A last-minute deal has been struck. I would be interested in other even-handed opinions about how good or bad this is. The people who believe Boris is always wrong will of course be unable to give any credit, so their opinions can be discounted. From this article, it seems the right people are complaining about it - though not very intensely - and the (other) right people are calling it the best that could be done under the circumstances - though again not very intensely. Keep your eye out for other articles, please. (HT: Maggie's)
Wildly stupid, but its Boris who rather specializes in dumb, being the front man for a nasty cabal, of seriously right wing billionaires.
ReplyDeleteThere is a tiny British fishing industry, that has sold most of its rights to its fishing areas. The British don't eat the fish they catch anyway and buy the fish they eat from the EU.
The supposed Free Trade deal is hogwash as 80& of British trade with the EU is services which do not come under the Free Trade agreement.
They have royally screwed the pooch with this deal. Boris is an intelligent moron, a special category for the wilfully stupid..
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-small-print-of-boris-s-brexit-deal-makes-for-reassuring-reading
ReplyDeleteLOL. You do know Boris writes for the Spectator? Its seriously onside for Brexit, and frankly only useful for understanding the aforementioned cabal.
ReplyDeleteExactly as predicted.
ReplyDeleteWell the facts am the facts, no matter how you like, or dislike them.
ReplyDeleteI rather like Boris. He is very funny and can weave a tangled web with the best of them. I would not put him in charge of anything though, knowing him as I do.
I’ve got an office in France with a multi-national team (Swedish, American , British, French) and I can tell you that while the EU is popular with regard to no internal borders (until COVID) and an easy transmigration of workers, there is no real sense of being “European”. Local politics is still national with regard to budgets and policy. The EU was designed to be a Franco-German ruling group with others behaving themselves. The British membership was always awkward and really not desired by Paris and Berlin. Brexit was the only real option for the Brits.
ReplyDeleteI may have mentioned this before but I found a series of lectures sponsored by Gresham College (London) featuring Professor Vernon Bogdanor on YouTube. He's got a very informative series on many aspects of UK politics covering the monarchy, Parliament, Prime Ministers, and the EU/UK relationship in the 20th Century (and some of the 19th). If you want a view from a real Brit.
ReplyDeleteI would have been OK with a no-deal crashout, but the Boris Johnson deal sounds like a decent compromise to return sovereignty to the UK while preserving some negotiation procedures with an important trading partner. I'm basing this on the two articles already noted above, not having seen anything else brilliant to add.
ReplyDeleteI've been following things fairly closely as someone who lived a big portion of my adult life in England, and may yet retire back to there.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I've not seen the 'document', as soon as I was aware that a trade deal had been reached, I searched out the news report summaries by the organizations that received it, such as the BBC.
I think the key was to read the summaries before the 'narrative' developed, when they were just a précis, section-by-section, of the text.
My first impression was that the deal is not bad. The headline fisheries part is actually pretty pragmatic, although it is now presented as a 'sell-out'. Anything much different would have been a big immediate change to contracts and income streams for people on both sides of the border.
The bit on the financial services industry is unfortunate, but they can adjust quickly - as usual, the press has under-predicted the as-yet unknown innovative responses and over-predicted impacts because they forget how resilient the UK financial sector is.
The above could of course be all wishful thinking on my part -- we got a small inheritance in £ and I've been advising my wife that the best way to grow it is to leave it in £ cash until the brexit uncertainty dissapates.