Theresa May's fantasy of a quickfire EU-UK trade deal lies in ruins

The EU's draft resolution on Brexit negotiations delivers several massive hammer blows to Theresa May's fantasy of a quickfire EU-UK partial free trade deal.

Theresa May's impossible fantasy

When Theresa May outlined her "negotiating tactics" in her January 2017 clown costume speech the hard-right press pack responded with glee at her diplomatically inept threat-based posturing, but anyone with a few brain cells to rub together realised with horror that she was slow-marching the UK towards a catastrophic "no deal" strop.

What she did was outline an ridiculously impossible fantasy of what she expects from the EU and then threatened that if she doesn't get it she'll take the nuclear option of stropping away from the negotiating table with no deal whatever.

A lose-lose situation

For ordinary people this negotiating stance was always going to be a lose-lose situation.

Even if by some miracle the EU caved into Theresa May's ridiculous demands we would be stuck with a situation where major corporate sectors (finance and vehicle manufacturing were mentioned by name) get to retain access to the Single Market, while small businesses, sole traders and individual citizens are locked out of it and hit with import and export tariffs. This would leave the UK economy even more rigged in favour of gigantic multinational corporations than it already is.

Given the fantastical nature of Theresa May's demands the more likely option was always going to be a socially and economically ruinous nuclear Brexit. The London School of Economics has estimated that a retaliatory nuclear Brexit would cost the UK somewhere between 6.3% to 9.5% of GDP, which equates to (£4,200 - £6,400 per household). Anyone who thinks that sounds like an attractive option is clearly bonkers.

The hammer blows

In this section I'm going to outline just five of the most significant hammer blows to Theresa May's wildly over-optimistic fantasy of a quickfire partial free-trade deal with the EU. These are five of the most serious issues, but there are plenty more too. If you want to see more take a look at the draft EU resolution here.

Separation first, trade deal after

In her Article 50 letter Theresa May begged repeatedly for parallel negotiations so that the UK's divorce terms and post-divorce trade deal can be negotiated in unison. The draft resolution shoots this wish down in flames.

The EU have made it absolutely clear that Theresa May won't be getting any kind of quickfire trade deal before the UK has officially quit the EU. The best they're willing to offer is a three year transitional arrangement so the post-divorce trade deal can be negotiated under relatively stable conditions.

A mixed agreement

The EU's lead negotiator Michel Barnier has stated that any post-Brexit trade deal would be classified as a "mixed agreement". This is highly significant because it means that aside from requiring ratification at the European Parliament, the trade deal would also need to be ratified by the national parliaments of all 27 other member states.

Essentially every other country in Europe is going to have a national veto over any EU-UK trade deal, plus, due to the special ratification procedures in Belgium, several of their regional parliaments like Wallonia will also get a veto too.

You'd have to be spectacularly optimistic to think that the likes of Theresa May, David Davis, the disgraced Liam Fox and Boris Johnson would be able to cobble together an agreement that is both acceptable to all of the 27 remaining EU states, and also to the hard-right tabloid propaganda rags that are looking for any excuse whatever to screech for a socially and economically ruinous "no deal" nuclear Brexit.

No sectoral deals

One of Theresa May's big demands from her clown costume speech was that certain sectors of the UK economy (she mentioned banking and vehicle manufacturing specifically) should be given preferential access to the Single Market.

This fantasy lies in ruins now because the EU have clearly stated that there will be "no sectoral deals" that replicate the benefits of being in the Single Market only for certain sectors of the economy.

The EU have made it absolutely clear that they don't intend to allow Theresa May to cherry-pick special access to the Single Market for favoured corporations (those with the financial power to bribe or coerce the Tory party into representing their interests). Either everyone gets fair access or nobody does.
  No jumping the gun

In her clown costume speech Theresa May naively pinned her hopes on getting a quickfire trade deal with the United States and then soon after she went scuttling off to lick Donald Trump's boots and plead for a special US-UK trade deal in the national humiliation that was her "begging bowl" speech.

The problem here is that the EU have made it explicitly clear that if she tries to jump the gun by negotiating trade deals with other countries before the divorce settlement is finalised, the EU-UK deal is off the table.

Here's exactly what the draft resolution says:

"Should Britain seek to negotiate any free trade deals with other countries while it is still an EU member state, there will be no future discussion of a deal with the union."

If Theresa May tries to jump the gun by negotiating trade deals with other countries (such as the United States) before we've fully left the EU then she'll be completely trashing the possibility of any kind of trade deal with the EU (which accounts for well over 50% of the UK's trade in goods).

No blackmail over terrorism
  The stipulation that neither side should try to use the withdrawal of security and defence cooperation as blackmail is eerily prescient.

It just goes to show how Theresa May is perceived on the continent that the EU would bother to add a clause to prevent her from using the threat of turning a blind eye to terrorism plots as a bargaining chip in the trade negotiations.

To have explicitly ruled out such sickening blackmail tactics they obviously see her as a fanatical and dangerous hard-right extremist who would use literally any kind of threat, no matter how depraved, in order to get her own way.

Astonishingly Theresa May managed to live down to the EU's worst expectations by including the threatened withdrawal of security cooperation in her Article 50 letter.

