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Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke @kevinhorourke
, 4 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
A reminder that the frictionless trade people are calling for here depend on the UK as a whole staying in a customs union and single market arrangement with the EU....

theguardian.com/business/2018/…
As the European Council's negotiating guidelines agreed in March put it, "Being outside the Customs Union and the Single Market will inevitably lead to frictions in trade."
That isn't a negotiating position but a well-known and well-understood statement of fact. The @EUCouncil shouldn't have to spell it out in a document like this but with HMG you have to. Unfortunately.
It's hard to recall a government denying basic logic & even definitions as assiduously as this one has done. I was going to call them anti-intellectual but the phrase seems misplaced: you don't have to be an intellectual to understand links between the CU, SM, & trade frictions.
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@MichelBarnier , @WeyandSabine , and everyone else involved, including on the UK side, deserves huge credit for getting the process to this stage: many congratulations. Given how many red lines had to be navigated it is a massive achievement.
Attention in the UK will focus on the imperfections of the deal but those are merely the reflection of the political red lines - leave the EU, leave the SM, no customs border between NI and GB - that negotiators had to work with.
What Barnier and colleagues have achieved is to construct a pathway towards an orderly Brexit, something that has not always seemed likely. And if a future HMG changes their red lines, the future relationship could be very close indeed.
Read 4 tweets
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@davidallengreen is of course right: if HMG reneges on the backstop it previously agreed this may well lead to a no deal Brexit, considerable economic damage to Member States including Ireland, and the very hard border the backstop was designed to avoid.
ft.com/content/0df643…
Does it follow that the EU was wrong to push the backstop? I don't think so. Avoiding a hard border was identified as one of the 3 key divorce issues and understandably so given the stakes. And HMG displayed bad faith on the issue throughout.
They clearly intended to use the Irish border issue to force the EU to accept no border controls anywhere, despite HMG being free to do trade deals with others, diverging in terms of regulations and all the rest of it. They were incredibly cynical.
Read 7 tweets
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Just a quick reminder. On the backstop, HMG has not only signed up to the December Joint Report, it also agreed in March that...
"a legally operative version of the “backstop” solution for the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, in line with paragraph 49 of the Joint Report, should be agreed as part of the legal text of the Withdrawal Agreement, to apply unless and until another solution is found"
In line with Paragraph 49, NOT in line with Paragraphs 49 and 50.

And NOT temporary: it is to apply unless and until another solution is found.

This concession in March is too often ignored. The source is here:

ec.europa.eu/commission/sit…
Read 4 tweets

Related threads

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Here’s a brief take on the leaked letter from Theresa May to the DUP courtesy of the @SamCoatesTimes story.
The opening is a bit confusing: “A Brussels plan to put a customs border in the Irish Sea if there is no Brexit agreement will be included in a divorce deal”.
The idea of a No Brexit Agreement usually means No Divorce Deal, so it sounds contradictory: ie, if there’s no divorce deal we’ll have this in the divorce deal.
Read 25 tweets
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As we are back in campaigning mode with #Leave on the back foot, what is the most important thing we have learned since #EURef2016 that means we should #StopBrexit?
- That #Brexit will leave us worse off in every scenario?
- That the Referendum was advisory, not an ‘instruction’ to the Government?
Read 28 tweets
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@montie Talking about “punishment” dodges the real issues. The EU has been somewhat more inflexible than it could have been. But the dilemma and trilemma were always there and never faced up to by many leavers.
@montie The dilemma is that you either stick close to EU rules (rule taker) or don’t (trade/customs barriers up, huge problems for businesses whose business is structured round frictionless trade, and angry Leave voters never warned about that disruption).
@montie The trilemma is the Irish border: you have to choose one of: (1) a hard Irish border; (2) a hard NI/GB border; (3) staying in a customs union and single market (at least for goods and agri) with the EU. No world exists in which you can avoid all three.
Read 4 tweets
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Are the Commission playing politics again? A quick thread 👇 on their latest slide which shows how few problems on (Irish) border would be resolved by a Customs Union. This is yet another example of Commission desire to play politics in the UK
1) As @adamfleming observed this is a very unsubtle message from the EU which is showing itself far too keen to intervene (in a very obvious and quite clunky way) in UK political debates. The Commission knows Parliamentarians are divided on Customs Union and are playing into that
2) Other examples of this desire to play British politics include Barnier's comments that EU would consider a change of position on UK Single Market & Customs Union membership at any point up until end of transition. Clearly this was intended to encourage UK parliament rebels
Read 13 tweets
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1. A thread on #trade and aid.

One of the first tangible benefits of #Brexit I've seen is the emerging reform of @DFID_UK where it is becoming more of an arm of trade policy than a state owned humanitarian NGO. I would like that to go much further and rethink trade.
2. I do not think we should be wasting too much effort on free trade deals largely because they are of questionable value and encourage inefficient value chains. Any work on tariffs should really be reserved for multilateral activity.
3. Instead we need DfID as the spearhead of our trade policy. There is no reason why we cannot pursue humanitarian goals and enhance our trade while we are at it. For a start we can do a lot with medicines and pharmacy products.
Read 21 tweets
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BREAKING: @CommonsNIAC including 3 DUP MPs says it “was unable to identify any border solution currently in operation across the globe that would enable physical infrastructure to be avoided” given the Govt decision to leave the Customs Union & Single Mkt parliament.uk/business/commi…
The @CommonsNIAC said the Govt “will not have the time to implement a new non-visible customs regime before withdrawal day” on the Irish border...
.@CommonsNIAC also says “The Committee found that additional infrastructure at the border would not only be politically objectional but ineffective and unworkable.”
Read 4 tweets

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