Ian Duncan Smith, one of the leading Brexit lights, still doesn't seem to understand it all, in spite of thinking about little else for thirty years. In this Telegraph article HERE he claims the EU is acting like a playground bully. I assume this is because they're giving us what he wants - the chance of a very hard, diamond tipped, Brexit. As I read the position papers, May's various speeches and the technical papers published last week, it isn't the EU which is acting like a bully but us. Article 50 has been triggered and we WILL leave the EU on March 29th next year. But it's clear the government, business and industry, the retail sector, the health service, trade unions, academics and probably a big majority of the people, including a lot of leave voters don't actually want that.
They want trade with Europe to continue as before and for the UK to participate in and influence most of the EU bodies that run the continent on a day to day basis.
Therein lies IDS' problem. All of these things are in the hands of those he calls the playground bullies. And they're not willing to grant us a special status or rewrite whole sections of EU law to allow us, a newly and self demoted third country, to enjoy all the benefits we had before without the same obligations that other members have.
Survival of the European project is uppermost in the mind of the Commission. This is not going to be achieved by allowing third countries unfettered access to the single market and the customs union. It would simply hasten the breakdown of the EU order.
What might help is to force the UK to face reality and remain close, or try and go it alone in a hard Brexit and see what life outside is really like. This choice, whether IDS likes it or not will need to be made in the next few weeks. Having voted to leave the club, accusing it of "bullying" doesn't somehow sound quite right.
In what will perhaps be a foretaste of a future for the UK being "bullied", Business Insider (HERE) carried a report in March about UK attempts in January this year to replicate the EU-USA Open Skies Agreement which allows airlines from EU countries to operate across The Atlantic. According to this report, "The UK reportedly walked out of secret talks when Washington offered the UK its standard bilateral open skies deal". The standard agreement is far inferior to what we have at the moment, ownership rules mean British Airways and Virgin Atlantic may not even be allowed to fly to the US!
"Failure to secure a deal with the US could have huge implications, Charlton [an aviation consultant] said, because the UK would fall back into the previous agreement in place between the two countries, called Bermuda II, which he said was "very poor and very unliberal in every way."
"Once the UK falls out of the EU-US Open Skies agreement, it's not as if they'd fall into a void. They'd actually fall into something worse than a void."
The idea that EU companies like Lufthansa or Air France and US companies like Delta and American will somehow help BA and Virgin is for the birds. They will do all they can to reduce competition and will lobby their own governments to try and increase their market share at the expense of British companies.
This is the sad reality for any country outside the big blocs like the US, the EU, China, Mercosur (South America) or the ASEA (South East Asian nations). The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
