It is done.

Reading the letter from Mrs May and having watched PMQs on it, I note that the "no deal" threat has vanished. It would appear that battle has been won. The tone now suggests something more akin with the Ukraine agreement. Effectively a free trade agreement with a number of bolt-ons governed by joint committees. They seem to think they can get away with something less comprehensive and slimmer than the EEA. I don't think they have really grasped the scale of it - especially since they seem to think they can do it in two years with only a basic transition.

They are working from the assumption that because we are already EU compliant for the most part that the task of engineering the switchover won't be such a big deal. This is naive. They will try to start off small and it will just balloon into something way bigger and more cumbersome than they had ever imagined whereby the number of emergency patches will be larger than the core agreement. We'll sign off on a pretty incoherent package with huge gaps in functionality then spend the next decade trying to negotiate a restoration of access.

The dangers now are that they assume they can change over on the flick of a switch without any kind of staged rollout. It won't be a legal limbo but it will cause mass confusion as we will be completely unprepared for it. That is another battle we have to fight on the blogs. It seems we have to dismantle one stupid misapprehension after another until we get something close to sensible. My concern is that without a system of co-determination for regulatory harmonisation we will be a passive recipient of EU judgements without a means of challenging them. This is why Efta would have been better.

The good news is that it won't be a total smoldering wreck as favoured by Tory Brexiteer mouthbreathers but we won't have a dynamic agreement which means it won't evolve as the EEA does. If it's bad it stays bad. We'll spend the next ten years caving in on a number of red lines to get back rights we enjoy now - as Switzerland has. Any smart opposition will be thinking about making EEA/Efta a manifesto commitment by now. I think that is where it will end up in the future and we'll have a lost decade of trade thanks to Mrs May.

What worries me is that Mrs May thinks there is no real urgency in replacing the EU agencies we intent to ditch. There is apparently no planning as to their constitution which will make it difficult to plan the implementation of any kind of FTA. Defra isn't equipped for it nor is HMRC. This is why we will have to stall the process when the penny drops. There simply won't be the infrastructure to go ahead with the agreement. I think it will be a number of years before we do finally break free. The EEA agreement could have squared that circle but you can't tell Toryboys anything.

The risk is that we will linger in the EU for a while - just long enough for a change of government who may very well change policy to associate membership - right about the time that public sentiment shifts away from Brexit and the shambolic Tories. We could see a scorched earth policy to prevent that from happening. That would be very messy indeed.

Let the games begin!

A-Day. The clock starts ticking. Now we can expect a torrent of clueless opining on what happens next from people who know absolutely nothing about trade - or even the EU for that matter.

As to what precisely does happen next is actually the first item on the agenda. When nothing quite like this has been done before we must first establish the order of battle. First and foremost comes the terms of departure. There will be a bill to settle along with the many administrative chores necessary to become an independent state. This includes our WTO membership reconfiguration. That should come high up on the agenda in order to get started as soon as possible.

That much will deal with future subsidy quotas and schedules - a singularly opaque process best left to the officials. It won't be until this is settled that we see any serious discussion about the mode of transition and the new framework for future trade relations. It will be some months before any serious work is done in that regard and not until the French and German elections are over. It will take some time for the new French administration to get bedded in.

Beyond that I do not care to speculate on what the various outcomes will be. What we do know is that the EU will insist on ECJ jurisdiction for the duration of any transition and that we will linger under the EU umbrella for some considerable time to come - assuming we don't see an accidental Brexit.

There will be two strands of negotiation here. We will see the political element which promises to be as dramatic as it is tedious and then there's the technical which is far beyond the wits of anyone in our media. Carving up the CAP and CFP promises to be an intensely political and hyper bureaucratic affair.

For me it will be a bittersweet process. Now we get to see who is right about what. I rather expect to see a torrent of Toryboy whining about trade barriers and regulation, seeking to present the EU as obstinate and unreasonable when in fact we will simply be seeing the natural conclusion to domestic political choices made some months ago. I'm not going to be magnanimous or even polite about this. In fact I am going to be deeply unpleasant like you have never seen.

I have now endured years of overly assertive ignorance on these such matters, and now we are looking at losing substantial operating rights within the single market I am going to make damn sure their excuses do not stand.

I think the first casualty of Article 50 will be the notion that the process can be completed inside two years. It is likely that we will surrender a good deal of leverage in seeking an extension not least because of the timing. We're on their clock. They hold most of the cards.

The second bogus assumption will be the notion that we can simply carry over EU rules onto the statute book. We could do it were we retaining the single market components but without membership of EU governance systems the whole idea starts to fall apart. Further to that, I expect the main reason a lot of third party agreements cannot be carried over will be the same absence of EU institutions.

As much as trade deals set out terms of trade and the means by which they are administered, they also include a statements giving effect to working bodies, arbitration mechanisms and surveillance systems. Data capture and market surveillance is central to most trade administration.

Because the government barely recognises the need for such instruments we do not know what form they will take and we will see a last minute fudge - either borrowing Efta constructs or leaving things as they are. We will see a number of embarrassing climb downs for the government as a number of key Brexit promises melt away. As much as the chickens will be coming home to roost, they'll be thumbing through the ikea catalogue and measuring the curtains. They're in it for the long haul.

At every turn we could have done ourselves a favour by opting for off the shelf instruments but instead we'll be wasting our time and their talking about bespoke systems to bring about functionality our government has overlooked. There are undisturbed pygmy tribes in the upper Amazon with a greater grasp of EU trade than David Davis.

Put simply, if you think Brexit has been a farce to date, you ain't seen nothing yet. There are many unknowns even for those who do have a clue. It will rapidly become a shambolic mess as a number of overly confident assumptions collide with reality.

Nick Clegg put it best the other day. This will be the first round of trade talks in history where the outcome is less trade on worse terms. This is not a result of Brexit. The EEA would, for the most part, safeguard "frictionless" trade. What we get instead will be a shadow of it - and it's purely a consequence of Tory tribal idiocy.

The great unknown is when exactly the penny will drop. It won't take long for politicians to realise they have faulty information and a flawed understanding. Whether or not there is time to correct it is anyone's guess. It may be possible to pause the proceedings while we hammer out a clone of the EEA agreement. That will likely see us backtracking on ending freedom of movement. That will be the price for bailing us out. It might well be that the EU saves us from ourselves. Mr Banier is not a hard liner and he is a pragmatist. He could very well be the voice of reason.

I get the impression that on the opposite side of the table there is a sense of bewilderment and disbelief that our government could be so ill-prepared and under informed. That will cost us. It is ironic that our best hopes to avoid a spectacular failure now lie with the much maligned EU. These are strange times indeed.

Brexit is fine. Tory self-immolation is stupid.

What is ultimately faulty about the Brexit debate is that it divides everything into binaryism. Last night we had the egregious Melanie Phillips trotting out the tiresome canard that there is no hard or soft Brexit - only Brexit. It's especially loathsome on two counts. Firstly there is a fairly well understood distinction and secondly, to not see the necessity to make a distinction after all this time betrays a certain intellectual dishonesty.

The Brexiteer argument is that to have a soft Brexit is to remain half in half out. This is argued from a position of total ignorance. A soft Brexit would see us remain a part of the single market for sure. That though is not the EU. The single market is a regulatory union - the bi-product of which means seamless free movement of goods, capital and services.

Norway is a member of it while not being in the EU. It has a system of co-determination through Efta whereby it reserves the right to veto or modify regulations to its own purposes. It is not subordinate to the EU. For sure, very often the Efta court will take ECJ rulings into consideration and very often mirror them. Brexiteers have fetishised that as a bad thing, when in fact all that really matters is the right to say no - a right which EU member states do not enjoy.

