If we extend our time in the EU for another two years, then we are still benefiting from it and our bill will increase, not decrease.
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Agreed. In the posts I’ve made on this analogy, and the related posts before it, I was focusing only on monetary reallocation.
Well in my System 2, I was paying Nava’s mother 1 pound, so yes. 
Other way round. A substantial compoment of the divorce bill is the UK making payments which it had already committed to make, up to the end of the current budgetary cycle. (The EU operates a 7-year budgetary cycle.) The EU view is that, the UK having committed to make these payments, and other parties having made there own arrangements and commitments in reliance on that, the UK is bound to make them, even if it chooses to leave the EU part-way through the cycle. The Brexiter view is, naturally, that the UK is not bound to make them. The UK government concedes that the EU view is correct.
The problem is sidestepped by a withdrawal agreement which provides for a transitional period up to the end of 2020 in which the UK continues to participate in, and benefit from, EU programmes. the end of 2020 is the end of the 7-year budget cycle for which the UK is already committed. So, transition to the end of 2020 makes it easier for Brexiters to swallow the need to pay the largest component of the divorce payment.
But if Brexit (or transition) is deferred beyond the end of 2020, then the UK will be participating in EU programmes during at least a part of the next budgetary cycle, and will obviously have to make budget contributions for that period. That;s not allowed for in the current calculations of the divorce payment. So in that scenario the UK will have to pay the currently-calcuated divorce payment, plus more, to cover participation post-2020.
On the EU side, it’s not really about money. Or, at any rate, not about budgetary contributions by the UK. For at least some in the UK this is a huge and problematic factor, but on the EU side they see budgetary contributions or the lack of them as a consequence that will fall out from whatever decision is made about Brexit, but not as a consideration which should drive them. They’d done their sums; even if the Uk defaults on the contributions it has already committed to, that’s a manageable problem, financially. The problemw would not be the financial impact, but the catatstrophic effect on UK-EU relations.
The reason the EU would grant an extension is that it wants to avoid a no-deal Brexit, but budgetary concerns are not a huge factor in that desire. The reason might be willing to would grant a long, but not a short, extension is that it might judge that a short extension chantges nothing, does not create any reasonable prospect of avoiding a no-deal Brexit, given where the UK is at right now, but that a longer extension might.
Depends how often you go shopping, no?
No. At least not in my analogy. Frankly I don’t know where you’re going with this. What are you analogising your parking fees to, that will be a set charge for the EU, but a recurring charge for the UK?
Bribery, a beginners guide.
So, you want to solve a political impasse by shovelling government money into the constituencies of your opponents so they’ll break with their party and vote the way you want? Of course you do! It’s a long and storied political tradition, and admirably simple to boot. There are just a couple of rules to follow if you want this strategy to come off:
- Plausible deniability. Everyone knows it’s a bribe, but you need to give people enough cover that they can accept it without looking nakedly corrupt.
- Make it a bribe worth taking. I mean sure, you don’t want to hand over more than you have to, but the point of a bribe is to get people to do something they don’t want to do, so it has to be big enough to overcome their objections. Being seen taking an enormous bribe is one thing. Publicly taking peanuts to sell your party and consituents out is quite another.
- Make it conditional. It’s no good just handing the cash over. Quid pro quo is the name of the game.
In related news, Theresa May has floated a £1.6bn funding boost for northern towns (most of which voted Leave, most of which have Labour MPs). No-one thinks this is anything other than a bribe for votes for the Withdrawal Deal. Broken down by region and town, this is less money than these places have seen cut in funding over the past 9 years. Leading Labour Leave MPs have already come out to call it derisory. And it’s already been made clear that this funding will be going ahead in any case. The net result is that it actually makes it harder for the targeted MPs to vote with the government, because it will look like they’re pointlessly selling out for peanuts.
All in all, it’s typical of the deft touch that we’ve come to associate with any negotiations May has a hand in.
It’s a smidgen of what the EU invests in deprived areas. It’s a sign of things to come post Brexit. Another ‘We-told-you-so’ for Remain…
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Just got told this by a farmer friend:
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I googled “DEFRA”, but…“scanned 197%”?
Just under two lambs per ewe, I guess.
22 days to go, and no-one has a clue what the relationship between the UK and EU is going to be
next month.
This is a colossal failure of responsible UK governance. An insane, unforgivable one.
Nobody knows what the relationship between the UK and the rest of the world is going to be. There are goods already on the seas between the UK and China and Japan, and we do not know whether they will face tariffs on arrival in the destination country and, if so, at what rate. Soon this will be true of goods being traded with countries closer and closer to the UK. British businesses trying to order parts or supplies from other countries are having increasing difficulty getting their orders accepted, because the suppliers do not know what terms and taxes will apply to the sale. Investment in the UK has slumped because of uncertainty over the business climate; consumer sales are still holding up, but partly because consumers are stockpiling. Etc, etc.
