Back stop, borders, Norway Plus, customs union, single market, Canada ++ and so it goes on. All discussion tends to focus on the day to day, internecine conflict gobbledygook of who said what to whom, when and how and what it might mean. What happens after a Separation agreement is settled, which seems likely, and we move onto the next and hopefully final stage of the negotiation has received little analysis or comment.
In this blog I put forward a few observations on the way that the UK and EU have conducted the negotiation so far and draw some inferences on what this might, and probably will imply, for this country’s near future. A happy story it is not!
From the very beginning the EU positioned Brexit as a divorce, the details of which must be agreed before there could be any discussion of what might happen after the divorce. Despite some initial protestations by David Davis, the first Brexit minister, this was accepted. First on the table was the Separation Deal and once agreed, then talk on the future Trade and Co-operation arrangements could begin.
At this stage the UK should have walked away but didn’t. This was a grave and fundamental error which predestined the outcome ensuring it would be disadvantageous to the UK. In other words, the EU would get a very good deal and the UK a very poor one.
Why so? Would anyone agree the price of something without knowing what they were buying? Surely not! But that is what our Prime Minister did. The price is the Separation Agreement. What will we get for it? Besides some pleasant non-binding addendum to the Separation Agreement we still have no clear idea. We may dream we have bought a golden carriage and four which, when reality dawns, turns into a pumpkin and four mice.
The UK has always wanted to get a deal on the future relationship as quickly as possible, but we are no further forward. Why? Originally it was envisaged that we would have agreed both the separation terms and the future relationship with the EU in 2 years. Yet two and a half years on, we have still not buttoned down the Separation Deal. Contrary to popular perception a significant contributor to the delay has been the EU. They have used many tactics to string out the process such as asking for more details or further clarifications. But perhaps their most successful tactic has been not to agree to an item and not allow the negotiation to move forward until it had been agreed. They knew that time was on their side and as the March 29, 2019 (today) deadline approached the UK’s bargaining position would become ever weaker.
Even more importantly, knowing that the UK was anxious to talk about the Future Relationship, the EU could and did extract ever more concessions from the UK on the pretext that these giveaways moved the process forward. This is not to say that our Prime Minister and our Parliamentarians are not without significant blame. They gave the EU negotiators a tail wind through their incompetence, infighting and public displays of divisions.
One thing Mrs May has achieved is to agree a Separation Agreement with the EU. Given that her negotiation strategy was a failure and her tactics did not work, it is the best outcome one might hope for, albeit a terrible deal! Any other deal that will be discussed in the Commons and may even ‘see the light of day’ will be worse, probably considerably worse. It is clear that Brussels is determined to make an apostate country pay a heavy price for abandoning the EU for fears that others may follow, and they have repeatedly said so. The term they use is ‘cherry picking’ and it will impact on our sovereignty, our finances, our laws, our economy and our global political standing and power.
Throughout the whole process the behaviour of a significant number of our elected representatives, whichever side they are on, has been little short scandalous and has completely undermined our negotiation position. This contrasts markedly with the solid, professional front presented by the EU.
‘No deal’, the only deal that might possibly have given a better long-term outcome, has been taken off the table and the Prime Minister has, all but explicitly, ruled it out.
Nevertheless, we are where we are. Where to now?
The choice appears to be either to try and get an extensive delay eventually leading to revocation of article 50 thereby staying in the EU or agree a deal choosing from a menu on which Mrs May’s Chequers deal is the least bad. Staying in the EU is not the end of the world, but we will be tied to a sclerotic, slow growth region which is in many ways dysfunctional and at risk of imploding. Likewise, a clean Brexit would not be catastrophic but could cause short term problems which if they were not overcome would be blamed on our ruling political and business elites who would not be able to pass the buck on to Brussels.
Wind forward now to the Future Relationship negotiation. Having given-in to nearly all the EU’s demands, paid the divorce settlement of around £40bn, agreed to the Irish backstop and accepted the role of a vassal state, the UK will be in a very weak position. The EU has pocketed all these concessions and has little incentive to rush the negotiation. Furthermore, the UK buys about £70bn more goods and services from the EU than they buy from the UK, further stuffing their coffers. Our ability to make trade deals with other states will be severely constrained whilst the EU could pass measures deleterious to the UK without the UK having any say.
