Brussels breakdown

[Suff]

What it comes down to Debih is laws and trade.

Our laws have become tied up with the EU for decades. Agreements on being able to land planes in the EU, for our companies to supply services in the EU (consider Easyjet and their intra EU flights), plus a range of international agreements we entered into with the EU, which are no longer ratified by us.

Unlike the scouts, you make binding international trade agreements with the EU.

We gave up our sovereignty to allow the EU to negotiate this stuff on our behalf. Now, both for the UK AND the EU, these things need to be sorted out.

The EU has insisted that they will ONLY discuss this in a trade deal. That they won't discuss these things outside of a trade deal and therefore blocked us from sorting out the day to day details everyone needs to be fixed. The reason is obvious. If you can cause total havoc if a trade deal is not agreed, then you can force the other party to bow down and surrender.

Unfortunately for the EU, we have no bowed down and surrendered so a whole raft of laws, agreements and ability to access each others countries is sitting on the table being ignored. It will impact everyone and cause total mayhem, but that is the EU, not the UK. We asked to negotiate them independently and they refused.

Then there is trade.



They sell us more than we sell them.
We can buy almost anything they sell to us from other markets and many of them will be cheaper. Cheaper because the EU puts trade barriers up.
The EU won't be able to buy goods they bought from the UK cheaper elsewhere because they apply tariffs. The highest tariff the EU has is 110%. More than double the cost of the thing being sold. This is done to keep others out and trade within the EU.

The EU NEED a deal so that UK goods don't suddenly become massively more expensive and disrupt their trade.
The UK could DO with a trade deal so that UK goods don't suddenly attract large tariffs and damage our trade. But, get this, we have options to source our imports elsewhere. The EU do not. Not on the same terms as they have today anyway.

But we can also buy goods outside of the EU, many of the same quality but lower price. If anyone thinks Argentinian beef is not of good quality they are kidding themselves. If Irish beef suddenly attracts a 74% tariff, then shipping beef from Argentina will become routine. The Argentine Peso $ is almost in freefall, prices drop constantly.

When you are in a golf club or Scouts, this is something peripheral to your life. It doesn't set laws on how you behave outside the club, set bounds on what you can do outside the club and certainly doesn't insist that it controls your life once you leave so that it can keep on sucking your money in.

Brexit is NOTHING like leaving a club, they were right about that. It is advanced international diplomacy and the EU is going at it like a bull in a china shop. Which is why it takes the EU 10 years to agree a trade deal the UK can do in 6 months.

This does not mean it will not cost either side pain. It will cost both sides pain. But, as things continue, that pain will reduce and we will become used to our new life.

Beware anyone trying to stampede you off a cliff. They are not doing it for your own benefit.

We are choosing to jump. What the EU never expected was that we would jump. Even less did they expect we would drag them over the edge with us.

It will be interesting to see who has the harder landing.

[Kaz]

I'm really not very up on politics and I admit that I don't really understand all the Brexit stuff.

But - what I really don't understand is why, if we decided to leave do we think we have a choice in negotiating anything. Surely if we decide to leave something without prior discussion with who we are leaving we get what we are given? Is that not like leaving the boy scouts, not paying your subs anymore but still expecting to get some badges and be invited to the xmas party?

Yes, it is absolutely like that, but the Brexiters don't seem to "get it"

[Suff]

And those who wanted to remain don't get just how reliant the EU made themselves on UK trade and UK money.

Read the EU "negotiating" mandate.

You think we went running to them demanding a trade deal?

They INSISTED that we talk trade as part of the separation. They INSISTED, that the separation document contained a commitment to negotiate a trade deal.

But it is all the UK.

Well I just hope the government finds the balls to veto Biden a few times in the UN, just to remind him that we aren't going to take any of his crap. A threat to leave NATO would be a good one too. The UK need fear no attack by any country in the world. The same cannot be said for the EU. We might as well get all of the skeletons out of the closet whilst we're at it and go out into the world without any preconceptions.

A clean break and all that.

[Workingman]

I was trying out my new non-stick shoes in 'Spoons when a man with a ruddy face leaned forward at an impossible angle.....

"We are superior to Johnny Forriner, you know. We had an Empire, won two World Wars and a World cup, to boot, and we play cricket. We can cherry pick the bits of the cake we want to eat and we will tell the unelected EU fascist, communist, Nazi, Marxist dictators how to negotiate or we will scweam and scweam and scweam....." He then stood as straight as he could and continued to dribble his warm and flat "Old Unicorn" English pale ale down his Union Jack waistcoat.

All the other stuff being said by the Brexiters is from the 45 years of lies, misrepresentation, deceit, myths and legends froth peddled by the likes of the Mail, Express, Sun, Telegraph, Farage, Rees Mogg et al, and don't forget Johnson, Mr Brexit Flip-flop Johnson. And even though they "won" they still keep on and on and on. It's an odd way for winners to behave: what!