The EEA agreement serves as a plug-in to the EU internal market while maintaining the essential sovereignty of statehood. That Norway does not often utilise it is neither here nor there. That principle alone is all that really matters. The aversion to any such an arrangement is the childish Brexiteer aversion to regulation. It's irrational. More to the point, it is stone stupid.

All the Brexiteers have assured us that we will seek out an agreement on tariffs and customs. Except that it does not work like that. The lack of customs checks comes as a consequence of regulatory harmonisation. They don't check because they don't have to. Any free trade agreement will require that any goods we export to the EU conform to the EU approved standards.

Brexiteers, particularly Tory Brexiteers argue that because we have been a member of the EU we already conform to the standards and reaching an agreement on mutual recognition should be no big deal. Except of course that regulatory systems are not set in stone and they constantly evolve. That means you need a system of maintaining parity. That would be a court or a system of co-determination like Efta. But since the Toryboys equate that with ECJ jurisdiction that means we simply take the rules as they come without a say in it. For clarity, that is actual ECJ jurisdiction if not on paper, then in practice. That's the reality of it.

By snubbing the EEA agreement we end up losing a number of permissions to operate within the EU internal market while having a far less dynamic relationship with the EU where it is more a dictatorship than partnership. And for what? Beats the hell out of me. It is unlikely to make any serious impact on immigration.

Like most Brexiteers, Melanie Phillips and her ilk reduce the entire Brexit process to one of securing a trade deal when in fact what we need is a framework for an ongoing relationship - one which safeguards our present trade while respecting our status as an independent state. 

The idea that we can have a bonfire of regulations except for those areas where we export is really a juvenile fantasy that really doesn't play out in the real world. We accept a certain degree of imperfection for the efficiency of having only one set of rules - most of which mirror the global standard anyway. Regulation is a fact of life like death and taxes.

The question is not whether we would be half in or half out. It is a question of whether we have a comprehensive agreement and a framework for continued cooperation with the EU or whether we become an estranged island with far fewer rights to trade. If you could make the case that trade with the rest of the world was likely going to compensate for the loss of the single market then I would see the point, but nobody serious thinks that. Only a very small band of Tory zealots and Ukipper morons.

 

Our position should be to safeguard our existing trade while gaining the ability to augment our external trade. For that the EEA would have sufficed. We are taking a hit to our European trade for no good reason - losing universal access for UK foodstuffs, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and aviation. I get the point of Brexit. I really do. I do not see, though, why we need terminate the most comprehensive trade agreement we are ever likely to have. Is this just so we can have old school light-bulbs? I seriously hope not. 

Endgame

On this the eve of Article 50 there is little more to say. Tomorrow we give notification to terminate subordination to the European Union, ending political union once and for all. It's now or never.

For all that my ideas and political views have evolved over the past few years, one thing has remained a constant; the belief that the government of the United Kingdom should be answerable only to the peoples of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. It stems from the belief that there is no higher authority - and nor should there be. It is a union of peoples, not a connivance of irremovable politicians and officials.

As to how we move forward from this is wholly different matter. I find myself at odds with most Brexiteers who seem to have drunk from the Brexit koolaid, believing Brexit to be an economic remedy. It is nothing so transactional. This is a matter of politics and democracy above all else.

The question of whether we leave is now resolved. The question of how remains unanswered. The objective should be to minimise the economic harm while maintaining good relations with our neighbours. The only way to do this is to recognise that Brexit is a process, not an event. This is the reality that those on the Tory right have steadfastly refused to acknowledge - and have gone to extended and thoroughly devious lengths to evade.

There was always going to be a short to medium term cost to leaving the EU. Pragmatism and realism could very well have minimised it. Instead though, the Conservative Party is seeking to maximise that economic harm. For some, out of ignorance, others out of malice. Supercilious, sneering, dishonest and deeply stupid people.

Every effort was made to furnish them with the right information, but in that inimicable Tory way they resisted knowledge to the bitter end. That is the evil of tribal party politics. Whatever comes next, that's on them - not those who voted to leave.

Brexit: the end of an error

The EU60 hashtag on Twitter is a potent reminder of why I voted to leave. It is radiating hypocrisy. More than anything the EU is a deranged cult. The Europe the true believers live in is not one I recognise at all. I do not see this malign entity as a guarantor of peace and prosperity. Quite the opposite in fact.

The modus operandi of the EU has always been to capture political institutions in the belief that consent would eventually follow. Only when their agenda is complete do citizens get any kind of say in it. This is why Maastricht and Lisbon were never put to a popular vote. Our rulers knew that we would say no. And we got off lightly.

Against all economic wisdom the EU pressed ahead with its vanity currency and now Greece is a broke and squalid internment camp. The rest of Europe has seen a decade of stagnation with no promise of recovery.

In that we must ask when do the peoples of Europe get a say? When exactly do we see this exercise in consultation? When shall we have democracy? At what point is it turned over to the people? And what price must we pay until then?

For this, the EU has no answers. A new Jerusalem is always just only one more treaty away. Paradise awaits but first you must surrender more power.

From inception the EU has been built on a foundation of lies. Perhaps the biggest is that the EU does not control us. For sure there is no dictator at the centre issuing decrees. What we see instead is a number of roadblocks which prevent governments from acting alone in accordance with the wishes of their peoples. They are many and subtle.

For as long as i can remember there has been running dispute about how much law the EU actually makes. To put a number on it is a rhetorical trap. It did not take all that many laws to give effect to EU institutions and grant supreme authority to the EU. It takes only a few sentences to make our entire statute book subordinate to EU authority.

In so doing, a number of areas of technical administration have been handed over and we have closed down our own systems of domestic administration. Brexit will make this acutely observable as we increasingly find we have to rebuild our capacity for self governance.

The effect of this is that reform of political and policy systems is impossible. Common EU policies, notably fishing, were designed in a hurry chiefly to bring it all under one authority. The view was that they would sort the rest out later.

Decades later we are still waiting for reform while species are routinely driven to the brink of extinction. Commercial and political interests of other Member States stand in the way of meaningful reform, and given the implausibility of achieving significant structural reform, even the UK has given up trying. You can extrapolate and apply this dynamic to any number of policy areas.

The real world consequences of this is a system bogged down in a bureaucratic quagmire where things that need to reform and modernise stay as they are inside contracts predating the internet. It is this that stands in the way of radical economic reform at a time when we most need it.

I have never sought to downplay the risks of leaving the EU. There will be a price to pay simply because change of this magnitude always has its costs - but also because we now lack the political and technical expertise as a consequence of surrendering national competence. We have seen an atrophy inside the civil service which has lost a good deal of its vitality and our influence has suffered because of it.

Meanwhile, we have dismantled our trade and diplomatic infrastructure that will leave the UK in a vulnerable place for many years to come. It is only because we are a former power in our own right that we have any chance of recovery at all. Not so for many EU member states who will be waiting a lot longer for any kind of meaningful political change. It is that which will ultimately nurture populist movements. We can attribute the SNP and Ukip to this dynamic. Eventually the EU will be destroyed by its own inertia.

In that regard, history will judge the EU as the entity which destroyed European prosperity. As to peace in Europe, the other big lie is that the EU is to be credited for it. More than anything it is the memory of two wars that have shaped European psychology along with our unity against the common Soviet foe. It is that which has kept an uneasy peace.

Everything about the EU is a lie. It owes its continued existence to the ignorance of the political class and the casual consent of the politically uninterested who accept the dogma of "unity, peace and prosperity" at face value without applying their critical faculties.

