Finally a trade deal — and with a whole week to spare. Only with the published text of the deal between the UK and EU will a full sense of who has given ground and where emerge. But after four and half years of chaos, trauma and often humiliating political turmoil, the UK finally has a settled idea of what Brexit looks like.
The fact that a deal has been done is good news. The consequences of failure would have been bad for both sides, though immeasurably worse for the UK.
It must be stated though that this deal, while far better than nothing, is a long way short of what a great global trading nation should desire; the bare minimum that could have been agreed given the ideological intransigence of the government. It is certainly not the easy deal Brexiters blithely predicted. Manufacturers may be spared tariffs and quotas but they face costly extra bureaucracy which is likely to hit exports to Europe. There is even less for the service sector, the engine of the British economy. The price of British sovereignty is essentially the first trade deal designed to reduce access.