The UK's former ambassador to the EU has rubbished both the government's customs proposals saying they would not fly "in the real world", warning: "We're heading for a major crunch".
Ivan Rogers, who was one of the most senior civil servants until he resigned last year in frustration at Theresa May's handling of the Brexit process, told MPs neither max fac – favoured by Brexiters and tipped to become official policy – or the new customs partnership were likely to be waved through by Brussels.
"Max fac doesnt solve the [Irish border] problem as other see it, so they dont understand why max fac is on the table at all," he told the Home Affairs Committee. "However facilitated at the border, its still a border, and still demonstrably different from what weve got now. So I dont think youll ever get max fac agreed, personally."
He also rubbished the new customs partnership as "complex, to put it mildly".
"We dont know whether the technology could be devised. It certainly doesnt exist at the moment," he said. It involves us operating as a third country power, policing the external border of the European Union, and then an extraordinarily elaborate machinery for remitting back to importers the difference between what our tariff rates have become once we use our sovereign trade policy and what the EU [does].
If you were confronted by that from the other side of the table, and that were Europeans putting it to us and saying, could we police your external border of your external customs union, and operate that, I can imagine what the UK systems answer would be.
As a result, Brussels was close to saying "neither max fac nor new customs partnership is a runner then, you know, you dont need to be in my shoes to say were heading for a major crunch".
Echoing Phillip Lee, the justice minister who resigned this morning over the government's handling of the process, he stressed that it was time to acknowledge its complexity which was not "messing up Brexit or undermining it or reversing it, or anything. Its saying: youve got a huge number of areas where youre extricating yourself from the existing relationship and the existing acquis [body of EU law], which is thousands and thousands and thousands of pages long."
He added: "This is a revolutionary system change. If you take Brexit seriously, which I do, you can;t say, we can do all that in a jiffy. Its not going to happen."
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