In truth there is no European identity. There is not even unity. The UK is one of the only member states to enter in good faith. The latecomers see it as a safety raft in a storm while the French are only ever true Europeans when it suits their economic agenda.

It is only through British politeness that we do not invoke Article 50 today on this anniversary of the EU. It would be churlish to spoil the party. We should mark this jamboree well though. For all the rhetoric about unity we must take stock. Scottish independence rhetoric was ramped up long before Brexit. We see separatist movements on the rise all over Europe. Beneath that is a burgeoning desire for change and democratic replenishment. Something that is fundamentally muted and restrained by the EU. It is the EU ripping Europe apart, not populism. It's cause and effect.

For all that I am worried about how Brexit will be handled, and for all that I am concerned for the economic penalty we will likely have to endure, I remain certain that leaving the EU is in the best interests of peace and democracy and ultimately the process of a renewal in governance will bring about the elusive economic regeneration we demand. It won't come soon, but late is better than never. For that reason I will be raising a glass to the 52% when Mrs May goes to Brussels. We are finally correcting a monumental error.

Sorry Civitas, it's not ok to walk away

If one were so inclined I could spend some considerable hours dismantling the Civitas report from Michael Burrage. There isn't much point though because when you are dealing with people who believe we can walk away from the EU without agreement you are entering a dialogue of the deaf.

There is much that is factually wrong in the report as already outlined, but then people are entitled to be wrong about technical processes and procedures. God knows I have been on more than one occasion. My tolerance ends though when it crosses the line into wilful distortion. Burrage makes a number of falsely framed assertions with regard to The Leave Alliance's Brexit plan. 

Flexcit looked to secure a smooth, reasonably quick and economically neutral Brexit, and thought that this might best be done by the UK re-joining EFTA and thereby retaining membership of the EEA and the Single Market. For some unexplained reason, it assumed that the referendum could only be won on the grounds that the UK would remain a member of the Single Market, and therefore decided that the UK should accept free movement, subjection to EU rules and continued UK contributions to the EU budget. Since the referendum was not won on these grounds, and virtually all leaders of the Leave campaign made perfectly clear they wanted and expected the UK to leave the Single Market, its argument has naturally lost momentum. 

Far from being "for some unexplained reason", we made it very clear early on that we could not win the referendum without winning the economic argument and we could not do that without a viable plan. That is the lesson we observed from the Scottish referendum. As it happens, that assumption was wrong - but only by a very slender margin.

Burrage asserts that we said we could only win by making a case for staying in the single market. This is a lie. What we said, with some validity, was that swing voters would not make the leap without some reassurances. That much became obvious fairly early on in the referendum campaign.

We anticipated the usual remainer lie that three million jobs would be lost should we leave the EU. Our argument was that these jobs depended on trade, not political union. It was therefore necessary to show that we could end political union while maintaining favourable trading conditions.

In the end, though we won the referendum, largely by an accident of events, the absence of a plan cost us considerably. I know of a number of people who voted to remain because it would have emboldened the hard right and we would see them pushing us over the cliff. Though we were able to say that there was at least a plan, it was pointed out that it was only a plan, not the plan. Vote Leave failed to reassure voters and consequently we lost votes. I take the view that we could and should have won by a considerably larger margin.

There was, though, a second strategic reason for having a plan. We were thinking in terms of how we could carry over the referendum win into influencing government afterwards. Ultimately the absence of a plan is why the Brexiteers were swept from the board in the immediate aftermath. The Brexiteers, save for David Davies, are all in token jobs and limited in the damage they can do.

The absence of a plan and the insistence on the most economically disruptive exit possible is why leavers will struggle to influence the end game. Once the penny drops that the WTO option is a non starter, the Brexiteers will find their cupboard is bare. As soon as Article 50 is done and dusted, they are history.

One other factor we considered was that lying was not necessary. The egregiously stupid £350m claim was not believed by anyone serious and no opinion former could lend it credibility. Similarly the leaver arguments in regard to regulation were equally slender. We took the view that we would not be taken seriously if we presented the kind of panglossian nonsense classic eurosceptics have a penchant for.

This turned out to be a correct assumption. Vote Leave likes to take credit for winning the referendum but in fact the vote was won on Facebook. The debate online was of far greater depth and breadth than the one presented in the legacy media. For several months, social media was alight with far reaching debate. In that, Vote Leave was next to useless, providing seasoned campaigners with no useful material and in fact, Vote Leave was a liability on more than one occasion.

With no help from any official sources, The Leave Alliance was able to bring the Norway Option into the public sphere which allowed us to make the distinction between economic integration and political union. That was probably our most useful contribution to the debate.

As to the single market, we took the view that how we leave was as important as question of why. It's all very well having a grand vision of a buccaneering free trade global Britain but that says nothing of how you get there.

We took the view that we most definitely will need a comprehensive trade relationship with the EU. Having been a member for four decades our central premise was that leaving is a process, not an event. We would need a sophisticated mechanism to do it because a basic free trade agreement does not even begin to cover the depth and complexity of the issues. In this, you can either spend years stuck in the EU negotiating one from scratch or you can take one off the shelf with a view to getting out as fast as possible without the inherent risk of failure.

Of itself we are not sold on the EEA per se, only that it is the only mechanism available to us that adequately cushions the blow of leaving. And this is really the difference of opinion between us Flexciteers and the Tory right.

The hard Brexit cult believes that there is no need to cushion the blow because there is in fact no blow to cushion. We are only a skip and a jump away from a trade miracle through unilateral liberalisation - and there are no adverse consequences. Consequently it has been impossible to sell them on the merits of even having an interim solution. It has been an uphill battle just to get David Davies to hint at the possibility.

And that is why the Civitas report is pure garbage. As much as the author wilfully misrepresents our position, the study is an evaluation on the merits of the single market as a destination. We only ever viewed it as a temporary solution and then in the post-Brexit stage we could evolve the EEA agreement into something more suitable.

Whether the single market is good or bad is neither here nor there. The fact is that we are in it and it will take some considerable effort to disentangle ourselves from it. Further to this, there are elements we would wish to keep, not least frictionless customs and the enhanced rights we enjoy for our aviation industry. There is nothing in the WTO option that covers these such EU policy areas.

In this the zombie Brexiteers have fixated mainly on tariffs and trade in goods neglecting to consider that the EU is far more than a trade framework. It is an extensive government with a number of systems we depend on having shut down much of our domestic administrative capability. A point entirely lost on the likes of Burrage.

In essence, the Civitas report is an attack piece aimed directly at Flexcit. Were it an honestly framed report it would not take such a sneering tone. Rather than advocating the single market "for some unexplained reason" we went to considerable lengths to explain the thinking - and in response all we have seen from the likes of Civitas is deflection and denial.

That tells us that we are dealing with a belief system and the very existence of this report indicates that they find our arguments threatening. They should. When you look at the two approaches side by side there is nothing at all to be said for the WTO option.

In any case, if reports are correct, Article 50 will soon be upon us. The waiting will be over and the complexities of Brexit will soon become apparent to the Brexit zombies. I do not expect them to acknowledge the issues even then. We will see more of the same insistence that walking away is viable. To everyone else though the penny will start to drop that a free trade agreement doesn't come close and we will need a more sophisticated departure programme. When the realities are known, the merits of Flexcit will present themselves.

Ultimately Flexcit was an exercise in facing up to uncomfortable truths and finding ways to manage them. It was our attempt to take an unvarnished look at Brexit and examine the difficulties as well as the opportunities. That is why it is still the subject of debate. Ultimately the resistance to Flexcit is because it says things that Brexiteers do not want to hear; that Brexit is complex, we won't get it all our own way and regulation is here to stay. This goes against three decades of eurosceptic thinking on which they have built their identities. They won't give up the ghost without a fight.

