Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

Kermit.de.frog

CelticRambler wrote: »

If the "light touch" reports are true, then not only are they signalling to the EU that the TCA isn't worth the paper it was written on, but combined with their unilateral reinterpretation of the NIP, they're also telling the rest of the world that there's no point in doing any kind of trade deal with the UK: sell any old crap to us, we're not going to check it; and don't bother asking us to promise anything for you, because we can't be trusted.

I'm increasingly thinking the UK govt does not want the EU to ratify the agreement. How else could these actions be explained other than intentional sabotage?

Another point is that it may prove that post brexit trade flows are in a catastrophic state and they are acting out of concern for food supplies from the EU but cloaking it in aggressive language.

I think this all came about the day before the EU were set to ratify it? Certainly seems like that's what they want.

Dave0301

The Tories being duplicitous in how they present information relating to Brexit. Shocking...

They really do seem untouchable at the moment.

The Cabinet Office run by Michael Gove has been officially reprimanded by the UK Statistics Authority for using unpublished and unverifiable data in an attempt to deny that Brexit had caused a massive fall in volumes of trade through British ports.

The letter said the Cabinet Office’s strong rebuttal contained “claims based on unpublished data, and as such these figures cannot be verified. It is our expectation that any data used publicly by government should be published in an accessible form, with appropriate explanations of context and sources.”

Link

joeysoap

Didn’t Lord Frost negotiate the deal?

Professor Moriarty

Dave0301 wrote: »

The Tories being duplicitous in how they present information relating to Brexit. Shocking...

They really do seem untouchable at the moment.



Link

Gove had enough of experts a long time ago.

Enzokk

joeysoap wrote: »

Didn’t Lord Frost negotiate the deal?

Don't let facts get in the way of the narrative that is being set here, it is the EU that is upset that the UK have left and that needs to negotiate(?) a compromise to the deal that he just negotiated.

I think the EU team must be scratching their heads at what is happening and there will be some disbelieve on what is happening here.

Sam Russell

Professor Moriarty wrote: »

Gove had enough of experts a long time ago.

I think he is confusing his experts with his exports. None of them seem to add up.

Strazdas

Matthew Parris in The Times yesterday wonders if the actual Tory / Brexiteer plan is to have continued tension and ill feeling with the EU right up until the next general election : that they might seen this as a potential election winner among their xenophobic voters.

It would of course wreck the economy but they have no interest in such minor matters.

McGiver

Coveney should be calling Biden NOW.

No time to wait, need to align the strategy and explain what's going on - that the UK regime are setting up the scene for damaging the Republic, the GFA, Irish membership of the EU and the EU itself.

Biden should issue an official statement warning the UK regime of potential sanctions or other measures.

Sierra Oscar

Highly incendiary interview by Arlene Foster on Radio 1.

McGiver

Sierra Oscar wrote:

Highly incendiary interview by Arlene Foster on Radio 1.

Could you share what was being said apart from the usual NO NO NO?

Kermit.de.frog

They blame the EU for not considering alternatives but there was an alternative under Theresa May that would have seen the north treated the same as GB.

The DUP vetoed it in parliament.

And Johnson suggested the NI Protocol. There's such an incoherent line of thought prevailing in much of the UK and in the media.

Junkyard Tom

Kermit.de.frog wrote: »

I'm increasingly thinking the UK govt does not want the EU to ratify the agreement.

They went to the trouble of rushing through a deal that shafted fishermen just before the new year so they must put some value in having a trading arrangement.

BlitzKrieg

Junkyard Tom wrote: »

They went to the trouble of rushing through a deal that shafted fishermen just before the new year so they must put some value in having a trading arrangement.

They put value in not being blamed.

Thats why every statement on all the shafting from that deal has tried to blame the EU bringing in new rules to shaft the UK or going back on promises when none of that is the case.

beerguts

I am thankful that Varadkar and Coveney are in government with Micheál Martin. I can't see them allowing MM to do a misstep like accepting vaccines or allowing the UK to separate us from the single market. Martin is seriously out of his depth as Taoiseach.
The only wildcard would be Mary lou. If it comes to us having to put customs and guards on the border would she play party politics and try and blame the government instead of the British.
I do see this escalating so hopefully ireland can stay firm and not bend to this bullying.

Kermit.de.frog

The thing is it's not really in our own hands. It's up to the other member states how long they will tolerate a hole in the single market.

I agree about MM though. In normal times he'd be fine but I'd rather have Coveney or Varadkar in that job atm.

They are not making any pretence of a scenario that does not exist which is trying to play both sides when the outcome can't be fudged.

Johnson phoned MM just before the British pulled the latest stunt and didn't mention a word about it. Spoke about the world cup offer. The political equivalent of shouting "squirrel!" as a distraction.

That is the level of disrespect we are dealing with now sadly.

