Here’s an article with some info.
More also from the BBC
Brexit: Boris Johnson set to unveil trade deal with EU
I do wonder whether there hasn’t been some deliberate stringing it out in order to bounce the difficult people on one or another side (or both).
Signing a deal means taking ownership of the results. It’s surprising to see the Johnson government doing that.
Oh, but he did that when he claimed the deal was “oven-ready”. The only trouble was, he forgot to check the giblets, which is why they’re still poring over the entrails:
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit-news/westminster-news/european-research-group-warning-over-brexit-6868890
From David Henig, head of the UK Trade Policy Project at the European Centre for International Political Economy:
Ultimately the EU achieved their main goals from Brexit, and the UK arguably did not. The EU successfully avoided a border on the island of Ireland and protected the single market from significant cherry picking. The UK succeeded in the headline goal of leaving the EU, but failed as proponents had expected to retain the benefits of membership without incurring the costs, and more recently in overturning any of the Withdrawal Agreement as the staunch Brexiteers had hoped.
The Brexit deal is finally done. It was a hell of a face-off, but based on the mainstream commentary, the UK Government got the deal it wanted. Details haven’t been released yet, but the UK has achieved it’s main Brexit goals of ending the annual subsidy to Brussels, ensuring that the UK will not be sucked into future increasing federalisation of Europe, agreeing to a new fair trade deal and customs agreement with Europe, and maintaining current mutually beneficial arrangements including security, aviation, travel, and medical care.
How nice it is to return to this thread after months away and to be able to respond to such a comment. I think the UK negotiators did an excellent job and achieved a Brexit deal that will benefit the UK. The UK Government has achieved its Brexit goals, it has done so under the direction of Boris Johnson, and delivered a deal that i believe will be acceptable to a large majority of the UK citizenship.
For some time the ‘mood music’ coming out of Brussels has suggested that a deal would probably be done, probably at the last minute, nobody will like it much, but it will enable both sides to declare a victory and move on.
But not the one the Brexiteers promised.
The UK is no longer in the EU, in eight days will be no longer subject to a transition status, has a trade agreement, and is otherwise mainly retaining the status quo that affects ordinary Britains. Feel free to quibble, but the gist of the Leave promises seem to have been achieved.
You sure? 58% of Scots now support independence, although this appears to be in response to Johnson’s handling of the pandemic as well as Brexit. 45% of Northern Irish support reuniting with the Republic. And one in four Welsh people think that Wales would be better off out of the U.K.
Do you think there’s any form of a Brexit agreement that the government could have achieved that would have received approval from the SNP and pro-independence Scots?
For that matter, suppose that there was a second referendum* that resulted in the UK deciding to stay in the EU. Do you think the SNP and pro-independence Scots would change their platform to “mission achieved - let’s cool off for the next 20 years.”?
*There was a second referendum. It was the general election run on a platform of “Get Brexit Done”. The Brexiters won the that second referendum.
I’m not British, so my understanding of British politics is not very deep, and at a remove, but probably not. However, there seem to be an awful lot more of those independence-minded Scots than there were before Brexit. The percentage of pro-independence Scots has gone from 45% in 2014 to 58% now. The percentage of Northern Irish supporting union with the Republic has risen to almost equal the unionists in Ulster. And I’d never even heard of a Welsh independence movement before reading that NPR story I posted. All of which suggests that the Brexit deal will not, in fact, be “acceptable to a large majority of the UK citizenship.”
As I said, I’m an American and have no dog in this fight. And I certainly could be wrong about all this. But I’ve followed the Brexit story for years; and the Scottish independence referendum before that, thanks to a sentimental connection to that nation. And it seems to me that dusting off your hands and saying, “Well, that’s done, then, no more Brexit problems to hash out!” on January 1 is a wee bit premature.
Well, since now the UK wont be “bombarded by hordes of smelly dark skinned foreigners that will take our jobs away” I think it succeeded quite nicely.
Boris “trump lite” Johnson should be proud. We got rid of ours, when you UKers gonna dump your nazi-lite?
Apparently the deal with EU runs to 2,000 pages. Presumably a lot of it relates to fishing.
Once people have read it, I expect there will be some questions.
