When I listen to Merkel, I wonder just who is

[TheOstrich]

Well, at least the "phoney war" is now coming to an end, and both sides can settle down and start to negotiate the next stages. I sincerely hope we'll see an end to posturing from both sides, and something workable emerges at the other end. I am reasonably optimistic we'll see the latter. Both sides will need to compromise, and both sides need to understand that neither side should be humiliated.

Let's face it, the ball is entirely in the EU's court in this respect; if they want to humiliate the UK, well then fine, we'll walk. In those circumstances I would 100% support walking, and I think the majority of the UK would too. On the other hand, if the EU want to negotiate fairly, then we'll give them what they want and leave on good terms. And I would wholeheartedly support that.

All I want is an end to EU governance of this country's affairs, an end to the threat of creeping federalisation, and an end to unfettered immigration. It would be good to achieve this "nicely", but if it has to be "nastily", so be it.

[Suff]

Barnier now has formal approval to negotiate to those guidelines. There are six headings and 26 points and a lot of them negate many of the things Leavers claimed, promised or threatened could not happen.

Yes, those 26 points are what the EU _needs_. Which is why they are on the negotiating list, because we don't _want_ them. This is the whole imbalance thing.

As for what the UK provides that the EU needs. Let's start with a few things. Services, we provide invisible services to the EU which they consume without even knowing we have provided them. We also provide technology in a very large part. Look at cars and look for the design centres for most car manufacturers. Whilst there will be a few people scattered here and there over the entire EU, the bulk of them are in the UK, thousands of them. That is pure money to the UK we don't need to import, we export it directly to the "manufacturers" in the EU. Stuff like that is not going away.

I said, right at the beginning of the whole thing that the UK exports things the EU needs but the EU exports things the UK wants. Want is subjective and tied to price and willingness to purchase. Need, on the other hand, can only be avoided at large cost.

Also let us take banking. Yes our EU banking makes up a part of the 12% of the UK economy. But don't be confused that the UK _only_ does banking for the EU, the UK is a world wide banking hub with huge clearing and lending. As was clearly identified when the EU was told they put the entirety of the €trillion and a half that the UK banking has lent to the EU states at risk if they damage our banking systems.

The Commonwealth of Nations has a net GDP of $14.8 trillion, on 2014 figures, it will be much higher now. The EU without the UK will be lower than that and that's just ONE of the opportunities which await our banking environments. Money we have been forced to restrict ourselves in how we handle it. Banking in the UK could, if handled properly, expand exponentially, out of the EU leaving the EU to either climb down or sulk and lick their wounds. I'd put my entire wealth on the latter.

The EU has decided it wants to have it's cake and eat it with the UK. My stance is the same as they told us about us also wanting to "have our cake and eat it". Especially as we never produced a list of 26 points which, essentially, said we wanted to stay in the EU without being in the EU. Which is exactly what the EU has just said by passing that (toilet), paper with a 26 point wish list.

The people have stood up to the EU. Now it is time for our government to do the same. If it means a decade of choppy seas as we work it out, then so be it. But I guarantee you this. The EU will miss the UK long, long, before the UK misses the EU to the same degree, if ever.

[Workingman]

Suff, I do respect you talking up the positives. At least you put up points to debate, unlike a lot of Leavers who can only throw insults, but the fact remains that the EU is in the driving seat with regards to Brexit.

It has published its terms for the negotiations whereas the UK has not. All we have had from May is the "no deal is better than a bad deal" soundbite, but we do not know what a bad deal, of whatever sort, constitutes. What we do know is that if there is no deal we go to WTO rules with all the new negotiations on various areas of trade they will require. It is not as simple as EU one day WTO the next, as many people seem to think.

Similar problems arise with the rest of the world, including our Commonwealth chums we left in the lurch some 44 years ago. We already have deals with many of them through our membership of the EU to which we signed over areas of competence for it to act as a negotiator for the whole bloc as a WTO member in its own right. Any deals we come up with independently will have to take into account, and not conflict with, those already in place with the EU. Also, because of the WTO's most favoured nation (MFN) rule, any country dealing with the EU under WTO cannot offer us a better deal than it has with the EU, and nor can we offer them a better deal than we have with the EU coming the other way.

There are choppy waters all around us and we only have tiny paddles and a small cup for our leaky canoe.

[Suff]

Also, because of the WTO's most favoured nation (MFN) rule, any country dealing with the EU under WTO cannot offer us a better deal than it has with the EU, and nor can we offer them a better deal than we have with the EU coming the other way.

Unless, of course, the UK also has MFN under WTO.

