As I write we do not know the details of any supposed Brexit deal. But I wrote this on Twitter last night and despite its brevity I think it likely to summarise anything I might say:
Johnson is going to want to call and Brexit deal ‘The Christmas Eve Agreement’, to parody the Good Friday Agreement. But there the comparison will end. The GFA brought peace and greater unity. His deal will bring turmoil and the end of the Union. That will be his legacy.
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) December 23, 2020
To say this will be a hollow achievement is likely to be very kind to it.
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It is a Hard BrexShit.
It is only a Deal In Name Only. And it will be a sore one (;-)
If tariffs are to be avoided this is a plus, but the rest will probably mean a shambles for years. Fishing was obviously a complete red herring.
Getting on for five years ago, I made a comment (somewhere), that it’s very easy to get a quick trade deal: you ask ‘What do you want? Where do we sign?’ If you’re not prepared to just do that, it’s going to be a long and difficult process… until you are prepared to do it.
What are the prospects we can discern meaningfully from these masterfully crafted leaks to the media currently setting the manufactured scene for a phone triumph?:
David Porter of BBC News (BBC Scotland), fast out the blocks: peddling the Government-line proposition that this hypothetical deal favours ‘Scottish’ fishing (even he qualifies this as ‘North East Scotland’). This is not even true. He means Scottish White Fish – the only interest group for fishing ever adequately represented by Government or media. Scottish fishing must include the West Coast non-white fish; the people with all the high-value containers rotting right now in a Kent car park, and who need the EU market for their high quality product. They have been sold out. The White Fish interest (cod and haddock – it comes with chips; politcally easily exploitable and wrapped in a newspaper, which is the only practical value British newsprint ever delivers), has famously been identified as amounting to a near monopoly owned by only five Scottish families; and much of the British fish quotas were sold off to Europeans.
Meanwhile the Scottish seed potato sector of the agriculture industry? Sold out with the West Cost fishermen.
Indeed
It may be a “World-Beating Brexit” but is it edible? We’ll have to wait see. This government hasn’t been good on detail or rather having foresight so far, indeed far from it!
I’ll stay on my cynical perch for the time being whilst recognising a degree of commonsense prevailed in government circles by avoiding a No-Deal.
After Trump got his MAGA baseball cap slogan wrong when it should have been MAGATA (Make America Great Again Through Accountability) they didn’t I believe have much choice than to do a deal with the EU.
I see Andy Haldane is screwing the austerity prospect tighter by now linking debt to a serious threat the BofE sees of a rise in inflation (‘This is Money’; late, 23rd Dec). The only cause of inflation I can see is if Andy Haldane know something we don’t; the Brexit deal is even worse than the nightmare we actually expect.
Seasonal greetings of the same sentiments are due to ‘This is Money’ for delivering this Christmas pantomime information:
This is Money! OH NO IT ISN’T!
Playing Scrooge in a panto near you
Haldane should try reading some in-a-nutshell Keynes! I especially recommend the following to him:-
“The first task is to make sure that there is enough demand to provide employment for everyone. The second task is to prevent a demand in excess of the physical possibilities of supply, which is the proper meaning of inflation”. (CW 27, 2013: 267)
Quoted in Phil Armstrong’s excellent 2017 article on Keynes and Functional Finance:-
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325297121_Keynes%27s_view_of_deficits_and_functional_finance_a_Modern_Monetary_Theory_perspective
Happy Christmas to Richard and all contributors!
“If winter comes can spring be far behind?” from Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind.
Thanks for all your contributions Helen
Happy Christmas
Hell has duly been delivered by the Party for Mephistopheles; just in time for Christmas. Goodbye freedom – to move: but I can promise, like many Scots; I am not “moving on”.
Hopefully, hopefully ongoing events in Kent will continue jolt everyone into reality.
BTW – living in a Tory safe seat, my prospect of voting ever again is really diminished so I can afford my self the indulgence of not voting for a party that ended my final salary pension in 2003 and has not promised (as far as I can see) to restore pubic sector worker pay losses since 2010 – the Labour Party (bye bye Keir). I also think fondly of my employing Council whose Labour Councillors enthusiastically took a Tory manufactured pension contribution holiday that has left us with a huge hole in the pension fund.
However, could you imagine what the mainstream media would have been making of all of this had Labour been in power?
Could you imagine the pressure for them to go?
How acutely interested the media would have been in their performance, in every sleight?
It’s worth thinking about.
But it is sad for me entering 2021 in the belief I’m afraid that no English politician gives a damn about these issues and that no one represents me and others who think like me.
Join the club…
The club of the ‘politically aware politically homeless’? Richard. I’m already in it, have been for years.
Join the club
At this rate, it could be the Christmas Day, Boxing Day or even New Year’s Eve agreement!
My brother who lives in Eire is a long distance lorry driver doing runs into France and Romania.
He got back home on Christmas Day afternoon!
Rather bizarrely considering the EU summary slide 2, Liz truss is claiming in the express
“Our deal with the European Union covers services, which the naysayers thought would be impossible”.
It does not cover services
Indeed, which begs the question why does she think it does?
Which is most likely?
1. She’s really dim
2. Boris is pulling the wool over her eyes and his other MPs (perhaps why he doesn’t want the full text released)
3. she’s helping pull the wool over our eyes
4. Services are covered means, they are covered by saying they are excluded
5. The EU summary is wrong
6. They aim to do services outside of the deal, tax evasion etc
The only way to sell this deal is by lying
So they are lying