It is rather an odd trade agreement given that it seeks to introduce new rules on trade rather than relax them and thereby encourage more trade.
I look forward to Boris unfurling his cunning plan for how the UK is now going to prosper outside of the EU, which is the biggest trading block in the world.
How are the contentions with the EU are going to be resolved?
Will the Financial Services business need to relocate into Europe to do business?
Usually trade deals take many years to agree. This one has been rushed because both sides have an interest in damage limitation.
The devil is in the detail and I expect we will be hearing a lot about those details in the coming weeks.
Do you know what the stats were right after the Brexit vote when it wasn’t as clear that it wasn’t going to be as rosy a deal as was promised (leaving aside whether it was as gloomy as feared.) If there was less support for independence outside of England immediately after the referendum, a reasonable conclusion would be that a better deal would have convinced more people it’s worth staying.
Racism and race-related hate crime has increased since the 2016 Brexit referendum, with officers appointed to deal with resultant “tensions”. "Incidents of racism have gone up throughout the UK as well as in Wales since the campaign to leave the EU, " Mr Jones said.
"It’s fairly obvious that Brexit has been a major influence.
"The feeling is that a lot of people believe they have the right to express their racist feelings or to show hatred.
There has been consensus that the issue of immigration played a primary role in the Leave campaign and Brexiteers’ minds. The reasons for this anti-immigrant sentiment have been explored, with economic and cultural concerns at the fore of the literature. Critically, currently missing from the debate is whether racism played a substantial role in causing anti-immigrant sentiment in the context of Brexit. This article uses new public opinion data from 2018 to investigate the extent to which racism motivated the Leave vote. It found that racism was an important predictor of referendum vote choice, even when economic concerns were held constant. Among all levels of financial satisfaction, people respond to their sociological concerns when making a political determination about immigration. Despite efforts from elites at the fore of the Leave campaign to rid the debates of racism, exclusively economic arguments proved to be a façade for private racist attitudes of many Leave voters. While concern over cultural pluralism is likely a complementary factor, this article finds the link between anxieties over skin color and anti-immigrant sentiment.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0038026119831590?journalCode=sora
Although a growing body of scholarship seeks to understand the motivations behind the ‘Brexit’ vote – including that which centralises explorations of racism, nationalism and post-colonialism – little consideration has been given to the ways in which ‘post-race’ racisms underpin the narratives of Leave voters. This article draws on data generated through 13 semi-structured interviews to examine the subtle and subterranean ways in which xeno-racism is articulated in the accounts of some Leave voters in the Greater Manchester city of Salford: a city that saw a higher percentage of the electorate (56.8%) vote to leave the EU than the national average (51.9%). Whilst restricting immigration was a key motivator of Leave voters in our research, interviewees vehemently rejected accusations of racism. Instead, couching their views in seemingly non-racial ways, they framed their concerns about immigration as a ‘legitimate’ response to a victimised whiteness. Thus, in discussing our data, we argue that far from living in a ‘post-racial’ epoch, racisms continue to thrive through new modes of articulation. These new racisms emerge from the shadows at key times, such as the EU Referendum, and refashion themselves in ways that are considered more palatable than the older (explicit) racisms of past.
Its racism… all the way down.
The vote was in 2016. The reason it’s looking rushed is not so much that there wasn’t enough time, it’s because there is no good solution, so there was just years of procrastination because nobody on the Leave side wanted to face up to that. Most trade deals are non-zero-sum in the positive sense, there is mutual benefit, the sum is greater than the parts. Here the reverse is true. As you say, it’s damage limitation - they have just been squabbling over exactly where each side is going to take their losses.
Didn’t Leave basically promise that Brits would be able to enjoy the same benefits as in the Single Market/Customs Union, except that it would be cheaper?
The UK have lost nealry all the benefits of being in the EU and the deal is one that the EU is happy with. What does that tell you? Also, financial services are not even covered in this deal.
This deal serves the EU much more than the UK and all the praise heaped on Johnson will unravel soon when people understand that he gave everything away. Fools!
My partner and I will be leaving the UK next year and while we will feel sorry for so many good people who do not deserve this, we will also not forgive those who destroyed the country that we used to love so much.