BJ might yet do so, but there will be [some number of] head-banging Tory Europhobes, in Parliament and in the Tory-favouring media who will claim that almost any binding agreement is ipso facto an infringement of sovereignty. And even if BJ is able to face them down in Parliament to get through an agreement they don’t like (and its associated legislation)*, they will be in a position to make continuing trouble for him in the longer term (and there will be plenty of reasons and occasions to do so outside this particular question - the handling of Covid, the absence of trade deals with other countries, and so on).
Boris is in trouble either way though. I’m not sure the trouble he would get from hardline Brexiters would be worse than the trouble he would have from a no deal Brexit.
Boris will soon have achieved his purpose. He won the election last year with an 80 seat majority; he will soon, one way or the other, have got Brexit done. Even Leavers expect some kind of short-term disruption as a result of Brexit. When that pain is felt, Boris will be left carrying the can. At which point he’ll be dumped and the Tories will get a new leader who had literally nothing to do with it, wasn’t even there guv, and on we go.
Well, this new, more infectious strain of Covid that has spread in the UK seems to have given many other countries good reason to restrict travel from the UK. So now we have the cross channel trade crisis arriving early with the Dover to Calais route blocked to traffic for health reasons.
The disruption we anticipated with Brexit seems to have come early, courtesy of Covid.
I’m as staunch a remainer as you could hope to find, but your sweeping assertion just isn’t true. People didn’t know what they were voting for, and the right wing press has spent the last 40 years telling them that everything that goes wrong is the fault of the EU. Remain didn’t stand a chance.
My mother voted leave. She isn’t xenophobic or racist. She’s from that generation who will vote no matter what, and she pretty much tossed a coin. She deeply regrets her vote and often tells me ‘they shouldn’t have let us decide, we didn’t know what we were voting for.’
Both Farage and Rees Mogg said pre-election that if they lost 48-52 they would continue to fight on. Funnily enough , once they won 52-48 the result became the immutable “will of the people”.
They would have been entitled to continue to put their case, but nobody would have listened. The response would have been “We had a debate, just like you wanted, followed by a vote, and you lost. The issue is now settled for the foreseeable future.”
That same situation applies to Scotland. But the Scottish people DO NOT believe the issue is “now settled for the foreseeable future”, instead polls suggest they now want to leave:
See also Quebec over the last 50-ish years. Itches don’t stay scratched.
IMO as an American watching from a considerable distance, had Brexit gone down 48/52 the Leave campaign would have licked their wounds for a couple of years at most then tried again. John Major certainly didn’t settle the matter, now did he?
The Leave campaign would have licked their wounds for a couple of microseconds, and Farage ‘outrage’ would have broken out anew. Just look at the pro-Brexit nastiness whenever the (ongoing) outcomes of Brexit are criticised. In spite of their having “won”. Why do they have to call their erstwhile enemies ‘remoaners’?
A correspondent once remarked that he automatically skipped all headlines beginning “Geneva Peace Talks Breakdown/stalemate/reopen” for years without missing anything of importance (and he hoped ‘Vietnam’ wasn’t going to go the same way.)
Yeah the talks have stalled. EU governments are unhappy that negotiators appear to have tried to ‘bounce’ Member States into a deal with little time to scrutinise. I don’t blame them.