Please Sir, can I have some more?
I recently wrote an article for The New European in which I compared the chances of re-joining the EU now with our original plan to stay outside the Common Market in the 1950s.
A plan that involved setting up a rival trade group, hoping desperately the whole European project would fail, trying to pick off individual member states and then begging on our knees to be let in at any price. I have edited the process just a little bit but that was the general trend.
It seems now that the Brexit plan is at the third part of that master plan.
We could not set up a rival trade group because there are no members to join it, EFTA which we did set up wouldn’t have us because we are too big, too angry, too disruptive and they are all in the Single Market, already, or as good as in the SM in the case of Switzerland.
Brexiteers’ hopes that the EU would implode as other members witnessed Britain storming ahead have died a very quiet death, strange because the swivel eyed loons still claim we are doing better than member states. Why oh why won’t those pesky continentals realise they are stuck in a sclerotic slave state? It is, I suppose a tacit acknowledgement that they don’t believe their own agitprop.
So that leaves trying to pick off member states. But this can never work, all the things that the UK needs and wants are under the control of the European Commission, not the member states.
Tread deals, customs arrangements, veterinary checks, industry standards, environmental rules, subsidies, the lot.
Rather like the pathetic attempt by the last Tory government to do “trade deals” with Arkansas, this cannot work. Even if Germany wants to be nice to us, they want to be abide by EU rules more.
We are a third country, it is what we asked for, we are on the outside looking in like.
It reminds me of Oliver Twist in the poor house orphanage, looking through the glass at the Beadle eating a feast and then asking “Please Sir, can I have some more?”
The next step will take much longer than the previous ones, because it actually involves serious negotiations, compromise and cooperation with Brussels. Three things the Brexit nutters in the Tory party think are all treasonous.
You can understand (just about) why the current government is so reluctant to take the next step, but its current attempt to improve Brexit by talking to individual member states will get virtually nothing and is doomed to fail.
Eventually someone has to go to Brussels and beg for more.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media