Brexit discussion thread XIII (Please read OP before posting)

Does it matter what the optics are. After January 1st the UK can get on and find out what were optics and what is reality, and the EU can just get on with its own business.

johnnyskeleton wrote: »

Apparently the Express has seen through this ruse:

Do they think Brexiteers are stupid? Possibly. But do they think Brexiteers are so obsessed with optics and national pride that they will take anything that they can call a win? Yes, yes they do. And given the madness of the last 4 years, its a reasonable view for the EU to take

Gotta laugh at that line "Do you think Brexiteers are stupid?". Of COURSE they're stupid, their agenda was built on lies, delusions, deceit and bullshít where they thought they could get their way against 27 other countries without any consequence and that's not considering how many connections Ireland actually has expecially in the US.

The true irony of all this is that the end result of this could be a rump state of little england, an independent Republic of Scotland and after a century or so a United Ireland. All that loss for them because they decided to dupe their own populace, feed them lies over and over and could not accept that the British Empire is dead and buried and todays world is a world dominated by large power blocks where we pool together to hold our common values and the weakest and foolhardy get ultimately ground down and thrown under the bus.

But sure they got glorious blue british passports (product of france) out of it!

Professor Moriarty wrote: »

The Express has this headline:

"Brexit talks to RESTART: Boris accepts EU capitulation after Barnier humiliating defeat"

Its always interesting, if somewhat unsetteling, to see a well oiled propaganda machine in action. This kind of thing would have made the editors of Pravda blush.

Anyone with eyes to see can tell that Johnson walked himself out on a ledge demanding a 'fumdemental change of approch' from the EU only to find it of no avail. So he lets himself be walked back from the ledge by deciding that an irrelevant aleration to the details of the process is the fundemental change he was asking for.

Do the Brexiteer press take Johnson to task for failing to wrest any kind of substantive change from the EU having publicly demanded it? No, they go along with the wafer thin face saving device that an irrelevant change to the negotiating schedual is a capitulation by the EU to be heralded.

None so blind as those who refuse to see...

This just confirms that Johnson has the freedom of action to do whatever kind of deal he likes domesticly. His majority is rock solid, and the Brexiteers will line up behind him hailing what ever deal he makes as a victory for the ages. If in six months time it suits Johnson to say it was an awful deal after all, they will line up behind him then too, and none of it would be anything new either.

fash wrote: »

No - allowing the UK to sell a humiliating defeat as a victory is the goal here.
Playing along that they have won, that Boris's amazing negotiating skills have defeated the EU - while getting what you want is the aim.

If your aim, as an EU negotiator, is to provide a propaganda coup for Brexiters and provoke Eurosceptics in every other member state to rush out and claim that their country should follow the example of the U.K. and leave the EU so that too can get a special deal from the EU which provides all the benefits without any of the obligations, then “playing along” is a great idea.

If it isn’t, then “playing along” would be an incredibly stupid idea.

Imreoir2 wrote: »

. . . This just confirms that Johnson has the freedom of action to do whatever kind of deal he likes domesticly. His majority is rock solid, and the Brexiteers will line up behind him hailing what ever deal he makes as a victory for the ages.

This. And this is exactly as the EU likes it.

RobMc59 wrote: »

He`s also tweeted both parties need to compromise which strangely has`nt been mentioned here at all.

Because there's nothing new or surprising in it. The EU has said that all along. (Both sides have said that all along.)

salonfire wrote: »

So it does expose the chink in the EU armour, optics. That throwing a tantrum prompts the EU to reach out to try and be the adult. What's to stop other states playing up the same.

Nothing stops them. But that's fine; the more times a negotiation ends with the EU getting what it wants while the other party claims a victory, the better.

This is a well-established strategy. In nearly all the negotiations it takes part in, the EU is much the larger and weightier party, with much more strategic power. The other party tends to be sensitive about this, and as result to "talk big", often largely for the benefit of a domestic audience. They want to reassure voters at home that they are not going to be rolled over by the EU juggernaut. But this then creates a problem; the smaller party has publicly staked out an unrealistically ambitious position; if there's to be a deal they need to climb down from that; precisely because they are the smaller party they are sensitive about being seen to climb down. So a mechanism needs to be found which enables them to climb down without loss of face.

And this is that mechanism. They claim a great victory, often (as here) on a matter of process more thans substance; the EU lets them claim a great victory. Domestic supporters either pretend to believe or actually believe (it doesn't matter which) that their government has won a great victory. And the deal the EU wants to do is done.

