Former WTO boss attacks 'total confusion' over Brexit

Theresa May’s government has been slammed by a former director general of the World Trade Organization for creating “total confusion” around its plans for Britain’s new trade relationship with the EU and the wider world after Brexit.

Peter Sutherland, who was the WTO’s founding director general, said that until the UK government gave clear answers on whether it wanted to remain a member of the European single market and the customs union, it would be condemned to a “dialogue of the deaf” in its negotiations with foreign partners.

“The government has to come clean on what the realistic negotiating posture is for the UK and that requires answering those two fundamental questions — ‘do you want to be part of the single market?’ and ‘do you want to be part of the customs union?’” he told an audience at the Centre for European Reform in London Thursday.

“If those questions aren’t answered, we will have no clear debate, it will continue to be obfuscated, confused by ludicrous arguments that anybody who knows anything about the reality of the WTO, the EU, the historic precedence of the EEA knows simply cannot take place.”

Sutherland, a former European commissioner for competition who was an outspoken advocate of UK remaining in the EU, singled out May’s assertion that her government could control freedom of movement from the EU while getting “the right deal for the trade in goods and services,” and her failure to clarify whether she wanted the UK to remain in the single market.

He also criticized Brexit minister David Davis’ lack of clarity over Britain’s future status in the European customs union.

On the issue of the single market, Davis said Monday that continued UK membership is “improbable” — a remark that was later dismissed by a Downing Street spokesperson as a personal “view” rather than the government’s stance.

“At the moment we are in a state of total confusion,” Sutherland said. “If you’re out of the single market there is no real prospect of having access to free services across the internal market. This has to be expressed. We have to know even at the beginning of a negotiation where the basic line of the negotiation is going to be as far as the UK is concerned.”

Sutherland was speaking as part of a project launched by the former deputy prime minister and Liberal Democrat MP Nick Clegg to set out the challenges facing the UK in the wake of the Brexit vote.

Clegg, a former MEP, said that British business had yet “not woken up” to the “explosion of red tape” that would follow in the wake of Britain striking new trade deals with non-EU countries — something he said would require the country to leave the EU customs union.

He also predicted that public opinion might shift against Brexit.

“If the economy were to sour and enter into a period of real volatility and there was real political gridlock because the government can’t resolve these knotty issues, public opinion would start getting concerned about whether the country was going the right way,” he said.

“I’m not wishing that on the country, but I can imagine that opinion would shift.”