Absolute Sovereignty

Yesterday, it emerged the Prime Minister wanted the UK to aim for absolute sovereignty in relation all regulations.

This might sound fine in theory, but all systems of conformity and standards are linked, and if the UK wants to sell and export to anywhere, it will have to comply with the country or countries the UK would want to import into.

And so such sovereignty and the compromises the UK would have to make in order to achieve this: in short it goes back to the trade/control scales I have mentioned in the past. You can have lots of one but little of the other. So total isolation means no trade at all.

The PM and Brexiteers will learn in time that such trade offs need to be made, and in the end reality of needing to trade will trump any ideological desire for isolation. The lesson might be expensive to learn though if the Brexiteers are happy to sacrifice entire sectors of the economy to get what they feel they need and what they think Brexit means.

The reality is that trade will win out, but as the EU pointed out today, a "level playing field" (LPF) is essential for the building of trust. And as the EU has zero trust in the UK's political class, and any assurances of a LPF this week might be cast aside next week. And so the new Commission President pointed out today that casting aside the LPF would have consequences, and breaking assurances in the Political Declaration, as has been suggested will happen with citizen's rights, would mean the shutters coming down at Calais.

So, business knows this, and seeing the Brexiteers being not totally honest means they also don't trust what the UK Government is doing, and will effect business confidence, reduce investment. So, far from securing certainty, it does the opposite.

And all for cheap headline in today's Tory Press which will turn to ashes when the effect becomes clear. Seeing the Brexiteers find this out in real time, that now with the EU fighting for its and its citizen's interests, it really will play hardball, and will look for measures under international law to ensure the UK complies, now that the UK is leaving the EU and the jurisdiction of the UCJ, then all is on trust, and trust is something May, DD, Raab, Johnson and so on have trashed over the past three years.

As the President of the EU Commission said today, the UK must learn that Brexit means Brexit, and the UK will be a third country.

Quite.