The EU has done this a lot, remember. They are the world's most successful negotiatiors, ever, having patiently constructed the largest and deepest network of international trade arrangements in history. You don't get to do that without picking up a few tricks along they way about how t bring home a negotiation successfully.

Everything you see here has happened before in other EU negotiations. In fact, it has happened before in other EU negotiations with the UK. Remember how signing the Withdrawal Agreement was hailed as a triumph for Borish Johnson?

salonfire wrote: »

Barnier should have let UK have the last word last week and said nothing. Now he is on the next plane to London.

On the next plane to London is where he wants to be. What's not to like?

salonfire wrote: »

It shows that the UK has the EU by the balls. Who wants a rogue state under cutting and undermining on their doorstep. That's why Barnier couldn't let it lay.

How does the UK have the EU by the balls? The EU wanted the talks to continue. Now they're continuing. The hard Brexiters wanted the talks aborted, and the UK to choose a no-deal end to transition. The EU has what it wants, and the hard Brexiters have been frustrated.

salonfire wrote: »

Maybe it's just me, but I never heard anything of what the EU were willing to give up in exchange for a deal while we know plenty of what they want.

Well, that's partly because your view of the negotiations may be disproportionately shaped by London-based media, whose coverage hasn't on the whole been that crash-hot, to be honest. But it may also be for this reason:

EU has said all along that both sides will have to move if a deal is to be made. This is a trite observation really; who could disagree with it? So the EU saying it (or the UK saying it, for that matter) tends not to get a huge amount of space on the front page. Fair enough.

But in this particular negotiation, the EU has learned the hard way that the timing of compromise is crucial. At an earlier stage of the negotiations we saw a regular pattern in which (1) the EU would accept the UK position on some matter; (2) the UK would trouser that, but make no gesture in return; (3) that would be treated as a new baseline; and (4) the UK would continue to trumpet that the EU was being rigid, inflexible, refusing to compromise, etc.

The EU came to see this as a consequence of May's weak position in Parliament. Once she started any kind of horse-trading she would be denounced by the True Believers for betraying Brexit, and she would not survive this. So the lesson they took from that was: don't compromise until you can see that the UK is willing to reciprocate. And of course at the last minute the UK did unbend, and a Withdrawal Agreement was done.

After Johnson won a thumping majority in the general election, the EU hoped that the ground might shift a bit; Johnson was in a much more secure position, and had got the ERG to buy into things May could never get them to buy into. It seemed that he could face down or dominate the gibbering loon wing of the Tory party in a way that had not previously been possible.

But that hope dissipated fairly quickly. If Johnson did enjoy that kind of security in office, he squandered it early on, by moving almost immediately to distance himself from the oven-ready deal his party were pledged to support. He repudiated the politcal declaration. He denied, or appeared to deny, that the UK would implement the NI Protocol it had signed up to. And finally he introduced legislation to violate the WA.

The message from this is that, whether or not Johnson has a strong enough position to face down the ERG, he's not willing to face down the ERG, so we were back in the negotiation frozen wasteland that prevailed for most of 2018-2019; it was not yet the moment to offer concessions to the UK. The UK would need to signal its readiness to reciprocate.

For some weeks now the EU has been quietly and deniably putting compromises on the table - e.g. in relation to state aid. They are waiting for a signal from the UK that it is ready to reciprocate. Based on what happened last time, they always expected that this would come fairly late in the piece - if a deal is to be done, Johnson will want to rush it through, and it's always easier to do that if it's the last minute. Now, they have given the UK the opportunity to claim a triumphant victory on a matter of process, and the UK has duly claimed it. They will think, or hope, that this means that the UK is ready to deal, and EU concessions will start to get firmed up, with reciprocal movement on the UK side. But this will be done directly between the negotiators, not indirectly via media leaks, so we may not know much about it until the very end, when it will all appear to happen in a rush.

Lumen wrote: »

I think it's worth pointing out that whilst Brexit has been incredibly badly handled, the position of wanting to be outside the EU is completely reasonable and rational, since there are a number of countries bordering or within the EU that are not in, and entirely happy with that.

True. But . . .

Lumen wrote: »

The problem is not being out, it's getting out.

The problem is not getting out. Getting out is incredibly easy. The problem is in working out why you want to be out and, once out, what kind of external relationship with the EU you want to have. The neighbouring countries that are "entirely happy" about being outside the EU have all done that. The UK didn't, and still hasn't. And the train wreck that is Brexit isn't just down to the want of "patience, diplomacy and intelligence" on the part of leaders of the Brexit project. It's also attributable to the incredibly obvious and very fundamental error of triggering the Brexit process when they didn't know what they wanted to get ot of it.

