As a former negotiator who now teaches this stuff, I promise you it makes a difference when the Minister in charge is seeking warm working relations and a path to progress instead of social media acrimony and a pretext for trade war.
1/ Habib's argument, that the TCA is preventing the UK from massively deregulating and thus delivering the "traditional Tory Brexit" he envisaged, is in direct contradiction to the UK government's repeated claims it had no intention of deregulating to race Europe to the bottom.
2/ Let's recall the horrors of the TCA negotiations.
The EU:
- was offering full market access, but wanted legal commitments that the UK wouldn't deregulate in areas like environment and labor rights to "exploit" that access.
This was the dreaded "Level Playing Field"
3/ The UK:
- Argued its regulations in these areas were world/europe leading
- That it had no intention of undermining them and never would
- That the level playing field commitments the EU sought were an unacceptable loss of sovereignty and more than you see in other FTAs
1/ Five reasons I think the Christmas Party scandal is so damaging:
Because they denied the (many many) parties happened at all, every new detail released is breaking news, and the potential sources for @PippaCrerar, @Annaisaac et al are legion.
The news cycle just won't end.
2/ It plays into not only the one narrative that has ever actually hurt the government (rules hypocrisy), but the one they were actively embattled in thanks to launching the world's dumbest attempt to rescue Owen Patterson from the consequences of his own actions.
3/ It is fundamentally a lockdowns thing occurring right as lockdowns are once again foremost in people's minds.
It doesn't feel like ancient history because Omicron has made this Christmas feel a lot like the one they partied through.
A trade war is when governments start using the tools of trade policy (tariffs, bans, requirements, testing, procedures etc.) maliciously, instead of merely selfishly (as is normal).
3/ Question: "What does that mean?"
It means analysing another government's economy and imposing barriers to trade and investment where they'll do the most economic or political damage, ideally without hurting your own consumers or producers too much.
First, rolling over an EU FTA may not be exactly as hard as negotiating a fresh deal, but it's still an achievement and Whitehall rando anons who have never been in a negotiating room should probably shut the fuck up about how easy it is.
Second, DIT does a lot of stuff other than negotiating free trade agreements and Whitehall officials of all people should know better than reducing a department to the one part of its work that makes headlines.
Third, the fact that the UK has in many cases (though not always) managed to secure for the UK deals nearly identical to those negotiated by the European Union, a bloc many times its economic weight, is worthy of praise, not derision.
This is funny, but my incredibly lame opinion is that while the government "agreeing on a diagnosis" would be very karmically satisfying for Remainers, it is neither politically feasible nor (more importantly) a prerequisite for tackling current challenges.
To continue Matt's analogy, the patient here admitting WHY his arm is broken isn't vital provided he admits that it IS and lets the doctor treat it.
The government won't magically gain new tools to address HGV shortages if Johnson, Cummings and Mogg all say "Brexit was dumb."
I am firmly convinced that by constantly pushing the government to admit that "THIS IS BREXIT, RIGHT?!?" its opponents are effectively giving it a free pass for the fact that the country is facing some pretty significant challenges on its watch. 🤷♂️
1/ If you've never seen a departmental risk register, as mentioned by @TomTugendhat in his grilling of the Foreign Secretary, they work like this (at least in Australia)...