There is no such thing as a trade deal + . “Pluses” merely signify that all deficiencies in the named deal will miraculously disappear when we Brits come to negotiate our own version of it.

As the scale of the humiliation they think the Prime Minister’s proposed deal delivers started, to dawn on politicians who had thought Brexit was a cakewalk – we have seen a proliferation of mostly half-baked cake alternatives. They all carry at least one plus. Canada has acquired many.

Besides “Canada +++” or SuperCanada, as it was termed by the former Foreign Secretary, we have Norway +, which used to be “NorwaythenCanada” then became “Norwayfornow” and then became “Norway + forever”. And now even “No deal +”, which also makes appearances as managed no deal” and “no deal mini deals”.

What is most depressing about the nomenclature is the sheer dishonesty.

The pluses are inserted to enable one to say that one is well aware of why existing FTA x or y or Economic Area deal a or b does not really work as a Brexit destination, but that with the additions you are proposing, the template is complete.

We even have the wonderfully preposterous sight of ex Brexit Secretaries alleging that the very Canada + deal they want has already been offered by Presidents Tusk and Juncker and that all that needs doing is to write this as the destination into the Political Declaration.

But let me tell you, as someone dealing with both at the outset of this process: what the EU Institutions mean by Canada + is not remotely what ex Brexit and Foreign Secretaries and the Institute of Economic Affairs scribes mean by it. The title page is the same; the contents pages are different.

Not for nothing did an unkind Brussels source label Boris Johnson’s plan A+ ( another + of course), Chequers 3.0.

It is nonsense. And aside from containing a wish list an understandable wish list – of things that are not actually present in Canada’s EU deal, it does not solve the backstop.

“No deal+” is brought to us courtesy of all the people who told a great free trade deal would be struck before we even left because the mercantile interests of key manufacturing players in Member States would prevail against the pettifogging legalistic ivory tower instincts of the Brussels ayatollahs.

Yet, as some of us forecast well over 2 years ago, it did not turn out like that. And that the Brussels theologians exhibited rather more flexibility than the key Member States when it came to the crunch.

And not a peep was heard from the titans of corporate Europe. Except to back very robustly the position in capitals that the continued integrity of the Single Market project was vastly more important to them than the terms of a framework agreement with the U.K. A position which won’t change during the trade negotiations ahead either.

The “no deal + “ fantasy is that if we just had the guts to walk away, refuse to sign the Withdrawal Agreement with the backstop in it, and withhold a good half of the money the Prime Minister promised this time last year, capitals, suddenly realising we were serious, would come running for a series of mini deals which assured full trading continuity in all key sectors on basically unchanged Single Market and Customs Union terms.

I don’t know what tablets these people are taking, but they must be very very good.

The reality is that if the deal on the table falls apart because we have said “no”, there will not be some smooth rapid suite of mini side deals – from aviation to fisheries, from road haulage to data, from derivatives to customs and veterinary checks, from medicines to financial services, as the EU affably sits down with this Prime Minister or another one.

The 27 will legislate and institute unilaterally temporary arrangements which assure continuity where they need it, and cause us asymmetric difficulties where they can. And a UK Government, which knows the efficacy of most of its contingency planning depends, to a greater or lesser degree on others’ actions out of its control, will then have to react – no doubt with a mixture of inevitable compliance and bellicose retaliation.

We already see the next generation of fantasies out there, and it’s now just a matter of time before a Tory leadership contender offers them publicly as the Houdini act.

A suite of very rapid legal mini deals, accompanied by the existing Withdrawal Agreement deal on citizen’ rights, the complete dropping of the backstop, and only paying the remainder of the £39billion cheque when the mini deals have turned into the miraculous Canada (with lots of pluses) deal.

All of which must happen in months. But of course…

To which the EU answer will be a calm but clear “Dream on. You still want a transition? All existing terms and conditions apply. And when it comes to any FTA – deep or shallower – “nothing is agreed till everything is agreed” – and that still includes the fish”.

They may put it slightly more politely. But not much, in the circumstances.

