1. Brexit. Like Christmas with Covid or dunking your head in a bucket of ice cold water or running your toes over with a lawnmower. What fun we did not have. But here we all are. Forced to play the worst ever drunken party game.

THREAD

2. So as we while away our time, whooping it up from lockdown, wondering at the next national crisis, let us ponder this week’s existential question: how can a Brexit deal be so close and yet so far away?
3. Is it close? Is it far away? Are we doomed or saved? And even if we’re saved are we in fact doomed?

It’s all too much. Like playing zenga with no twig things or scrabble with no letters. My head is spinning. Pass me the whisky and egg my nog.
4. To generalize (why not, everyone else does) Brexit commentary tends to fall into two illustrious camps both full of the wisest of sages.
5. The first reflects upon Mr Johnson’s character and political track record, the many hard as you like pronouncements emanating from various government orifices and the most peculiar composition of the Conservative Party, to arrive at an understandably unhappy conclusion.
6. The other camp (in which I have pitched my measly bedroll) tends to put more weight on what might be loosely described as the fundamentals. Put simply, only an absolute lunatic would risk the consequences of no deal for a few more fish.
7. The good news - and I say this from my very lofty vantage point - is that both views are right! Happy days! There are both deal positive and negative elements in play.
8. The bad news is that both views are wrong? Why? Exactly the same reason! There are both deal positive and negative components in play.

In other words, there is a complicated and shifting balance in place.

I’m sorry but this is life.
9. Now before you fling your tweeting devices away in frustration, I shall get to the good part and explain why after many trials and tribulations I think deal will prevail versus no deal.
10. And, I shall lead with the punchline. Perversely, I think deal will win out because political considerations will triumph or rather conjoin temporarily with the fundamentals.

(NB I am often wrong)
11. We can, I think, discount some arguments on both sides. I don’t think Team Brexit cares much about LONG TERM (deliberate caps) economic projections. I think Team Brexit cares v much about the Union but I also suspect key Team members think this is a problem for another day.
12. Finally, taking a rhetorical feather from my good friend the sage @trekonomics I am going to say something very controversial.
13. I don’t think the ERG matters as much as people think. Because I don’t think they will have the numbers and I really don’t think they are especially relevant to the Johnson political strategy going forward.
14. So what are we left with?

The political cost of compromise for the Iron Maiden of Brexit versus the political cost of two unequivocal NEAR TERM fundamentals if there is no deal: huger traffic jams and even lower growth and higher unemployment in the first part of next year.
15. My view is that the political cost of the latter is higher than the former. My view is also that various other factors, including the pandemic, the Biden election, the sackings of Cummings and Cain, have pushed the situation further in the deal direction.
16. On a more subjective note, I sometimes like to think about this very complicated situation as if I was a pound shop pundit writing a column for a national newspaper.
17. The column would be called the Great British Brexit Deal & it would be about leadership in the national interest, about a new dawn for a proud nation, about statesmanlike compromise, about balls coming loose from scrums & winning goals, about sunlit uplands not vales of tears
18. As a wise man never said,

‘If you write it they will come.’

And this Brexit deal writes itself. 

/ends

More from Objective Columnist

A quote from this excellent piece, neatly summarising a core impact of Brexit.

The Commission’s view, according to several sources, is that Brexit means existing distribution networks and supply chains are now defunct and will have to be replaced by other systems.


Of course, this was never written on the side of a bus. And never acknowledged by government. Everything was meant to be broadly fine apart from the inevitable teething problems.

It was, however, visible from space to balanced observers. You did not have to be a trade specialist to understand that replacing the Single Market with a third country trade arrangement meant the end of many if not all of the complex arrangements optimised for the former.

In the absence of substantive mitigations, the Brexit winners are those who subscribe to some woolly notion of ‘sovereignty’ and those who did not like freedom of movement. The losers are everyone else.

But, of course, that’s not good enough. For understandable reasons Brexit was sold as a benefit not a cost. The trading benefits of freedom would far outweigh the costs. Divergence would benefit all.
Typically excellent piece from @dsquareddigest The exponential insight is especially neat. Think of it a little like fishing...today you can’t export oysters to the EU (because you simply aren’t allowed to), tomorrow you don’t have a fish exporting business (to the EU).


The extremely small minority of people who known anything about this who think that Brexit will be good for the City make a number of arguments which I shall address in turn...

1. They need us more than we need them. This is a variant of the German carmakers argument. And we know how that went...Business will follow the profit opportunity and if that has moved then so will the business...

And what do we mean by us / we. We’re not talking about massed ranks of Euro investing / trading etc blue blooded British institutions.

Au contraire. We’re talking about the London based subs of US, Asian and indeed European capital markets players...As soon as they think the profit opportunity has moved then so will they...it’s a market innit...

More from Brexit

Brexit also brings UK pork sector to standstill. Surprise eh? @RichardAENorth 🙄
UK pork processors are experiencing significant issues in exporting products to the EU, which has already brought part of the industry to a complete standstill, risking knock-on impacts on farm.


The widely seen footage of overzealous Dutch (*my edit: "no they were not"*) inspection officials confiscating ham sandwiches transported by British hauliers is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the UK pig sector is concerned.
The NPA’s processor members have reported that

excessive (*my edit: only for non-EU members*) bureaucracy associated with paperwork requirements are causing delays at Dover, Calais and other ports. With pork being a perishable product, these delays are making UK shipments unattractive to buyers in the EU, forcing processors

to reject shipments and cancel future orders.
Despite the trade deal agreed between the EU & UK just before Christmas, the UK’s formal departure from the EU Customs Union and Single Market was always going to mean additional checks, new labelling and certification requirements

and delays at ports. While the full overall impact of the new rules is yet to be felt, as UK export volumes remain lower than normal for the time of year, the UK pig sector is already feeling the effect. Processors have reported a number of issues, including:
This very short article by Jeremy Cliffe is the best thing I have ever read on Brexit and the EU. It pivots on the contrast between Delors’ and Thatcher’s authentically provincial Christian visions and suggests the battle in Britain between the two is not over.


Thatcher: Protestant believer in the totally free market and absolutely sovereign centralised nation state. Delors: Catholic believer in third way personalism, corporatism and federalism. Individualism versus relational love. Heterodoxy versus Orthodoxy.

The article useful gives the lie to the idea that the Catholic vision of the EU has altogether vanished even though it is weakened. Delors wanted a social dimension to the free market and single currency and yet lexiteers laughably insist the EU is more neoliberal than the U.K.!

Subsidiary federalism is a doctrine of democracy and human fraternity. State sovereignty is a doctrine of naked power. It is a face of Antichrist. Leviathan.

Those combined that democracy can only be inside a single state fail to power just how much of private law and evermore so is necessarily international. Thus if political institutions don’t extend over borders there can be no democracy.

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Following @BAUDEGS I have experienced hateful and propagandist tweets time after time. I have been shocked that an academic community would be so reckless with their publications. So I did some research.
The question is:
Is this an official account for Bahcesehir Uni (Bau)?


Bahcesehir Uni, BAU has an official website
https://t.co/ztzX6uj34V which links to their social media, leading to their Twitter account @Bahcesehir

BAU’s official Twitter account


BAU has many departments, which all have separate accounts. Nowhere among them did I find @BAUDEGS
@BAUOrganization @ApplyBAU @adayBAU @BAUAlumniCenter @bahcesehirfbe @baufens @CyprusBau @bauiisbf @bauglobal @bahcesehirebe @BAUintBatumi @BAUiletisim @BAUSaglik @bauebf @TIPBAU

Nowhere among them was @BAUDEGS to find