People can change their mind in even less than 5 months, especially when the context changes dramatically.
Theresa may simply believe that the UK public will not be happy to compromise on immigration even if it means losing the single market. No matters how personally she believes in it. She needs to deliver what the UK public wants.
Of course, she could start by trying to explain how bad it would be without the single market, but that line of thinking has been used and abused for month leading up to the referendum and then after, and still now. There is no point adding a layer.
At the end of the day, regardless the circumstances even staying in the EU, she cannot be sure to be able to deliver prosperity. There is no vindication by the number for her at the end of the tunnel. The economy will not boom like China in the 90's, those days are over. Even staying in the EU, the UK is not protected from another 2007 crisis.
So she can't deliver on prosperity but she can deliver on immigration control, and that also happen to be the number 1 concern of her population and so that's simply what she must do rather what she would want to do.
When asked to choose between immigration control and single market access, more people wanted to retain single market at the cost of immigration controls than the converse.
Especially since leaving the EU only affects EU immigration, which people are generally much less worried about. Non-EU immigration, which is what people really worry about, is largely independent of EU membership.
I am not sure about this, in certain areas people are really worried about Eastern Europeans, particularly Poles (google "polish vermin brexit"), and Farage did speak often of sending Italians and Spaniards back home.
I am starting to believe that May's hard-core "Brexit means Brexit"* stance may actually be her way of remaining in the EU. After all, the Brexit positions are massively internally inconsistent, apart from at odds wit the external realities.
The best way to show those inconsistencies is not to argue against them, but to forcefully try to go forward with them, failing utterly and completely and thus revealing the inconsistencies.
*whatever that exactly means. "welcome to Tautology Club. If you like tautology club, I am sure you will like Tautology Club".
Conservative PM Theresa May said she will formally begin the Brexit negotiation process by the end of March 2017. This will trigger the two year process of negotiations as per Article 50 of the EU agreement, according to the BBC.
May promised a bill to remove the European Communities Act 1972 from the statute book, but repeal of that act won’t take place until the Article 50 negotiations are complete, if ever. Now, here’s the catch:
Her "Great Repeal Bill" that she is intending to submit to Parliament will “enshrine all existing EU law into British law.” So, why leave the Union if you’re going to make all EU law part of the UK statutes? She says, they will work on removing the bureaucratic elements of the law later. The only significant difference is that the bill will end the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in the UK. So what, if UK courts will now have to enforce the new law?
UK courts are already enforcing EU laws, an appeal to the ECJ isn't the first thing you do.
This is the only way to do such transition this is pretty much how every former colonial territory has transitioned and why it's not common to find laws from 2-3 different colonial powers in the law books of various countries.
In the middle east it's not uncommon to have laws from the Ottoman Empire, British/French Mandate and Modern Laws in countries like Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Jordan.
You can't just transition from 100 to 0 and then to 100 again, EU legislation has supplemented, replaced, and added tons of laws and regulations that govern many day to day activities in the UK.
Passing new laws to replace each of those with a UK law will take years or decades, now there is already a framework that mostly works and it would be codified with a single grandparent law.
If and when the Brexit fully happens (the UK invokes article 50 and actually pulls out of the UK completely) various EU laws and regulations would be slowly replaced by new UK laws but this will take a long long time to complete if it ever going to be completed because each of these laws will be a parliamentary vote and a political battle because there would be money and benefits up for grabs.
Whatever you think of Brexit, is a pretty sound procedure. Those laws are already valid in the UK, so by bringing them in you ensure there are no disruptions, while giving yourself time to amend them / replace them with new ones. It also signals that the UK is doing an orderly Brexit and that it's "open for business".
I suspect laws dealing with human rights, which May was quite strongly against, will be the first to be repealed the moment EU membership is officially up.
Preserving the status quo as a default makes the transition easier, because it means they don't have to have replacement laws drafted for everything before the switch date. It seems like quite a sensible policy to me.
Theresa may simply believe that the UK public will not be happy to compromise on immigration even if it means losing the single market. No matters how personally she believes in it. She needs to deliver what the UK public wants.
Of course, she could start by trying to explain how bad it would be without the single market, but that line of thinking has been used and abused for month leading up to the referendum and then after, and still now. There is no point adding a layer.
At the end of the day, regardless the circumstances even staying in the EU, she cannot be sure to be able to deliver prosperity. There is no vindication by the number for her at the end of the tunnel. The economy will not boom like China in the 90's, those days are over. Even staying in the EU, the UK is not protected from another 2007 crisis.
So she can't deliver on prosperity but she can deliver on immigration control, and that also happen to be the number 1 concern of her population and so that's simply what she must do rather what she would want to do.