And to anyone who tells me – and we’ll hear plenty of it in the coming weeks, I assure you – “but the EU stands to lose access to London’s capital markets and their companies will suffer unless they do our quick and dirty “no deal” deal”, I think I would just say “even the last 30 months have evidently still not taught you how the EU functions: try again in another 30…”,

If we lurch, despite Parliament wishing to avoid it, towards a “no deal”, with delusions it can be “managed” into a quick and dirty FTA, that will not end happily or quickly.

I am in no position to second guess those who have to try and model the macro effects of such a scenario. No developed country has left a trade bloc before, let alone in disorderly fashion, and let alone one which has become a lot more than a trade bloc.

But I do fully understand the legal realities. And because so-called “WTO rules” deliver precisely no continuity in multiple key sectors of the economy, we could expect disruption on a scale and of a length that no-one has experienced in the developed world in the last couple of generations.

The complacency that such things cannot and would not ever really happen in modern economies is staggering. Mercifully, it is not shared in either Whitehall or the Berlaymont. But these are outcomes which proper political leadership is about both understanding, contingency planning against – and avoiding.

Markets continue to react, or have until this week, as if something must turn up and that “no deal” is a virtually unimaginable scenario for politicians professing to be serious, to contemplate. That risk has therefore been seriously underpriced for a year or more, because we are dealing with a political generation which has no serious experience of bad times and is frankly cavalier about precipitating events they could not then control, but feel they might exploit.

Nothing is more redolent of the pre First World War era, when very few believed that a very long period of European peace and equilibrium could be shattered in months.

The huge problem for the UK with either reversion to WTO terms or with a standard free trade deal with the EU is in services.

This is the curious case of the dog that has largely failed to bark so far. The public needs to be aware of the big trade-offs that are coming next…or resentment when the next set of climbdowns begins will be off the scale.

So far, both during the referendum and since, the trade debate has been dominated by trade in goods, tariffs issues and some discussion of the impact on manufacturing supply chains of departing the Single Market and Customs Union.

Politicians find goods trade and tariffs easier to understand than services trade and the huge complexities of non tariff barriers in services sectors. They just do not understand the extent to which goods and services are bundled together and indissociable (when did you last buy a mobile phone outright rather than a service contract with a mobile phone attached).

They even more rarely grasp how incredibly tough it is to deliver freer cross border trade in services which, by definition, gets you deep into domestic sovereignty questions in a way which makes removing tariff barriers look easy.

And they understand even less that, however imperfect they think EU attempts at internal cross border services liberalisation might be, anyone who has negotiated with the US, China, India, Japan or sundry others can tell them why far-reaching market-opening services deals are few and far between.

It isn’t going to happen.

As the Prime Minister gradually backed away from her original red lines, as she realised she would imperil large tracts of UK manufacturing if she persisted with it, the position softened on quasi Customs Union propositions. Hence the constant howls of betrayal from those who thought October 2016 and Lancaster House mapped the only true path to Brexit.

Her only way to seek to sell this politically – so far with very little sign of success – was to talk boldly about greater autonomy and divergence in services regulation.

The reality is that UK services’ industries needs have been sacrificed to the primary goal of ending free movement.

And post exit, and post the end of any transitional arrangement, it is UK services exporters who will face the starkest worsening of trade terms because of the substantial difference between how far services trade is liberalised under even the highly imperfect European services single market, and the very best that is achievable under any other form of free trade or regional agreement on the planet.

Yet it is in services sectors where the U.K. currently has a sizeable trade surplus with the EU, whereas in manufactured goods we have a huge deficit.

For all the imperfections of the Single Market, services trade between Member States is, in many sectors, freer than it is between the federal states of the US, or the states in Canada. The US Government is unable, even if it were willing, to deliver on commitments in many areas in international negotiations, just as it cannot bind its states on government procurement, on which many federal states are as protectionist as it gets.

Not that one ever hears a squeak on this from those who rail at EU protectionism.

But the extent and type of cross border free trade that exists in the Single Market, ceases when you leave. A very large proportion of cross border services trade conducted outside the Single Market only happens because firms have offices physically established in the countries to which they are exporting.