Throughout, the EU negotiators will tell us we cannot move forward unless issues such as for example, the status of Gibraltar, or fishing rights, or the status of offshore financial centres such as the Isle of Man and so on are agreed. As the UK will want to reach agreement as quickly as possible, if only to be seen to get something back for the price it has paid for the Separation Agreement, it will acquiesce to many of these demands. All the while the need to avoid triggering the Irish backstop, which is due to come into effect at the end of 2020 if no future Relationship Agreement is reached, will loom large. The EU has every incentive to drag out the negotiation for many years during which the UK would continue to pay a negotiated membership fee.
The UK is now in a far weaker position than it was two and a half years ago. The behaviour of our elected representatives has made matters worse. The negotiation team and the PM have shown that they have not just failed but are also incompetent and must be replaced. All has not gone well and there is little evidence that it will get any better. Even if we had the most brilliant negotiators in the world, they would be hard put to it to get anything like an advantageous Future Relationship agreement. Some might argue that we should not even bother to negotiate further agreements with the EU but devote all our energies on getting deals with more attractive, dynamic and faster growing parts of the world. This eventuality is unlikely.
Perhaps the best we can hope for is that like the good second-hand car salesman who throws in a free car mat to secure the deal, that the EU will be as kind to us and toss in a low-cost concession or two, if only to make us feel a bit better.
Alan – March 2019
Jeremy Corbyn is today’s poster child of the so-called progressives. Yet his politics harken back to an earlier, much darker age. It is bad that he is in denial about his racist views. It is worse that he leads a party that is, as Chuka Umunna MP put it, institutionally racist. It is scandalous that he and his stalwarts accuse the Jews of creating a fuss about nothing merely to launch scurrilous attacks on his leadership. Read more…
There is something rotten at the heart of the British government and of British industry.
At the core of the British government’s daily actions is the Article 50 negotiation process around which the whole machinery of public servants, media and politics has been focused, laser like, over the last two years.
That this process so far has been a disaster, a train crash slowly, inexorably and unavoidably coming closer, closer and closer, is deniable only amongst those who know nothing about negotiation, who include Theresa May. It has been focused on getting to discussing a trade deal as quickly as possible. This chimera has become increasingly putrid as each day passes and after nearly two years of phoney negotiations the UK is no nearer to substantive negotiations on what it might look like, save the recent white paper, which will merely be used to delay the process even further. Indeed, the Eurocrats insist there can be NO trade talks until we are officially out of the EU. Once out they will ensure Britain honours all the concessions it has offered and we will discover that rather than ‘nothing is settled until everything is settled’ turns out to be ‘a hell of a lot has been settled before we are allowed to get on to trade talks’.
It might have been different, very different. As a once upon a time trainer of customer managers in global companies in the art and science of negotiation, I used to lecture my delegates with clichés such as ‘to fail to plan is to plan to fail’, thinking, mistakenly, that everyone knew and accepted this piece of common sense advice. Theresa May, who it now appears has been holding the reins of the process, is obviously unacquainted with this truism. If she had been she would never have acquiesced to Barnier’s initial negotiation agenda, that is the strict order in which individual and separate parts of the eventual agreement must be dealt with. This made it absolutely certain that the UK would get a bad deal. To ameliorate this eventuality, she has given concession after concession which, as an appeasement policy inevitably gave rise to even more concessions. It is almost inevitable that more will follow as the rhetoric ratchets up.
In parallel the great and the good of British industry are publicly advising the government of the economic disaster that crashing out of the EU would be for jobs, exports and the difficulty of doing business with our European ‘friends’; who also happen to be our competitors. Grid lock at all ports would be the order of the day. This is the other ‘rotten’ edifice erected by the pro status quo bureaucracy.
For a moment let’s consider what sort of people these leaders of British industry are. Almost to a man/woman they are apparatchiks. They have climbed up the greasy pole of corporate hierarchies by effectively managing and growing parts of existing businesses within corporately acceptable tacit rules of behaviour and policy. Are these the sort of people who would carry the flag to new markets, with new innovations, based on world beating new strategies? No, no and no because they don’t even know what these words mean. No wonder they wish to maintain as much of the status quo as they can. They are not risk takers and never will be. They want an easy life and our Theresa seems determined to give it to them.