Personally I believe the EU is only in the driving seat so long as it retains 27 state unity. Of course if we make it plain that some of the 27 are going to suffer extreme economic pain because we're not accepting that deal, that unity is going to be stressed to the limit. Especially when some 20 of those countries don't actually pay into the EU, they get back from it and that of the other 7, 6 of them are the main bankers of the EU budget. Then, on top of that, of those 6, 6 of them a huge amount to lose without a deal.

I vote for shattering this ephemeral EU27 Unity and playing divide and rule. If you play the game the way the EU sets it up you lose, every single time. So we play the game the way we need to win and stuff what the EU wants.

Because if we don't go in like that; the cost of losing to the EU is going to be exponentially higher, than the few years of adjustment the UK needs to make, if we just bang out without a deal.

I like to stay positive but I won't stay positive for the EU. In my opinion the EU has been shafting the UK for 44 years and wants to keep shafting the UK for centuries to come. Personally I prefer to be the shafter, not the shaftee.

[Suff]

Someone else on the same page as me..

Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, however, struck a note of realism when he conceded that Saturday's harmonious mood would not survive in the long run.

"When the negotiations start and detailed, more complex discussions have to take place, obviously some countries will assign bigger priorities to different issues," Kenny said.

[Workingman]

MFN status is a defining principle of WTO trade law, it does not have to be applied for. The EU currently trades with ove a hundred countries under WTO rules so already has MFN status with them. There are a couple of exceptions for devloping nations and within free trade areas, but the only basic workaround is bilateral agreement. However, the UK would have to individually negotiate every single one, maybe more than a hundred, and unfortunately the Sun is about to die in three billion years or so.

I see Kenny also said:

"So," he added with a smile of understatement, "it won't all be as calm and as measured as today."

Not as calm is not the same as falling apart and I might be wrong but neither case looks to be anything positive for the Brexit negotiations. If anything they push a deal further away. What that deal looks like is anybody's guess because May will not tell us.

Asked about her insistence that no deal would be better than a bad one, May told ITV television: "I wouldn't have said it if I didn't believe that."

She added: "With the right strong hand in negotiations, we can get a good deal for the UK."

So there we have it, more electioeering but not one atom of detail.

Another interesting quote from the article comes from Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern after leaders were briefed by Barnier.

"The Commission and Barnier ... have really done their homework well," Kern said. "One can say that the British have not done so with the same intensity."

I can't ague with that as it is pretty much what I have been saying.

[Suff]

I can't ague with that as it is pretty much what I have been saying.

This is very true but it's apples and oranges.

The EU is an federal state of 28 states or which 27 states are now going to have to agree to the EU negotiating the 28th state's exit from the federal treaties and leave the overall state.

The UK, on the other hand, is one country in the process of negotiating exit from the EU. We don't have to create "negotiating constraints" so that all our disparate parts will agree to what is negotiated. We have one government and that government is mandated to negotiate the exit. Yes our parliament will have a vote on the "deal", if one is agreed, but it will be one deal, one vote, one country.

Trying to compare the two is groundless and disingenuous. All it makes is political soundbites to hide the truth. The UK only needs ONE deal for what One Country, the UK, wants to get when it leaves the EU. The EU, on the other hand, must make a deal with meets the needs of 27 states.

Were we Ireland, or Greece, or Sweden, it would not be a big problem and could be handled differently. But we're not. We're the second largest economy in the EU, the most powerful Military power and we are the prime conduit for international intelligence on threats and terrorism, both for the UK intelligence and the US intelligence.

The UK leaving is one huge hole in the current make up of the EU. Greece? They could have punted them and felt little more than a bug bite. The UK leaving? One huge kick, in the knackers.

The EU? They are facing something they never wanted to face. The Lisbon Treaty was supposed to give the illusion of the ability to leave the EU. Nobody who signed it ever believed it would actually be used.

SURPRISE!!

Now the EU is more organised than the UK to leave? Naturally, it's not so much of a big deal to us. They want to take away all those competences from the UK? Banking? Others? Then they may do so, at their cost. The EU? Trying to make the UK pay more than their fair share? That's been the game all along, except now it's not going to fly.

So I do get annoyed. The EU is the only one doing any real talking and the press are bigging up the EU case. I want the UK to do some talking too but, sadly, I'm frustrated. My fear is that we fail, as we have failed to see so many times, to recognise what the EU is up to and wind up leaving us in a difficult place.

Personally the hardest of hardest brexits is the only way I can see that the EU and UK will ever come to terms with this divorce. Because once we have left and everyone sees the pain on both sides; then the positions can be negotiaited from knowledge and not fearmongering.

