Tin Shipman in The Sunday Times (HERE) this week reveals that the Brexit "war cabinet" last week agreed a four point plan that Mrs May is apparently going to announce to a suspecting EU on Friday. And he tells us roughly what will be in it. The EU will no doubt read it with some amusement, as one might do when seeing a spoilt child's Christmas list for Santa Claus.
According to the usually well informed Shipman the plan will include:
- Mutual recognition of each others standards
- Publicly committing to keeping UK standards as high as the EU's
- Pledging to keep rules and regulations "substantially similar"
- Insistng on the creation of a new disputes body to oversee areas where we might want to diverge.
This latter body would of course be entirely independent of the ECJ.
The EU should tell the PM not to waste her breath. EU rules are not about recognising others standards but about the supervisory and enforcement mechanisms through the law, of EU standards inside the single market. Britain wants the same level of access but without the supervisory and enforcement measures that apply to everyone else. It can't happen.
It is being claimed that thick-as-mince David Davis "wrestled [the plan] into shape" with some frantic toing and froing in the hours before the meeting. For "wrestled it into shape" read "made it completely unacceptable" to the EU. It was the part about divergence mechanisms that worried him but this will be useless because we will be able to diverge as much as we like on product standards after Brexit it won't make any difference to the EU.
He doesn't understand Mutual Recognition Agreements and thinks they apply to standards rather than what they actually refer to which is conformity assessment. In other words the EU will recognise a body in the territory of a third country which will confirm goods for export comply with EU standards. It is NOT recognising other standards. It is quite different. And it will not make trade with the EU frictionless. There will still be occasional checks.
Apparently it hasn't been decided where or when or how we will diverge. We are going through Brexit just in case we might want to at some unspecified time in the future. My guess is we won't, ever, at least not in any meaningful way.
One of those present at Chequers explained: “We are going to be associate members of various agencies on things like aviation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals and then we get [EU] market access and don’t need to have our products checked in more than one jurisdiction. We can decide at any time, in the full knowledge that there are consequences, that we don’t want to be regulated in this way.”
This is several stages beyond delusional. I really can't imagine the EU making these sort of concessions. This is the kind of stuff that Norway and the other EEA members have but we also want to be outside the single market with just a simple free trade agreement. It would basically upset all the EEA members and probably every one of the existing 60 or so FTAs the EU has with third countries. Even if whatever we were proposing was workable it would not be acceptable. The EU would not only have to negotiate a new deal with us but with every other EEA member and FTA.
It is not even clear if the EU will grant us associate membership of these EU agencies that the source breezily suggested. It would be interesting to know how many other third countries are also associate members of an EU agency. I would say there aren't any. It's another delusion.
Boris Johnson, the great Eton educated know-nothing of our time and present Foreign Secretary was said to be still harping on about EU regulations that prevented him changing the design of lorries to make roads safer for cyclists and those about making the sale of Dyson's most powerful vacuum cleaners illegal. First of all, I wouldn't even want to be on the road if I thought any vehicle designed or even modified by Johnson was about. And Dyson don't even make vacuum cleaners that would exceed EU power limits. He has really learned nothing since the referendum campaign and nobody has been able to hammer any sense into his thick skull.
This article (HERE) explains why he's wrong on trucks - and the same arguments can be used for vacuum cleaners as well. Quite apart from that why would anyone want a large inefficient vacuum cleaner when you can have one that is smaller, lighter and consumes less power?
And according to one who was present at the meeting there was no discussion of a fall back position. BoJo is actually expecting to get everything in the proposal. He will probably get nothing. And paradoxically, the longer all this takes the less time there will be to prepare for a no deal exit.
In fact I am starting to think Theresa May wants to keep us in the EU but is simply stringing things out to fool the Brexiteers.
BoJo is a nutjob but he and the others at Chequers are actually involved in deciding our future.
