Thread by @Staedtler

We're not expecting a withdrawal agreement on October 18th, but another Euco is pencilled in for November 15th - just in case.

But the stupidity of English politics . . . We'd better go through this properly so we all understand what's what.
The "deal" we're talking about - but anyone using that word has no right to call themself a journalist - is a withdrawal agreement. Just that, and nothing more.

When they say a "deal" can be done, what they mean is complete a withdrawal agreement.
And that's the easy part, remember. Withdrawal agreement. Could have done that at any time in the last two years.
That's what Article 50 is for: Complete a withdrawal agreement

You sign a withdrawal agreement, including a legal obligation to keep the Irish border free. And then a political statement about what sort of relation you've got in mind in the future. That's all. Bye bye.

So what's the problem?
The problem is what it's always been. Theresa May wants a new treaty out of this process, and she's not going to get one.

At first she tried turning the exit negotiations into a treaty renegotiation. She banged her head against that brick wall for over a year before she finally figured out it wouldn't work.

She knows she misused Article 50, and she knows she has massively fucked up. She's not going to get a new treaty out of it. All she's going to get is a vague political statement about future relations, but with no legal force.

And the thing is, once we leave next March, Europe is free of any obligation to negotiate anything with us. We become a supplicant nation sitting in the waiting room until Europe condescends to sign a trade agreement with us - a decade or more.

And even if we get some sort of transition, that can go on and on, decades if it wants, Europe won't mind. Because, you see, once we're in a transition we have no legal claim on Europe's time or attention. We have to sit and wait and do as they say.

And that's what Theresa May - and those dozen or so Tory MPs clever enough to understand this stuff - is terrified of.

She is terrified of finding herself in the position of no legal right to a new treaty, and entirely dependant on the will and whim of the European Union.

That's why she is trying to use Northern Ireland as a kind of hostage. She wants to be able to threaten Europe and Ireland with partitioning Ireland if she doesn't get a new treaty.

Now, you would think that using the Irish border to blackmail herself a new treaty, and threatening to destroy the whole peace process and plunge it back into god knows what, should be terminal for her entire career.

But apparently, no. It's perfectly normal in the Conservative Party to let a prime minister threaten to plunge her own country back into violence because she can't get her own way.

Anyway, Europe - or Ireland - are not going to be blackmailed by a racist bigot in Downing Street, so they are determined to protect the Good Friday Agreement from any crass attempt by Theresa May to use it as blackmail.

That's why they are determined that the Irish border has to be legally established in the withdrawal agreement, such that Theresa May cannot then use it to blackmail her way to a new treaty.

That's why there is no withdrawal agreement. Theresa may keeps trying to blackmail Europe, and Europe is not going to be blackmailed. Nor should they.

Europe will never put a legal obligation on themselves to provide Theresa May with a new treaty. They will certainly stay open to a new treaty, and their political statement will say as much.
but they will never accept the obligation.

And Theresa May also knows - what she doesn't want her thickwitted MPs to know - that the moment she signs a withdrawal agreement, Britain becomes legally powerless.

Unable to leave because of Ireland. unable to force a new treaty.

And as soon as her backbenchers figure that one out - and even my goldfish has died of boredom waiting for that penny to drop - they're going to ditch Brexit and her like a hot turd.