Hardliners won’t like this soft Brexit plan. Tough – we have little choice | Simon Jenkins

At last the fog is starting to clear around Britain’s Brexit negotiating position. The cloud is lifting, and we can see what lies beyond. It is nothing. There is no negotiating position. There is just an unbridgeable gap between idea and practicality. That gap continues to mesmerise political conversation.

When the public voted to leave the EU last year, there was no evidence that it wanted rid of the single market or cared about the European court of justice. The EU was never an election issue. The vote to leave was a proxy for voters’ immigration concerns. It must be honoured. But who could tell which Brexit was preferred, indeed, what the vote meant?

Since the government was strongly for a minimalist interpretation at the time of the vote, it should have gone immediately to Brussels with a problem. It should have explained that it had to withdraw, but believed it in the nation’s best interest to stay as close to Europe as possible. So which of the “softest” options might form the most constructive basis for negotiation?

As it was, Theresa May did the opposite. She ignored Henry Kissinger’s diplomatic maxim, of building confidence by negotiating from areas of agreement towards those of disagreement. She exaggerated disagreement from the start. Like some remainers I know, she seemed to want hard Brexit just to teach the leavers a lesson. She appointed three loud-mouthed Brexiters as her negotiators, hoping that hanging tough at the start would “win” more at the end. She cried hard Brexit at every turn. Inevitably, the EU retorted in kind. It was bad tactics.

We are told that behind the terrible trio of David Davis, Liam Fox and Boris Johnson are 80 of Whitehall’s brightest and best, burning the midnight oil on a deal under sherpa-in-chief Oliver Robbins. We are told they have a deal just around the corner, “the easiest in human history” (Fox). We “can have our cake and eat it” and the EU can “go whistle” (Johnson).

Brussels regards this as rubbish. MEPs have accused Britain of scuppering a Brexit deal, saying it will be impossible to meet an October deadline unless our negotiators give in on EU citizenship and budget payments. Brussel sources have said that given Britain’s “red lines”, there appears to be no sight of a deal on these matters – which along with the Irish border are the three preliminary withdrawal issues – let alone on a substantive new treaty. It is like the 1438 Council of Basel: as the Ottomans lay siege to Constantinople, the popes and prelates argue over whether the holy ghost was “of” the son or “through” the son. We now merely argue over chlorinated chicken.

The key must be to treat hard Brexit as a paper tiger. This week’s Economist carries a poll showing a quarter of referendum leavers (plus the vast majority of remainers) would vote for soft Brexit, assumed as some version of single-market membership. This confirms a recent YouGov poll that has 72% of leavers stating that the vote was about immigration, yet half of them accepting free movement in exchange for single-market membership if there were restrictions on social benefits for immigrants. The same finding emerges from a King’s College London survey. Again the issue is not immigration as such, rather a desire to relieve the perceived pressure on public services.

I know of no Brexiters who really want tariffs and trade barriers against Europe’s markets. I know of few who want NHS and care workers sent packing, or British fruit farms to close, or to have to get visas every time they visit Europe. There is no way the UK can replicate 35 EU regulatory agencies, all operating under the European court of justice. There is no sum that has trade lost to Europe replaced by trade with the rest of the world. Every economic model, however sceptical, has Brexit costing the British economy dear.

Come March 2019, it is a near certainty that the Brexit clock will have to be stopped. Common sense dictates that the best way forward will be to adopt “temporary” membership of the European economic area (EEA) outside the formal EU, a cobbled-together version of the Norway option. That means honouring leave, while also honouring the clear wish of public opinion to remain within the single market. Continuing to pay a proportion of £8.7bn a year will be cheaper in the short term than the reported £50bn leaving fee.

Brexit pundits may criticise the Norway option as messy, but they can rubbish anything. The chief hurdle is the contentious issue of free movement of labour, one of the four freedoms embraced by the EEA, along with free movement of goods, capital and services. But immigration is now an issue in every EU country. With barriers already going up between Italy and France and round Hungary and Greece, migration is fast becoming a challenge to all Europe. The concept of the “emergency brake” is already embedded in the EEA. Some reform of the Schengen area and control of intra-European migration is a near certainty. That, surely, is the area for Brexit negotiation.

Of course the EEA, temporary or not, will not satisfy Tory fundamentalists. But who cares? They have no coherent vision of what a post-EU labour market, or blanket passport control, or cross-Channel trade would be like. Their anti-Europeanism is not so much practical as psychological, romantic, disruptive. Theirs is an attitude of mind rather than a policy. The evidence anyway is that theirs is a minority view.

The oft-cited assertion that Brexit must mean “leaving the single market” may be legally true, but the EEA offers a replacement market. Jeremy Corbyn and his party are all over the shop on Brexit, but it is inconceivable that Labour would vote against EEA membership with some modified immigration clause. If anyone wanted to argue the issue, we can always stage another referendum, as the Danes and Irish did in comparable circumstances.

Arguments over trade and migration between adjacent states always end in compromise. Europe is already split between the eurozone, the EU and the non-EU, in a layer cake of sovereignties and deals. It is now to be split from Britain. But it has to be in everyone’s interest for the split to be minimised. Hard Brexit is not just daft, it is unnecessary. Brexit should mean flexit.