My advice to May and Davis is this. The base position is "No Deal" and then we'll listen to what you have to offer. If we don't like it we're happy to walk. If we do like it, we'll deal.

Because you can't force that position. If we simply reiterate, over and over again, that we are totally happy with the status quo ante of leaving without a deal then it is up to the EU to convince the UK that they are going to get a better deal by negotiating with the EU than they are going to get by leaving on WTO base rules for trade.

They're also going to have to explain exactly what the UK is going to _get_ for it's €50bn.

That, to me, is the only way to negotiate with the EU. No, NO and Hell NO, over and over again till the EU stops talking crap and starts making sense.

Of course we need to be prepared to leave with no deal and we need to be happy with that as a consequence.

[Workingman]

So what is this other deal May wants to achieve and keeps banging on about, the one that is better than no deal? I have looked everywhere for it, in the car, down the back of the sofa, under the mat, and I never get anything. Will it be the WTO option? Well not if Leave HQ is anything to go by. Its rather long article trashes the whole WTO idea and inadvertently the hard Brexit, no deal, scenarios as well.

It does offer some interesting alternatives, though, for a few types of bilateral agreement. May might even be eyeing them up in hope, but there is a problem, quite a few in fact: the EU and its negotiating position and May's mystery position.

The EU has already set out its demands for free access to the single market and the UK cannot meet them. The fall-back would then look to be something like those mentioned by Leave, RTA, TBT, NBT and so on, and it is not exactly over the moon with those. They actually look very much like the 'bad deals worse than no deal' that May keeps banging on about, so are probably not on.

So here I sit with absolutely no idea about what a handful of Tory politicians are going to do to my country. They will not tell me, probably because they have no idea, and I too am bloody angry.

[Suff]

The EU has already set out its demands for free access to the single market and the UK cannot meet them.

Actually not. The EU has set out bilateral requirements for access to the EU and UK markets that IT needs, not the other way around. We, the UK do not need unlimited access to the EU market. The EU, on the other hand, absolutely requires unlimited access to the UK market.

This is what the EU does, it presents it's own needs as the needs of the other negotiating party and then sets out how the other negotiating party is going to climb down to meet it's own ( the EU), needs.

The only way to approach this, if you want to win, is to refute that their needs are our needs, to refuse to negotiate on their terms for what they want and to tell them they can't have what they need unless they are willing to be reasonable about it.

For me that is not the UK setting out a list of demands. The UK setting out what it wants is just another way of letting the EU set the agenda by saying that the UK can't have what it, the EU, wants (unlimited market access), whilst making restrictions on that unlimited access.

May is taking exactly the right approach. Namely we don't want unlimited access and you're going to have to come back with a better deal than that.

May and her government have told you exactly what their strategy is. They want a fair and equitable arrangement with the EU on exit or they will walk away. You want the UK to name that fair and equitable deal. In fact you want the UK to do what the EU has done which is to set out a list of demands from which we will not back away. In short you want our government to bind us into failure before we have begun.

That is not how you approach negotiations. To negotiate you set out your aspirations and then agree on what each party is willing to compromise on.

Now go back to what the EU is doing. They are _not_ negotiating. They are setting out a list of demands which are impossible to meet and telling us that this is their "negotiating" stance.

Then you tell me you are incandescently angry because our government won't do the same.

So let's look at the Wiki definition of negotiation.

Negotiation is a dialogue between two or more people or parties intended to reach a beneficial outcome over one or more issues where a conflict exists with respect to at least one of these issues. This beneficial outcome can be for all of the parties involved, or just for one or some of them.

It is aimed to resolve points of difference, to gain advantage for an individual or collective, or to craft outcomes to satisfy various interests. It is often conducted by putting forward a position and making small concessions to achieve an agreement. The degree to which the negotiating parties trust each other to implement the negotiated solution is a major factor in determining whether negotiations are successful. In many cases, negotiation is not a zero-sum game, allowing for cooperation to improve the results of the negotiation.

It also has tactics in the list. Let me see

Brinksmanship: One party aggressively pursues a set of terms to the point where the other negotiating party must either agree or walk away. Brinkmanship is a type of "hard nut" approach to bargaining in which one party pushes the other party to the "brink" or edge of what that party is willing to accommodate. Successful brinksmanship convinces the other party they have no choice but to accept the offer and there is no acceptable alternative to the proposed agreement.

I would state the EU position, right now, as Brinkmanship. I would state the UK position, right now, as refusing to bow down to Brinkmanship.

