Britain wants control over immigration. This means they must leave the EU and lose influence over its institutions, there is no way around it.
Britain wants a relatively frictionless border with Ireland. This means a custom union, again there is no way around that. And because of (1) it inescapably follows that they will have no influence over their trade policy.
You don’t usually get everything you want from a negotiation. Given that the UK got both (1) and (2), what did May’s critics expect a deal to look like?
Well for me any deal that takes away my right of residency in the EU is a bad deal. Full stop.
Out of this negotiation there were always going to be two losers, The UK and the EU. Both have indeed lost badly but the EU probably has lost less. Not that it is any comfort to anyone.
Hopefully this madness can still be reversed. May’s “deal” getting voted down would be a good start to stopping Brexit entirely, which is the only outcome I am interested in.
Is "stopping Brexit entirely " on the table at all in the UK? Aren’t the options now this deal or hard Brexit? Seems like Tories want Brexit, Labour wants Brexit; the people who oppose Brexit seem to be profoundly politically powerless.
Well May did say recently that it’s her deal, no deal or no Brexit. First time I can recall that she’s allowed for the possibility of no Brexit. I think she was trying to scare the Brexiteers into line, but I think she’s given the Remainers some faint hope.
There are loads of obstacles in the way of no Brexit though. First up, assuming May survives that long, there’s the MPs’ vote on the deal. This looks like a horrible decision between the middle option and an unknown one of the extremes. Voting against this as a Remainer feels like a gamble: it’s the only way to no Brexit, but it’s also more likely than not to lead to no deal, which is surely the worst possible outcome.
Assuming the vote rejects the deal, as currently is looking likely, I can’t imagine May will last the day. Then either an individual will challenge her leadership, there will be a party vote of no confidence or there will be a general vote of no confidence in the government.
The last of these results in a general election which will be a de facto referendum on Brexit in some areas and a foregone conclusion in others. With the differing views throughout the Labour party, it won’t be clear whether Brexit or no Brexit has won unless Labour campaigns on a People’s Vote platform (i.e. for a real second referendum) and wins handily. The result of the second referendum seems like certain remain, based on polling data. This will leave the country paralysed for months but is probably the most likely route to no Brexit.
If there’s a party vote of no confidence, as I understand it the rank and file members get to choose a new leader. This is likely to result in a Brexiteer being elected as they include the most recognisable names and the party as a whole appears to be a little to the right of its MPs.
If there’s an individual leadership challenge, I believe MPs get to choose the next leader. This will lay bare the divisions in the party but there appear to be more who want to leave than stay so I can’t see anyone who runs on any sort of remain platform ending up as the chosen leader.
If we do end up with a leader in favour of no Brexit, they will still need to get legislation through parliament to revoke Article 50. In the case of a general election or particularly a second referendum, this should be easy. If we still have all the same MPs though, it will be very tricky to pass. The frothing section of the press will be calling everyone traitors who votes against the “expressed will of the people”. Much acrimony to be expected.
It’s not as bad because it’s one of those “no taxation without representation” things, it feels less bad. Still pretty bad though, I’d guess she’s one of those who thought Brexit meant not having to care about any of the EU’s rules, instead of you know, giving up your power to vote on those rules.
The people on the Brexiter side who dislike the deal are willing to tolerate more border friction, and not at all willing to accept compromise of sovereignty. May has always wanted to minimise border friction, both in NI and more widely, which as you say has lead to the deal we have.
The EU insisting on zero NI border friction as a precondition for any deal is still obnoxious mind you, but we will never know if May and Robbins really pushed back on this to the extent that people with sovereignty concerns would have wanted. This make for a ready made stab in the back narrative.
In any case the deal does several things May promised she wouldn’t do. It has no legitimacy democratically, which proves May has learned nothing from this mess. Really that is why it is a bad deal - because it is a ready made recruiting tool for populists.
“Canada plus” with a low-friction (but not no friction) Irish border. Of course this may never have been on offer - the EU’s imperialist behaviour with regard to NI is in itself a populist recruiting tool. Then again I’m not sure how much people outside of NI really care about it.
