Most Brexiteers never had a problem with the Single Market – it’s the rest we didn’t like

For several decades the position of Eurosceptics was roughly this: we said we didn’t mind economic collaboration, but we did object when that was extended into other areas – such as establishing common citizenship, a common legal space or common foreign policy. One thing we should be wary of in the Brexit negotiations is that they do not achieve precisely the reverse of this: diminishing economic collaboration (which we didn’t mind that much) but leaving all the things we really objected to intact.

One reason we should perhaps be nervous about this is that Mrs May is Prime Minister, and when she was Home Secretary, even after the UK had secured an opt-out from a wide range of EU security mechanisms, Mrs May chose to opt us back into many of them. For a number of traditional Eurosceptics, who had until the early 2010s hoped we might remain within the EU on some renegotiated basis, that was something of a final straw. If the UK government was going to choose to extend its participation in non-economic EU matters even when it had the option not to do so, what hope was there of renegotiating any new partnership with the EU that excluded such things?

Speaking personally (but I suspect I am far from unusual), my position on UK EU membership was not that it was fine so long as we stuck to forming a common criminal code, common foreign policy and so forth, but having a Single Market was unacceptable. No. The things I most objected to were things like the European Arrest Warrant, Europol, the European Investigative Order, or the Common Foreign and Security Policy.

It is thus more than a little disturbing to read the spin regarding Theresa May’s speech in Munich last Saturday, where she set out some of her thinking on the new security Treaty she hopes will form part of the post-Brexit future partnership with the EU. Specifically, this was widely interpreted as implying that the UK will remain part of the European Arrest Warrant and Europol. The Government has attempted to emphasize that, whatever new arrangements we come to in these areas, we will not accept ECJ judgements having a direct effect in the UK. That’s all very well, but doesn’t really answer the key questions. Will we accept the EU (or an EU Member State under EU auspices) being able to instruct us to arrest and hand over someone that state wants to put on trial? Will we accept the EU (or an EU Member State under EU auspices) being able to instruct us to carry out criminal investigative measures?

We may not necessarily object to such arrangements, in bilateral form, in some particular cases — e.g. Ireland regarding things that happen in Northern Ireland, or perhaps Cyprus regarding things that happen in Akrotiri and Dhekelia. But a central purpose of leaving the EU — more so than issues to do with the Single Market or Customs Union — was to escape from such impositions at the EU level.

If we reinvent, via a new security Treaty with the EU, exactly those security, criminal and foreign policy restrictions that leaving the EU was supposed to enable us to escape, we will have failed to re-assert control in the security realm in much the same way that if we were to leave the EU but have a new Treaty keeping us in the Single Market and Customs Union we would have failed to re-assert control in the economic realm.

That does not mean that the ideal is no security cooperation, or even security cooperation only as limited as that which occurs between the EU and non-European countries — any more than the ideal is no economic cooperation or only economic cooperation as limited as that which occurs between the EU and non-European countries. But it does mean that we should place just as much scrutiny over the UK Government’s intentions for this new security Treaty as is placed over the Government’s economic negotiations. What, in the security realm, is the “Brexit in name only” equivalent of staying in the Single Market and Customs Union? Given her past record, and given that for many if not most Eurosceptics it was the reducing the non-economic aspects of cooperation that was really the central purpose of Brexit, we should probably trust Theresa May less on the security Treaty than we do on the economic negotiations.

One important area here regards the transition/implementation period. Why can we not withdraw from most non-economic aspects of the EU immediately upon Brexit? Why continue with embassy sharing or the common foreign and security policy or the European Arrest Warrant or Europol for even a day past 29 March 2019? Since the central purpose of leaving the EU was non-economic, we ought to signal that Brexit really does mean Brexit, and that the transition period really is only a transition period and not an attempt to buy time for reversalists to prevent Brexit truly occurring, by withdrawing from many if not all of the non-economic aspects of our EU membership immediately upon departure.