Handy guide for Dominic Raab and other Brexiteers, and for anyone keen to replace our EU trade with trade with the rest of the world on WTO terms...

Here we go. The final Brexit debate begins. The final splash of petrol on the dumpster fire before the match is lit at 11pm tomorrow night.

Boris Johnson deliberately mocks the SNP by calling them the Scottish Nationalist Party, despite being admonished by the Speaker. There speaks a man who doesn't give an itty bitty toss.

Boris Johnson: "Just as we've avoided trade barriers"

What? Ah, it's because he carefully defined them as "tariffs and quotas" just before lying about them.

There will be massive, massive non-tariff barries.

He's dodging the question about fishing and Northern Ireland, wriggling like one of those eels the EU won't be buying any more.

Boris Johnson is bigging up the speed with which the UK managed to reach a trade deal.

But a trade deal that favours the interests of your counterpart while securing almost none of your own *should* be a quick process. Biting your hand off takes no time at all!

A few thoughts in advance of seeing the Brexit deal, assuming it's not scuppered at the last.

1. It will save industries, in the short term. For all the problems it *won't* solve, there is at least that. Tariffs would have finished off some sectors like switching off a light.

2. Expect a lot of confusion (through ignorance, and deliberate obfuscation by certain segments of the media) between free trade and frictionless trade. Trade that is free can still come with plenty of friction. Those extra £billions in customs paperwork won't go away.

3. There may be a standstill or implementation period. If there is, that will be helpful because it will let us get further down the road of vaccinating against the coronavirus, and resolving one crisis before plunging into the rest.

4. Any standstill will trigger a huge wave of "you told us scary things would happen, but they didn't." If you're counting along, it will be the 3rd such wave. First was during the negotiations while we were still EU members. Second during transition when EU rules still applied.

5. Those are just words. But the damage to the economy is real. So a standstill remains preferable, though teeth may have to remain gritted a while longer as a result.

6. Expect a few positive surprises. (Not compared to EU membership, but to what would otherwise have been.)

Here's how the UK's situation will change after the transition period ends, compared to our former EU membership...

(Come back to this thread. It will keep growing!)

- UK can negotiate its own trade deals
- No more automatic participation in new trade deals reached by the EU

- UK gets to keep fish equivalent to 25% of the catch EU boats previously caught in UK waters, staggered over 5.5 years
- Costly export health certificates for fishery products
- Inbound and outbound customs and regulatory checks (UK side will defer some of these temporarily)

- Stringent rules of origin and local content requirements
- Loss of freedom of movement for UK citizens in the EU and EU citizens in the UK (Ireland excepted)
- No Erasmus programme
- No equivalence decision for financial services

- A border down the Irish sea between NI & GB
- No access to the Galileo military
- Temporary agreement on data, which expires in 6 months
- 2 parallel trademark systems, requiring firms to file twice in the UK and the EU

- 2 parallel product conformity assessment systems (CE and UKCA), requiring firms to file twice in the UK and the EU. One year grace period (with exceptions).
- 2 parallel chemical regulatory systems (REACH and UK REACH), requiring firms to register twice in the UK and the EU

THREAD: Here are the essential points from the EU's time-limited, limited effect no-deal Brexit mitigation offer.

(Most concessions are unilateral measures it will implement. Some require UK cooperation - not clear what happens if we refuse to do

Air travel
"Unless there is a contingency measure in place on air transport at the end of the transition period, air traffic between the EU and the United Kingdom will be interrupted."

The EU is proposing 6 months of reciprocal concessions to keep (most) planes flying.

However, they're not offering any concessions on airline ownership requirements, so BA for one may come unstuck here (depending on how its restructured shareholding is going). Its message: you already had plenty of time to prepare, including a grace period.

Road transport

A) Haulage
With no agreement, hauliers would have to use ECMT permits to provide any freight transport between the UK and the EU. But there aren't nearly enough of those to go around. So they're giving a basic grace period of 6 months, as long as we reciprocate.

B) Bus services
"Furthermore, in the absence of an agreement on a future partnership between the EU and the United Kingdom by 1 January 2021, regular bus services to and from the United
Kingdom would have to be interrupted"

Here too, offer is 6 months of continued connectivity.

UK Government just released 70 pages of case studies today, showing how the borders will operate after 1 January 2021.

They're essentially hardcore porn for red tape fetishists.

Doomed, we are. Doomed.

(e.g. exporting fish; exporting mechanical goods)
https://t.co/zWpkdGJeim

This is exactly what should have been presented years ago so that firms could prepare.

Or, arguably, before the Brexit referendum. Just the 70 pages of case studies released TODAY could have tipped the result the other way. Not everyone is blinded by sovrinty & hating forrins.

Going back to the examples...

The person in France buying (say) UK mechanical goods will take one look at the procedures involved, and Google an alternative supplier inside the EU instead.

As for the fish, they could probably swim to their intended destination faster of their own accord than following the new process, if only they had water in between to traverse.

The purchasers will smell them coming a mile away.

Auto parts. I am practically weeping at my keyboard.

Let's track some of Donald Trump's solutions to problems: Give Hurricane victims paper towels (to sop it up), rakes to wildfire fighters (make America rake again), teaching kids to look at solar eclipses (they're too smart for that), and asking for global warming in cold winters.

This is the perfect asymptotic approach to the extremes of both Republican and Democratic rhetoric (which are both inevitably devoid of any sound logic) - you eventually get presidents like this. This is a warning call to dissolve the Republican and Democratic parties.

It seems to me our nation is now tossed between two insane extremes, bickering and arguing with each other, embodied in the Republican and Democratic parties. When you get extremist politicians who adhere fully to broken logic and rhetoric, our future is laid waste.

New parties must emerge soon. For fun, I propose a new party : "Uniters" and call the other parties "Dividers" (Republicans and Democrats). We can say that the Uniters believe in uniting people rather than dividing people.

That implies that one 'dominant' world view cannot prevail (including the illusion that we are in fact a set of states United right now) - we have to work and labor hard together to fulfill the promise the founders sought to build this country upon.

1. Juan O’Savin for verifying this. “Plane crashes are targeted kills.”

Here is a brief summary for those who may not be familiar with Kennedy History: