John Sentamu: We need to strike a Brexit deal for the common good

No area is more important than that, when it comes to negotiating Britain’s departure from the European Union and to forging a new relationship, ‘a deep and special partnership with the EU’.

Indeed, the reality is that there is no way in which a minority government can hope to get all the legislation related to Britain leaving the EU through Parliament without the help of others. The Government needs to make a virtue out of this necessity.

The challenge now is to negotiate a Brexit for the common good.

How do we make Britain’s departure from the EU a good news story for the poor, the unemployed and those whose wages and living standards have been falling? This is no easy task.

The Government’s most recent poverty figures showed that 14 million people live in poverty in the UK. Numbers started to rise last year and research published by the Joseph Rowntree Trust project that by 2020/21 there will be over a million more children in poverty than there are now.

It was welcome news, therefore, in the Queen’s Speech for the Government to promise to increase the National Living Wage “so that people who are on the lowest pay benefit from the same improvements in earnings as higher paid workers”.

And my hope is that the increase will be up to what the Living Wage Commission, which I chaired, recommended. Playing catch up is not good enough.

There are some who hold that leaving the EU will only impoverish further existing marginal and vulnerable communities. These voices need to be heard rather than silenced. They need to be drawn into the debate as to the type of economic model we need to encourage post-Brexit and how that understanding should shape the Government’s negotiating strategy to leave the EU.

Only by doing so will we be able to bridge the deep divisions exposed by the vote to leave the EU – and indeed the recent General Election. It is evident that we need a more collegiate and consensual approach.

Beyond Government, in the latter’s dealing with Parliament, the media and the electorate, the approach needs to be more transparent and more broad-based.

Conducting the negotiations in a positive and constructive tone requires the Government to ditch once and for all the ‘confrontational and threatening’ language that it has used since the referendum.

Fiery slogans like ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ might play well with Eurosceptics, but they do little to build the partnership between the UK and the EU that the Government has always said is its fundamental objective. ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’ – does that mean, for example, that we will cut all our diplomatic ties with the 27 remaining EU countries if we get ‘a bad deal’?

But all is not lost.

It was encouraging to see in the Prime Minister’s statement of June 23 that she wanted “all those EU citizens who are in the UK, who’ve made their lives and homes in our country to know that no one will have to leave. We won’t be seeing families split apart. People will be able to go on living their lives as before”.

The proposals are a good start but this will be one of the thorniest issues to be resolved in the negotiations and, always, the devil will be in the detail.

I humbly encourage the Government to take a broad and open-minded attitude to this matter. The simplest solution would be to codify clearly and comprehensively the rights of EU citizens in British law and to take March 2019 as the cut-off period. Going forward the motivation of both sides should be goodwill, justice, compassion and the Rule of Law.

What would help the Brexit negotiations more than anything is a greater degree of realism. I have every confidence that the Government will reach the two-year timeframe negotiation period set by Article 50. We need however to recalibrate expectations that a new relationship with the EU can be negotiated by March 2019. Most experts hold that it is unlikely to be completed and ratified this side of 2025.

This is where we need a cross party commission – maybe even a Royal Commission, akin to the Privy Council – to look at possible options and to offer impartial but honest advice to the Government on the best transitional and final arrangements. Its size should not be too large. As Queen Elizabeth I said, on her Accession: “A multitude doth make rather disorder and confusion than good counsel.” She shrunk her Privy Council from 30 to 10.

I’m certainly not looking for a place on any such body, but I want to suggest that if you are going to help, maybe the Government would be wise to look at keeping the UK in the single market and the customs union until the end of the transitional period when any new relationship with the EU comes into force.

The outcome of the General Election offers the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland an opportunity for a fresh start – not to turn our backs on leaving the EU, but rather to learn the lessons of the last year and deliver and manage our leaving the EU that provides for the long term flourishing of this country.