What we see from Burrage is a number of tortured contortions to present a rose tinted Brexit model pretending that forty years of economic, social and political integration is undone at the stroke of a pen. Anyone with a shred of integrity can see right through it. But then when it comes to Tory Brexiteers integrity is in short supply. It comes as no surprise that such dishonesty carries weight among their creed.

More sloppy thinking from the hard Brexit zombies

The trade benefits of belonging to the European Union have been "largely imaginary", according to the social policy think-tank Civitas. Its analysis argues that exports from non-EU countries to the single market have grown faster than the UK's, since its creation in 1993. That, apparently, lends weight to the argument that no EU deal is better than a bad deal.

Michael Burrage, the report's author, said that before joining the single market in 1993, the UK's exports to the EU grew at a faster rate than major economies such as the US, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Norway, South Africa and Brazil.

The flaw in this thinking is that trade growth will always reach a plateau inside any particular framework. In the early nineties when we enacted the single market we removed a dramatic number of barriers to trade which saw an increase in exports to the EU. After that, there are far fewer barriers to remove so you reach a stage of trade normalisation where volumes reach their optimal capacity. Further increments come from innovations in technology or regulatory interventions.

For the rest of the world however, the barriers remained in place and have only been removed on a piecemeal basis. Over the years, the EU has secured a number of bilateral deals that have proportionately increased trade for third countries at a rate faster than our own. They are seeing the same surge we saw when the barriers came down.

Growth rates in isolation tell you absolutely nothing. You have to look at it as a whole to see which products were being shipped under what tariff regimes, what non tariff barriers they encountered and then you have to look at other trends in market demand.

The truth of the matter is that Civitas never entered this exercise with any other intention than to show the single market has illusory benefits. Their report contains a number of rhetorical tricks and dishonest games with numbers.

The best they are able to say, were they approaching it honestly, is that progress on liberalising trade within the EU has stalled. Nobody could or would dispute that. But all the same, inter-EU trade is fairly liberal so far as trade in goods go. That much is unarguable.

As you probably know by now there is far more to trade and the single market than just tariffs and customs systems. As much as anything the system works well because it runs on a series of systems that buyers and sellers have confidence in. It is that which makes for trusted trading environment. Sitting atop of this are a number of agencies working to ensure supply chains are free of corruption and able to detect fraudulent and counterfeit goods. The value of that is seldom ever accounted for. Without it, the losses would be massive.

What Civitas doesn't say is how we would improve matters by disengaging from all of this. Assuming one could could say in all honesty that EU trade has grown as far as it is ever going to, how does erecting barriers with the EU improve the situation? The answer, obviously, is that it doesn't.

I voted to leave the EU because I know that the UK can do more with trade. We are a services economy and we don't have as much manufacturing to protect as France or Germany. By entering bloc deals we end up losing market access for our services because France won't open up their markets to foreign competition. More to the point, large bloc deals of the type the EU favours take several years and very often fail. It's a bad system and things are done differently now.

That, however, does not mean we can afford to casually throw away our trade with the EU. Almost half of our trade is with the EU and on balance I do not think there is much value in closing ourselves off from EU competition. If we are to leave the EU then it should be to use our new position to augment and enhance non-EU trade. Nowhere does it say this must be a binary choice between the EU and the rest of the world. We can have both so long as we maintain a high level of convergence and integration with the EU.

With the USA being as impenetrable as it always has been, the EU has become the main global regulatory superpower and most countries are now bringing their regulatory regimes into line with the EU baseline. There is nothing to be gained by leaving the single market and having a bonfire of regulations. There is no trade miracle to be had.

Any progress will be by way of a number of parallel multilateral negotiations with regard to specific products and sectors. On an incremental basis we then make progress while the EU is still lumbering around looking for silver bullets like the ill fated TTIP. It is not necessary to leave the single market to do that.

Civitas has it that leaving the single market will allow us to relax our rules on trade in services. This is a misnomer. EU rules on trade in services are considered incomplete and are in fact the holy grail to complete the single market. In this though it is using global frameworks which are presently becoming the norm in commercial contracts. The private sector is well ahead of governments in this regard. India has expressed an interest in creating a WTO agreement on trade in services to bring about a global single market. That is exactly what we want to nurture and we should join with the EU and India in pushing for exactly that rather than undermining it with bilateral deals.

It should be noted though that Civitas has no interest in what is actually going on. It is running a propaganda effort for hard right Tories who believe that there is a trade miracle to be had by severing all links with the EU and having that bonfire.

They have been pushing for the WTO option since long before the referendum and have never had any interest in a well managed and careful departure from the EU. They are nihilistic wreckers incapable of reason and have been deaf to any pertinent information. They still maintain that the USA trades with the EU on WTO terms despite the fifty or so agreements in the EU treaties database. With such wilful refusal to engage in honest debate there is no point arguing with them. They are contemptible.

Brexiteers are still missing the point

Writing for City AM, Hjörtur Guðmundsson mounts a blistering attack on the EEA option. "Coming from a country with a long experience of the EEA while outside the EU, I simply cannot recommend that path to Britain, either as a temporary transitional arrangement, as some have suggested, or as a permanent one".

Speaking as an advocate of the EEA option, I'm afraid that Mr Guðmundsson has rather missed the point. And it's point that seemly escapes Civitas as well. Were we starting out from scratch I wouldn't recommend the EEA either. I would object to it for more or less the same reasons I object to the EU. But we are not starting from scratch. We have been a member for four decades.

Mr Guðmundsson has it that:

"The EEA Agreement means the EFTA/EEA countries are subject to most of the EU legislation covering the bloc’s internal market and therefore indirectly the EU integration process in that area. This was recently highlighted by a representative from Norway. Like EU membership, the EEA Agreement demands transfer of national sovereignty to supranational institutions. While the institutions in question are run by EFTA and not the EU, they are expected to mirror the decisions made by the European Court of Justice and the European Commission.

The latest EU demand is that the EFTA/EEA countries must become subject to its newly-formed financial authority. The EFTA/EEA countries have already accepted this after it was agreed that EFTA will ensure compliance within their borders. However, Iceland’s most senior legal experts in this field have concluded that EFTA will in fact only be a middleman to make it appear as if the EFTA/EEA countries are not accepting EU authority".

Now this all depends on who you talk to. Some have it that it is an amicable system of co-determination. Others have it that Efta states pretty much roll over and do as they are told. I think, depending on context, the truth lies somewhere in between. That is why I would not wish to join it were we not already in the single market.

The point I would make is that if we wish to maintain frictionless trade then we will necessarily have to adopt EU regulations, and in fact the Great Repeal Bill promises to do exactly that.

There are several issues to consider here. Firstly we have to integrate EU law on to our own statute book which is not so easily achieved outside of the EEA in that EU rules bring into effect a number of protocols, institutions and regimes for which we have no immediate replacement. Across every policy area we are looking at partial or complete re-writes on the fly. It is not so easily done.

The second point being that simply aligning our laws with the EU is not enough. We need a mechanism to maintain conformity and equivalence. Already there is a major programme of food safety reform along with intellectual property and data protection. If we do not have a system of co-determination then we will simply be a passive recipient of rules. More than likely that without the Efta court we are more likely to have to abide by ECJ rulings.

The only other way to avoid this is for any new comprehensive trade agreement to have some sort of court or arbitration system. We need a system for continued relations with the EU. Whether we like it or not the EU has its own gravitational pull and as our nearest neighbour, and the closest of the three regulatory superpowers in the world, it follows that we will be bound to follow the EUs rules in one form or another. If you try to ride two horses you find that one supply chain comes at the expense of the other.

