Taken at face value, the outcome of Britain’s December 12 general election could not have been clearer. The substantial parliamentary majority obtained by the country’s Conservative Party guarantees that the UK will leave the European Union in January and seek to negotiate a new trade and regulatory relationship by the end of 2020.
Since any new EU-UK free trade arrangement will have to be achieved over a period of months, the outcome can only be either a deal on trade in goods alone, or that Britain departs at the end of next year with no deal: an outcome that would create a high WTO MFN tariff wall between the EU and the UK.
Any such deal would not address trade in services which presently make up 58.5 per cent of the UK’s exports, about half of which are to the EU27, or the regulatory alignments that the EU is seeking, or other important bilateral matters unrelated to trade.
