I'll tell you what I want (what I really, really want)

Theresa May’s “big speech” on Friday where she outlined her five point plan for what she wants from Brexit, was supposed to be her Spice Girls moment - telling us what she really, really wants. It would bring the Conservative party together, pacify governments elsewhere in the EU27 and apply some balm to the festering domestic wound caused by the vote to leave the EU. To read various domestic media outlets, you could be forgiven for thinking that it had hit many of its targets. According to the FT "Theresa May warns Eurosceptics to 'face facts'". The Telegraph called it “her most pragmatic Brexit speech to date” and noted “if only [she] had given this speech 13 months ago at Lancaster House.”

Instead, I heard a speech that was long on words but short on content. Guy Verhofstadt got it broadly right in his Twitter feed when he noted that “PM May needed to move beyond vague aspirations. While I welcome the call for a deep & special partnership, this cannot be achieved by putting a few extra cherries on the Brexit cake.” In some ways, the Telegraph was right about one thing – it would have made a far better starting point than her car crash Lancaster House speech in January 2017. But it was not a speech which gives anyone any confidence that at this stage of the Brexit negotiations, the UK government is on track for a Brexit that works for anyone – politically or economically.

The five “tests” were themselves an exercise in irony: (i) “the agreement we reach with the EU must respect the referendum”; (ii) “the new agreement we reach with the EU must endure”; (iii) “it must protect people’s jobs and security"; (iv) “it must be consistent with the kind of country we want to be … a modern, open, outward-looking, tolerant, European democracy”; (v) “it must strengthen our union of nations and our union of people.” In terms of (i), the only thing the electorate voted for in 2016 was to leave the EU – not the customs union nor single market. With regard to (iii), most economists struggle to see how we will be better off and on (iv) I have remarked previously about how the world sees the UK as becoming more, not less insular. But (v) really was a corker: Two areas of the union voted to remain and they are being dragged out of the EU because of the choices of voters elsewhere. Brexit poses the biggest danger to the union in modern times.

May’s statement that “we must bring our country back together” produced this rejoinder from Jolyon Maugham QC, the prominent Remain campaigner: “When your Brexit doesn't deny our children the privileges we enjoyed, we'll listen. When you apologise for calling us "citizens of nowhere", we'll listen. When your policies respect the dignity of our friends, colleagues and partners, we'll listen.”

As I parsed the speech, it was difficult to discern anything new. It was similar in tone to that in Florence last September (albeit way better than the efforts of 2016 and early-2017) though it better reflected the reality that the UK is not going to leave the EU on its own terms. There was nothing of any substance about how to resolve the Irish border problem, although the phrase “we want as frictionless a border as possible” was directly used four times and another twice in a slightly different guise. Nor was any justification provided for the decision to leave the customs union. Another thing that struck me was the mention of introducing processes to differentiate between small and large businesses in Northern Ireland to reduce the administrative burden on smaller companies. So we introduce more admin to reduce the administrative burden? It would be laughable were it not so serious, and none of this would be necessary at all if the UK simply remained in the customs union.

To compound the litany of dreadful decisions, May reiterated that the UK would leave the Digital Single Market – the EU's strategy to make it easier for digital businesses to work across borders and which guaranteed things like no roaming charges. And “on financial services, the Chancellor will be setting out next week how financial services can and should be part of a deep and comprehensive partnership.” Only six months too late as banks begin to implement processes to allow them to cope with the business disruption caused by an end to passporting – a process which, once it starts, will not be reversed. With regard to services more generally, “we want to limit the number of barriers that could prevent UK firms from setting up in the EU and vice versa, and agree an appropriate labour mobility  framework.” So there is at least a recognition that non-tariff barriers are a major hindrance for the services sector, so that’s a start, but we have been saying this all along. But scrapping the existing movement of free labour in order to introduce a new set of plans? It all defies logic. As I pointed out in 2015, swapping one set of rules for another means “much of what is currently legislated by the EU would have to be done domestically in the event of Brexit.”

As an economist, I found the speech content-free. But increasingly, it seems to me, the problem is Theresa May herself. As the blogger David Allen Green has pointed out, the PM and her colleagues make speeches whereas the EU issues detailed legal documents. Worse still, May is neither a strong leader nor a good communicator. She can't lead because she is a prisoner of the two factions of her party who want either a hard Brexit or the softest possible and can please neither side as she walks the Brexit tightrope, giving the impression of a leader who is in office but not in power. The PM seems not to understand how to communicate with other EU leaders – her speeches are bland and lack any of the specific detail which her soon-to-be-erstwhile EU partners want to hear. I’m afraid to say that whilst her predecessor David Cameron will go down in history as one of the worst prime ministers in recent history, Theresa May is currently running him close.