So we know already that cross border supply will diminish pretty radically post exit, and that ease of establishment of legal entities and ambitious deals on the temporary free movement of workers and on the mutual recognition of qualifications will be central to trying to sustain trade flows in much colder conditions, to limit the impact on the U.K. economy.

But a substantial hit on the balance of trade and on the public finances of substantial relocations out of the UK’s jurisdiction is guaranteed, because we have rendered the best mode of supplying services across borders far harder.

The implications are obvious. And again the public is not being told of them. Because the fiction has to be maintained – at least until a first deal is done – that there will be no sort of preferential free movement terms for EU citizens.

We stagger on, with the government constantly postponing the long promised White Paper on immigration post Brexit.

And after it eventually does get published, we know that, in reality, once the FTA negotiations truly get under way, and reality bites on the UK side, the policy, like so many others in the last 30 months, will simply disintegrate in the face of negotiating imperatives.

The EU already knows that the UK will, under whoever’s Premiership, be prepared to pay a heavy price to maintain better access to business, legal, consultancy, and financial services markets than other third countries have, to date, achieved via standard FTAs. Why? Because that’s an economic imperative for a country which has world class services capability, but needs market access.

That EU leverage will be deployed in the years ahead and it will be used to enforce deals on issues like fisheries, on which again referendum campaign commitments will be abandoned in the teeth  of reality.

Those saying this now will of course get the ritual denunciations for defeatism, lack of belief, treachery and whatever.

But just give it 2 more years. The Brexiteers, the strength of whose case to the public always resided, as I say, in saying to the public that their leaders had mis-sold them on what the EU was becoming, have now done their own mis-selling. And they are in the middle of the painful process of discovering that, as trade terms worsen on exit, which they denied would happen, they will, under economic duress, have to let down the very communities to whom they promised the post Brexit dividend.

That penny is dropping. Just very slowly.

If WTO terms or existing EU preferential deals are not good enough for the UK in major third country markets, they can’t be good enough for trade with our largest market.

You cannot simultaneously argue that it is perfectly fine to leave a deep free trade agreement with easily our largest export and import market for the next generation, and trade on WTO terms because that is how we and others trade with everyone else…

….AND argue that it is imperative we get out of the EU in order that we can strike preferential trade deals with large parts of the rest of the world, because the existing terms on which we trade with the rest of the world are intolerable.

If moving beyond WTO terms with major markets represents a major step FORWARD in liberalising trade, then deliberately moving back to WTO terms from an existing deep preferential agreement – which is what the Single Market is – represents a major step BACKWARD to less free trade. You really can’t have it both ways.

Though obviously many can and do try to argue that black is white and vice versa. But it is well beyond incoherent.

It is fine and legitimate to argue that the UK should aim at a global lattice work of bilateral and plurilateral free trade deals. This is especially true in the current absence of any ability to drive forward major multilateral trade liberalisation, at a time when the US has turned inwards, and may indeed be setting about deliberalising trade, undermining the World Trade Organisation..

It is equally legitimate to argue that you only want free trade deals which stop well short of the intrusion on national sovereignty which Single Market harmonisation and mutual recognition via supranational legislation, adjudication and enforcement entails.

As long as one also recognises that all trade deals inevitable erode and trammel one’s sovereignty to some degree – often to a significant degree.

Binding international commitments to opening each other’s markets – on goods, services, government procurement, whatever – seriously limit one’s capacity to regulate sectors of the economy as one might ideally see fit.

Genuinely free global trade actually seriously trammels national sovereignty. This should be obvious to everyone – it is not news.

Possibly the greatest reason to be a passionate free trader is to curtails the ability of myopic politicians to erect barriers to commerce in the name of sovereignty and national preference against non-national producers.

This is why our current debate on sovereignty and “taking back control” is often so bizarre. It is comical listening to Right wing populist politicians claiming they are avid free traders and simultaneously saying that one of the purposes of taking back control is to be able to rig domestic markets / competitions in favour of British suppliers / producers.

Protectionism is always someone else’s sin, of course.