Christy42

beerguts wrote: »

I am thankful that Varadkar and Coveney are in government with Micheál Martin. I can't see them allowing MM to do a misstep like accepting vaccines or allowing the UK to separate us from the single market. Martin is seriously out of his depth as Taoiseach.
The only wildcard would be Mary lou. If it comes to us having to put customs and guards on the border would she play party politics and try and blame the government instead of the British.
I do see this escalating so hopefully ireland can stay firm and not bend to this bullying.

I really can't see what guards at the border would do anyway. More making a show of doing something and annoying people as opposed to actually stopping smuggling. Not sure that is something we could do if we wanted to.

If you want to stop this it has to be done by dealing with the EU. If the UK breaks the agreement then the EU should consider the agreement null and void and treat the UK as a country with no agreements with the EU. As soon as the UK decides to keep their end of the bargain then the EU should as well. We shouldn't be out to punish them but neither should we simply let them take whatever they please.

I can't see it ever being sorted on a purely Irish level. We didn't join the EU out of our own bat. We joined because the Brits did, without allies we are too small of a fish to seriously stand up to the British doing whatever they well please.

Strazdas

Kermit.de.frog wrote: »

The thing is it's not really in our own hands. It's up to the other member states how long they will tolerate a hole in the single market.

I agree about MM though. In normal times he'd be fine but I'd rather have Coveney or Varadkar in that job atm.

They are not making any pretence of a scenario that does not exist which is trying to play both sides when the outcome can't be fudged.

Johnson phoned MM just before the British pulled the latest stunt and didn't mention a word about it. Spoke about the world cup offer. The political equivalent of shouting "squirrel!" as a distraction.

That is the level of disrespect we are dealing with now sadly.

In fairness to MM, he reacted angrily when he heard what the Brexiteers were up to the next day. It may be dawning on him just how slippery and mendacious Johnson is and that nothing that comes out of his mouth can be believed.

rock22

What would be the short term and long term outcomes if we, i.e. the EU, agreed to set aside the Northern Ireland Protocol in the WA?

Naturally there would be a need for customs and bio checks on the border and dairy and other food processing would be affected. NI businesses would not have the benefit of having access to EU and GB. And of course we would not be seen as on a step to United Ireland.

Peregrinus

rock22 wrote: »

What would be the short term and long term outcomes if we, i.e. the EU, agreed to set aside the Northern Ireland Protocol in the WA?

Naturally there would be a need for customs and bio checks on the border and dairy and other food processing would be affected. NI businesses would not have the benefit of having access to EU and GB. And of course we would not be seen as on a step to United Ireland.

There'd be a hard border in Ireland, which would be socially, politically and economically damaging on both sides. And this would be a long-term outcome, with enduring and compounding adverse consequences.

And the EU would lose significant credibilty, sendign a message that it's fine to negotiate, sign and ratify treaties with the EU and then violate them when it suits you; the EU will retrospectively approve your violation by "agreeing" to it.

Aint't gonna happen. And the UK doesn't want it to happen; if they did they would be going about things in a very different way.

And how exactly do you propose to police that?
How do you stop goods flowing from GB->NI->IRL/EU?

Your solution would impose great costs on Irish businesses and consumers for the benefit of who?
Boris Johnson and his Tory party would be delighted.

fly_agaric

rock22 wrote: »

What would be the short term and long term outcomes if we, i.e. the EU, agreed to set aside the Northern Ireland Protocol in the WA?

I don't think that is very likely.

I think that a collapse of the EU Trade agreement with the UK would happen before that (if UK continues on + refuses to implement the NI protocol).
(As far as I understand) it was all supposed to be predicated on existance of the WA and the UK having signed up to a mutually agreed solution for NI after all.

After that (assuming UK takes the hit from the late arrival of "No deal" Brexit and doesn't change course) the Irish govt. will (eventually) get to pick between putting customs in on NI border or a severly diminished EU membership.What form that would take I don't know. Speculating/pie in the sky...initially, a return to a sort of UK-Ireland customs area for goods purposes to go alongside the CTA but the changes won't end there IMO and that will be just the start.

NeuralNetwork

I think economic realities are being masked by COVID. There’s a very harsh dose of reality, and an entirely self inflected one, coming at some stage this year. You simply cannot disrupt supply chains to the level that has happened and expect things not to go very badly wrong.

That’s ultimately what will drive a pragmatic solution. There’s no real way of spinning away from that. It’s just practical reality.

CelticRambler

correct horse battery staple wrote: »

Collapse of uk-eu trade deal is exactly what hardcore Tori Brexiteers want. They then get to blame the EU, what we have is a resumption of the drift to an ever more extreme Brexit as Tories realised that if they can get away with killing 150odd thousand of their subjects they can get away with most hardcore version of brexit too.

My proposal above does not give them that satisfaction, Eu/uk trade remains but a huge non tariff wall is build on our side by ensuring imports from uk to Eu get strangled.

