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The big Brexit thread - news, updates and discussion

TopCat said:
www.theguardian.com

Brexit: No 10 startled by EU insistence that UK accept trade terms

Bloc’s stance apparently taken as challenge to Boris Johnson’s threat to walk out on talks
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

This wont go down well.
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Johnson's position is to go for no deal and sort a deal out in the new year, the EU know that, they also know which side stands to suffer most from this (both sides will suffer, one more than the other though) and are fed up with pretending to play his games. S'alright though, the economy is buoyant to ride this shit out...
 
maomao said:
Or rather the corona depression is deep enough to hide it.
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The plan was in place long before the plague showed up. But yeah, they'll try and blame that too. The strategy is led by Cummings, a man who thinks maths will solve all the answers, but not being a mathematician fails to understand the limitations of maths. Boris is impressed cos Cummings can count higher than 10 without taking his socks off.
 
MickiQ said:
The EU have called BoZo's bluff, to which his solution is to bluff some more. He doesn't seem to twig on that bluffing is a one time strategy that if it fails once it fails forever.
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Is he bluffing? Maybe. What could tip his hand though is if the EU leaders mock him and the UK at their summit this week.
 
brogdale said:
Stack has been superseded by Brock now editor
Easy to wonder if Brock isn't some sort of portmanteau combining Brexit and Cock-up.

View attachment 234457
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Sounds like a world-beater already

In January 2019, a rehearsal for part of Operation Brock was carried out, using the former Manston Airport as a lorry park.[4] It was criticised for being unrepresentative of the actual situation that would occur in reality. On the first day of the test, only 89 of the planned 150 lorries turned up for the rehearsal.

The contraflow has been the height of issues however. As Operation Brock was not used due to Brexit being delayed, the decision was made to partially revert the M20 back to its original state. This was done by reopening the eastbound carriageway fully, and keeping the steel barrier in the event that Operation Brock would have to be activated again in the following months due to the uncertainty of Brexit. The westbound carriageway has stayed at 50 mph. This has decreased safety to motorists travelling on the M20 whether Operation Brock is in force or not, as if they breakdown they are in a live lane and there are no warnings to other traffic like there are on Smart Motorways. In the first few weeks of the contraflow in force, many accidents happened on the stretch, and with no hard shoulder emergency vehicles found it hard to get to the scene.
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Facilities are being planned and built in about ten different locations, not only the traditional Operation Stack area.
It is about a desperate attempt to deal with the practical fall out of the Brexit victory, not about creating a 'good thing'.
It isn't about something that would happen without brexit, but something that is happening because of Brexit.
 
Barnier is coming to London next week.
I suppose the EU is bending over backwards to allow the Tories to make a deal on behalf of....the Tories I suppose.
He said again that the EU have made their position 'crystal clear'.
 
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Very good thread here I think
threadreaderapp.com

Thread by @pmdfoster on Thread Reader App

Thread by @pmdfoster: Right. We are getting to the twitchy bit now. Who will fold first as the #Brexit crucible intensifies? The EU side appears to bet that Boris Johnson will. But are they right? Latest @FT...…
threadreaderapp.com threadreaderapp.com
or on twitter


ETA: or better still the FT full piece

Who will blink first as EU-UK talks near danger zone?
There are political and psychological limits to what Boris Johnson can concede
Some Brexiters will feel that Boris Johnson has learnt the lessons of his predecessor’s failed negotiations by threatening to walk away but this approach has worked only up to a point
October 15, 2020 2:56 pm by Peter Foster

It was always going to come to this, but the EU-UK trade negotiations are now entering the danger zone stage where we get to find out who will wilt under the pressure of a looming “non-negotiated” exit.

This week negotiators managed another round of incremental progress, but fell far short of reaching the headline political deal that Boris Johnson had said he wanted by this week’s EU leaders’ summit.

Mr Johnson keeps on having phone calls with EU leaders in which he reminds them that an “Australia-style” exit holds “no fear”, even as a succession of government ministers, officials, industry chiefs and Commons select committees hear of the chaos and disruption this would bring.

For some weeks — as last week’s Briefing reported — EU diplomats have been sketching out the scenario of marginal progress up until this week’s European Council, followed by intensified talks over the last two weeks of October, with a deal in early November.

Even that looks ambitious now. The draft EU Council conclusions are chillingly anodyne; the diplomatic equivalent of a hard stare. They restate the EU’s insistence that its top negotiator Michel Barnier sticks to his mandate, while inviting him to “continue” (not even “intensify”) negotiations to reach an agreement that can apply from January 1 2021.

