Last week, when Maroš Šefčovič, the European Commission vice president, floated the prospect of the UK joining the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention (PEM), a Europe-wide customs scheme, Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, denounced this idea as a “betrayal” that would “shackle us to the EU”.
But this means that the Conservative leadership is now taking an even more hardline approach than some of the most prominent Brexiters in the party.
In an interview in the Times today, Lord Frost, the former Brexit minister who negotiated the post-Brexit trade deal with the EU, said that joining PEM would not threaten any of Britain’s Brexit freedoms. He said, when he was in government, he considered the case for joining. He explained:
We didn’t see it as raising any issue of principle, but we equally didn’t consider it to be particularly in UK interests. The EU also seemed to lose interest rapidly so the negotiations on this point quickly ran out of steam.
And Daniel Hannan, the peer and former MEP who was one of the leading Tory pro-Brexit campaigners in 2016, has also indicated that he would not mind the UK joining PEM. In his column in the Sunday Telegraph this weekend, referring to the response to the Šefčovič proposal, Hannan said:
Immediately, Conservatives were denouncing “membership through the back door” while Lib Dems were exulting in Brussels being “receptive to the UK joining the Customs Union”. But the PEM is not a customs union (something which, for the avoidance of doubt, the UK, as a global trading nation, should not join). Are we really going to oppose, on principle and without looking at it, anything containing the word “Euro”?
Source: The Guardian