I'm not sure that the hardcore Tory Brexiters really know what they want, only what they don't want; as much now as when Brexit first became a realistic possibility (and in that sense, they are perfectly "Unionist" in their mentality - oppose everything, no-no-no, themuns are out to get us ... )

This latest stunt, I think, doesn't fit into any long-term strategy to torpedo the TCA or weaken the NIP - it's opportunist reactionism, pure and simple: they saw the empty Belfast shelves on the news, they heard of the EU's AZ export ban, and they jumped on the coincidence of the two stories to stir up trouble.

At best, it is a clumsy attempt to deflect attention from the fact the world-class Global Britain that we've heard so much about is utterly incapable of hashtag-taking back control of even the simplest aspects of being a global trading nation, i.e. effective monitoring and tracking of imports and exports.

For that reason, though, you might get your wish. However, rather than it being just Ireland that imposes a higher bar for the import of UK products into the single market, with the TCA not yet ratified and the UK government admitting that it is effectively incompetent when it comes to monitoring imports, the EU could reasonably argue that all UK imports should be treated as suspect, and businesses seeking to buy them be required to ensure that every consignment was certified by an EU lab, accompanied by an EU-issued track-and-trace number, and be subject to punitive fines if the procedures were not followed.

This is not a million miles away from where we are right now. Up until a few months ago, for example, there was no agreement to recognise UK vet labs' antibody titres for rabies vaccines, and travelling pets' samples would have had to be sent out of the country to be validated. Having only just won approval for the UK labs to be recognised and made life easier for English pet-owners to take their dogs to France, the Brexiters seem willing to sacrifice that small gain so that British dogs can walk on Ulster soil. It's in a thousand versions of this scenario that the sheer weight of English voters compared to disgruntled unionists will eventually, I think, force the Brexiters into retreat.

For a sect that lives so much in the past, you'd think the ERG would have learnt by now that Ireland/Northern Ireland is toxic to British politics; always has been and always will be until it's cut off from "the mainland" like a gangrenous toe.

A Dub in Glasgo

I got my first direct experience of Brexit this morning; I went to the post office to post a Mothers Day card to my mum in Dublin, I had to fill in a Customs Declaration (CN22) form!

redcup342

A Dub in Glasgo wrote: »

I got my first direct experience of Brexit this morning; I went to the post office to post a Mothers Day card to my mum in Dublin, I had to fill in a Customs Declaration (CN22) form!

CN22 is for Commerical Items (i.e. if you sold the card)

You don't need CN22 for Gift Cards of a personal nature.

CelticRambler

redcup342 wrote: »

CN22 is for Commerical Items (i.e. if you sold the card)

You don't need CN22 for Gift Cards of a personal nature.

Not true. While CN22 is not needed for a simple card or letter, it is required for all goods or gifts for which the weight is under 2kg and the value less than £270 / 380€. A greetings card does not need CN22, a gift card does.

CN23 is recommended for similar sized packages of commercial value.

rock22

Peregrinus wrote: »

There'd be a hard border in Ireland, which would be socially, politically and economically damaging on both sides. And this would be a long-term outcome, with enduring and compounding adverse consequences.

And the EU would lose significant credibilty, sendign a message that it's fine to negotiate, sign and ratify treaties with the EU and then violate them when it suits you; the EU will retrospectively approve your violation by "agreeing" to it.

Aint't gonna happen. And the UK doesn't want it to happen; if they did they would be going about things in a very different way.

I probably should have said 'accept' rather than 'agree' to remove NIP.

It seems to me , at the moment, that we have no way of pressurising the UK government to implement the protocol properly. Except the trade agreement which we, i.e. EU, rushed through to suit UK. We could perhaps cancel or delay ratification. But at the moment there doesn't seem to be any consequence to UK for breaching the protocol.

So if the EU 'accepted' that UK is not going to implement and work to the NIP and as a consequence denied ratification of the trade deal then it would be sending a signal that it expects agreements to be adhered too.

At the moment we are hearing a lot from the DUP attacking the protocol but nothing from other players in NI. Removing the trade agreement might at least have those affected speak out in support of the protocol. And I appreciate that perhaps we are not hearing those voices for all sorts of reason but right now it is been spun as a protocol being imposed on NI. And RTE broadcast an interview with a NI business leader also criticising the protocol. I know some of this is perception more than anything else but at the end of the day , if no one in NI is support the protocol then its' future looks uncertain.

Zubeneschamali

I agree that this is not part of a strategy to bring about No Deal. This lot have no strategies, and if they did, they are too useless to make a plan to realize them.

They are just stumbling along reacting to the headlines.

If they wanted No Deal, they could have walked away from talks and exited with No Deal, but they know it would be an even bigger catastrophe.

That is what will prevent a hard border in Ireland - any such moves from the UK would mean a hard border in the Channel with an angry EU, and they would be goosed.

No, they are still just making noises for the UK headlines, when push comes to shove they will grudgingly implement what has been agreed.