In short, the traditional EU negotiating squeeze is now on. The unspoken expectation in Brussels and EU capitals is that Mr Barnier’s infamous ticking clock will sound ever louder in the ears of British negotiators until the noise becomes so intolerable that David Frost, his UK counterpart, and Mr Johnson concede on most of the key sticking points.

For now the choreography of any concessions seems blocked, with member states pushing Mr Barnier not to give away leverage (particularly on fish) as the space for a deal narrows. EU officials complain that the UK side “does not look like a counterpart that wants a deal” — UK officials, citing the EU clinging to its position of status quo on fishing rights, say exactly the same. For now at least, the record appears to be stuck.

As in October 2019, if concessions come on the difficult outstanding issues — fishing rights, the level playing field and the governance of the deal — the EU will do its best to help Mr Johnson sell them back home, but they expect the British to make most of the running.

Time will tell whether this is a huge miscalculation on the EU’s part, but the harder they look at Mr Johnson’s political options as Covid-19 closes in again, the more confident they become that he will ultimately give much of the ground they seek.

Some Brexiters will feel that Mr Johnson has learnt the lessons of his predecessor’s failed negotiations by threatening to walk away, getting Brussels to back down on some key areas — notably dynamic alignment with EU state aid policy.

But this approach has worked only up to a point (the EU was always going to have to move on state aid), which raises the question over whether Mr Johnson should indeed walk away if only to try to break the stalemate. The assumption is he will not.

But if Mr Johnson stays at the table he risks being sucked slowly into an ever-more invidious choice between doing a very skinny trade deal — which will probably come with the offer of some nice easements in the end — and a destructive no deal.

Alternatively, both sides continue with the stand-off, and the entire process simply dribbles away into failure. The risks of this are higher than commonly appreciated, in my view. There are limits — politically, psychologically — to what Mr Johnson can concede.

All of this has been made harder by Mr Johnson’s decision to threaten to legally override parts of the withdrawal agreement with the internal market bill. The move was intended to inject motion into the negotiations, but it has actually only complicated them on three fronts.

First, if the intention was to force an EU walkout or get the EU to back down, it failed. Brussels didn’t take the bait, but opened long-winded legal proceedings that did not kill the talks, while making clear that any UK-EU agreement would be contingent on the UK dropping the offending clauses.

Effectively Mr Johnson, who thought he had put a “gun on the table”, now finds it pointing back at him: “Drop the weapon, prime minister, or there won’t be a deal.”

Second, by making such a spectacular show of bad faith over last year’s agreement, Mr Johnson has strengthened the arguments on the EU side (from the French, notably) for a very strict governance mechanism for a deal.

Even if Brussels is overplaying its hand on this front, given the thinness of the market access offer, the internal market bill has given it the perfect excuse to do so. The EU, in trying to protect the unity of the 27, retreats back to a “highest common denominator” negotiating position.

Third, and perhaps most important, the promise to unilaterally rewrite the Northern Ireland protocol in the event of a no deal makes it almost impossible to see how Mr Johnson could ever engineer a soft no deal.

Because of that move, a no-deal outcome is now set to be politically much more destructive than it otherwise needed to be. The Whitehall working assumption, I understand, is that it will take two years to get back to a basic free trade negotiation.

If Mr Johnson really does want to take the plunge off the no-deal cliff, he just made the drop considerably higher.

This week a defiant UK government source accused the EU of “using the old playbook” of running down the clock in the erroneous belief, the source said, that “the UK would be more willing to compromise the longer the process ran”.

It looks, from the outside, very much like that is exactly what the EU believes. In the not too distant future, we are about to find out if it is right.

Brexit in numbers
Another reason often given in Westminster as to why Mr Johnson will ultimately have to do a deal with the EU is that the public already think that their vote for Conservatives last December was a vote to Get Brexit Done. And it is already done.

There are fears in Number 10 that, as the Covid-19 crisis reasserts itself, the distinction between getting the divorce deal done and then failing to complete a free trade agreement would be lost on the vast majority of voters. It would just look like failure to deliver.

One nice illustration of how Brexit has faded into the political background was to be found at the Tory party conference where the “B-word” (as measured by two professors at the UK in a Changing Europe think-tank) was barely even spoken.

“While not entirely banned — the prime minister did, after all, say the B-word four times this year — talk of Brexit and the EU from the conference floor has fallen by a staggering 89 per cent in a year,” they wrote.

Just one more reason to support Brussels’s calculation that Mr Johnson will not dare to thrust Brexit back on to the already crowded political agenda by allowing talks to fail.
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