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The group of people tasked with trying to make decisions on this – Parliament as a whole, not just the government, and the civil service – have brought us to a position where we are now being told we have to accept a certain course of action because otherwise it will be catastrophic. It beggars belief that the sixth biggest economy in the world should get itself into that position. Everyone in Europe has a strong economic incentive to have been coming to a free trade agreement. That is something we should have been saying in 2016, (and) was what we wanted to do. But the only way of getting other countries to agree to that was to demonstrate that we had actually put in place credible plans to be prepared to leave without a deal because we can’t impose a deal. You have got to have a credible bargaining position. We haven’t had a credible bargaining position because we haven’t put in place measures where we can say to our colleagues in Europe: look, we would like a free trade deal, we think that you would like one to, but if we can’t agree, don’t be under any misapprehension: we have put in place measures that would enable us to leave without one. And that is a practical thing that can be done. It can’t be done in six months; it takes several years. But you have to start straight away.
I’m not going to tell the government what to do, but what is pretty clear is that we are likely to have some sort of deal. But we are going to get the worst of both worlds. We will leave next March, but only in the sense that we won’t be going to any of the meetings that take place, so we will have no say in what happens. And yet we will still be bound by all the rules and regulations of the European Union. And I think the biggest risk to the UK is what worries we most, is that this issue isn’t going to go away. The referendum hasn’t decided it, because both camps feel that they haven’t got what they wanted, and that is not how policy in Britain is usually made. Normally, we have an issue, both sides present their case, and then you have a general election, and the government that wins puts its policy in place and we accept it. What we have now got is a situation in which neither side is accepting where we are.
Mervyn King’s comments originally appeared in an interview on the Today programmeBecause you read about brexit
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