And the Tory Party has been through these – decades-long – spasms before. Joseph Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform and Imperial Preference campaign, as loudly pious, nationalist and messianic as many today, led all the way through to his son Neville’s protectionist legislation of the early 1930s which helped worsen a post financial crisis economy. Sound familiar?

A post Brexit Britain which is committed to openness and free trade will need first of all to run hard to stand still, as 2/3 of UK exports are currently either to the EU or to countries with whom the EU has a preferential trade deal, which we shall have first to try and roll over.

Market access into the EU WILL worsen, whatever post exit deal we eventually strike. And the quantum by which our trade flows with the EU will diminish – and that impacts immediately – will outweigh the economic impact of greater market opening which we have to aim to achieve over time in other markets, where the impact will not be immediate but incremental.

As the country debates its future trade policy in the next stage of negotiations both with the EU and with other sizeable markets it needs honesty from politicians that trade agreements take a long time.

That even if every one we aspire to were completed, this will have a really very modest impact on overall UK economic performance.

And that every version of Brexit involves a worsening of the UK’s trade position and a loss of market access to its largest market. As we strive to limit the extent of that worsening, public debate will have to be serious about what the real trade-offs are. Because the EU will be quite brutal in teaching us them.

Meanwhile, before we have even left, we have seen, in the last 2 ½ years, the most anaemic boost to UK net trade triggered by ANY major sterling devaluation since World War 2. For politicians not completely blinded by their own rhetoric, the warning signs for the UK economy as we worsen our trade terms with the Continent are there to see. Again, public debate needs to be based on the realities, not on fantasy. Or the reality will soon catch up with us.

It is just not possible or democratic to argue that only one Brexit destination is true, legitimate and represents the revealed “Will of the People” and that all other potential destinations outside the EU are “Brexit in Name Only”.

The public voted – in huge numbers – and the majority voted to “leave” and not to “remain”. That much is very clear. But people were not asked to give their reasons for voting “leave” or “remain”, and they were multifarious on both sides.

For decades, some of the staunchest standard bearers of the case for leaving the post Maastricht Treaty EU have made the case for staying in the so-called Single Market, remaining a signatory to the EEA Agreement but leaving the institutions of political and juridical integration of the Union.

Over the years there have been plenty of eurosceptic tomes – many very well argued, whether you agree with them or not – arguing that Maastricht, amplified by subsequent Treaties, represented the wrong turn in European integration, and that what we needed to do was to return to the essential mercantile ideas behind the internal market project and jettison U.K. adherence to the rest.

For many people, perhaps especially outside the metropolitan circles who obsess about post Brexit models, that sense of “we only ever joined a Common Market, but it’s turned into something very different and no-one in authority down in London ever asked us whether that is what we wanted” is actually probably the closest to capturing their reasons for voting “leave”.

One can’t now suddenly start denouncing such people as Quisling closet remainers who do not subscribe to the “only true path” Brexit. Let alone insist on public self-criticism from several senior politicians on the Right who themselves, within the last few years, have publicly espoused these views, and praised the Norwegian and Swiss models, the health of their democracies and their prosperity.

To be clear, this is not an argument for an EEA model as opposed to the current proposed deal. This is not the place or time to rehearse the arguments either for or against any single version of Brexit.

It is perhaps the place to deplore the way in which the substance of all the models is constantly distorted by those who seem to not understand them – opponents and proponents – and then have given them a few days’ thought – in a panic.

But the real objection here is to the style of argument espoused both by the pro “no deal” Right and by Downing Street which says that no other model but their own is a potentially legitimate interpretation of the Will of the People – which evidently only they can properly discern.

Both fervent leavers and fervent remainers as well as No 10 seem now to seek to delegitimise a priori every version of the world they don’t support.

As for the Prime Minister’s proposed model, the entire EU knows that where we have now reached derives from her putting the ending of free movement of people well above all other objectives, and privileging as near frictionless trade in goods as she can get over the interests of UK services sectors.

The EU are no doubt unsurprised by the former but surprised – sometimes gleefully by the latter, as it seems to point precisely to a deal skewed in their favour.

