Rishi Sunak is facing a new row on two fronts over Brexit, as he sought to quell a backlash from hardline Eurosceptics given suggestions the UK could seek a Swiss-style deal with Brussels, while businesses are expected to call for a more “practical” immigration stance.
Ahead of the prime minister’s address to business leaders in Birmingham on Monday morning, Downing Street tried to dampen down speculation that a deal similar to Theresa May’s “Chequers” plan could be adopted, claiming it was “categorically untrue”.
There has been renewed focus on the effects of Brexit given the UK is the only G7 country still lagging behind pre-pandemic growth levels, and the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, recently suggested that removing trade barriers would boost growth.
Senior government figures were said by the Sunday Times to be revisiting a Brexit trading arrangement offered by the EU last year, which would get rid of 80% of the checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland and open up access to the single market.
But the move would require the UK to pledge alignment, at least temporarily, on food and agriculture standards. Doing so would be anathema to champions of a hard Brexit, including Boris Johnson’s chief negotiator David Frost, as well as MPs in the hardline European Research Group.
They see any alignment as surrendering control to Brussels, and even though ministers including Michael Gove have repeatedly in the past declared that the UK would keep food and farming standards equal or higher than those in the EU, any formal deal would be seen as a part-reversal of Lord Frost’s trade deal.
The EU’s Brexit negotiator, Maroš Šefčovič, offered a Swiss-style trading agreement last June but it was rejected by Frost. The move is reportedly being considered by some in government, particularly while Sunak seeks to avoid a trade war with the EU and strike a deal on the Northern Ireland protocol.
Raoul Ruparel, a former Brexit adviser to May, said a Swiss-style deal without freedom of movement was tantamount to her ill-fated Chequers deal. “We tried that, a lot,” he tweeted, adding that it was “unlikely to ever be negotiable or supported by Tory MPs”.
Steve Barclay, the health secretary and final Brexit secretary before the post was abolished when the UK left the EU in January 2020, told Sky News on Sunday: “I don’t recognise this story at all.”
He said he did not support a Swiss-style relationship with the EU when it was first touted, and added: “I want to maximise the opportunities that Brexit offers.”
Other senior Tories sought to disparage the suggestion, including trade minister Maria Caulfield, who called the report “fake news”. Frost added that if the claims were correct, he hoped “the government thinks better of these plans, fast”.
Former Brexit party leader Nigel Farage has said he may return to frontline politics in response to a potential “betrayal of Brexit”.
“I’m not ruling anything out,” he told the Sun.
A government spokesperson said it was “categorically untrue” the UK was being lined up to request a Swiss-style deal with the EU and said there would be no return to freedom of movement, restrictions on striking trade deals outside the EU or “unnecessary payments” to Brussels.
It was suggested that the briefing may have been designed to test how far the ERG would resist a closer relationship with the EU in the challenging economic environment the UK has found itself in.
Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow work and pensions secretary, told Sky News that Labour was “not proposing returning to the single market or the customs union, or anything like that”.
“But we do want to negotiate a bespoke deal for the UK, so that our businesses can export, so that we can get those agreements on agriculture, so we can work together on security issues,” he said.
After Hunt’s autumn statement on Thursday, Tony Danker, the head of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), said there had been little detail about boosting growth and productivity in the UK.
In his speech at the CBI conference on Monday, Danker is expected to urge Sunak to drop “barriers” to growth by adopting a more “practical” stance on immigration and doing a deal with the EU to reform the Northern Ireland protocol.
“Let’s have economic migration in areas where we aren’t going to get the people and skills at home any time soon. In return, let’s make those visas fixed term,” he will say.