The issue is not the specific nature of the deal, but that it doesn’t match (in spirit, rather than specifics) May’s position in the 2017 election. If May’s platform was “soft brexit” then the deal would be fine. But May’s platform at the time was very much medium - hard brexit.
Is this really what was happening? My impression from over here across the pond was that both sides wanted the open Ireland border. Britian needs it (for the sake of stability across all of Ireland) even more than the EU does.
It is as clear as mud, which is part of the problem. May had other red lines which were inconsistent with a no-friction Irish border.
However the following are clear:
The UK’s original suggestion for the Irish border was a low-friction solution, which was rejected by the EU.
The EU pushed strongly for the no-friction wording in the December agreement, and came up with the NI as part of EU customs union(*) with no option to unilaterally depart proposal in February. That is essentially preserved into this agreement, and has been the main sticking point in negotiations for 6 or so months.
(*: Which I assume means the central EU revenues would get 80% of all tariff income on tariffs for imports into NI, including from the UK. If anyone has any evidence otherwise I would love to see it. This is an issue I haven’t really seen discussed, and appears to be the most obviously odious aspect of the EU proposals.)
It’s entirely unclear to me whether May has folded to the EU’s imperialist demands or May has used them to lever a soft brexit deal which nevertheless ends freedom of movement into being. Which is certainly an achievement, but not, I think, the achievement her voters were expecting.
I note that one way out of the backstop for the UK is Irish unification. Which would make the problem of keeping the peace on the island of Ireland entirely the EU’s. And this withdrawal agreement might make that an actual challenge - if anything will goad the most extreme unionists back into terror it would be this kind of process. As I said before, short termism on all sides.
(The last third is a typical brexiteer advancing of alternatives to which the EU has no reason to agree to, and has said that it will not agree to, as realistic alternatives)
It might well be the best possible deal that satisfies both the criteria you mention. That doesn’t make the deal good. We’ve made a hell of a lot of trade-offs to make those two things possible - leaving the Single Market for the first, and sacrificing independent trade policy (and, if you believe a great many politicians, most surprising of which is Corbyn, jeopardising the future of the union) for the second. Those are incredibly unpalatable trades, especially in combination, and were nothing like the expectations that were raised during the referendum.
Ireland is not going to accept a deal that results in friction on the NI border. It considers this a prerequisite for peace, and this is non-negotiable from their point of view.
The UK can argue all it wants about this, but here’s the simple facts: 1) any deal has to be accepted by all 27 remaining member states in the EU, and 2) Ireland will vote against any deal that does not include guarantees for the state of the NI border.
That’s all there really is to it.
The Brexit-idiots agitating against the deal at this point are pretty much in two camps - those who have no conception of reality (aka people like Dorries mentioned above), and those who want “No Deal” so that they can capitalize on the chaos that follows in order to attempt a power grab. Neither of those types care at all about what happens in Ireland.
But then again, pretty much every single expectation raised by the Leave side during the referendum were either outright lies, or way exaggerated to begin with.
I always find it interesting when discussing with my less EU-friendly Norwegian friends to point out exactly the issue that got Dorries so agitated: Norway, as a European nation outside of the EU, is probably the European country that follows EU regulations most stringently, but has effectively zero say in determining what those regulations will be. That’s the reality of being outside the EU, when your primary trade partner is the EU.
That makes perfect sense to me - if I were the EU, why would I give the UK some kind of special border? The EU wants to make Brexit difficult to discourage other member states from leaving in future, and the best way to do that (at least in terms of border control) is to treat the UK like any other foreign country. Either they get no special treatment at all (i.e. no deal Brexit) or they stay in the customs union in exchange for border freedom (i.e. Norway model). From an outsider’s perspective, I don’t see why the UK would expect anything other than those two choices…at least not without some other major concessions that don’t seem to be forthcoming.
I really don’t see how the EU side here is “imperialist”, when all they’re doing is exactly what Brexit asked for - demanding that Britain be treated like a foreign power.
I considered bringing this up earlier but figured that would be an ignorant American mistake. :) If Northern Ireland hasn’t left the UK and unified with the rest of the island prior to this, I figure there’s a good reason.