The UK has essentially sacrificed all ambition on services sectors in return for ending free movement, sold the latter as a boon (when amongst other things, it clearly diminishes the value of a UK passport), and presented the former as a regaining of sovereignty, when it guarantees a major loss of market access in much our largest export market.

Well, by all means argue for it. I fully accept that control of borders – albeit with much confusion about the bit we already have control over, but year after year fail, under this Government, to achieve any control of – was a central referendum issue.

But don’t argue it’s the only feasible Brexit. Or that it’s an economically rational one.

Of course the EU side will now back the Prime Minister in saying it is. They have done a great deal for themselves and they want it to stick. Who can blame them? It’s in their own interests after all.

Brexit is a process not an event. And the EU, while traditionally poor at strategy, is very good at process. If we don’t start to take the process seriously and get better, we will get hammered. Repeatedly.

One cannot seriously simultaneously advance the arguments that the EU has morphed away from the common market we joined, and got into virtually every nook and cranny of U.K. life, eroding sovereignty across whole tracts of the economy, internal and external security, AND that we can extricate ourselves from all that in a trice, recapture our sovereignty and rebuild the capability of the U.K. state to govern and regulate itself in vast areas where it had surrendered sovereignty over the previous 45 years.

The people saying 3 years ago that you could were simply not serious. And they have proven it. They also had not the slightest plan on what they were going to try and do and in which order.

Bold, confident assertions, during and in the many months after the referendum that we would have a fully fledged trade deal with the EU ready and in force by the day of exit, and, not only that, rafts of further free trade deals with other fast growing countries across the globe, were just risible when they were made, and have now proven empty bluster.

Likewise, all the breezy assertions that “no deal” would pose no great problems for aviation, for road haulage, for medicines, for food, for financial services, for data and for any number of other areas – for most of which, “WTO terms” are simply not a safety harness.

No number of repetitions of the grossly misleading term “WTO deal” makes it any more real or effective. This is not because of Establishment remainer sabotage. It was because these were always fantasies, produced by people who at the point they said this stuff, just did not understand what they were saying.

Unfortunately, before much of the serious work to look at where we wanted to land post exit had happened, we locked ourselves into a date certain for the invocation of Article 50. That duly forfeited at a stroke any leverage over how that process would run. And it gave to the 27, who had, by the morning of June 24th, already set out their “no negotiation without (Article 50) notification” position, the first couple of goals of the match in the opening 5 minutes.

All the people who are now loudest in bemoaning the Prime Minister’s deal were, of course, the loudest in cheering from the rafters as she made this fateful error. Many are now hastily rewriting history to claim they were always against it. They weren’t, though. 

One cannot blame the EU27 for playing it as they did. Though one can and should blame them for having had too few serious top level discussions about how they see the relationship with the UK working after exit.

Before the Prime Minister had even turned up for her first ever leaders’ meeting, the combination of that decision to guarantee notification by a certain date and the red lines substance of her first Party Conference leaders’ speech had completely cemented the solidarity of the 27, which has held soundly ever since, on how to kick off and to design the sequencing of the process which has led to where we are today.

It’s about the one first order issue on which the EU27 have since held together in near perfect harmony. If that does not tell you something about this Government’s negotiating prowess, what will?

But in the total self-absorption of Party Conferences and Westminster, no one was paying much attention to how the EU was patiently constructing the process designed to maximise its leverage.

Even by April, when the first set of so-called Guidelines emerged from the leaders at 27, it was hard to get anyone here to read them. We were, as usual, preoccupied more with the noises from the noisy but largely irrelevant in Westminster, while the real work was being done on the other side of the Channel.

But those very expertly crafted Guidelines led completely inexorably to the December 2017 agreement. And the substance of that, in turn, led equally inexorably to all the elements of the deal now on the table which has caused the furore. The battle on sequencing which the then Brexit Secretary declared to be the battle of the summer of 2017, was actually long since lost before he started fighting it.

And because the U.K. had given no serious thought to the question of transitional arrangements until it was too late – precisely because of the fantasies propagated that this would be one of the easiest “trade deals in human history” and all would be definitively tied up legally by exit day – by the time they actually did focus, London was urgently begging for what is now pejoratively termed the “vassal state” transition, precisely because it knew that it could not be ready for a post Brexit equilibrium state by March 2019.