There is also another tactic. Attempted by Juncker when he brought the 1,600 pages of the CETA agreement for May to peruse during their meeting.

Snow Job: Negotiators overwhelm the other party with so much information that they have difficulty determining what information is important, and what is a diversion. Negotiators may also use technical language or jargon to mask a simple answer to a question asked by a non-expert.

Right now the EU is attempting to force the hand of the British people with both those tactics. Fortunately May is likely to win this election and gain a greater majority. Giving her a stronger hand to refute these attempts.

What the EU is currently engaged in is not a negotiation. It is, at it's fundamental level, nothing more than Smash and Grab. Fortunately we don't have to put up with that sort of crap.

For me the best tactic of all is to get the EU to understand that we are not in a game of Chicken and that excessive Brinkmanship will lead to all of their aspirations coming to nothing.

Now let's look at another dynamic. The EU is the negotiating body for 27 states. It is setting unreasonable expectations. When the game of chicken fails and the brinkmanship crumbles, how are they going to get the 27 to suddenly accept a different stance when they fail to get any headway with the UK?

The supremacy of the ECJ is going and freedom of movement is going. Those are non negotiable and this will not change. That is directly in conflict with the Brinkmanship of the EU. The EU knows that the UK voted to leave, in majority, on these two issues and then, deliberately, set out terms and conditions of exit which leave them in place.

So the answer is simple in terms of what we are going to do. We are going to make the EU capitulate on these two issues and if they don't we're leaving without a deal. Everything else is up for "mutual" negotiation of a reasonable settlement.

We don't need a list and it will not be helpful. The EU needs a list because they have no intention of negotiating.

Not hard to understand. So why berate our government when the EU is at fault. It is the EU who got themselves into this position and they are going off the cliff with the same attitude that they showed Cameron when he tried to "negotiate".

Put your ire firmly where it belongs. On the EU.

[Suff]

If you read the Independent article on the meeting with Juncker, then take away the rhetoric and EU centric bias, you get a clear picture.

Juncker came to the UK to _tell_ May why she was doing the wrong thing and what she had to do. He came armed with documents to _tell_ us why her aspirations were not possible.

Juncker became agitated when May insisted that what he wanted to say was only part of what she had to discuss. There are other things going on in the world but, apparently, not for Juncker. He seems to be of the opinion that because he wanted to come and browbeat the UK into submission, that there was nothing else to talk about.

A little man, puffed up with his own importance.

But some things became quite clear and I'm glad about that.

The PM reportedly insisted on discussing other world problems as well as Brexit and refused to accept that the UK owed the EU billions of euros, saying there was no such demand in EU treaties.

She was told in response that the EU was “not a golf club”.

If the UK did not pay, said Mr Juncker, there would be no trade deal.

So there really is NO requirement for the UK to pay one single Euro Cent to the EU on exit. However the EU are demanding €50bn as the price of negotiating a trade deal. Clearly the EU has been talking to Michael O'Leary....

Ms May also informed the officials she wanted to clarify the rights of UK citizens in Europe at the EU Council meeting in June – an idea dismissed by Mr Juncker, given the complex nature of associated issues like healthcare.

So the EU demands full rights for EU citizens, but the EU won't even talk about the rights of UK citizens in the EU. Even when all that is asked is the same rights as other 3rd country citizens in the EU.

If you take two pieces of Merkel's speech, immediately after this meeting

She declared the EU would put its own interests first and it would choose how to handle the negotiations. This meant talking about their new relationship first, followed by financial matters, in reverse order to the wishes of Ms May.

“While we aim at maintaining good relations with the UK, the decision of the British people has set an irreversible course,” it read.

So, the EU is only going to accept things which are in its own interests and will insist on how it proceeds with the negotiations. They'd like to be friends but only on the terms of the last 46 years. I.e. the UK can be friends if they do exactly what the EU Says.

So, let me see.

June. No deal on any of that, do you have any better to offer?
July. No deal on any of that, do you have any better to offer?
August. No deal on any of that, do you have any better to offer?
September. No deal on any of that, do you have any better to offer?
October. No deal on any of that, do you have any better to offer?
November. No deal on any of that, do you have any better to offer?
December. No deal on any of that, do you have any better to offer?
January. No deal on any of that, do you have any better to offer?

It won't take more than 4 days a month to sort that out. I wonder just how far it's going to go down the line before the EU gets the message? You can set any terms you want in the Demands (this is not a negotiation), that you make, but time is running out.

Because there is only one answer to the current EU approach.

"No thanks we're fine, just pay the tax when you import your goods and we'll do the same!"

On and on and on until they get the message that we're actually happy with that.