The misapprehension of Brexiteers is that free of the EU we can throw the rule book away and form our own standards in a vacuum where it has no ramifications for trade. They further assume that we will have no further cooperation with the EU medicines agency or other such agencies. If we want to export chemicals and pharmaceuticals then it is more than likely that we will retain some of the functionality, if not associate membership of them. There is no clean slate.

Having ruled out the EEA we are now in a position where our participation in such programmes will be as the junior partner with considerably less say than EEA members. We will also need a far longer transitional arrangement specifically because we will need to develop domestic administrative capability and re-write nearly all of the rules in order to remove EU bodies. We will linger on as a shadow EU member for some time rather than being out.

More to the point, Brexiteers have a woefully limited understanding of the depth and complexity of the trade agreement we will need. There is no magic wand solution nor is there making the inherently complex simpler. If we were talking about trade in goods then yes things might very well be straightforward but we are also talking about everything from chemicals registration to air traffic and space policy.

Had we opted for the EEA we would be taking most of the risk out of negotiations and the process would be subject to far less uncertainty and risk - and there would be fewer points of failure. What we shouldn't forget also is that a trade deal cannot be done in two years. The EEA solves that. Trade is for the most part already dealt with.

There seems to be a universal failure among Brexiteers to understand that we are not starting from scratch. We must undergo a slow and forensic process. Nothing is going to happen quickly and the more radical the approach the more damage we will do. It is entirely unnecessary.

You will get no argument from me that Britain needs to leave the EU in order to enhance its trade globally but the aim should be to enhance and augment the trade we already have. The EEA at the very least safeguards the majority of our EU trade and that which we do via the agreements the EU has with third countries - another factor which seems to escape Brexiteers.

Nobody that I know of has made the case that the EEA is ideal, rather that it solves a number of headaches regarding the exit process and reduces the risk of a trainwreck Brexit, which should be the number one priority for this government. The Efta system is far from perfect and the single market has many serious flaws. I have no arguments with Brexiteers about that. Whether we like it or not though, the WTO option is a total non-starter and there isn't much to be said for the FTA approach either. It does not give us the free hand in regulation that Brexiteers want - especially when you examine trends in global regulation.

I think though, this renewed effort to attack the single market from sources on the hard right is a good sign. They wouldn't be so vocal were they not worried about something. We heard yesterday from the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, that “A no deal scenario is not what we want” saying that failure to reach a deal would have "serious repercussions for the UK". It seems that there is a least one grown up at the table even if he's on the opposite side of it.

I rather suspect this has the hard Brexit zombies worried. Outside the Brexit bubble nobody thinks a no deal situation (their favoured outcome) is viable. It might well be that the penny has dropped in high places and this is their swansong. We can only hope that it is. We are leaving it a bit late for sense to prevail.

A Fysh out of water

Marcus Fysh, MP for Yeovil, yesterday remarks on Conservative Home that:

"It is in the interests of both the UK and the EU to achieve a fully negotiated preferential trade agreement or binding framework for such between them within the UK’s two-year Article 50 withdrawal process, and I urge national governments across the EU to ensure that this happens. Were this not achieved it would be a major missed opportunity and a blow for the credibility of the EU. However, the view that the alternative is “no deal” which would be “deeply damaging” to the UK, as has been mentioned by some in the House of Commons and elsewhere, is in my view not supported by the evidence.

Somehow not having the freedom to export chemicals or pharmaceuticals is not "deeply damaging". Having to divert animal products to ports with inspection facilities is also fine apparently. No problems there. Having no permission to pick up air passengers from Schiphol seemingly doesn't trouble him either. Losing the UK aviation sector is no big deal. Having no agreements on standards and conformity - and having trucks subject to spot checks is seemingly not a big deal either. As for having tariffs on all other goods, well that's all in the game. Trashing all EU supply chains overnight is somehow abated by multilateral activity at the WTO apparently.

The negative view of the “WTO Option” fails to take proper account of the potential for a growth dividend from the UK’s service sectors if we can take a leading role in new rounds of multilateral service liberalisation via the WTO. It must be said that WTO members and the secretariat are excited and enthusiastic about that prospect. This includes liberalisation of trade in services. Renewed impetus in this area could also dramatically improve the prospects for bilateral or pluri-lateral discussions of other preferential trade agreements which the UK may undertake.

I'm not going to argue that there is scope for new rounds of multilateral talks but see, thing is, multilateral talks are, well, multilateral. Long and difficult. To get any kind of agreement you have to break off a policy area where agreements are likely such as a global agreement on tyre standards - which itself was years in the making. To suddenly find ourself cast adrift with no preferential terms for selling in the single market, with no customs cooperation, leaves us starting from ground zero. Mr Fysh does not say what we would do in the meantime.

But it seems that what you or I take to mean "no deal", ie not having a deal, doesn't mean not having a deal to Mr Fysh. He thinks it means something else.

To return to the nub of the issue about future frameworks for trade with the EU, the overarching requirement of the Lisbon Treaty is for the EU to establish or maintain close relationships with neighbouring countries, as under Article 8. Furthermore, under Article 50 the withdrawal process has to take account of the framework for trade that will replace that which exists while the UK is a member.

Not if you walk away with no deal. That's the point. Failure to reach a deal ends the Article 50 process. You then stand as a third country without an agreement of any kind. No agreements on tariffs. No agreements on conformity. No access to market surveillance systems or cooperation programmes. Nothing, nadda, zilch.

Meanwhile we lose all of our existing agreements with other countries via the EU. Any future trade agreement with the EU would be starting over from scratch in an entirely new set of negotiations after everything grinds to a halt. 

The EU is then bound by its own rules to seek close cooperation with its neighbours as per Article 8 - which is why it does have a number of comprehensive agreements on trade with them - but there is no compulsion to enter immediate trade talks and nothing that obliges extensive access. Fysh does understand that this would be a separate process after the fact.

Not to grant the UK successional arrangements on departure from the EU which at least establish mutual recognition, equivalence of assessment and conformity processes at its borders such as to maintain reasonably frictionless trade would arguably be a breach of Article 8, and for the EU to refuse to discuss these matters in parallel with discussion of the terms of withdrawal would arguably be a breach of Article 50.

This is, in a word, drivel. The EU has no obligation to drop any of its standard frontier controls. Frictionless trade doesn't happen by casually waiving inspections. It is a product of long standing systems integration from which we are pulling out. If we have no deal then all of that comes to an end and so does our European trade.

The whole point of negotiating in the article 50 process is to ensure we retain some degree of future interoperability. You either have an agreement on trade or you don't.

In this the EU cannot discriminate, but all that means is that it cannot impose any barriers that it would not impose by default to all third countries. There may be some economic merit in unilateral liberalisation on our part but the EU is not compelled to reciprocate nor can it. The single market is above all a system with rules and systems within systems - and it is far more than a system for the free movement of goods.

It doesn't seem to matter what we write or how much work we do on this subject. We are dealing with people who don't know and don't want to. We are dealing with people who don't know how the system works and have little hope of understanding it. Their frame of reference is so out of kilter with reality that there is now little left to do but watch it unfold with exasperation and dread.

"Demonising WTO framework per se is wrong from an economic point of view that's my point" says Fysh on Twitter. This gives us some clue. Fysh thinks the WTO is some kind of global free trade platform with a series of defaults on which we can operate. This is incorrect. It is a rules based system but it does not grant any special rights or privileges. It provides standard parameters for trade agreements but if you don't have a trade agreement with the EU then you do not have a trade agreement with the EU. I can't see why that is so difficult to grasp.

