I suspect it is a small number of people in the UK government who really believe in taking on the EU and US over Northern Ireland. Plus the usual MP and associated media suspects.
The rest will want to claim a win and move on. Brexit wins votes in the abstract not as reality.
It isn't out of friendliness towards the EU that so many MPs will want to move on, but a residual fear of what may happen in Northern Ireland, a place of which most MPs have strikingly little knowledge, and beyond a surface unionism, little deep concern.
We must also remember for all the tables of which ministers are popular with Conservative Party members, that most MPs don't have much time for their activists. True of all parties. On the surface flying the flag and socking the EU is popular, as long as there is no real damage.
The cynical calculation before was pure Brexit for Britain and hope to come back for Northern Ireland later. If international relations doesn't allow for the latter, I suspect little appetite to force the issue. Accompanied by plenty of virtue signalling.
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A coincidence to ponder. Yesterday after some time without mentioning the subject too much, a UK Minister once again made a UK-US trade deal priority. Meanwhile, UK words on triggering Article 16 have softened. Could the two be linked?
Starting to think that being good at one thing (election or referendum winning) does not automatically equate to being good at others (governing, international relations).
As we've seen before when business leaders are supposed to fix public sector governance problems.
The evidence mounts that very few people in the UK government since 2016 have understood trade, Northern Ireland, the economy, regulations, international relations, or power relations. Those that did have been largely ignored.
I hear stories of business leaders laboriously explaining to Cabinet Ministers what regulations are and why they are needed. Diplomats in despair at the lack of interest the government shows for what they do. You can't move on from Brexit if you don't understand it.
Aha! Someone noticed that the UK's threats to invoke Article 16 of the Northern Ireland protocol could not in fact deliver a sustainable solution. They may also have noticed that delivering trade war just before Christmas was not a great idea.
Biggest problem is the UK government's foolish and dangerous incitement of unionists as a negotiating tactic always liable to fail in the face of superior political forces leaves huge instability which now requires the kind of sensitive handling we have not seen of late.
Northern Ireland has to have special arrangements for trade under Brexit. Since there were already some special arrangements, this did not have be an existential issue. But it is now. It will take more than the technical fixes implied by Article EU or proposed by the EU.
Yet more trade deal food controversy. As ever the real problem is that the UK government doesn't have a trade policy, or rather it has a glib statement about not lowering standards, which it possibly doesn't mean, complex realities, engaged stakeholders. politico.eu/article/red-tr…
Then there are the conflicts of interest - essentially the lobbyists for large agricultural producers in other countries who have influence also with UK ministers. Their goal is to lower UK food standards compared to the EU, issue by issue. There's a lot of money in doing that.
There's agriculture policy, or what the UK actually wants to produce, and how this fits in with trade policy. Then consideration of developing countries, who currently have preferences over large producers, but won't once these deals are completed.
Last week the US and EU ended a Trump-era trade dispute by reaching a new agreement on steel and aluminium trade. On closer inspection it is one of the worst examples of undermining the WTO we've seen - my latest for @BorderlexEditorborderlex.net/2021/11/10/per…
@BorderlexEditor What happened was that the US raised some tariffs citing rather dubious national security grounds, and have now reached an agreement just with the EU on quotas. That's pretty much the entire founding principles of the GATT then WTO ignored. It is that blatant.
For the US, the value of the steel and aluminium deal is obvious - it explicitly aims to return manufacturing and reduce trade with China. The EU cares more about the WTO than the US does - but it clearly cares abut keeping competitive industry through its green deal more.
Suspect we're going to have plenty more disappointing GDP figures to come. Those high trade barriers will be a drag for some time (4% is a huge economic loss, and restrictions on immigration make it worse) and government has no plan for growth.
Self-proclaimed free marketeers, who are mostly in reality supporters of hard Brexit and therefore high trade barriers, are very confused, complaining about everything except the one thing doing more to drive growth downwards than any other.
And of course a trade war with the EU over the Northern Ireland protocol will depress growth further, and even the threats will be having a chilling effect.
Brexit trade barriers are bad for the economy. As predicted by every reputable study.