The Great British Trade-Off
I first published this article on the National Institute of Economic and Social Research blog . It is reproduced here with permission. For the non-British readers, the title is a play of words in reference to a famous BBC TV series, the Great British Bake Off. The British Prime Minister and four of her senior cabinet colleagues will in a series of speeches over the next few days set out a vision for the UK after Brexit. Those speeches will likely reiterate the government’s official goal of ‘free and frictionless’ trade with the EU. Less clear are the concessions that the UK is prepared to make to achieve this objective. In this blog we explore the likely trade-offs from the prism of a simple schematic and focus on three key areas of negotiation - market access, labour movement and budgetary contribution. There is no magic formula and the decision is ultimately political. With that in mind, the PM and her colleagues should spell the priorities on each of these three dimensions in th