All the EU had to do was to ensure that the transition hinged off a Withdrawal Treaty containing a permanent legal all-weather backstop, and it knew that the U.K. had no alternative but to sign such a Withdrawal Agreement.

No amount of bold, but empty, talk about “no deal” being better than a “bad deal”, however oft repeated at whatever level of Government, made the slightest difference to the 27’s assessment of the negotiating reality: the U.K. needed much more time, and failure to get it would be much worse for it than all alternatives.

Whilst it is obviously good to know your “best alternative to a negotiated deal”  in all negotiations, you have to know whether you can walk out, and be very sure you understand what could happen if you do, and what you can do to mitigate all downsides.

But if you know you cannot mitigate, don’t bluff. It just makes you look weak, not strong, and it fools no one.

Those who were suckered into doing, or cheering, the wrong thing in the negotiation at the wrong time for the wrong reason, and duped themselves and others into thinking it would all be extraordinarily simple, cannot acknowledge that of course. So the narrative has be of “Betrayal” by a remainer elite who sabotaged the “no deal” plans

And if you set yourself a ludicrous, unachievable deadline for a complete regime change, don’t be shocked that others use the pressure of the clock and the cliff edge to dictate the shape of Brexit.

It is, in the end, the total absence of a serious realistic plan for the process of Brexit as well as a serious coherent conception of a post Brexit destination, which has delivered this denouement to stage 1 of what will be, whether Brexit proponents like it or not, a much longer process.

For the next stage, we need much less self-absorption, a vastly clearer, less self-deceiving understanding of the incentives on the other side of the table, and a less passive approach to the construction of the process. We need serious substance not plausible bullshit.

We already see in the Withdrawal Agreement the clear signs that, having succeeded with its negotiating plans in this phase, the EU will repeat the clock and cliff edge pressures in the run up the next U.K. election, knowing it can and will exact concessions as the deadline looms. But walking away to a “no deal” outcome, managed or not, does not escape that pressure.

One can of course blame the EU for overdoing their success in ordering the whole negotiations but the basic truth remains that it really helps, in a negotiation, actually to know what you are doing, where you want to go, the sacrifices you are willing to make and be stone cold sober about the real interests of the other party.

Other people have sovereignty too. And they too may choose to “take back control” of things you would rather they didn’t.

The sovereigntist argument for Brexit, which was one powerful element of the referendum campaign – taking back control of laws, borders and money – is a perfectly legitimate case to make.

If you think the consequences of living in a bloc where the pooling of sovereignty has gone well beyond the technical regulatory domain into huge areas of public life are intolerable for democratic legitimacy and accountability, that is a more than honourable position.

But others who have chosen to pool their sovereignty in ways and to extents which make you feel uncomfortable with the whole direction of the project, have done so because they believe pooling ENHANCES their sovereignty – in the sense of adding to their “power of agency” in a world order in which modestly sized nation states have relatively little say, rather than diminishing it.

They did not want that pooling to stop at the purely technical trade and regulatory domain.

Brexit advocates may think this is fundamental historical error, and has led to overreach by the questionably accountable supranational institutions of their club. They may think that it leads to legislation, opaquely agreed by often unknown legislators, which unduly favours heavyweight incumbent lobbyists.

Fine. There is some justice in plenty of this critique.

Then leave the club. But you cannot, in the act of leaving it, expect the club fundamentally to redesign its founding principles to suit you and to share its sovereignty with you when it still suits you, and to dilute their agency in so doing.

It simply is not going to. We see this exceptionalism, with the idea that deep mutual recognition agreements should be offered to the U.K., alone of all “third countries” with which the EU deals, and in the initial propositions on both financial services, other services and data.

We see it in the constant have your cake and eat it demands which run through every document the European Research Group produce or endorse.

If by sovereignty we must mean more than purely nominal decision-making power and we mean something about the genuine projection of the UK’s power in a world, then, as we get into the deeper trade, economic and security negotiations ahead, we are going to need a far more serious national debate about trade-offs.