The right-wing press reacted gleefully to Theresa May's disgusting blackmail tactics, but any Brit with a shred of human decency must surely be horrified that Theresa May is actually threatening to turn a blind eye to terrorism in order to blackmail the EU into caving into her fantastical demands.

Did Theresa May want a "no deal" nuclear Brexit all along?

The sheer incompatibility of Theresa May's fantastical expectations and what the EU have outlined in their draft resolution makes her threat of launching a mutually destructive nuclear Brexit look almost inevitable.

The Tories and the hard-right press have been indoctrinating the public for months with their "no deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric, but this has left Theresa May no room for manoeuvre whatever. Any concession she makes to the EU will be leapt upon by the hard-Brexiters and the right-wing press as proof that Britain is getting a "bad deal" so that they can demand their favoured "no deal" scenario.

At the absolute best Theresa May's "no deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric is a catastrophic failure in expectation management, but it actually seems more likely that it's a deliberate ploy to condition the public into actually believing that driving the UK economy off an economic cliff edge is the best course of action!

The quickfire cherry-picking Brexit deal that Theresa May outlined in January is never going to happen. It always was a ludicrous fantasy. The big question of course is whether Theresa May outlined such a ridiculous fantasy because she's totally delusional, or because she knew it was impossible nonsense all along and saw the making of such ludicrously unrealistic demands as part of a Tory ploy to walk away from the negotiations empty handed while pinning the blame for the ensuing social and economic catastrophe on the EU.

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How Wallonia looks set to do more democratic scrutiny of Brexit than the UK!

The Tory party have used Brexit to engineer an extraordinary anti-democratic coup. It was somewhat ironic that unelected peers in the House of Lords put up the fight in favour of democracy and parliamentary sovereignty, but their "meaningful vote" amendment to the absolute insult of a Brexit bill was defeated in the House of Commons as the Tories (assisted by UKIP, the DUP, the UUP and six appalling democracy-hating Labour Party rebels) cleared the path for Theresa May to scrap the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and set herself up as an autocrat who is beyond democratic accountability.

This defeat for democracy means that the Tory government will be able to make up the terms of Brexit as they go along, with no parliamentary scrutiny or approval whatever. Theresa May and her three incompetent Brexiteers will decide the future direction of the UK and there will be nothing that parliament can do to stop even the most brazenly self-serving of their machinations.

The Brexit situation is now utterly farcical. According to the terms of Article 50 the European Parliament will get a democratic vote on the post-Brexit agreement, but the Tories have engineered it so that the British parliament won't get a vote!

If things get complicated (which they likely will) and the post-Brexit trade deal becomes what is known as a Mixed Agreement, it won't just be the European Parliament that gets a vote, the individual national parliaments of the remaining 27 member states will all get a democratic vote on whether they agree to the terms, but the Tories have engineered it so that the UK parliament won't get a democratic vote!

If the post-Brexit deal becomes a Mixed Agreement it won't just be the national parliaments of the 27 remaining member states that get a vote either, the ratification procedures of Belgium include giving their regional parliaments a veto on the deal. This means that if the post-Brexit deal becomes a Mixed Agreement the Belgian regional parliament of Wallonia will get a democratic vote on it, but the UK parliament won't!

If the EU fail to cave into Theresa May's ludicrous threat-based posturing to fulfil her ridiculous list of demands for special favours for her corporate mates, there's the chance that she will launch a retaliatory and mutually ruinous "nuclear Brexit", and there will be no democratic means available for parliament to stop her doing it.

The only way for this anti-democratic Tory power-grab to be stopped now will be through the courts. However if the courts do decide to reassert that parliament is sovereign, we can be absolutely sure that whoever brings the case will be inundated with rape threats and death threats by the Brexit mob, and the pro-democracy judges will be declared "enemies of the people" again by extreme-right propaganda rags like the S*n, Daily Mail and Express.

The Tories have voted to scrap the principle of parliamentary sovereignty in favour of giving Theresa May authority to do whatever she likes free of any kind of democratic scrutiny. There's absolutely no way that such an anti-democratic power grab could be achieved within the framework of the EU. It's only by quitting the EU that such anti-democratic Tory extremism has been enabled.

It's becoming ever clearer that the European Union is actually very much more democratic than Tory Brexit Britain, and that Brexit was just an excuse for an anti-democratic Tory power-grab to free them from the democratic constraints of parliamentary scrutiny and approval. This anti-democratic Tory scheming makes me wonder how all of the people who voted for Brexit because of issues like "democracy" and "parliamentary sovereignty" are taking this.

I guess the most likely option is total denial, because for Brexit voters to accept this anti-democratic coup for what it is, would mean them accepting that they've been duped into signing a blank contract with the hard-right fringe of the Tory party, and we all know that people have a tendency to prefer the comfort of denial rather than taking the huge self-esteem hit of admitting to themselves that they've been played like gullible fools.

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Do Brexiters love sinister corporate power grabs or not?

I'm pretty sure we all remember how Brexiters chose to fearmonger about TTIP in order to sell the case for Brexit. The argument against the TTIP corporate power grab is a very strong one, so it's no wonder Brexiters jumped on the anti-TTIP bandwagon.

