May vows Brexit won't hurt jobs as she unveils 'five tests'

EU leaders want May to be realistic and stop pretending - as they see it - that the UK can 'cherry pick' the benefits of membership without accepting the responsibilities.

Speaking on Friday, May’s Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said she will provide a 'very detailed picture' of her vision for future trade with the bloc, including setting out where Brexit will limit British access to markets.

“She’s going to recognize that there are things that we can’t have as we leave the single market and we leave the customs union,” Grayling told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

The UK prime minister is under pressure to meld together competing visions of Brexit from rival factions within her own governing Tory party. In a telling detail that highlights her political weakness, May asked her ministers on Thursday to allow her to make last-minute changes to the text of her speech, a request they agreed to.

Over the course of a two-hour meeting with senior figures on Thursday, all May’s ministers weighed in on what she should say, with the premier agreeing to make tweaks to accommodate euroskeptics on one side and the pro-EU camp on the other, according to one official familiar with the deliberations.

The risk is that in trying to please rival wings of her party, she’ll fail to provide negotiators in Brussels with the clarity they insist on with just over a year to go before the UK and the EU part ways.

The EU has repeatedly rejected what it has seen of May’s strategy so far. But she will stick to her demand on Friday that the EU should grant Britain its best ever trade deal, and offer close collaboration in return.

“People in the UK voted for our country to have a new and different relationship with Europe, but while the means may change our shared goals surely have not – to work together to grow our economies and keep our people safe,” she will say.

“I want the broadest and deepest possible agreement – covering more sectors and co-operating more fully than any Free Trade Agreement anywhere in the world today,” she will say. “Rather than having to bring two different systems closer together, the task will be to manage the relationship once we are two separate legal systems.”

The need to find a UK position that squares the contradictory demands of her ministers meant the extracts released by her office hint at where she could compromise: for example, pledging to “protect people’s jobs and security."

Brexit Bulletin: May binds herself with jobs pledge

May is taking a line straight from opposition Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn’s playbook. He vowed to seek a "jobs-first" Brexit, in what turned out to be a first step toward pledging to stay in a customs union after the split to. That policy, which would smooth trade, has the backing of pro-EU rebels in May’s party - who are increasingly emboldened - and probably a majority in Parliament.

The other four tests of success May will set in her speech are:

• The deal must see Britain regain control of its laws, borders and money, while recognising the referendum “was not a vote for a distant relationship with our neighbours.”

• The agreement must be enduring and not lead to endless future negotiations. It must be consistent with Britain remaining a “modern, open, outward-looking, tolerant” nation that stands up for its values while meeting international obligations.

• The deal “must strengthen our union of nations and our union of people.

• The last of those goals will be seen as an olive branch to the devolved governments of Wales and Scotland, which have disagreed with her approach.