Hello and welcome to the FT's weekly politics podcast with me Miranda Green.

For women in politics this was an unusual week, a chance to celebrate a hundred years of progress, sometimes a little slow, since women were

granted the right to vote in UK elections.

Both the Prime Minister Theresa May and Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn found ways to mark the moment.

More of that later, because in one other respect this week was painfully like those that preceded

it, with the government's position on Brexit unresolved and a lot of blows traded on the impact of Britain leaving

the EU. Joining me to discuss this are James Blitz, our Brexit newsletter author

in London and Alex Barker from the Brussels Bureau.

So James, the UK Cabinet met this week in these intensive sessions, supposedly to thrash out

the national negotiating position on what we want from Brexit.

It seems as if not much progress was really made.

We now understand there's going to be this away day at Checkers for the Cabinet to actually

resolve the British position.

What is going on?

It seems that Theresa May herself even didn't take a position.

Well, Theresa did take one position this week, which is that at the start of the week number 10

definitely ruled out membership of the customs union or a customs union after a

brief period in which it partly through an F FT story we could see that there were people inside government who wanted that adopted.

So that's been put to one side and you're absolutely right.

The ten members of the cabinet subcommittee then met for two sessions about five hours in all.

And what they appear to be discussing is once again this question of what's called managed divergence between the EU and the UK.

In other words, the UK will choose a certain number of areas in which it will have a sectors where it will have regulatory alignment,

...