Lumen wrote: »

That the EU want it to be difficult and costly for obvious and justified political reasons makes it harder, but that's life in long trousers.

No. As pointed out, getting out is pretty easy. The EU's view on this is that they don't need to do anything to ensure leaving the EU a painful and costly step; it is inherently painful and costly. They (not surprisingly) think that EU membership is a valuable and advantageous thing, and therefore that surrendinging it is costly and disadvantageous. They don't need to go out of their way to make it painful; on the contrary, they need to go out of their way if they want to alleviate the pain.

Lumen wrote: »

Still no idea how this will pan out. I was banking on BRINO all along but this is looking less likely as time ticks on.

I think it depends on when you consider it to have finally "panned out".

At the moment it seems that transition will end with either (a) no trade deal, or (b) a very thin trade deal, conferring much less benefit on the UK than most Brexit-supporters would have hoped, expected or assumed in 2016. There are those - and I am among them - who doubt that this is a stable end-point; it's not one the EU wants, and it inflicts too much injury on the UK which, in the long term, the UK populationw will not see the need for. So my expectation is further developments, leading to a closer relationship with the EU. But it could take a while; as noted above the UK needs to work out what it wants and why, and it needs to build a national consensus around that. The discourse within the UK to date has been basically tribal, and has deepened divisions; they need to have a nationcal discourse that focuses on identifying points of agremeent and building a consensus on them. That's pretty much how Norway, Iceland and other happy non-Members have handled the matter, and the UK needs to learn from them.

Lumen wrote: »

There's a distinction to be made between necessary pain in the journey, and the climate of the future uplands.

To the journey pain: even when everyone is competent and negotiating in good faith, change is politically hard due to asymmetric loss aversion. Any net neutral change in the trading relationship will have winners and losers on the same side, and the losers will moan more loudly than the winners crow. There isn't a technocratic fix to this, it's inherent in politics.

As for the destination, if it was better in than out then everyone would want in, and they don't. So the "valuable and advantageous" thing is debatable.

Couple of points.

As regards “necessary pain in the journey”, I think there are a couple of different kinds.

First, all change is disruptive, and disruption is painful.

Secondly, as you point out yourself, even if the disruption leads to a net neutral position, there will be winners and losers in the UK, and the pain of the losers will be expressed and perceived more than the pleasure of the winners.

But, thirdly, nobody expects Brexit to be “a net neutral change in the trading relationship”. It is unquestionably a degradation of the UK’s trading position which will impose significant real economic disadvantage on the UK. So “more winners than losers” won’t be just a perception, the artefact of asymmetric loss aversion; it will be the objective reality.

(There are a few Brexiters who argue against this, or at any rate who decline to accept it, but their position is not convincing and in most cases I am sceptical that it is sincerely-held.)

The obvious counter from Brexiters is that the economic cost is a price worth paying in order to achieve significant non-economic advantages - e.g. greater sovereignty, greater autonomy, the ability to keep Johnny Foreigner out. And, obviously, whether you perceive these to be advantages and the weight that you attach to them to some extent is a matter of subjective preference.

But the counter to that is that EU membership also has significant non-economic advantages - political stability, solidarity, the benefits of free movement and EU citizenship, etc, etc. And, again, there are subjective preferences at work there.

Which means that, when working out what external relationship you want with the EU, you have to trade off both advantages and disadvantages, some of which are objectively measurable and others of which involve subjective value-judgements.

But it’s very notable that, of the European countries that are outside the EU and are happy about it, most (and possibly all?) have chosen a trade-off which involves a high degree of economic integration with the EU, and a corresponding loss of autonomy on economic matters - Iceland, Norway, Switzerland. The only European countries which have minimal economic integration and maximal autonomy and are not seeking to change that are Russia and Belarus. And I think we have to accept that there are geopolitical considerations at work there that - ahem - don’t apply in the case of the UK.

So, yeah, as you point out not every country in Europe wants to be in the EU. But almost every country in Europe is either in the EU, is a candidate for EU membership, or is closely integrated with the EU through EEA/EFTA membership. The only countries in Europe not falling into one of those groups are

- Russia

- Kosovo, whose political status is disputed but who wants to become a candidate for membership

- Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has applied for candidate status

- the Eastern Partnership states (Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan)

- the United Kingdom.

