Awol

Honestly? I’d rather stay in than sign that god-awful treaty, & I’m pretty firmly for Leave... It’s the roadmap for an absolute national disaster, and as you say we’d still have the right to leave the EU. By any objective measure the Conservative party deserves to dissolve over this farce, probably spawning two new parties. I’d say the same about Labour, too. The misalignment of public opinion and party structure is greater than I’ve ever known it. BIAD and start again.

@snowychap thanks for posting that. My point was in a no-deal scenario May and Hammond would be gone really, really fast. What happens then is anyone’s guess, but in those circumstances I wouldn’t take anything with the Treasury’s fingerprints on it as likely future policy.

I reckon that’s broadly correct. It’s difficult to know what the UK would do about applying tariffs to imports from the Irish Republic because in a no-deal May & Hammond would be out. If we assume reciprocal rates, then large parts of Irish agriculture is on the fast track to insolvency. Dublin can’t make unilateral deals with the UK and so huge pressure is then exerted on Brussels to move into a mindset of resolve the issue with the UK, rather than winning a battle. Obviously I’m not trying to convince you, only to highlight that with an executive in London that is actually committed to getting this done, things would start to look different. We’re not in that place & are very unlikely to be, so this is pretty academic anyway. FWIW I reckon we’re on a track to revoke, with the silver lining of exploding the Conservative party.

@peterms I’m not saying May is being manipulated, I’m saying she is the manipulator, ably assisted by the civil service.

I totally get that you haven’t followed the actual detail of counter insurgency operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia etc.why would you? AQ in Iraq for example we’re systematically demolished by UK and US special forces. That’s not an isolated case. If the IRA fancied a comeback it would be horrific for them. Not what some people may want to hear, but still a realistic assessment of the current operating environment.

I didn’t say they wouldn’t do any damage, I said it would end very, very badly for them, because it would. As for being deluded you may well be right, be you haven’t actually responded to my arguments, which is interesting. So embarrassment aside: No-deal day +1, what does Dublin do on the border with Northern Ireland?

I guess we’ll be waiting 30 years for the papers (or two years if someone cashed in for their memoirs) to find out definitively, but I think what I said is correct.

Post 9/11 we’ve spent nearly 20 years smashing terrorist networks on an industrial scale and doing things very differently to the 80’s & 90’s. If Republicans go back to that kind of violence it’s going to end really, really badly for them. I sincerely hope they don’t.

She promised to leave the customs union, then insisted via Ollie Robbins that the backstop (a customs union with the EU) was extended to cover the whole of the UK. That would apply unless or until the EU chose to release the UK from it. It’s been engineered this way by London to avoid actually leaving the economic and legal order. I’m not going to argue the toss with you but having followed this process obsessively it’s been well explained by the professional commentariat.

Honestly I’m happy with that, the idea of goodwill from Ireland towards the UK is pretty hilarious in any circumstance. Nevertheless, we’ll have to come to an agreement on managing flows of goods across the border that doesn’t involve Dublin building and manning border checkpoints. Through gritted teeth it may be, but we’ll still have to sort that out.

Not having a WA doesn’t mean we simply cease trading with the EU, it means we trade on a WTO baseline that is suboptimal for both sides until an alternative is agreed. Exiting without a deal forces a solution to be found in Ireland outside the WA. Once that’s done the threat of being locked into a customs union by the EU with no unilateral exit is gone. After that the remainder of WA is tolerable, so no-deal is effectively a device to force a solution to that problem outside the A50 framework. Comments about wet dreams, tantrums and growing up are all a little bit cockish, to be honest.

On your first para we just disagree. Agreed that there’s no end-state called ‘no-deal’, but there is leaving the EU without signing a new treaty that surrenders our primary leverage (money) while securing nothing. If we were outside as a third country then the leverage of the A50 process disappears, the motivation of spoilers within the UK system is greatly reduced and the reality of no new treaty will force London & Dublin into finding a workable solution to the border outside the backstop arrangement. Medicines, aviation and many other areas are already sorted according to HMG. (Un)Surprisingly that never registers with the continuity Remain campaign in politics and the media who simply report their version of reality.

If a no-deal exit was really so disastrous they’d have already revoked article 50 - Mervyn King shot that fox quite comprehensively on the Today programme during the week. It’s now about the fact that we’ve come up to the deadline to leave but the public haven’t been intimidated into changing their minds since 2016. The MPs and HMG collectively lack the courage to simply revoke and overturn the referendum, neither can they bring themselves to do that which they had legislated to do - Leave with or without a deal. At this rate they are likely to crash the entire political system, imo. That could be a profoundly good outcome for the UK.

The lol is strong with this one... May has a mandate from the electorate to leave the EU. Not to try and cling on to the economic & geo-legal EU order, but to be outside it. To exit. That’s what Leave actually means. May decided Brexit was basically about racism, so as long as she delivered an end to free movement anything else was fair game. It’s the possibly inevitable consequence of a Remainer trying to deliver something they never understood in the first place.

I know, it’s astonishing that May was prepared to go so far to avoid actually leaving. The Tories are finished, and as was discussed at the beginning of this thread Brexit will hopefully do for the main parties in their current form.

Hopefully Mr Macron will deliver the coup de grace to this abortion of a process and see us out on 12th of April, once and for all. It’s absolutely certain that if it is left to Parliament we will not leave.

Wikileaks, a.k.a. Moscow. Lol.

Looks to be going that way, finally. Neighbours could quite easily get drawn in if it turns even uglier, but that’s for Maduro to decide.

Bump.

There Is No Alternative.

Agreed. More likely it’ll be the positive or negative development of the EU in our absence that influences the balance of opinion in UK over coming years. Listening to PMQs now & May’s plan seems to be tweaking her deal and going again. Quite remarkable levels of delusion.

Fair enough, we should swop twitter’s.

Twitter says WTF?

Seen. That’s why I think people pinning all hope on a 2nd referendum aren’t being totally realistic. Of course Remain could win, but that’s far from being a shoe-in and the campaign would raise the level of public rancour even further.