[1andrew1]

Tony Danker, the CBI director general, has joined the many Tory Brexiters who reacted with alarm to yesterday’s story in saying that the government should not be aiming for a Swiss-style deal. He told the Today programme this morning:

I’m a bit puzzled about the whole Swiss thing. It took them about 40 years to get to the Swiss arrangement. Currently, we’re not even implementing Boris’s deal. Let’s implement Boris’s Brexit deal, that still has some growth in it, by the way, that’s all come to a freeze, and let’s forget the discussion about Switzerland for now.

Asked if a Swiss-style Brexit deal would be a betrayal of Brexit, Danker replied:

"All I want to do is implement Boris’s deal. Currently we’re not implementing Boris’s deal. We’ve got we’ve got an impasse because of the Northern Ireland protocol. There’s lots of freezing of our science relationships, of our recognition of our qualifications, of easier travel across Europe. Those things will give us some growth. But it needs the Europeans and the British government to get round the table and solve the protocol.

There’s a landing zone there. If we fulfil the agreement on the protocol, we’ll start to open up some of those other other economic benefits from Boris’s trade deal."

https://www.theguardian.com/politics...08958e0f819abe