I must admit to enjoying it when a Brexiteer's arguments are publicly destroyed so I read the Twitter thread below avidly yesterday. It is in response to an article in The Telegraph by Robbie Gibb, a former Director of Communications at Downing Street under Theresa May. He's described as a long-standing Brexiteer so it's not difficult to see why she struggled to do anything with men like him around her.
The thread is from someone calling himself Steve Analyst (I image it's not his real name) in response to a Twitter exchange earlier concerning the recent Telegraph article about the EU-UK trade talks Analyst had clearly suggested Gibb didn't understand.trade and Gibb then asked what it was he was supposed not to understand. Well, he got his answer.
Gibb is like most Brexiteers they seem to wilfully misunderstand:
1. Robbie Gibb asked me this question a while ago. I can’t say what he doesn’t know, but I can break down his article.(OK, some of this is pedantic, but a lot is fundamental to trade deals and how the EU approach them.)(Thread)
— Steve Analyst (@EmporersNewC) May 4, 2020
The original article is titled: The EU misunderstands the UK position, which Gibb claimed is set out in the Tory manifesto, as if the manifesto was an international treaty lodged with the UN. Analyst points out the manifesto confuses free trade with preferential trade but more than that it says there will be no political alignment and the role of the ECJ will end.
But the NI protocol in the Withdrawal Agreement already concedes a role for the ECJ.
The thread goes on but is well worth a read. One point Analyst digs up is a quote from the US Congressional Research service which points out that the EU does not make standard 'off-the-shelf' free trade agreements (PTAs or Preferential Trade Agreements as the US call them). They are all bespoke with a "framework for cooperation on a range of political, security, economic, trade and human rights issues".
Brexiteers constantly refer to the EU offering standard deals, but this just isn't so. It seems to me that far from the EU misunderstanding OUR position we have entirely misunderstood THEIR position. A misunderstanding which is bound to lead to a crisis sooner or later.
The EU use trade to advance their interests in all sorts of ways, one of which is to prevent a close neighbour country turning itself into a sweatshop as a way of competing with their businesses and citizens unfairly.
Meanwhile, Michael Gove has reportedly called keeping to the Brexit timerable, even in the middle of trying to bring a global pandemic under control, "plain prudence" according to The Evening Standard:
"Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove has dismissed mounting calls to extend the Brexit transition period, insisting it is 'plain prudence' to stick with the current timetable despite the disruption unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic".
This is pure Orwell for me. A clear reversal of the truth presented as inescapably rational so I searched on line for quotes from 1984 - a book I have read more than once but I don't remember every word and I haven't got a copy at home - and found this one:
“What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself; who gives your arguments a fair hearing and simply persists in his lunacy?
With Gove one must assume he knows what he is saying is completely false but makes no indication or admission that it is. It is indeed persisting in lunacy. What can you make of it?
Only that he is doing it for effect. To influence Brussels, to gaslight a nation into believing they are going mad for thinking Brexit next year without a trade deal is unthinkable. Some will be reassured that no senior government minister could say such a thing if it's a flat out lie. But it is.
So another quote from Orwell's 1984:
"There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
Keep clinging.
