I wish so badly Ukraine had been a part of NATO and the EU. That would have curb stomped Putin’s ambitions. What he did would have been a declaration of war, and with a President who wasn’t a traitor back then, we would have been there with you to defend them.
I think this is the gist of it. Chequers tries to break the most fundamental red line the EU has set from even before the referendum (the four freedoms). That the UK government keeps going on about the EU’s “theological” approach means they still don’t understand the line will not (I think) be crossed. The UK has been negotiating thinking red lines are not really red lines (and tbh, the EU has done the same regarding Ireland).
I hope the Ireland issue will get solved, but I don’t doubt there will be tariffs and checks after all is done. Frictionless trade will not happen, and I think that will be the compromise (regular Canada-style trade deal, checks in Ireland’s border targetting mostly trucks and vans). The main question is to whether we can negotiate a transition period so there’s time to shift the economies, or if we go off the cliff in March.
Also, I wonder: a border, even if “soft” in Ireland will have a heavy impact on NI politics. Isn’t the UK concerned about that? I would assume the need to avoid a border would be equally strong on either side.
Interesting, I always saw Chequers as a free trade agreement stacked heavily in the EU’s favour with some freaky customs arrangements to minimise paperwork. It’s completely legit to see it as a “free market in goods though”.
A deal like the one you describe would be fantastic. At the moment it’s the EU that’s blocking it. We will see.
I think the impact of an NI border depends entirely on the attitudes of the enforcement on either side. If it is light touch then people’s lives will go on as before and the only people who will make an issue of it will be people who would make an issue of something else anyway. If the friction is significant then a lot of people will be directly impacted and it will become a major issue.
So, for example, the UK would rather deal with, say, illegal immigration over the NI border than have a hard border. Equally, NI being tied to the EU regime in some specific areas (energy and agriculture are the obvious ones) seems like a sensible decision in the situation. However the EU’s extremely broad demands of regulatory control in Ireland and a “hard” border down the Irish sea are well outside the UKgov’s envelope of acceptability. The only way I think the EU could believe they might be acceptable is:
A) Briefings from Corbyn’s circle. Corbyn is very much on the Republican side here.
B) Briefings from the Irish government that “it’s the DUP stopping them, put enough pressure on and they’ll have to fold”. I think this is a fundamantal misunderstanding of the political temperament of the conservative and unionist party. I mean, I might be wrong, maybe May always planned to sell out the Unionists and held the 2017 election to reduce her dependency on DUP votes to get Brexit legislation through (don’t all laugh at once).
I wonder what similar misunderstanding lead to the Chequers proposal. I suspect the EU dropped some hints about “Some arrangement that is like the CU but not called the CU might resolve the Irish border issue.” and then May and her civil service fixers went off on some regulatory alignment tangent in secret having completely misunderstood what the EU meant. This is of course rampant biased speculation though.
EDIT: Also Hunt comments at conference were absolutely awful. Hopefully the end of his career, doubt it will be though. Raab and Davidson pretty much summed up my perspective.
ISTM that the problem with the ‘light touch’ approach is that, philosophically, the motivation for Brexit was to stop the free movement of people. An open border between Ireland and NI means that anyone can move freely, though maybe not legally, from the EU into the UK and vice versa. Similarly, the ‘light touch’ means goods can also avoid whatever tariffs result from the final trade agreement. Given the UK’s political commitment to end freedom of movement, and the EU’s political necessity to treat a Brexited UK less favorably than EU members, it’s not clear to me that either side can tolerate the ‘light touch’.
This isn’t an issue. Most UK immigration policies aren’t enforced by stopping immigrants at the border (who are difficult to identify anyway), it’s by restricting legal employment (or tenancy agreements or bank accounts, or whatever). UK politicians are behaving like idiots right now, but literal ‘build a wall’ rhetoric is (thankfully) limited to across the pond.
I dunno, I see May as more of an “Oscar the Grouch” than “Machiavelli.”
This:
As my French friends were discussing this morning; It’s as if the English team had turned up at the FIFA World Cup with cricket bats and golf clubs, and spent two years arguing whether they were going to play basketball or tennis.
Well as we invented all of those sports except basketball, surely we get to dictate what happens next!
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
I’m getting morbidly curious now, to see what happens in the event of a no deal exit.
I’m confident basic arrangements like planes being allowed to fly etc will still be in place.
Would be vaguely amusing if they weren’t, or rather the ensuing blame game would be amusing.
I can see it now, Brexiteers blaming remainers for not being fully on board and that it is therefore their fault. ☺😀
They will just all blame the EU and be done with it.
Sure, but there’s still a real world outside, and people will need answers, a shrug and it’s the other guys fault only cuts it until it doesn’t.
And part of me would love seeing what no deal Brexit would look like, but that part already got a smorgasbord of riches with Trump, so, better not?
Why? It’s not a trivial problem, and by all outward signs nobody is pursuing it. And it’s one of probably hundreds of similar problems.
Meanwhile…
Our new EU operations will be ready to go soon. None of this is public. Corporate Britain is quietly moving away.
Any hint they are and the media and socmedia is full of calls for boycotts, nationalisation and worse so the Suits have learned to run it all as secret relocation projects.
The challenges around the Irish border are around the legal requirements we will have if we are not in a trade bloc within the European Union to operate the WTO compliant border, which does require checks at the border. That’s what the WTO rules require… We are depending on the WTO to regulate our relations with the rest of the world, we will have to comply with the rest of WTO regulations or we will find we can’t enforce our WTO rights against others.
I’m not sure how WTO requirements interacts with the free movement of people. I’m not sure how statements as to what would happen in the case of no deal is relevant to a proposed deal involving “light touch” regulation.
This does not surprise me at all.
Allow Nissan to verify my statement.
Can’t imagine why they’d think that.
This is quite a good discussion of the current state of affairs.