Theresa May: Brexit Means Leaving the Single Market

On Tuesday, British Prime Minister Theresa May at last outlined her objectives for Brexit, confirming after weeks of speculation that the United Kingdom will leave the European Union’s single market rather than accept the free movement of people across borders. May made clear, in other words, that her recipe for making Britain a great economic power again requires first leaving the world’s biggest economic and trading bloc.

May spent much of her speech trying to spin Brexit as an internationalist move, rather than an insular retreat to “Little Britain.” The day of the Brexit referendum, she said, “was not the moment Britain chose to step back from the world. It was the moment we chose to build a truly global Britain.”

That truly global Britain will feature, if May has her way, stricter border control, and will have to renegotiate its trading relationship with Europe. She explained that the U.K. would make no attempt to remain in the European single market because that would mean accepting so many conditions from Brussels that “It would to all intents and purposes mean not leaving the EU at all.”

Instead, May wants to reach a separate trade deal with Europe and with other countries around the world; President-elect Donald Trump said in an interview published in The Times (English edition) on Saturday that he will do a deal with Britain.

“Theresa May has promised a ‘clean Brexit’,” Joseph Dobbs, a research fellow at the European Leadership Network, told Foreign Policy. “But given that she has just promised voters in the U.K. an excellent free trade deal with Europe with no trade-offs, my bet is that it will be anything but clean.” That will be bad news for the British economy next year, after Brexit got a relatively benign reception in markets. “2017: Like 2016, but now with consequences,” Dobbs said.

Those consequences may still be a while away. Negotiating the terms of departure from the EU could take years, and will keep things paused meanwhile: The EU has already said that Britain may not make the independent trade deals until after it’s put the “exit” in “Brexit.”

And though May has vowed to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, the legal mechanism for beginning the end of the United Kingdom’s time in the EU, her country’s supreme court has yet to decide whether she is empowered to do so. The decision may instead rest with Parliament, whose members tend to see departure differently.

But even delayed consequences manifest themselves at some point. Take British universities: May insisted Tuesday they’ll remain competitive globally, but vice chancellors of those universities say her hard Brexit is a “disaster,” and that European applications are already down. Of course, since May was the Home Secretary who wanted to limit student visas and send foreign students home right after after graduation, she might not see that as a disaster at all.

Still, it wasn’t all bleak news for everyone. May’s comment that she will throw the ultimate decision on Brexit to cooler heads in Parliament gave a boost to the beleaguered British pound, which just had its best day since the financial meltdown almost a decade ago. Investors apparently believe that, given the chance, lawmakers will undo last summer’s shocking referendum. 

Photo credit: DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP/Getty Images