The reality is that the UK’s global economic and power position is slipping year after year in world rankings. The outcome of Theresa May’s negotiation strategy and laughable tactics will merely accelerate this trend.
For our grandchildren and their issue let us hope that there will be politicians of sterner metal in a Churchillian vein coming forward and business people the like of Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh and James Dyson taking the reins of the business economy.
Crashing out before the train crash impacts gives the UK an advantage, providing all the contingency plans for a no-deal are in place. This should have been well underway even before Article 50 was triggered. Then we have the initiative regarding how trade will be handled. Eurocrats are not used to dealing with this type of situation but it is ‘take or leave it’. It puts them on the back foot and they will in all likelihood leave it. Nevertheless, when they return to the negotiation table, as economic reality dictates, this will be the starting point.
This will not only serve to turn a potential train crash into a beginning of a new network of railway lines (to continue with the analogy) but also release the creative and entrepreneurial spirits at the heart of our island realm. This is the only course of action that will stop this once mighty nation slipping inexorably further down the road to irrelevance. Nevertheless ‘irrelevance’ is the path our political and business leaders are quite content to lead us down for they lack the vision and enterprise to understand any alternative to the status quo.
Alan
July 2018
In the letter sent by Israel’s opposition Labour party leader to Jeremy 
Corbyn suspending all contact with him and his office, Avi Gabbay stops but a little short of labelling the leader of HM Opposition an anti-Semite. There can be no doubt that this is one of the most serious and direct rebuffs that Corbyn has suffered. https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-israel-britain-labour/israeli-labour-party-breaks-off-relations-with-corbyn-idUKKBN1HH280
In the rarefied atmosphere of the Corbyn PR machine the continuing spin is that he is essentially a decent and honest man. I guess this puts a Newspeak interpretation on the words ‘decent’ and ‘honest’ which George Orwell had in mind in writing his book 1984. In it Newspeak is the language required to meet the Ideological requirements of English Socialism.
In reality Corbyn is neither decent or honest. He predictably, in Pavlovian fashion, choses to side with the faction he considers to be the underdog in any dispute without considering the fairness of the action of the belligerents. And he parrots the narrative of the perceived underdog without verifying its veracity. Surely the leader of HM’s opposition has a duty to examine every issue in an objective and fair fashion rather than feeding his own prejudices in a blinkered and unquestioning manner. And being ‘honest’ means not telling lies, even if you are only repeating the lies of others.
It is clear that Corbyn himself does not recognise any of these ‘idiosyncrasies’ or, as his enemies might call them ‘personality and character flaws that should bar him from holding any public office and indeed any private one with any significant responsibility’. Some might describe Corbyn as a zealot although I doubt if he would be happy with this description because the original Zealots were a Jewish sect.
So the reality is that Corbyn simply does not get ‘it’. His mind just cannot conceive that he, or his party, could be prejudiced against any race, since the abhorrence of racism is in the DNA of socialism. He believes he is a true socialist who buys into all the class struggle ideology that it comes wrapped in. Therefore, he cannot be a racist. The leader of Israel’s Labour party, a fellow socialist, disagrees with Corbyn to such an extent that he will have nothing to do with him.
How then will the Labour party get itself out of the mess that Corbyn has landed them in. Its first foray was to launch an internal investigation led by that impartial, and very media savvy, Shami Chakrabarti, ex director of the left-wing NGO Liberty and Chancellor of the University of Essex. After receiving a mountain of written evidence and seemingly ignoring most of it especially, if social media are to be believed, that which gave some credence to the charges of anti-Semitism, she concluded that there were only a few small pockets of anti-Semitism emanating from a few misguided people. Her recommendation was to re-educate these individuals and train them to not use words that might be construed as anti-Semitic. Well training never did anyone any harm. At no stage did her report even intimate that Corbyn’s Labour party is institutionally anti-Semitic with deeply embedded Jew hating attitudes and beliefs.
