Roughly speaking no dealers can be divided into two camps. Liars and morons. The liars tend to be Tories and the morons tend to be Brexit Party. Tories will tell any lie and no lie is too big. Brexit Party morons just tell you things they wish were true but actually aren't. Neither can be productively argued with.
It starts with having a particularly two dimensional view of the world. The base assumption is that trade deals relate mainly to trade in foods and that free trade deals are primarily a matter of tariffs. Here is where we have to assume these people are morons because there has been three years of public debate about this and all of it has passed them by.
Worse still, they haven't given any real thought as to what they seek to accomplish. We know they want to leave the EU and they don't want to pay "huge sums" to the EU and that we should "make our own laws" and control our own borders. That's as deep as it goes.
As important as it is to have a general destination in mind it is also useful to have an idea of where you don't want to end up. For instance you wouldn't want to leave in such a way that leaves you with no leverage and accepting the same rules you hoped to get rid of without a say in the matter.
Many argue that this is exactly what May's withdrawal agreement does. They are, to a large extent, correct. There are non-regression clauses and a few ambushes that will give the EU considerable powers over our future decision making and will place constraints on how we exercise sovereignty.
Some call the deal Brexit In Name Only on account of the backstop approximating a customs union and the requirement to align with EU regulations. This does their own arguments a disservice. The EU is considerably more than a mere customs and regulatory union, and wouldn't be nearly so offensive to democrats if it were. If it were just a system of trade governance I might have thought twice about voting to leave.
There are two factors at work here though. Firstly the EU is protecting its own sovereignty in that the UK could very easily threaten the integrity of the EU system of rules and undermine it. Secondly, the EU takes the Tories at their word. They have openly talked about diluting standards and weakening regulation and since the Tory right are calling the shots right now, the EU is taking defensive action.
Essentially the EU is cautious about the UK because our politicians speak openly of ripping up agreements and abrogating international obligations. They want to ensure that we can't - or at least if we do, the EU is protected. If Brexiters don't like the deal they should examine their own rhetoric since 2015. Careless words have consequences.
Howsoever, the deal could best be described as a scaffolding for the gradual dismantling of membership, where in the first instance not a lot changes. We use the systems and institutions established in the agreement to evolve our way out of the EU where we can transition into the new relationship without the hammer blow to British jobs and exports. The deal is suboptimal but that's only to be expected when doing a deal with the regional trade superpower. The advantage is theirs.
But in evaluating the deal, it cannot be looked at in isolation. One must compare and contrast with the alternatives. I won't go into it but we could have derailed the sequencing of Article 50 talks by knowing what we wanted beforehand and made moves toward an EEA Efta deal which might well have avoided a backstop row. That opportunity was squandered early on as Theresa May bowed to pressure to "invoke Article 50 now" with no destination in mind.
So now the options are pretty much May's deal or no deal. This is where Brexiters depart from reality. For sure, no deal does release us from any legal financial obligations in the future, and there are no binding ties that constrain our law making. Mission accomplished right? Not quite.
The UK has been part of the EU regulatory ecosystem for three decades and our business models have evolved inside that framework. It covers everything from waste export licences to fisheries management plans. It's easier to list what isn't licenced or in some way regulated by the EU. Unplug from that ecosystem and authorisations are terminated overnight. Of particular concern is trade in services.
In the digital age, data is everything. And if you want to bid for EU services contracts you need a data adequacy agreement at the very least. We would need to comply with the EU's own GDPR requirements in order to continue trading. Some believe it is an exaggeration to say this trade would end overnight but that has to be the working assumption where the EU's Notices to Stakeholders say authorisations end and where there are no official contingency measures.
When you pull the plug on hundreds of commercial activities, pretty soon you find yourselves in serious trouble. The EU has done just enough to ensure rudimentary air services continue and that controls at the ports are phased in gradually so as to avoid long tailbacks, but the tariffs we will incur and customs formalities we face at the ports are less than a tenth of the issue.
Though we can look forward to developing trade opportunities with New Zealand and Peru there is still the question of what we do in the meantime having torched all formal trade relations with the nearest and largest market which accounts for nearly half of our trade.
