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An important week of Brexit

Three unprecedented things happened with Brexit this week:

  1. Prime Minister Theresa May capitulated fully on Britain's financial settlements with the EU, amounting to around £40bn.
  2. Brexit Secretary David Davis failed to produce any impact assessments, telling the select committee that the Brexit impact assessments didn't exist, even though he had talked about them at great length. What parliament got was a couple of hastily thrown together ring binders of Wikipedia. However the Conservative-dominated select committee decided this was not a contempt of parliament.
  3. An agreement was drawn up between the UK and the EU on the exit process, satisfying the EU that trade talks could proceed. Theresa May conceded the following:
    1. Citizens rights would be arbitrated by the ECJ. Those rights would be conferred to family members and partners.
    2. In the absence of other agreements, the entire UK would effectively remain in the Customs Union so as to avoid a border in Ireland.
Although this looks like complete surrender by the UK, because it is, this is actually really good news. It avoids the probability of a cliff-edge Brexit and the ensuing chaos, and it means that the de facto position of the UK is to remain a member of the single market, which is great news for Remainers.

Hard Brexiters are of course howling betrayal, but their opinions aren't thought through. For some disgraceful reason, these morons still get plenty of airtime, which is the reason for all this mess in the first place. A hard Brexit would be absolutely catastrophic for hard Brexiters: their reputations would be destroyed and they would literally no longer be able to set foot in the UK.

Now that the UK seems to have finally adopted a more realistic understanding of the situation, I expect that future trade talks will proceed much more smoothly. Of course this agreement is really an interim agreement that kicks the can down the road, but it opens up the prospect an indefinite series of extensions at which point the UK may realise that the appetite of Brexit is gone and the UK will remain some kind of adjunct member of the UK for years to come.

This raises another question: At what point has the UK "left" the EU, allowing the UK to legitimately claim that the referendum has been fulfilled and politicians can "come out" and start the process of rejoining the EU? How long is the shadow of the EU referendum mandate? I would say 5 years max, but really, democracies can change their minds at any time. All it takes is leaders with guts.

It also complicates future trade deals. If the UK has regulatory divergence with the EU, then a border must pop up on the Irish Sea, effectively splitting the UK, which will prove a massive obstacle for any new trade deals.

One is reminded of the Flexcit strategy, to leave the EU to join EFTA, and then extract the UK from EFTA slowly and avoid the time-limited nature of Article 50. However this isn't really thought through either. Yes, joining EFTA is possible, but from there it gets messy again, and having left the EU, the UK population would rightly campaign to rejoin it. It sounds more like the business plan of the South Park Underpant Gnomes.

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