Mrs May is prepared to face down this opposition from her own side and get more houses built, then she will have shown that her conference commitment to stand up to the elites on behalf of ordinary working people wasn’t just rhetoric.
Farage is Don for
A SLEW of Republicans might be abandoning Donald Trump following his boasts about pussy-grabbing – but not Nigel Farage.
But Farage’s refusal to dump Trump is hurting him back home in the UK.
“The spell around Nigel was broken by the Trump stuff,” one influential Ukip figure tells me.
His shilling for Trump isn’t a good look for the party, particularly as Ukip already does far less well with female voters than with male ones.
Adding to Farage’s problems is that support is ebbing away from the man thought to be his preferred leadership candidate, Steven Woolfe.
The brawl in the European Parliament that Woolfe got involved in, which ended up with him in hospital for several days, has cast so much doubt over his judgment that people are busy looking for someone else to support.
Indeed, there’s speculation that when the party’s national executive meets on Monday he will be barred from standing for the leadership because of it.
Paul Nuttall, the party’s former deputy leader, and Suzanne Evans, who wrote the party manifesto at the last election, are now regarded as the two strongest candidates in the field. But neither of them are close to Farage.
It's rank for Cam
MORE bad tidings for David Cameron.
Academics have ranked him as the third worst PM this country has had since World War Two.
This means that the three PMs at the bottom of the list are all Old Etonians.
Not good news for another Old Etonian, Boris Johnson.
But a school friend of Boris’s points out that, unlike these three, Boris was a scholar like Harold Macmillan – who comes in a creditable fourth from top on the list.
In other words, the scholarship boys don’t make an Eton Mess of it.
Louis ban would mock free speech
IF British Gymnastics cuts the funding of Louis Smith following this paper’s revelation that he had made a video apparently mocking Islamic prayer practices, there will be a political stink.
Charles Walker, vice-chairman of the influential 1922 Committee of Tory MPs, tells me that he will table a series of urgent questions in Parliament if this happens.
He argues that this is a free-speech issue – religions cannot be allowed to carve out a special protected status for themselves. '