Here we bump into yet another no dealer contradiction. Apparently we can trade as normal without a deal since most countries trade with the EU on WTO terms (not actually true). Yet, at the same time, they tell us that we can trade as normal by way of WTO Article 24 until a new deal is in place. Leaving aside that Article 24 has a number of conditions to satisfy it, and that it must be by mutual agreement, and that it does not cover the full scope of trade and regulation, there is a tacit admission that no deal is not a viable destination. We do actually need a deal.
So once we have excluded ourselves from lucrative EU markets, burning EU goodwill in the process by leaving a gaping hole in their Irish customs frontier, we will find the EU in a less than cooperative mood. And since the UK will be hemorrhaging exports and jobs, our need will be somewhat more acute than theirs. At that point we will have handed all of the leverage to the EU where it gets to dictate the terms. The deal then on offer will look much the same as the one we have just rejected only EU member states will have spent the time in between cannibalising the UK's market share and we never fully recover those exports.
And in case you were wondering, that future FTA will also come with its own conditions. We must submit a fisheries management plan before the EU will accept our exports, and with any deal having to be ratified by member states with their own red lines, it is a given that fishing rights will be on the table along with much else. By the time we're done the fisheries chapter will look much the same as the CFP only we'll have no means of veto and no say in the rules. Another reason why Efta EEA was the smarter option.
Then there is the aforementioned GDPR compliance where the UK will find itself caving in on a system of rules the Brexiters had hoped to get rid of. In no circumstances will we be making all our own laws. That's just not the way modern trade functions. Regulatory harmonisation is the WD40 of trade by way of it removing administrative barriers.
In the meantime, the EU is always making new laws. As Ivan Rogers notes, no deal is not a destination. "It is simply a volatile and uncertain transitional state of purgatory, in which you have forfeited all the leverage to the other side because you start with a blank slate of no preferential arrangements, and live, in the interim - probably for years - on a basis they legislate - in their own interests".
If the objective of Brexit is ultimately sovereignty, then no deal is actually the worst of all worlds. To avoid falling into this trap you have to recognise and acknowledge certain realities. When you do it becomes abundantly apparent that international trade agreements necessarily are an impediment to the exercise of sovereignty and in most instances, it is the larger partner calling the shots. That's why it might have been a good idea to know what we wanted before triggering Article 50. An equitable relationship is not impossible, but leaving without a deal is a fast track to the kind of "vassalage" Brexiters have persistently wailed about.
In no time at all the UK will be grovelling to Brussels for any deal it can get. Even if a quickie deal (no such thing) with the USA doubled our trade with them (highly unlikely) it would go nowhere close to mitigating the loss of the single market. The Brexiteers may well have their hard man for the interim but it won't be long before he, and the Conservative Party are out on their ears and then it will be Labour government or Lab/Lib coalition doing the negotiating. One rather suspects Brexiteers are not going to like the outcome.
As a matter of fact an ordinary FTA is not going to be an adequate basis for the future relationship with the EU. An FTA can only go so far in terms of customs cooperation and there are numerous non trade related strands of cooperation that will ultimately result in a new treaty with the EU that in the end, looks a lot like associate membership. Having squandered our best chance of operating as independently as possible in the modern arena by ruling out Efta, the UK will be bound to the EU by thousands of strands, but with wholly inadequate democratic safeguards and still under the rule of the ECJ. Exactly where we did not want to be. We'd have all the burdens of the single market with far fewer advantages. As to operating an independent trade policy, fuhgeddaboudit!
If we were ever to get anywhere close to the sovereignty and independence as imagined by Brexiters, we'd have to build up a European consensus to take other EU member states with us to build a Europe of intergovernmentalism and cooperation. We needed a bigger vision than Brexit. We needed to use Brexit as an opportunity to reshape Europe, but Brexiters only think in narrow terms of moving tins of beans over the channel. Cementing Efta as a powerful player in the European regulatory ecosystem would have been our best shot, creating a viable alternative to EU supranationalism. The isolationism, petulance and rank stupidity of the Brexiters, however, means the UK will be out on its own and doing as it is told.
Undoing what was done to us by generations of politicians was never going to be a straightforward or even quick process. In failing to produce a vision and a plan, the Brexiteers are on course to do yet more damage. Assuming this grim chapter does not lead to us rejoining the EU, it will take decades more to recover from. All because the Brexiteers preferred easy answers and the soothing songs of demagogues and frauds.
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