[medsec222]

I'm really not very up on politics and I admit that I don't really understand all the Brexit stuff.

But - what I really don't understand is why, if we decided to leave do we think we have a choice in negotiating anything. Surely if we decide to leave something without prior discussion with who we are leaving we get what we are given? Is that not like leaving the boy scouts, not paying your subs anymore but still expecting to get some badges and be invited to the xmas party?

Nigel Farage might say, exactly Debih. More than likely he would be happy to trade on World Trade Organisation rules. He would call that a clean break and it may come to that. However, most people recognise that if we can achieve a mutually acceptable trading deal then that would be better than no-deal but it is looking unlikely.

[Kaz]

Well said Frank!

[medsec222]

I'm waiting for a parcel. It's coming from Paris. I hope it's not stuck in a queue!

[Workingman]

It could be in the air container from Brussels coming back with BoJo with the easiest deal in history, or the oven ready one, along with the bits of the SM and CU you were promised in the lies you were told... so it might never arrive.

Never mind, eh, you got us out.

[jenniren]

We are down to hours, not days, now and this will continue to play out. I'm just letting it all flow over until Monday. There is nothing here that has changed. The UK is not giving in, the EU thinks it is some world powerhouse that nobody can deny and the press are talking the usual BS. There is almost no sense anywhere in the press. Well in the UK at least and virtually none in the EU.

My thoughts exactly Suff.

[Suff]

Ah well. We had an oven ready deal, but when we presented it to the EU in January they told us to take a hike.

I know that most people don't like to know the fine details so let's have a simple analogy.

We have 28 families in a shopping pool. We all pool our resources and buy the groceries. Some families are larger than others, let's say 100 for the largest, 80 for the second largest right down to 2 or 3 at the bottom. Each family contributes to the budget and the shopping is bought at a bulk discount and shared out. Some families are middling size but don't have much money, some families are smaller but have more money, the very largest families have the most money. So the bigger families help and support the middling families.

And so it goes on. Over time the myth that this is the only way it can be is made.

Then the second largest family with the second largest amount of money leaves.

What happens next? So we lost 80 people and the funds from 80 people. We need 80 people less shopping and we all need to take a bit of the extra that was being given to the poorer families.

That all makes sense right?

It means we need to buy less shopping, but all but the poorest need to pay just a little bit more for it to help out.

This is how collectives and communes work.

Everyone should be able to put this into their own lives, it's shopping after all. So now tell me this.

Why did the people managing the shopping budget say that we need THE SAME in the shopping budget? Hang on we just lost 80 people and the shopping for 80 people. Yes we lost the little bit that they were paying to the poorest, but we can share that. There is NO WAY that we need a shopping budget the same size. Who upgraded to Caviar?

Now in the real world, the budget managers would have to own up and tell everyone that the second largest family was paying their own contributions to the fund, plus the top up for the poorest, but were buying their own food anyway because the budget wasn't big enough in the first place and now there is not enough money to buy food if the budget doesn't stay the same.

Of course in the real world we'd sack the budget managers, reset the budget, get a fair distribution from everyone, tighten the belts and cut out all of the excess until we managed to balance the budget and then everyone could work together to make things better.

But this is not the real world. This is unicorn land EU where fantasy is the rule of the day and nobody ever tells the truth.

So what is left? Try and blackmail the leaving family to keep on funding the lies and the fairy story by telling them that they can't even trade with the community unless they capitulate and let the community run their lives and their budget.

This is what is going on today. The EU budget has not shrunk by the €100bn or so the UK was contributing, It has shrunk by €100 million and only because the smaller, richer, states rebelled. The budget managers (the commission) wanted a bigger budget even without the UK. The EU needs the rest of the money it was making off the UK in taxes and trading surpluses; or the patched up mess of a budget will fall over again half way through its 7 year run.

In order to do that the EU needs to control our laws, our trade and our budget.

Fortunately we have a PM who is elected with a majority of people who think that this whole situation is unfair. It is completely impossible for him to bow down to the EU on the most important issues and he knows it very well.

This EU summit currently going on has decided that a trade deal with the UK is not important enough to discuss. They've patched their budget up for today and now they have a solution to the UK.

They will very kindly allow us to keep accepting their thousands of trucks every day and allow them to come back to the mainland. They'll even let the hundreds of UK trucks come over to deliver the stuff they really need. They'll let the planes land from the UK (but not provide services inter EU), keeping their own citizens flying.

They'll even kindly allow us to give them 90% of our fish catch for the next year, just so it doesn't disrupt things.

What a Wonderful, WONDERFUL bunch of people. We should get down on our knees and count our blessings!