It would appear that Fysh confuses full and active participation in the WTO with the "WTO option" which is a wholly different ballgame. Everybody in the Brexit field seems to understand this, except for MPs. How we get to a week before triggering Article 50 and still have our law makers not even knowing what the basic constructs are I really don't know, but that is almost as big a political crisis as the one they are about to unleash on us. The system is not working.

Yes, Brexit is a mess. So what?

This Tory government has next to no idea what it's doing. Brexiteers seem not to have a clue between them. They're a pretty dismal bunch. But then you do have to wonder how dumb you have to be to expect that leaving things as they are means everything sails along as normal.

It's all very well trotting out the I told you so's as Brexit descends into farce, but let's be fair here. Yes, David Davies is an arrogant quarterwit, yes Boris Johnson is an oafish slob, and yes Theresa May is out of her depth, but then what are the alternatives? Tim Farron? Jeremy Corbyn? Chuka Umunna?

To anyone with even a scintilla of intellect it is self evident that political competence is thin on the ground. The only thing even approaching sagely statesmen are the dinosaurs of previous governments who themselves were not known for competence. Certainly I'm not going to take any lectures on what is good for the country from John Major or Tony Blair.

It is not that Brexit is necessarily damaging either. A well managed departure could be more or less economically neutral. We're just going to suffer from a lack of domestic political adroitness. It is that lack of competence that ultimately makes Brexit necessary.

Our political class seems unable to grasp that there has been a seismic shift in global economics over the last decade. We escaped a global financial meltdown by the skin of our teeth and the cupboards are bare should there be another nasty surprise. Worse still, the old habits are drifting back.

Just this morning I noted Theresa May announcing that the Swansea Bay tidal barrage "is part of our plan to deliver an economy that works for everyone and will mean £1.3bn of investment and 9,000 jobs". They haven't learned anything.

We are not a country that can piss money away on eco-vanity projects any more. We stopped being that country in 2008. The politics of binge and splurge to keep the plebs in make-work jobs is dead in the water. We want the fundamentals addressed. 

As it happens I would bet on the Swansea bay barrage being the last such sticking plaster venture of its type (if it goes ahead at all). Brexit will see to that when there's no money in the kitty. Or at least I hope so. This notion that a Welsh super paddling pool is an investment is continuity Miliband. 

When people voted for Brexit, more than anything they were voting for change. The political class wasn't going to change. It hasn't even changed now. It's not going to change until they are forced to confront certain realities - that being that we are pretty much a hollowed out economy propped up by the City and we are pissing money away not to confront the issues but to mask them. 

Had we not voted to leave, we would have retained the Milibandesque economic model - and the EU would most certainly promote more of it. No doubt a big dollop of "EU funding" would have gone toward this and other such "green" energy projects. It's all in the game. Meanwhile if the UK's economic fundamentals are unsound then that goes double for most of the EU. 

Our European "elites" live in a fantasy world where the 2008 crash never happened, whereby they can keep writing cheques on our behalf, caring not a jot if they will bounce. We just don't have adults at the wheel. 

And this is why I could get more than a little bit cross with "liberal" remainers. They are infants. This so-called progressive dream world they inhabit does not seem to ever intersect with reality. They buy into the EU utopian image entirely uncritically. Greece is turning into a an internment camp for refugees. The Hungarian border is becoming a new iron curtain. The European far right makes our own look like the Women's Institute. By European standards we don't even have a far right.

Over the last couple of years things have never looked bleaker and the world is turning darker somehow. In this the EU stands crippled with indecision, passing the buck to member states in the face of crippling pressures. The EU doesn't even have a clear idea of its own destiny or direction. The stock answer of "more Europe" just means a further retreat into fantasy land.

The fact is that Britain no longer has the luxury of deferring the adult decisions. We need a pragmatic and cost effective energy policy. We very seriously need to rethink how we do healthcare. We need major land and planning reforms and we need a new approach to agriculture. In this virtually everything is bogged down by targets and EU social and environment policy. There was a time when we could afford such indulgences but that time has passed.

The ideals of 90's EU policy were built on a foundation of sand. Now that the tide is coming in, we need the realists back. As to whether that political competence still exists I do not know. We will have to rediscover it somehow. But we do have the next best thing to competence. We have wreckers.

I'm now pretty sure the Tories will make a pigs ear of Brexit. Even if I'm wrong and they do manage to pull off a workable settlement we are still up a certain creek.  But I would surmise that we have been up that creek for a while. We have travelled up the EU cul-de-sac to find we can go no further and we are out of ideas. To fix it, it is going to take something far larger and more profound than what our current political class can provide.

This now goes one of two ways. Either we confront and rid ourselves of the present political class and the system it inhabits or we surrender to it and pay the price. I am optimistic. The Tories are enjoying a firm lead at the moment - but I think it is an illusion that will melt away as soon as the effects of Brexit are known. We will then see their incompetence in the full light of day.

When that happens we will be presented with a pretty bleak choice. The Tories, or whatever else is on offer. There won't be much in it either way. We can expect the next government to be just as bad or worse and see major political strife.

Remainers would have it that Brexit sends us back to the dark days of the 70's and the winter of discontent. It very well might and in fact I rather hope it does - because that was a political reckoning that brought about a running dispute over a number of years - the result of which has defined my entire adult life. It brought about a new settlement for a new era. And that is what we need. This cycle is in terminal decay.

In that regard I have a certain respect even for the most cretinous of Brexiteers who at least recognises that it is time to start the ball rolling. There are those who mistakenly believe that Brexit leads to sunlit uplands and, for sure, that's pretty risible - but then the notion that remaining in the political stasis of EUtopia saves us from our fate is every bit as bankrupt.

When I look at anti-Brexit protesters I see petulant whining millennials and snobby middle class liberals who have never had it so good - and want to remain because they do not want the status quo to be disturbed. There is a word for that. Cowardice.

More than that, it is a a deep-seated insular selfishness that assumes that because economic tides do not affect them directly they can be denied outright - and that we can continue as we have been unabated. These are people who look at the existing political class and don't see very much wrong with it. Frankly, if you're looking at Tim Farron right now and think he's the one with answers, well, it's really you who's the inward looking thicko, isn't it?

No, the UK's problems are not solved by splurging money at the NHS. No, we're not going to revive the economy by borrowing and spending on green energy. HS2 isn't going to revive the north. Nor is another hashtag fad like the "Northern Powerhouse". No. We need hard headed adults back in charge making the decisions our present crop of politicians have been too gutless and too facile to take.

Some of us don't want to be treated like children and some of us would rather face up to reality. Remainers may whine, but politically they have had it all their own way for a generation. That's ok, we could afford them for a while. It's nice to take a break from grown up responsibilities every now and then. But times have changed and it is long past the time that kidult Britain put on the big boy pants.

Brexit: the end of the great British ponzi scheme

According to Reuters, a poll reports that a third of European companies expect to cut investment spending due to Brexit uncertainties and a tenth of those with operations in the Britain plan to pull out of the country.

"Over half the companies said they did not expect Britain leaving the European Union to change their investment plans, but 24 percent anticipated reducing investment "somewhat", and 8 percent "significantly", the survey, published on Friday, showed."

There's two points I would make here. Firstly we don't know exactly what Brexit looks like. It might well be that for many businesses, the trading environment does not change.

Secondly, I'm not bothered. Right now, the only thing propping up the economies of the regions is massive state spending. Hinkley Point, Trident, HS2 consultancy, the QE carriers, F35 etc.