Aside from what people may think about Brexit as a general concept, one of the most dispiriting things about the past 3 years has been the consistent demonstration that politics as practiced in Britain doesn’t merely fail to produce competence in its elected officials, it actually seems to select **for **incompetence.
The implications and consequences of the backstop were realised and widely discussed within days of the agreement being reached in Dec 2017. But for over a year we have collectively indulged any amount of evasion, wilful ignorance, wishful thinking, triviality and general refusal to face facts and make decisions on the part of MPs, Cabinet and PM. There isn’t a technological solution. There’s no “managed new deal”. There’s no “Article 24 trade agreement”. There’s no magic way to be both outside the CU and SM and simultaneously inside.
If British politics rewarded grown-up politics and politicians who could a) understand and b) publicly acknowledge the reality of the position we were in, we’d have spent the past year deciding what we wanted to compromise on, and how far. But, as practiced, the rewards are to those who either don’t understand the situation, or who are prepared to act as if they don’t.
This isn’t just a problem of a PM, or Cabinet, or MPs, or Opposition. This is about party members who lap up obvious bullshit from obvious bullshitters thus giving them a power-base, voters who don’t or can’t make their voices heard outside elections, media who can’t or don’t produce fact-based interrogations of politicians and experts, and can’t or don’t distinguish between experts and blowhards.
But the real crunch point is, if your political system isn’t producing people who can grapple with serious problems and come up with serious solutions, how can it solve that very problem?
That’s not specific to British politics. Electors don’t want to hear that there’s no solution to a perceived problem. They’re always rewarding politicians who tell them that there’s a simple solution that won’t hurt them at all (and for bonus point will hurt some other unworthy group). You need to have a lot of political capital to be able to acknowledge unpleasant truths and stay in power, on top of having those other qualities you mention (like actually understanding that truth is unpleasant, which isn’t a given, indeed). Or the situation has to be so dire that nobody can delude himself anymore.
If we had higher expectations, for instance viewed lying politicians in the same way we view corrupt ones (and I can imagine a hypothetical society where such expectations exist and where showing that a politician deliberately misled electors would be career-ending) such situations wouldn’t occur. But I’m not aware of any country where this is true currently.
As an American, this sounds awfully familiar…
And even if this agreement squeaks through, it is only an agreement to start two years of talks to define and fill out the details of the longterm relationship.
At this stage, it’s pretty clear May’s Deal will only pass under duress. I can’t see it surviving a month.
any form of Brexit will pass only under duress.
If May’s deal passes, the WA becomes an internationally binding treaty, and the consequences of repudiating that are much more severe than the consequences of not entering into it in the first place. So the considerations which induce the UK to enter into the deal will operate even more strongly to induce the UK to observe the deal.
Of course, the deal only runs to the end of 2020 (unless a mutual decision is made in mid 202o to extend it). But this again increase the incentive to respect it for the agreed duration; even if you think it’s working out badly for you, the cost of letting it lapse in a relatively short time is much less severe than the cost of breaching it immediately, so there’s an inducement to sweat it out.
Far more likely that May’s government will collapse than that the deal will be repudiated, IMO.
The votes will be cast for second votes on Mays deal. Then a vote on leaving with No Deal.
Both are likely to be rejected. We will know for sure in a week. In which case there will be an extension of Article 50. For how long?
May will try to make it short, try to negotiate and get some sort of concession out of the EU to get more support within her party…
…then rinse and repeat?
There are some elections coming up in the EU on May 23rd. If the UK is still in the EU at that time, it could get quite bizarre.
Some politicians are calling for a years delay to Brexit. This sound sensible. I really don’t see that a couple of months would be enough. I guess the voting numbers might provide some indication as to how much progress May has made persuading her own party to back her.
:dubious:
What amazes me is the power of the executive in the UK. We have had several times when a PM has made a very bad decision that has gotten the country into a lot of trouble. Eden and the Suez crisis - a humiliating disaster. Tony Blair managed to manipulate the system to take the UK to war in Iraq. A terrible error of judgement which sours the memory of his time in office.
Here again we have May, another PM, this time driving the country off an economic cliff to appease the Brexit faction. Yet the Cabinet system seems to invest this power, despite there being very few politicians who actually think that this will be anything but a disaster. Decisions are made by the PM and her small coterie of advisors and senior cabinet ministers.
I suspect various members of the Cabinet will break ranks, resign or split, if she does not get enough votes this time. They know that their careers depend on how their position shifts over the next week or so. There are not many principled politicians around, most see their loyalty and position within a party to be more important than the interests of the country. Careerism is the curse of our age.