You can plese some of the people

[Suff]

all of the time and all of the people some of the time.

To paraphrase.

However, right now, pleasing the Remoaners is going to cost us very dear indeed in negotiating with the EU.

After the abject capitulation of Athens on the Greek bail out, I read a very interesting article. It said something close to what I believed when Syreza took over.

Here is the gist of it.

What the Article said was that the best Greek negotiating stance with the EU was to say "We're leaving the €, redenominating all Greek debt into Drachma and we're going to devalue 20% per year for the next 10 years. Unless you have another suggestion. If that means we have to leave the EU, then so be it, but that is what we are doing".

The author of the article was absolutely right. Because the panic it would have caused in Brussels would have been monumental. They would have done almost anything to avoid even one of the PIIGS from escaping from the mountain of debt they had built up buying Northern European goods and "living the good life".

So why didn't they do it? Because they had campaigned on a platform of keeping the €. Which was a platform of weakness. In the end it led to the total capitulation of Greece for no other reason than that they had wedded themselves to the €.

So take Britain. The Remoaners are trying to force us to accept terms, any terms, so long as they get free and unrestricted access to the EU market. There is a HUGE trade imbalance between the EU and the UK, worse that trade imbalance is invested, mainly, in the two richest and most powerful countries in the EU.

So what should our stance be?

I submit this.

We leave, no deal is on the table and we will slap 50% taxes on all EU imports. If the EU takes it to the WTO and tries to cause action we'll threaten to VETO every single legislation agreement the WTO wants to bring until the WTO agrees to allow the UK to block EU aggressive marketing. What? Veto? WTO? Why did nobody ever mention that? Yep if the WTO tries to pass any new legislation the UK can veto it to get what we want. Just as India did.

Sometimes being the "bad boy" in the world is not such a bad thing and would allow us to bring the EU to the negotiating table at the end of a French and German gun.

OH and just to level set. The UK economy is quite a bit larger than the Indian economy and in much less available services and goods. You can't just switch provider of many of the goods and services the UK provides.

If we don't the UK trading relationship with the EU is going to be very much the same as the Greek relationship with debt. Rapine and usury by the EU and capitulation by the UK.

In this WM is exactly right. Trigger A50 and next day say "no deal, were leaving. You want a deal, you come up with one". Hard Brexit with an opening for the EU to come up with offers of a solution. Not the UK coming cap in hand to the EU asking for "favours".

Then we get to be the one saying "no that's not good enough go back and think again".

When Canada publicly stated that they believed the EU was incapable of negotiating a trade deal, the EU, France and Germany came in and "sat" on the Belgian and Wolloonian PM's until they capitulated. Notably Belgium is a net recipient of EU funds, not a net contributor.

[Workingman]

I do not get this:

There is a HUGE trade imbalance between the EU and the UK, worse that trade imbalance is invested, mainly, in the two richest and most powerful countries in the EU.

and

We leave, no deal is on the table and we will slap 50% taxes on all EU imports.

About 44% of the UK's exports go to the EU, in return between 8-17% of exports from the EU come to the UK (depending on how you measure it). So we slap 50% tariffs on their goods and services and they do the same to us - a good move. Doh!

Yes, we hurt them, but they hurt us a hell of a lot more. If ramping up tariffs and playing silly beggars with WTO rules is any sort of plan then we are all doomed.

[Suff]

Actually it's about €60bn of goods of which about €40 billion of them are German.

That is a very different picture than 8-17%. That is a huge hole in German trade. Germany has undue influence due to it being the largest net payee to the EU.

I hate it when figures are used like this. The other day I checked out someone's assertions that because global population growth in 1968 was 2.1% and now it's 1.1%, that population growth had fallen. Yep, it had fallen from 70 odd million to 81.4 million.

With the EU you cannot simply take a figure, map it to the whole and then say "yeah it's only x%". That is not how the EU works and people, especially the UK government, never seem to learn the lesson.

[Workingman]

Germany, last time I looked, was part of the EU and it is EU/UK trade being talked about.

Germany and the UK cannot do a deal as Germany will be part of the 27 nations within the EU telling the UK what is, and what is not. The EU negotiators know the figures and if they are going to be hurt then they can hurt us a lot more.

I also note that global population growth figures will not be part of any EU/UK negotiations.