One of the worst aspects of TTIP is the inclusion of sovereignty destroying ISDS components that would allow multinational corporations to completely bypass the democratic and judicial systems of any countries that have signed up to it in order to sue governments in secretive transnational tribunals. This means that if any democratic government introduces new legislation that multinational corporations don't like (plain packaging on cigarette packs, environmental protection laws, product safety standards, consumer rights, improved workers' rights ...) then the multinational corporations could extract £billions in compensation from the taxpayer in secretive transnational tribunals operated by a tiny band of extremely highly paid, mainly US based, corporate lawyers and arbiters.

It didn't matter how many times people like me pointed out that although TTIP is a very bad idea, it would have to be approved by every national government in the EU before it could be implemented. It didn't matter that we pointed out that the Greek government had already sworn to veto it. It didn't matter that we pointed out that the left-leaning governments in Portugal and France would be extremely unlikely to endorse it either. It didn't matter that we pointed out the massive scale of pan-European opposition to TTIP ... it was a fabulous anti-EU attack point for the Brexiters to use, and they did in their thousands.

Brexiters opportunistically jumped onto the anti-TTIP bandwagon despite the fact that the Brexit movement was driven by hard-right fanatics like Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, John Redwood and Iain Duncan Smith who would just love to see British sovereignty completely over-written by a corporate take-over charter like TTIP. Before the Brexit vote the Tory party was one of the biggest cheerleaders for TTIP in the whole of the EU. Boris Johnson even wrote articles lavishing TTIP with praise and savagely condemning anyone who dared to criticise any aspect of it!

It should have been absolutely clear to any anti-TTIP Brexiter that handing even more power to the hard-right fringe of the Tory party by voting for Brexit would give them a perfect opportunity to ram through hard-right corporate power grabs to make TTIP look like a walk in the park, and without any democratic avenues to fight back against it either. Sadly lots of Brexiters just bought into the anti-EU rhetoric and chose to believe that that people like Boris Johnson (who so loved the idea of TTIP until a few weeks before his Brexit conversion) are genuinely concerned about protecting British sovereignty and "taking back control"!

Fast forward a few months and the adoption of another EU transnational corporate power grab called CETA is being stalled by three regional governments in Belgium. Three of the six Belgian federal parliaments have objected to this deal with Canada (the Wallonia region, the Brussels-Capital region, and the French community) so Belgium will not be able to sign up to it.

This deal between the EU and Canada contains exactly the same kind of shady ISDS tribunals as TTIP. It's precisely these sovereignty destroying ISDS components that are the main objection of Belgian politicians like Paul Magnette who have led the opposition to CETA.

The reaction from Brexiters has been comically hypocritical. They're now trying to claim that the CETA is a great thing and that the EU is a basket case for allowing regional democratic parliaments to obstruct this supposedly marvellous deal!

Before the referendum it was pretty much impossible to find a Brexiter who would argue in favour of TTIP because criticising TTIP conformed with their anti-EU agenda. Just a few months later it's pretty much impossible to find a Brexiter who will admit that CETA is exactly the same kind of sovereignty destroying corporate power grab as TTIP. Additionally the facts that regional parliaments in Belgium can obstruct it, and that all national governments will have a veto on its implementation are suddenly signs that the EU is "utterly dysfunctional", not conclusive proof that the EU isn't half as anti-democratic as the Brexiters were shrieking a few months ago.

What the hell do these Brexiters want? A few months ago they were telling us that corporate power grabs were evil and unacceptable attacks on our democratic sovereignty in order to push their anti-EU agenda. Now they're telling us that giant corporate power grabs are the absolute bees knees and the EU is a totally dysfanctional basket case because individual member states and federal regions can assert their democratic sovereignty to obstruct them!

Either the EU is a giant anti-democratic behemoth which imposes sinister corporate power grabs against member states' wills, or it's a democratic organisation that allows member states to obstruct wonderful, amazing. brilliant, marvellous corporate power grabs. It just can't be both.

It seems to boil down to this. If progress towards a massive corporate power grab can be used to attack the EU, then hoards of Brexiters will do it ... but if the democratic obstruction of another massive corporate power grab by Belgian regional parliaments can be used to attack the EU, then hoards of Brexiters will do that too.

The double dose of hypocrisy is absolutely searing. Before the referendum Brexiters told us that corporate power grabs are terrible, but now they're out in force to describe CETA as the bees knees, and before the referendum they wouldn't shut up about the importance of democracy and national sovereignty, but now that Belgium is asserting its democratic sovereignty within the EU they're shrieking "dysfunctional", "basket case", "red tape nightmare", "the EU is broken" ...

This multi-layered Brexiter hypocrisy is a perfect illustration of the blinkered and anti-intellectual ideological puritanism that is toxifying British politics. Screw the facts, screw the politics, screw the economic indicators, screw the experts, screw the evidence, screw rational consideration, screw ideological consistency, screw the consequences ... As far as millions of people are now concerned the EU is pure evil and they are determined to attack it from every angle, no matter how utterly hypocritical they make their cause look in the process.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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