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Originally Posted by OLD BOY
The government is conducting negotiations in this way for a reason. The EU have finally put their paper forward, so we can see where they are coming from. This gives us the advantage, because we can hone in on those areas that are vague or unacceptable and put forward a better way.
A lot of people who argue that the negotiations are a mess would have wished us to put all our cards on the table from the beginning.
Take it from me, and I have a successful track record in difficult negotiations, but that really is not the way to negotiate. If the government had gone in that way, they would have suffered the same fate as Cameron did. He went in with all his cards on the table and they dismantled them one by one!
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The document to which you're referring is basically a summary of the first stage discussions in December in which the UK and the EU agreed there would be no hard border on the island of Ireland. To renege on this promise as BoJo seemed to suggest is not a good negotiating position.
---------- Post added at 19:36 ---------- Previous post was at 19:29 ----------
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Originally Posted by jonbxx
I am mega confused about this Northern Ireland thing. In December, the joint UK/EU report stated;
( https://ec.europa.eu/commission/site...int_report.pdf paragraph 49)
Then the EU draft paper which is designed to formalise the agreement made in December says;
They seem to be saying more or less the same thing.
I think the government needs to set out what it means by 'regulatory alignment' to support an 'all Ireland economy'. I am looking forward to tomorrow when hopefully the Prime Minister will clarify this. |
You're of course correct.
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So far, the government has avoided coming clean about the trade-offs that Brexit makes inevitable. It has stuck to the cake-and-eat-it line whereby the UK can end free movement and negotiate its own trade deals while avoiding a hard border in Ireland and any economic damage from trade friction.
But there is no magic solution to the Northern Ireland border. As soon as the UK starts importing goods from outside the EU under its own trade agreements, there has to be a customs border with the Republic of Ireland. There is a straightforward decision to be made. Do we want the UK to have its own trade deals with other countries or do we want to maintain the current border arrangements in Ireland? We can't have both. If we choose the hard border option, the EU's current line is that it will refuse to discuss trade deals. How firmly it will stick to this is anybody's guess but it certainly increases the risk of the UK leaving the EU without any sort of trade deal.
So it's not difficult this. It's a straightforward trade-off. We can have some of what the Brexiters promised but not all of it.
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https://flipchartfairytales.wordpres...at-it-bluster/
Some Brextremists in between dreaming of trade deals with Narnia, Atlantis and Jumanji may be licking their lips over a technological solution to the Irish border. None exists. Flip Chart Fairies again:
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Government ministers have probably known for some time that there isn’t an easy solution to the Northern Ireland border question. If Boris Johnson really believed that it was no more complicated than administering the congestion charge between the London Boroughs of Camden and Westminster, he wouldn’t have been the slightest bit worried by the European Commission’s fallback protocol. His response would have been, “What a silly suggestion. Everybody knows it won’t come to that because we have the technology to avoid customs checks at the Irish border.” Instead, he got angry and blustered. Indeed, it is the same people who have been assuring us all along that technology would solve the border question (many of them quoting an EU report that said nothing of the sort) who have gone apoplectic at the EU’s protocol. Which was, I suspect, the whole point of it.
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