Saturday 3 March 2018

How to deal with Eurojelly



We Brits are argueing among ourselves about what kind of Brexit, soft, large or non existent we want. It’s a waste of time. We’ll get what we’re given. Because we’re dealing with an entity which can’t negotiate, that won’t be much.

We’re not negotiating with naysaying Barnier or jolly junketing Junker but a giant jelly fish .EU authority is divided between twenty seven nations, a Commission which isn’t a government and a council of ministers which claims to be one but isn’t. Hovering in the wings is the pretend parliament which also has a say, though no one’s sure what it is

If they all negotiate it would be bedlam. Easier just to say “” and employ a professional naysayer to say it. In French. He then sets up hurdles for us to jump. When we do, he says no again.

This amorphous mass can only be kept together by firm rules, and Europeans are legalistic, while we Brits are pragmatic .Our question is “does it work?” Rather than what’s the law.

Of course the laws can be fiddled and in the EU they regularly are..No state aid, but the Germans have a Development bank and aid from regional banks.Free movement of people. But Poland and Hungary don’t allow it. Limits on budget deficits .But the French can go over.

All that’s internal .When it comes to negotiations with entries or leavers its easier to put up a blank refusal to change the rules and let the other party beat its head against a brick wall until they submit. That’s what they’re now doing to us.

Negotiations become a process of wearing the other side down by obfuscation, ever new demands and blank resistance until they either give up, as Greece did, or go away, as they hope we will.

In a coordinated operation Rampant Remainers help them to achieve this doing the EU’s work for it. They criticise everything the British government proposes, support the EU’s refusal to accept it, and create fear of disaster if we go. 

The aim of this coalition of yesterday’s men is to encourage the EU to be intransigent in the hope that we’ll lose heart,the government will fall and we’ll crawl back to Europe, saying we should have listened to Tony in the first place.

To sweeten the bitter pill Tony’s now saying the EU should control immigration. He hopes that this will make our humiliated voters a little happier about being humiliated.

It won’t.Look what happened to Cameron’s desperate attempts to get changes to help him win the referendum. He got peanuts. Tony will too because he runs up against the same inability to negotiate or change which Theresa May is already facing.

“No can do” is the EU’s answer to everything:change, reform,negotiation Macron, Greece, Cameron even their very own fifth column in Britain.You’ve got to be tough, absolutely determined, carry a big stick and be prepared to use it to get anywhere when you’re dealing with a jellyfish.

2 comments:

  1. "He hopes that this will make our humiliated voters a little happier about being humiliated".

    I wonder if there might not be a case that the sense of humiliation was a factor in the Brexit vote. Of course there were issues which affected the result in some regions (fishing in Grimsby; immigration in Peterborough as two examples), but could you make out a case that the EU actually had very little to do with the way many people decided to vote? To put this another way, did not many people see the choice not as Leave or Remain but as Accept or Not Accept the disregard felt in the Midlands and the North for a metropolitan-based elite that had offered them nothing but austerity for eight long years along with a large dollop of arrogance?

    It is not nice to be patronised by people earning £74k a year - plus expenses.

    In other words, might not the question have been perceived as 'Shall we give them a good kicking or not?' and the EU referendum was just a fortuitous means to enable this expression of discontent?

    'Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget;
    For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet'.

    Maybe, for once, they did speak.

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  2. And yet what is ignored by this blog post and many other Brexiters is that we will end up conducting exactly these same negotiations but with less leverage. Leaving the EU does not mean that you get step outside the complexities of international negotiation the "jelly" if you will). It just means that you have less clout when making your arguments.

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