Boris Johnson: UK will 'still have access to single market’ despite Brexit

Conservative Party leadership frontrunner says cooperation with Europe will 'intensify'

Monday 27 June 2016 09:07 BST

Boris Johnson arrives to speak following the results of the EU referendum (Getty)

Boris Johnson has said the UK there will be “still have access to the single market”, despite Britain’s historic vote to leave the EU.

Considered the frontrunner for the Conservative Party leadership, he laid out plans for an “intense and intensifying” cooperation with Europe.

In his column for The Telegraph, Mr Johnson said: “I cannot stress too much that Britain is part of Europe, and always will be.

6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you

“EU citizens living in this country will have their rights fully protected, and the same goes for British citizens living in the EU.

“British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and to settle down. As the German equivalent of the CBI – the BDI – has very sensibly reminded us, there will continue to be free trade, and access to the single market.

“Britain is and always will be a great European power, offering top-table opinions and giving leadership on everything from foreign policy to defence to counter-terrorism and intelligence-sharing – all the things we need to do together to make our world safer.”

Mr Johnson stressed that leave voters must “assure” those who voted differently in the EU referendum, acknowledging the result – 51.9 per cent to 48.1 per cent – was “not entirely overwhelming”.

Despite the pound sterling falling to a 30-year low, the largest single-day drop by any currency in history, he said the negative consequences of the vote to leave were being “wildly overdone”, insisting the public should be “incredibly proud and positive”.

Earlier on Sunday, former deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine said Mr Johnson, Michael Gove and UKIP leader Nigel Farage must be in charge of EU negotiations, so that they would have no-one else to blame in the event of an adverse economic outcome for Britain.

6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you

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1/66 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you

6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you

More expensive foreign holidays

The first practical effect of a vote to Leave is that the pound will be worth less abroad, meaning foreign holidays will cost us more

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6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you

No immediate change in immigration status

The Prime Minister will have to address other immediate concerns. He is likely to reassure nationals of other EU countries living in the UK that their status is unchanged. That is what the Leave campaign has said, so, even after the Brexit negotiations are complete, those who are already in the UK would be allowed to stay

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6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you

Higher inflation

A lower pound means that imports would become more expensive. This is likely to mean the return of inflation – a phenomenon with which many of us are unfamiliar because prices have been stable for so long, rising at no more than about 2 per cent a year. The effect may probably not be particularly noticeable in the first few months. At first price rises would be confined to imported goods – food and clothes being the most obvious – but inflation has a tendency to spread and to gain its own momentum

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6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you

Interest rates might rise

The trouble with inflation is that the Bank of England has a legal obligation to keep it as close to 2 per cent a year as possible. If a fall in the pound threatens to push prices up faster than this, the Bank will raise interest rates. This acts against inflation in three ways. First, it makes the pound more attractive, because deposits in pounds will earn higher interest. Second, it reduces demand by putting up the cost of borrowing, and especially by taking larger mortgage payments out of the economy. Third, it makes it more expensive for businesses to borrow to expand output

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6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you

Did somebody say recession?

Mr Carney, the Treasury and a range of international economists have warned about this. Many Leave voters appear not to have believed them, or to think that they are exaggerating small, long-term effects. But there is no doubt that the Leave vote is a negative shock to the economy. This is because it changes expectations about the economy’s future performance. Even though Britain is not actually be leaving the EU for at least two years, companies and investors will start to move money out of Britain, or to scale back plans for expansion, because they are less confident about what would happen after 2018

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6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you

And we wouldn’t even get our money back

All this will be happening while the Prime Minister, whoever he or she is, is negotiating the terms of our future access to the EU single market. In the meantime, our trade with the EU would be unaffected, except that companies elsewhere in the EU may be less interested in buying from us or selling to us, expecting tariff barriers to go up in two years’ time. Whoever the Chancellor is, he or she may feel the need to bring in a new Budget

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He said: "It is essential that the negotiations are conducted by Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage, the architects of this policy.

"Any other negotiating team will produce claims that those three would have achieved a better result and during the negotiations they will excuse any deterioration in Britain's position as a failure of the negotiators.”

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