And the trade-offs are real and difficult. No-one should pretend that all the answers will be great.

To take just one technical example, though it rapidly develops a national security as well as an economic dimension, cross border data flows are completely central to free trade and prosperity – not that you would know it from listening to our current trade debate, which remains bizarrely obsessed with tariffs which, outside agriculture, have become a very modest element in the real barriers to cross border trade.

The EU here is a global player – a global rule maker – able and willing effectively to impose its values, rules and standards extraterritorially.

Before the referendum, we had Brexit-supporting senior Ministers and advisers who should have known better, fantasising about the autonomy we would have to plough our own furrow once sovereignty had been resumed and we were no longer obliged to live under the jackboot of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Sobriety only started to set in in this debate after the referendum, as the implications of a failure on the UK’s part to achieve a so-called “adequacy determination” under GDPR from the EU started to sink in – because corporates across a huge range of sectors started to set them out for Ministers.

The same applies to so-called “equivalence decisions” in masses of financial sector legislation. Again, the consequences of failure to achieve such decisions will be the substantial erosion of market access into EU markets by U.K. companies.

What, really, are these “equivalence” and “adequacy” stories about? They are the EU projecting power – it does so quite as well as, probably more effectively than, Washington, in multiple critical regulatory areas – and using its pooling of internal sovereignty to impose its values and standards well beyond its borders.

The current U.K. debate on sovereignty leaves so many corporate players mystified and cold because in “taking back control” over our laws and leaving the adjudication and enforcement machinery of what used to be our “home” market, we are privileging notional autonomy over law- making over real power to set the rules by which in practice we shall be governed, since departure from norms set by others when we are not in the room will in practice greatly constrain our room for manoeuvre.

 The massive costs of deviation will force large scale compliance with rules set when we are not part of setting them

First Lesson:  “Brexit means Brexit”

This means primarily that leaving the EU is genuinely a major regime change, with massive political, legal, economic and social consequences.

Being just outside the EU outer perimeter fence is not AT ALL similar to living just inside it. Which is where David Cameron sought to entrench the U.K. – outside political, monetary, banking, fiscal Union, outside Schengen, and with a pick and choose approach to what used to be the third pillar of justice and home affairs. His was the last attempt to amplify and entrench British exceptionalism WITHIN the EU legal order.

It failed. A majority voted to leave altogether

Once you leave the EU, you cannot, from just outside the fence, achieve all the benefits you got just inside it.

First, there will, under NO circumstances, be frictionless trade when outside the Single Market and Customs Union. Frictionless trade comes with free movement. And with the European Court of Justice. 

Second, voluntary alignment from outside – even where that makes sense or is just inevitable – does NOT deliver all the benefits of membership. Because, unlike members you are not subject to the adjudication and enforcement machinery to which all members are.

And that’s what we wanted, right? British laws and British Courts.

Fine. But then market access into what is now their market, governed by supranational laws and Courts of which you are no longer part – and not, as it used to be, yours – is worse and more limited than before. That is unavoidable. It is not, vindictive, voluntary, a punishment beating, or any of the other nonsense we hear daily. It is just ineluctable reality.

Leaving the EU whilst continuing to trade with it, as our largest single trade partner means that we have effectively sacrificed real power and influence over how the EU sets the rules and regulations for the majority of our foreign trade, and in return we receive only nominal power over our own state.

The solidarity of the club members will ALWAYS be with each other, not with you. We have seen that over the backstop issue over the last 18 months which will pale into insignificance when it comes to the actual trade negotiations. wait till the trade negotiations.

The solidarity of the remaining Member States will be with the major fishing Member States, not with the U.K. The solidarity will be with Spain, not the U.K., when Madrid makes Gibraltar-related demands in the trade negotiation endgame. The solidarity will be with Cyprus when it says it wants to avoid precedents which might be applied to Turkey.

The EU is negotiating with us, not as a member, but as a prospective soon-to-be third country, a competitor on the global stage. We voted to become a third country and an opponent and rival, not just a partner, now. It is time to accept the consequences.

So now we know what brexit looks like, or do we?