The United Kingdom’s referendum a year ago gave the government the mandate to take Britain out of the EU. That was all. Voters did not say, and were not asked, whether they wanted to stay in the single market or the customs union.

The new British prime minister to emerge from the wreckage of the Conservative Party after the referendum, Theresa May, has allowed MPs to ask questions about Brexit, but has told them they have no right to decide the terms of Britain’s departure from the EU. The Tory press, like the xenophobic Daily Mail, cheered her on with asinine adulation.

But the results of May’s ill-judged and badly conducted general election campaign has left her strategy in tatters. By the time you read this, indeed, she may no longer be prime minister. After the Brexit vote that nobody predicted and almost half did not want, Britain faces the new nightmare of a hung parliament and a Prime Minister whose authority has been severely diminished.

The Leave campaign was recklessly cavalier about how easy it was going to be to leave the EU. The reality is that disentangling Britain from a series of legal treaties is not one event but many. The Financial Times has calculated that it will need to renegotiate more than 750 agreements that the EU has with more than 160 countries, covering fishing, flying to the US, trade, agriculture, nuclear power and far more. It will be a mammoth task even to replicate these arrangements, let alone improve on them as Leavers claim.

In the next 15 months Britain is due to dismantle an economy that has taken it over 40 years to build and which will take the next 25 to 50 years to recover. The full complexity of making bilateral deals to replace and extend the list of those already struck on Britain’s behalf by Brussels is only now coming into focus.

The cost in lost trade pending such deals, the cost to business of an abrupt end to free movement of labour for EU workers will be economically devastating.

This election appears to have been, among other things, a rejection of the vague but harshly worded prospectus for a hard Brexit for which May sought a new mandate. She (or possibly her successor if she is ousted) needs to revisit that prospectus. The referendum a year ago did not oblige her to lead Britain out of the European single market and the EU customs union as well as the EU.

As the detailed Brexit negotiations evolve, especially on trade, Prime Minister May’s Oxford degree in geography should stand her in good stead. For, however contentious and complex these discussions end up, the enduring reality is that the UK’s economic fate and future lie in Europe and not in some romantic ‘Global Britain’.

The enduring reality is that the UK’s economic fate and future lie in Europe and not in some romantic ‘Global Britain’

Napoleon, who knew all about power and geography, captured the essence of geography. He wrote: “The politics of all powers derives from their geography.” Britain is a prisoner of its geography, whatever some of its modern politicians believe.

Britain is an island nation, but has always had exceptional geography in Europe. This has enabled and protected Britain. It may arguably also have contributed to the ways in which it regards freedom and the law. Most certainly, it spurred discovery, necessitated trade to survive and demanded a spirit of commerce, strength at sea and the development of statecraft. From these flowed Britain’s great history.

For many supporters of Brexit, this historical but now defunct construct survives, even though time and global geopolitics have moved on and shifted away from Britain. Ironically, it was precisely this shift that drove the UK’s integration into the EU economy 44 years ago, creating an interdependence and a new identity which Brexit now seeks to weaken or, if poorly implemented, undermine.

Roughly half of UK trade - which accounts for about 30 per cent of GDP on average - is done with the EU. The EU is the taker for virtually all the UK’s export categories. The bulk of British exports and imports is overwhelmingly concentrated in a group of countries that are less than 2,000 kilometres from Britain’s shores.

The UK trades with many countries that are further away, but for the most part this trade is eclipsed by what happens closer to home.

It is no accident. Geography matters. Leaving the largest free trade agreement in the world on Britain’s doorstep is a giant leap into the unknown. The more rushed the Brexit process proves, the less likely it is to yield even an interim agreement.

The British government should stop obsessing about trade and ‘Global Britain’ and argue instead for a transition arrangement in which exit from the EU would be less cliff-edge and more carefully phased over time, perhaps over several years.

It is going to be immeasurably complicated. This negotiation can only be done badly in two years. And it is probable that it cannot be done at all.

On the current approach to Brexit, it is likely that Britain will crash-land out of the EU in 2019 with no completed deal. It is hard to put a financial figure or describe the social disruption on the consequences of that. But it will certainly be large. Crashing out of the EU is in nobody’s interests, least of all Britain’s.

May would be wise to signal now that her plan is to seek a transitional deal, prior to the comprehensive terms on which departure from the EU will be sought. It is entirely possible that Britain could successfully apply to join the European Economic Area (EEA), which is an agreement to secure the free movement of goods, services, capital and people between Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and the members of the EU.

This would permit opt-out of those EU laws, such as fisheries policy, which the UK finds burdensome. But to join the EEA first would bring temporary certainty on commercial and social policy. Crucially, it will also buy time to do a proper negotiation.

The move would bring trouble politically from the head-bangers on her right, though. The biggest challenge will be in explaining that EEA membership includes the free movement of people. There is a risk of being denounced by Leave zealots, who fear a temporary deal will end up being the basis of a permanent settlement. That, however, is still much better than crash-landing with a considerable thud in 2019.

Britain’s interests dictate the need to seal a transitional deal to take Britain safely away from the cliff-edge until the next election in 2022, which would be a more informed plebiscite on the outcome.

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