UK trade chief: Staying in EU customs union would be sell-out

28/02/2018 06:09 AST

Britain must leave the EU customs union to strike new trade deals after Brexit, the country’s trade minister said Tuesday, widening a major fissure within British politics over future trade relations with the bloc.

International Trade Secretary Liam Fox planned to say in a speech that remaining inside the tariff-free EU trade zone “would limit our ability to reach new trade agreements with the world’s fastest-growing economies.”

In extracts released in advance, Fox branded customs union membership “a complete sell-out of Britain’s national interests” because it would mean accepting EU rules after Britain leaves the bloc in 2019 without having a say over how they are made.

But Fox was contradicted by the trade department’s former top civil servant. Martin Donnelly, who left his job last year, said quitting the customs union was like “giving up a three-course meal... for the promise of a packet of crisps in the future.”

He said 60 per cent of Britain’s trade is with the EU or with countries that have EU trade deals. “You just have to look at the arithmetic — it doesn’t add up, I’m afraid,” Donnelly said. Fox was making a speech Tuesday, a day after opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn said his Labour Party would “seek to negotiate a new, comprehensive UK-EU customs union to ensure there are no tariffs with Europe.”

The issue is a major fault line in UK Brexit plans. Opposition lawmakers are trying to ally with pro-EU Conservatives to win a vote in Parliament backing continued customs union membership.

In addition to its implications for trade, leaving the customs union would complicate the issue of the Irish border. Britain and the EU have both promised there will be no customs posts or other border infrastructure along the currently invisible frontier between Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, and EU member Ireland. But it is not clear how that could be achieved if one side of the border is in the EU customs union and the other isn’t.

Some fear the return of a hard border will hurt cross-border businesses, fuel smuggling and heighten political tensions in a region still moving on from decades of violence.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson dismissed concerns about the issue, comparing the Irish border to the boundary between different London boroughs. He told the BBC “there’s no border between Camden and Westminster,” but drivers who go between them are electronically billed for the city’s traffic-easing Congestion Charge.

Johnson said “it’s a very relevant comparison because there’s all sorts of scope for pre-booking, electronic checks, all sorts of things that you can do to obviate the need for a hard border.”

Opposition politicians expressed astonishment at the comparison. Labour Party lawmaker David Lammy tweeted: “God help us all this isn’t just stupidity and ignorance but wilful recklessness.”

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