When we are told that European firms are investing in the UK we have to ask what they mean by investing. What it tends to mean is buying failing shell companies just to make use of their established infrastructure such as a UK headquarters then bidding for OJEU contracts. They won't bring any expertise of their own. They will hire engineers and managers on a zero hours basis and cream off a cut for themselves. They are shell companies that add no value - and many of them are subsidiaries. I've worked for three of them in recent times.

With Hinkley Point, the eye watering strike price is much the same as the Renewable Obligation Certificate scheme. An incentive to make a bad idea attractive to business. Rather than being direct taxation it effectively grants corporates a licence to raid our wallets through our energy bills.

Politicians love it because it notionally creates jobs - but that is a result of government spending, not foreign investment. EDF is not a charity either. They are not putting money into the EU economy for shits and giggles. They have spotted a number of opportunities to fleece us. The Short Term Operating Reserve system is a massive money spinner.

And who does this keep in jobs exactly? Middle class engineering graduates. People who vote Tory/Blair. Effectively, since 1997 the UK national grid has been an elaborate corporate welfare scheme whereby the mug punters are obliged to fund the vanity schemes of politicians peddling their eco credentials.

Brexit will shut a lot of this down. We don't know if the OJEU system will carry on as before. Not sure I would miss it. Meanwhile, since trade takes a hit and tax receipts decline, a lot of the batshit stuff will likely be shelved. The Swansea tidal lagoon and HS2 might very well be put on the back burner indefinitely. We will also see a number of nuclear energy projects put on hold.

What this means is an emergency situation where we are no longer on track to keep the lights on so we will be forced to build CCGT plant. Gosh. Imagine that. Actually buying the kit we need at the price it should be!

As to whether we want "investment" in our defence sector, I can't say I will miss Thales or any of the other thieving French defence parasites.

There is free market investment and then there is the stagnant economic model we have been operating pretty much since 1987. All of it financed with debt, entitling ever more greedy corporates to shave off slices of our income.

Brexit shatters these economic norms. In fact, if the Tories do make a pigs ear of the Brexit process then in all likelihood we won't be able to borrow and spend our way out of this as our credit rating will be shot to pieces. Again, my give-a-fuck-o-meter needle is barely moving.

As it happens, Brexit is going to cause quite a lot of economic realignment and abandonment of long standing policies. And that's the whole point of it. And will be be substantially less well off for it? For the time being, yes. It will be made even worse by the Tories who have no idea what they are doing. But then that's what you get for handing over governance to Brussels for forty years.

I've been noticing quite a lot recently that the UK economy is a ponzy scheme and ever since the 2008 crash we have been operating on cartoon physics. We don't fall until we look down. Brexit bursts that bubble.

As I see it, the fundamentals of the UK economy are not sound. The City is a life support machine and little else is generating any serious revenue. I even see it manifested in the countryside where agriculture is gradually being abandoned. One of the more distressing facets of that is seeing Somerset plastered with solar farms.

We could have maintained the status quo without addressing any of the fundamentals, and we might well have continued to evade the consequences of 2008. It could well have continued making us fatter, lazier and pampered. But there is a price for that.

China is waging an economic war on the West and the Chinese don't give a shit that we're doing less and producing less. It will only take a generation or two to rob the West of its financial hubs and then we are left with nothing. All the while, as we become dumber and less capable we see a gradual bleed of vitality. We will lack the ability to bring about any kind of economic restoration.

Further to this, Brexit has not caused any new divisions in the UK. It has only revealed them. There is a massive economic and social disparity between London and the regions and that cannot continue. It is that more than anything that is breaking the Union. Anything Scotland can say can also be said by Yorkshire - only Yorkshire doesn't have a clan of knuckle scraping nationalist gobshites to make noise in Westminster.

What we need is an economic forest fire to allow light to fall on the green shoots. This economic era is one belonging the previous century and we need to remodel it to cope with the globalised Internet world.

The remainers would rather duck this question. It's expensive, it's time consuming, it's a hassle and yes, it's quite a bit scary. Nobody my age or younger has ever experienced political upheaval of this magnitude. We are presently in a phoney war where nobody quite understands just how profound Brexit is and just what will happen when it hits. There will be economic casualties. Our habits will change and so will attitudes. We're going to be correcting a few mistakes and making a few new ones.

There is no real certainty to be had save for one. Things are changing. And that's good because they need to change. This unreality bubble of bogus prosperity has to be popped. If we don't do it then we will hand this poisoned chalice to the next generation and leave a bigger mess for them to sort out.

So no, I don't care about foreign investment. I don't care to maintain the status quo nor do I wish for my generation to preside over the stagnation and cultural decay caused by political inertia. Just look at Westminster. That's all the proof you need that we cannot go on like this.

Trump is right to shun Merkel

I'm not exactly sure what game Donald Trump is playing. What I can see happening on present trajectory is NATO becoming a redundant shell and little more than a flag of convenience for joint UK/US operations. Keeping Europe on the fringes will likely lead to ramped up efforts toward greater European defence cooperation.

NATO is pretty much a cold war relic and like the EU is part of the post-war peace architecture. The NATO aspect though is the framework for the US military empire. It is key to US defence exports. If the US is rowing back from NATO then it is pretty much ending its military dominion over Europe - with the exception of the UK.

Britain is locked into NATO, or at least US defence cooperation for a time to come. Chinook, Apache, Trident, F35, Poseidon are all service mainstays and fairly recent undertakings that will define UK procurement for the next two decades at least.

What we can expect in the wake of Brexit is a retrenchment of the European defence sector, with several big names drawing down their UK operations - to be replaced with Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

With Britain leaving the EU and ending freedom of movement defence industry cooperation is made less attractive and so we will see more continental defence integration but without the UK. Britain will also take a more junior role in European space projects.

I expect defence cooperation between the UK and France will stay as strong as ever. In logistics, intelligence and electronic warfare we are mutually dependent. RAF Waddington is Europe's eyes and ears. This is what gives us considerable leverage in Brexit talks.

In terms of the much vaunted "European army" we are already seeing acceleration toward that end now that the British question has been resolved. How far it can go is all really dependent on how much EU citizens are willing to tolerate further erosion of their defence sovereignty.

This is actually why Brexit is brilliant. Britain can participate in joint EU military efforts but will always remain detached as a non-member. It keeps doors open to Norway and close Commonwealth naval allies.

As far as trade goes the Commonwealth is dead but in terms of military ties, Canada, New Zealand and Australia remain key allies and Brexit ensures that they will not be frozen out. Through the UK's carriers are largely useless they are prestigious defence assets and will buy us considerable EU cooperation. Politicians and generals like big shiny toys.

In effect we have stopped the creation of a European military superpower and the EU is now the junior partner in a Western alliance. This is why UK defence spending is more crucial now than ever.

If you're a peacenik, you may not see the point of all this but ultimately this is about power and empires. It always has been. The EU has always had ambitions of being a superpower and we've just killed that dream.

The left will have it that it means the UK now is a servile military outpost of the United States, which is not entirely incorrect but at the same time, who cares? It is far better to have a broader, looser Western defence alliance than two allied but competing superpowers. I cannot imagine anything worse than the EU having the tools to be the interventionist power it has always wanted to be. Libya is instructive as to how well that pans out.

Thanks to Brexit, EU defence cooperation will remain a disjointed and unpopular platform struggling for relevance. It survives only as long as the political elites driving the EU - which is not for much longer by the looks of it.

As to NATO, it will probably linger on in a semi-dormant state for as long as Trump is president. Trump though, will eventually be gone. What the world looks like then is really all dependent on his successor.

