Fintan O'Toole is one of the best Irish writers on Brexit and he has produced what I think is a great if rather depressing summary of the position we find ourselves in with this article HERE. If you read nothing else on Brexit today, read this. He says the Brexit vision set out in the Chequers accord is indeed "miserable".
"And instead of freeing British businesses from Brussels red tape, it proposes to wrap them up like mummies in layers of staggeringly complex bureaucracy, with two completely different tariff regimes operating side by side. And this, remember, is what the UK is asking for, not what it will get".
And in proposing a "common rule book" - a euphemism for regulatory alignment, he says, "If a deal is to be done at all, the last vestiges of fantasy Brexit will have to be stripped away and what will be left is a state that has negotiated its way from full partnership to the status of a rule-taking satellite of the EU".
And isn't this next sentence smacking the nail squarely on the head?
"When you take away all the heroic elements of Brexit, all the epic thrills of throwing off the oppressor and beginning a new history, what you are left with is just this – a country that has gone to enormous trouble to humiliate itself. Brexit has reached the point where the best possible outcome is the worst of both worlds, a state that is neither in nor out, neither on its own nor part of something larger".
The sub title of this blog includes this:
Now nearly two years on with the cloud of uncertainty thickening we stumble onwards to the national humiliation that surely awaits us. Brexit is taking us on an enforced journey of self-examination. At the end we will be wiser but also poorer, weaker, less influential and diminished as a country.
We are indeed humiliating ourselves at huge expense. What a mess we're in with 261 days to go.
