Good morning,
It's not just the weather outside which is set to be scorching today - the political temperature is also approaching record highs as the battle over the customs union continues to escalate, with Theresa May accused of "declaring war" on her own MPs.
Cabinet Brexiteers took aim at Downing Street after Business Secretary Greg Clark went on the Andrew Marr Show yesterday to make claims that 3,500 Toyota jobs could be lost if the UK didn't adopt May's rejected customs partnership proposal, with a Cabinet source slamming his intervention as "Project Fear all over again."
Open Europe's Henry Newman told Ridge on Sunday that Downing Street was making a "big mistake" by continuing to cling to the customs partnership after its decisive Cabinet defeat, while his highly insightful Twitter thread on the issue is well worth a read and won approval not once but twice from Michael Gove. Downing Street denied that Clark's comments were part of an "orchestrated move", but within minutes there was a flurry of supportive comments from many of the usual suspects, including the CBI and ultra-Remain group Best for Britain.
The reason why hard Remainers have suddenly become so supportive of the customs partnership, despite having previously been determined to stay in the customs union, is because they have belatedly come to the realisation that the two are essentially the one and the same thing. The customs partnership is staying in the customs union.
The only substantive difference between the customs union and the customs partnership is the farcical idea that a magical system of tariff refunds and backpayments will be bolted on to the existing customs union in around 6 years' time which will supposedly give the UK a backdoor through which to sign separate trade deals from the EU.
It's not clear whether anyone outside a few rooms in Whitehall and Downing Street still genuinely believes there is the slightest possibility of this actually happening. Even Jacob Rees-Mogg and Anna Soubry appeared to be in rare agreement over the issue yesterday, with Rees-Mogg explaining on Peston on Sunday how the customs partnership is in fact the customs union, while Soubry rather let the cat out of the bag when she told Sunday Politics "I don't care whether you call it a customs union, arrangement, partnership..."
Remainers are trying to dismiss the row as the headbanging of Eurosceptics, but they have the situation the wrong way round. The country already had this debate two years ago. The Remain campaign spent £9.3m of taxpayers' money telling the entire country that Brexit would mean some increase in friction in trade with the EU. The Treasury's Project Fear dossier which conjured up the "£4,300 worse off" claim was repeatedly explicit that all of the post-Brexit options under consideration, including the Canada model advocated by Vote Leave and used as the basis for the Remain campaign's headline figure, involved not being in a customs union with the EU.
And what happened? The country said "thank you very much, but firstly, your predictions are clearly a bit dodgy, and anyway, leaving the EU is more important." Remainers lost. And yet they are still trying to wheel out the same arguments and fight tooth and nail over the same issues almost two years later.
We have truly gone through the looking glass when the tiny handful of Tory Remainers who have repeatedly rebelled against their own Government's flagship legislation start accusing Brexiteers of being the ones trying to blackmail the Government, or accuse them of acting like "Russia at the UN" for insisting that the Government implements key pledges from the manifesto that they themselves were elected on (as a serving Cabinet Minister no less in that specific case).
However, this strategy would not have been half as effective without the deft pincer movement pulled off by their ally Michel Barnier, who probably cannot believe his luck at how effective stirring fears over the Irish border has been at achieving his key strategic negotiating objective of ensuring the UK diverges as little as possible from EU rules after Brexit.
Far from helping to ease the tensions around Northern Ireland and Brexit, Barnier's decision to turn the Irish border into a political football has done the precise opposite and heightened divisions between the two communities in Northern Ireland. It is rich indeed for Barnier to talk about respecting the Good Friday Agreement when as recently as last week he was still suggesting the inflammatory solution of drawing a border down the Irish Sea. Throughout the process, he has given the impression of listening only to the Nationalist side of the argument, while dismissing Unionist concerns as the UK's problem, not his.
His partisan behaviour is even turning moderate, pro-Remain Unionists against him, as Alex Redpath of the Ulster Unionist Party writes today on BrexitCentral. Instead of negotiating in good faith, he says the Commission have deliberately being using the Irish border as a fulcrum to try to force the UK to stay in a customs union, while alienating and antagonising the Unionist community by proposing a "backstop" solution Barnier knows would be in direct breach of the Good Friday Agreement. Read his article here.
DUP leader Arlene Foster yesterday called for "less rhetoric and more engagement in relation to the pragmatic way forward" from the EU, while also setting out her position that it was "very clear that the British people voted to leave the customs union" and reinforcing the fact that this is her party's position as well. Watch the clip here.
However, businessman Richard Patient says that the picture for the Prime Minister would be would look far less bleak if she threw her full weight behind the "max fac" plan that her inner Cabinet supported and stamped her authority on Brexit in the House of Commons. Most importantly, the country would be behind her. Read his article here.
Hugh Bennett
Deputy Editor, BrexitCentral