At the report’s launch Jew hatred language was spewed at Jewish MP Ruth Smeeth who, hounded out, left in tears. Jeremy Corbyn chairing the meeting said nothing. The report itself was widely criticise
d for being a whitewash. Shortly after Ms Chakrabarti was nominated by Corbyn and was awarded a life peerage. Reward for failure?
Much has occurred since. It shows the present UK Labour party is culturally anti Jews and hounds anyone who has a contrary viewpoint out of the party.
Now Jeremy has upped his game. Unfortunately, only a little bit. The answer now is that the Chakrabarti report needs to be implemented, some two years after it was written, with greater urgency. A critic might comment “how can the implementation of a report that was criticised for not addressing the real problem, ‘a whitewash’, solve a problem that it neither acknowledged nor examined?” In this context the blindness of the Jew haters touches the realm of incredulity.
One might conclude that what I have so far outlined that the head of HM opposition is not a fit person to become prime minister of our country, nor are the party he leads fit to be that of government. And that would be right.
BUT, much, much more concerning is that at the last 2016 election, 12.8m Brits voted for Corbyn, some 40% of the electorate. His meetings with terrorist organisations and sympathetic words for his ‘friends’ Hamas, Hezbollah, IRA and others were well publicised and widely known. His animosity to the only Jewish majority state on our planet peppered almost every utterance about the Middle East. This, despite or perhaps because of his racist approach, seemed to be make him more attractive to a huge section of the population and most worryingly amongst the young, those under 40. Some might conclude that the issue of racism, especially if directed towards Jews, is not really that important since this particular race are reputed to be enormously resourceful and know how to work the system, whatever that might be, to their own personal aggrandisement.
The historical analogies are all too obvious.
Jews in the UK are worried. Very worried.
This country, which has generally been good to its minorities, appears to be turning on its Jews. Around 40% of the population are signalling they are sympathetic to Corbyn’s world view or are choosing to turn a ‘blind-eye’ towards it. This is a seismic change. In the past, in all the nations Jews have emigrated to they have shown a remarkable allegiance to their host countries, tried to contribute productively to society and integrate themselves into their adopted cultures. Many have, up to the last minute, maintained this loyalty until they came face-to-face with HORROR.
Past lessons have been learned in many different lands. Now they no longer shrink back and take the vitriol that is hurled at them. Jews now stand up and protest. France is emptying of Jews. Next it may be the UK. Now they will leave before it is too late!
On the 23 December 2016, in the fag-end days of the Obama administration, Resolution 2334 proclaiming that Israeli settlements have no legal validity was passed by the UN Security Council with the UK being a major party in formulating the resolution and voting for it. Less than 4 weeks later Donald Trump, who had been extremely critical of the resolution, was inaugurated. Read more…
Imagine you are the head of strategy for ISIS. A key matter awaiting your attention is the decision on which front you should direct your disciples so as to facilitate their desire to copulate with 72 ethereal virgins. Luckily for you a target has raised its head above the parapet, almost asking to be the one. Read more…
Barcelona, Manchester, Paris, Nice the list of attacks goes on and on. No one is surprised or shocked any more, just saddened wishing it would all end and the leadership of the terrorists brought to justice. Read more…
Much attention has been paid to the opening salvos of the Brexit negotiation as to who said what. Those MPs, journalists and judges who clamoured for Theresa May to give more details of the UK’s requirements from the negotiation can now appreciate the damage they have done. By revealing the most important elements of what the UK was looking for, its opening position was revealed. This has allowed the EU bureaucracy several weeks to consider what their opening stance should be, throwing in Gibraltar and more. Read more…
The women’s march and the inauguration were, in a way, concurrent symbols of what is great about America.First, there was the peaceful transfer of power, and the celebration of this country’s free and fair elections. Then, there were those who were unhappy with the results of that election, letting their voices be heard on issues that are important to them. Read more…
President Trump has issued and executive order barring citizens from seven Muslim Majority countries from entering the United States for the next ninety days and suspended the admission of refugees for 120 days. This is in line with his campaign promise and that he would seek, during this time, to ‘reform the US immigration system’, which everyone admits is out of control.
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