In a lot of ways our commitment to the US in its ill-conceived adventures has paid dividends in that our operational compatibility with the USA has remained intact and it makes the USA the obvious direction for future defence relations. In a roundabout way, the Iraq war has preserved our defence sovereignty.

As to procurement, Brexit probably rules out any more ideological me-tooism. The EU likes to have all the baubles of empire. The USA has Boeing, so the EU must have Airbus - which has always been a political venture. This has given rise to the ill conceived A380 and A400M. Both epic failures. Brexit means we will likely continue to buy US military hardware off the shelf - which is usually better - and of more value to the UK economy.

I for one could not be more delighted. For all that cretinous bilge from remainers about us Brexiteers "stealing my European identity", I say bollocks. You have no European identity. It is a figment of your imagination. You weren't watching a French cop show on Netflix last night were you? You didn't go and see a Spanish superhero film at the cinema last week. You know more about US politics than you do about the EU. Culturally, militarily and politically we are Anglospheric. That is a fact.

For all that we have seen remainers amphibious with grief, I say go and look at the traffic jams and the behaviour of drivers in Rome or go and watch the Spanish torture a bull to death and tell me that your culture is in any way reflected in Europeans. That's when I tell you to fuck right off.

If I have to pick an empire to be allied with, I choose the USA every single time. The land of The Wire, South Park, Rick and Morty, the First Amendment. The country that never needed any persuading that Communism is the manifestation of evil on earth.

Say what you like about Donald Trump, but Donald Trump is not America. Trump is for four years or so. Moreover, Trump is a good sign. Yes, he's a brash, oafish wrecker but he was elected on the back of a total rejection of American leftism. That which has aggressively moved to bury all moral norms and free speech along with it.

This is why Trump is weakening relations with the EU. Ultimately the diseased politically correct establishment in the USA is the consequence of a detached and corrupt liberal elite. In that respect the USA is in a more advanced state of decay than the EU - but we should view it as a warning. The soft left political consensus of the EU, with its deeply ingrained NGOcracy is that same disease. Brexit is not Trump. Brexit means we avert having one of our own.

In 2003, I was handed a pirate CD with a few low quality rips of early South Park episodes. I laughed until I hurt. And why was that? South Park drove a horse and cart through American liberal political correctness and spoke to a certain truth - that the left has totally lost the plot. To me, South Park marked the beginnings of a conservative reawakening. It was viewed as edgy at the time when really it was just the truth that nobody dare speak.

Well now that truth is being spoken openly - and that's a good thing. Now we are dismantling the empire of the Left. The one installed by Blair and Brown. And that makes Brexit all the more necessary. It is fashioned in their image.

In that regard I can understand the "Brexit at any cost" mentality. Politically our survival depends on it so that we do not follow the USA into its current cultural hole. Without that moral backbone there is no way our politics or indeed our economy can survive in the long run. I would rather the Tories didn't make a total pigs ear of it, but as a whole I would still vote to leave every single time.

In that respect, we are "taking back control". We are snatching Britain back from Euro cultural oblivion. The all pervasive creeping erosion of our institutions has already left us weak and vulnerable. You can see it in how Brexit is being handled - by a crop of criminally incompetent and stupid politicians lacking any guile or wit. This is what happens when national governments atrophy. Sooner or later that starts to manifest in more noticeable ways where we cannot respond to existential threats with any moral certitude. Which is exactly what the self-hating left has always wanted.

To that end, it is no surprise that the fightback has started in the USA. We may not like the messenger, but we are seeing a return to that conservative order - the one that defeated fascism and communism and brought about great leaders like Thatcher and Reagan. For all their many faults, they were staunch defenders of liberty and ensured we had the means and the will to fight our enemies.

Right now the focus is on Russia. The EU is pushing Russia away and half of the eastern bloc with it. I can see Poland eventually leaving the EU. We have made an enemy out of a potential ally in a future conflict. If you pay any attention to trade at all you will see that China has been waging an economic war on the west for more than a decade.

China is undermining Western power overseas and weakening our economic power. There is nothing in the EU Arsenal to counter this not least because there isn't even a recognition of what is happening. Trump may not have the right strategy but he at least sees that there is a threat. If the fightback has started, I am glad that, once again, Britain stands with America.

Scotland again

Twitter is in smugness overload this evening - with remainers gloating that they warned a second Scottish independence referendum was a consequence of Brexit - and we dismissed them as fearmongers. The truth of the matter is that we rather hoped it wouldn't come to that but ultimately we didn't care enough to be blackmailed. Even if Scotland becoming independent was a dead cert I would still have voted to leave the EU.

Adding to the tedium is the rather predictable response that Brexiteers not wanting Scotland to be independent are hypocrites - wanting to preserve the Union while leaving the EU. Except of course the Union is a genuine demos with a common history and culture - forged in blood and war. That's a real union. Not a bureaucrat's managerial construct. The two are not remotely comparable. The nations of the Union are bound in battle and song.

We have to accept though that EU membership has weakened that union. The modus operandi of the EU was to erode national unity, not least by bribing the regions and institutions, alienating them from London, making them more loyal to Brussels. The damage is done now. Exactly why Scotland has fallen for it after the eradication of Scottish fishing, turning the East coast into heroin racked slums beats the hell out of me but that's a topic for another time.

The point though is this. It is not Brexit that has brought about a second referendum. Or at least it isn't Leave voters. Scottish independence had already jumped the shark but its corpse has been exhumed by the media and the remain inclined as a political device to make Brexit a pyrrhic victory. There is nothing they would like to see more. Such is their churlishness. Sturgeon is the ideal noisemaker to give the remain-o-sphere a launchpad for another attempt to delegitimise Brexit.

In that regard I am happy to call their bluff. If Scotland feels that trashing the Union is right for them then fine. Independence as a principle in its own right is a worthy enough reason and technical arguments aside, it's the same reason I voted for Brexit.

What Scotland should know though is that if the economics do not stack up for Brexit - and they really don't, then that goes double for Scotland. There are plenty of English who would be more than happy to cut off the umbilical and there are no Brussels bailouts to be had without a price. The EU is not going to tolerate a leftist tax and spend splurge and it will slap Scotland down in much the same way it did Greece. It will be a most hollow independence.

Between now and then though, Scotland will learn that "taking back control" is not so simple - as per the example set by Brexit. There is no taking back Scottish fishing waters - especially if Scotland intends to rejoin the EU. Moreover the quotas are now private commercial property. There is no secret hoard of North Sea oil either.

On the whole I expect Brexit will leave the UK bruised and humiliated for a time and we are going to lose a substantial amount of trade. It was avoidable but political competence is in short supply. The question Scots must ask is whether, based on the SNP track record, they are any more likely to make good of a split than the Tories have in leaving the EU. Good luck with that.

The short of it is though, Britain is leaving the EU. It was always going to leave. And Scotland's attachment to the EU is only as strong as its usefulness as a stick with which to beat England. That fever will pass. Eventually.

Scotland may piss and whine about it but culturally and economically, independent or not, it is always going to be tied to England. The sheer force of human behaviour will undermine any barriers the EU erects. That's because there is a real and lasting bond that transcends the EU and the SNP. Whatever barriers go up will only last as long as the EU - which isn't for that much longer. So it's time to let Scotland run its own experiment in democracy. We can ride it out.

Ultimately European Union is a falsehood. It is a narcissistic delusion. There is nothing about it that compares with the Union of the United Kingdom and though ossified structures may melt away into history, we will remain as one - because we are one. Scotland will find that divergence is little more than bagpipe dream and that our fates are linked - economically, socially, technically, geographically. It will remain so long after the EU has crumbled to dust. The EU has failure in its DNA.