Thread by @Usherwood

Have discussed this before, but let's run through "what negotiations are for" once again

1/

The two schools of thought you usually encounter on this are:
- "to win"
- "to compromise"

Neither is correct

2/

Instead, negotiations are to see whether you can get more through agreement with another party than you can by yourself

3/

As long as you can achieve more through that agreement than you can by yourself, then it makes sense to agree (even if both sides of that calculation look not that good in absolute terms)

4/

A key part of this is recognising that this is a two-way street: that balance has to work for the other party too

5/

As such, the crucial point is: what is your (and their) best alternative to a negotiated agreement?

6/

This is why the EU isn't keen to make concessions to the UK: it thinks that the UK's best alternative (i.e. no-deal) is very much worse than the Withdrawal Agt, so the UK really should be going for what's on offer

7/

If the UK want to change that perception, then it either has to show it has fully-operational no-deal plans (inc. handling the EU for any future talks), or it has to reframe the issue, to show that other benefits accrue

8/

Right now, neither strategy looks particularly successful, for three reasons:

9/

Firstly, the weight of the economic costs looks huge, both in an immediate crisis and then longer-term, with impaired trade flows

10/

Secondly, the EU can only act post-Brexit under treaty provisions that are much more ponderous than Art.50 (ie with unanimity), so the UK is, by definition, not going to get a better deal in this scenario

11/

And thirdly, the EU looks at the UK and sees deep instability. Why compromise now, when you might have a new gvt in a few months' time?

12/

To pull this together: absent a detailed alternative plan from UK to address EU concerns, there is no good reason for EU to move off the WA

13/

A final thought: all of this is the logic that has got us to here. UK gvt evaluated costs of no-deal and got WA because it was better than the alternative. No obvious reason to think that calculation has changed.

/end