IRELAND THREATENS BREXIT DEAL
Two weeks ago the Foreign Minister of the Irish Republic made the entirely credible threat that, if the Irish Government didn’t get what they wanted in keeping an open border with Northern Ireland, then they would veto any proposed EU trade agreement with the United Kingdom.
The reason that such a threat is entirely credible is that for any EU trade agreement to be ratified it has to go through the process of ratification, not only by the EU institutions, but also by all 27 remaining Member States of the EU.
This is part of the reason why the EU has been so very slow over the years at entering into trade agreements. In the case of the trade agreement with Canada, the vast majority of terms were agreed relatively quickly, but the ratification was then held up for years because the Belgium Walloons were being difficult about an obscure point and until they agreed the Belgium state could not ratify the agreement.
We may also have difficulty with the Walloons, who are, of course, notorious about being difficult about almost everything. There has also been a direct threat from Spain of vetoing any EU trade agreement with the EU unless they get what they want over Gibraltar.
Then in terms of troubles ahead there is the problem that Germany is currently politically rudderless. Angela Merkel, the Chancellor for so many years is no doubt focussing all her efforts on internal political considerations (and her own future!) rather than thinking about issues relating to Brexit!
As things stand under Article 50 we are out of the EU in March 2019. That is just 16 months away!
Even if we were already agreed on almost every aspect of the trade agreement negotiations that would be an almost impossibly short period to succeed in getting all the EU institutions and also all the Member States to all ratify the agreement.
As it is, we haven’t even begun the trade negotiations because of the EU’s approach to negotiation – that the divorce package must be agreed before any trade negotiations can begin. This negotiating approach was always intended to minimise the British Government’s negotiating position.
The EU will be left desperately short of money as a result of us, one of its major cash cows, leaving the EU which is why they are trying to get us to agree to pay a vast ransom before they will even agree to discuss any trade deal, so that we cannot use our financial position to extract any concessions from them.
In addition to our financial position our Government’s negotiating team throughout that the question of the EU migrants who are here would be helpful. In many cases they are sending back to their home countries a significant proportion of what they are earning, plus child benefit and other remittances which help keep their home countries financially afloat.
Our negotiating team also thought that it would help us that our security services are more effective and sophisticated than most of the rest of the 27.
All of these issues seemed to give potentially strong negotiating positions. That is why all of which points the EUs current negotiating stance is intended to strip away from us!
When you couple all of this with the relative weakness and incoherence of Mrs May’s Remainer dominated Government – it has never looked very likely that she was going to be able to deliver a good deal on trading terms between us and the EU countries!
If the Irish deliver on their threat it would be politically impossible (not to mention – politically suicidal!) for any British Government to negotiate away the integrity of the United Kingdom, let alone a Conservative and Unionist Prime Minister whose very Party, as it currently stands, was formed on the question of Ireland in 1922 when Conservative and Unionist MPs came together in the original 1922 Committee to vote to withdraw from Lloyd George’s National Coalition over the question of Ireland.
There is also the electoral dynamic in the House of Commons which requires the support of Arlene Foster’s Democratic Unionist Party who would not agree to what Ireland is asking for anyway. So Mrs May’s Government has even less ability to agree what Ireland is demanding than any other British Government would be able to!
So it would appear that no deal is really the most likely outcome.
If Mrs May’s Government are really sensible it would be currently planning for that and certainly not parting with any English Taxpayers’ money to buy the possibility of having trade negotiations, when those trade negotiations are clearly going to go nowhere in the long run.
Brexit, membership of the EU and properly implementing the referendum decision combine in a cluster of issues which are very important to a lot of people. They are perhaps more important than traditional party loyalties. They also cut across the line of the political spectrum represented by the Post War two party system British Establishment Parties.
Therefore we have a real prospect that the Remainiac manoeuvres that we see going on in Parliament may lead to a smash for the Establishment. That means that there is to a real prospect on re-alignment of the political spectrum, hopefully more in accordance in delivering what ordinary people really want out of politics. In my view, that is patriotism; coupled with welfare for our people; control on immigration; coupled with higher wages for our people; support for traditional values; an end to political correctness; integration not multi-culturalism; a land in which there is room for difference and innovation; self-improvement without the dead weight of bureaucratic “Equality and Diversity” quotas. In short an England that would truly make you proud to be English!
As against that majority view we do, on one end of the spectrum, have perhaps no more than 25,000 corporate globalists supporting the Tory Party, but they are armed with vast resources and control of big business and much of the print media. On the other end there are certainly no more than 600,000 internationalist, socialist, statists supporting Labour again armed with influence in the state hierarchy, academia , teaching, Social work and in the media – especially the BBC.