The UK is a pretty striking anomaly in that list. So they are putting themselves very definitely at one end of the spectrum of possible trade-offs between economic integration and political autonomy, a place where few other states freely choose to be. I think they’re there not because they’re happy to be there but because they are in denial about the choices they need to make and have therefore been unable to make them. And exiting the EU while in that state of mind is certainly not something the EU needs to go out of its way to make painful and costly; the EU thinks it will be naturally so, and they are right.

Lumen wrote: »

In any case the Brits have proven themselves to be incompetent and negotiating in bad faith, so this is all a bit academic.

Even if they were competent and acting in good faith, Brexit will still be a disaster for them as long as they have not arrived at a stable domestic consensus about why there are doing it and what they want from it.

Imreoir2 wrote: »

Its always interesting, if somewhat unsetteling, to see a well oiled propaganda machine in action. This kind of thing would have made the editors of Pravda blush.

Anyone with eyes to see can tell that Johnson walked himself out on a ledge demanding a 'fumdemental change of approch' from the EU only to find it of no avail. So he lets himself be walked back from the ledge by deciding that an irrelevant aleration to the details of the process is the fundemental change he was asking for.

Do the Brexiteer press take Johnson to task for failing to wrest any kind of substantive change from the EU having publicly demanded it? No, they go along with the wafer thin face saving device that an irrelevant change to the negotiating schedual is a capitulation by the EU to be heralded.

None so blind as those who refuse to see...

This just confirms that Johnson has the freedom of action to do whatever kind of deal he likes domesticly. His majority is rock solid, and the Brexiteers will line up behind him hailing what ever deal he makes as a victory for the ages. If in six months time it suits Johnson to say it was an awful deal after all, they will line up behind him then too, and none of it would be anything new either.

Really highlights the difference in perception between himself and Theresa May.

I mean how much of a better deal has he got than the one Theresa May got. Damn all worse really and she was hounded out of office and he now hailed as a hero.


It is all a joke. I’m far from a feminist or anything and really it’s more to do with personality than gender in this case.

But politics is really all style and no substance even in this well educated technically advanced age.

salonfire wrote: »

So it does expose the chink in the EU armour, optics. That throwing a tantrum prompts the EU to reach out to try and be the adult. What's to stop other states playing up the same.

Barnier should have let UK have the last word last week and said nothing. Now he is on the next plane to London.

It shows that the UK has the EU by the balls. Who wants a rogue state under cutting and undermining on their doorstep. That's why Barnier couldn't let it lay.

I'm not sure you understand the difference between tactical optics and substantive strategy.

BoJo places great value on short term optics as reported by the Daily Express and the rest of the Brexit echo chamber media channels.

The EU couldn't care less about the optics in the UK. It is focused on (very) long term goals and objectives.

The optics will be forgotten very quickly.

What is secured in the FTA will last decades.

Peregrinus wrote: »

No. Your aim, as an EU negotiator, is to get an deal on terms the EU likes. If allowing the UK to claim a great victory as cover for a substantial climbdown helps you to get there, that's all good.

The EU are not concerned that eurosceptics in other countries will believe that the UK has actually won a great victory, and will rush to follow suit. Eurosceptics in other countries have seen the shambolic parade of delusion, incompetence and disaster that is Brexit and (a) don't like it, or (b) reckon it is wholly unsaleable in their own countries, or (c) both. Eurosceptic movements have generally stopped talking about their countries leaving the EU, and now talk about the urgent need for reform. This has been one of the most striking consequences of Brexit, but Brexiters largely don't notice it because they notice nothing that happens outside the UK, and very few things that happen outside England.

You are quite correct that Eurosceptics in the other EU countries are staying quiet about Brexit given the current state of uncertainty it has engendered.

That state of uncertainty though will end shortly and if it ends in a PR victory for the UK’s Eurosceptics then the Eurosceptics in the other EU countries will immediately be publicly “vindicated” about their Euroscepticism. A “great deal” for the EU countries is NOT one that provides fuel for the fire of their domestic Eurosceptics.

Need I point out how easy it would be, in a future referendum on an EU Treaty, for domestic (and non-domestic) Eurosceptics to attack any Treaty up for ratification given that we have already had the spectacle of losing multiple referenda on EU treaties? Be under no illusion they can and will push for us to become more and more semi-detached from the EU and our decision in the WA to prioritise our CTA relationship with the U.K. over the rest of the EU/Schengen already plays right into their hands.