Thursday 24 December 2020

A deal to be announced this morning?

It looks as if a deal will be announced this morning with talks having continued through the night, mainly I believe on fish species. I assume Frost is desperately trying to make a bad deal for Britain's fishermen look half decent. Negotiators must be heartily sick of it all - and they will never forget who is responsible for it. I don't know when the full text will be published, it may not come until later and so delay scrutiny of it even further.  This morning I note some commentators on Twitter are saying a deal was not inevitable.  It was.

I have always thought Johnson was bluffing  and he has never at any point considered leaving without a deal. It was all an act designed to make the EU believe he would. And it failed.

Where he did succeed is in persuading his own supporters that no deal was a real possibility and the phrase that they will be throwing at him is that Britain would "prosper mightily" without a deal. Britain is not going to 'prosper mightily' WITH a deal and the border chaos in Kent this week will gives us a clue as to why.  Supermarkets are already warning of shortages, Toyota stopped production early for Christmas due to a lack of parts.  We need them more than they need us.

Exports will collapse in January - whatever happens - and imports will fall as well, and/or transport costs will rise because EU hauliers will stop delivering so we will see price rises and shortages and job losses. 

Quite quickly people are going to notice and ask why things have got worse with a deal than without one?  The ERG are already lining up to examine the text for signs of revisionism against Brexit orthodoxy. David Jones MP, one of the more extreme headbangers tweeted:

The Bruges Group - which is full of swivel-eyed guardians against ever closer union with anybody also tweeted:

To get a flavour of what Brexit Johnson will face in he next few weeks and months you only need to read an article by David Blake, one of Patrick Minford's colleagues in Economists for Free Trade (formerly Economists for Brexit) in The Telegraph earlier this week.  The headline is: The EU has outsmarted the UK at every turn - We are in danger of getting virtually nothing, while the EU walks away with everything it asked for.

Blake complains the EU got its way on the sequencing of the talks, on the divorce bill, on the NI protocol and that the trade deal will be heavily in their favour because it will focus almost entirely on goods, protecting their near £100 billion surplus while damaging our trade in services where we  have a surplus - which is set to get smaller next year.

I have to say this is the view (albeit expressed in more moderate terms) of most serious Brexit analysts who think the final deal will be very close to the EU's initial mandate. They may have made concessions on the detail but not on any of the principles.

None of the Eurosceptic groups trust Johnson. They are all deeply suspicious of him and his motives.

In fact I daresay the deal he has negotiated the seeds of his own demise. 

The WhatUKthinks series of polls published a couple of new ones recently - both showing a 9-10% lead for those thinking that Brexit is wrong and the BBC have a summary of where we are by professor Sir John Curtice. The nation is not entering this bright new future with unbridled enthusiasm. In fact, the great majority think it has all been a big mistake.

The truth is the referendum was won on lies and the problem with lies is that they are not a permanent thing. The truth can be hidden or distorted or faked but it can't be suppressed forever. Truth is eternal while lies are only a fleeting thing. 

Johnson's lies will eventually be shown to be what they were and are. He cannot escape his past.  He will shortly find that his suggestion we were going to prosper mightily without a deal will soon be coming back to haunt him. 

I think and hope that next year it will be impossible to keep the lies going. Nobody on the remain side has ever trusted Johnson and now it seems the extremists on his side have woken up to the kind of man they elected.  At the moment only those in the disinterested centre, the ones who voted to leave without realising what it meant and afterwards promptly forgot about it, are the next group to discover what a charlatan he is.

There will be a lot of government spin on this and you may feel a bit deflated over Christmas but take a moment to listen to Nigel Farage on LBC this morning. He is not happy and says the deal is a new treaty which will only benefit the EU. Enjoy:

Finally, can I take a moment to wish you a very Merry Christmas.

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