What’s the most significant thing that Liam Fox has said today, as he begins talks with the US on a post-Brexit trade deal? Is it that he thinks the British media has an ‘obsession’ with chlorine-washed chicken (Ross takes a non-obsessive look at this here) or that he has admitted that it might be ‘optimistic’ to expect a trade deal between the UK and the EU by March 2019?
It is true that the International Trade Secretary has often been the most optimistic about how hard Brexit will be (unkind people might suggest that this is because he hasn’t actually had to do much of the nitty gritty stuff since taking the job a year ago), so his comments today at the American Enterprise Institute do represent a rather more pragmatic tone. He said:
‘There’s a growing consensus amongst the Cabinet that we will leave the European Union but we will have a transition and implementation phase where we’re outside European law but voluntarily would choose to keep a number of rules as part of the acquis to give our business in particular and our inward investors the ability to understand what the new environment is going to look like.
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