[Ignitionnet]

If you believe Liam Fox and his nonsense he saw fit to spout to the WTO it'll all be fine.

“We have our own schedules that we currently share with the rest of the EU. These set out our national commitments in the international trading system.”

Nonsense. Schedules set out tariff and subsidy arrangements. We have no schedule of our own as we're inside the EU's customs union. We would have to propose a provisional schedule of tariffs and subsidies and any WTO member could object.

Fox and the rest of the Brexit trio are fixated and obsessed with the idea of hard Brexit, and to hell with the downsides and details.

Clearly they've been drinking in the Lawyers for Britain experts' unbiased advice.

Perhaps not quite completely believing it as he also said:

“The UK will continue to uphold these commitments when we leave the European Union.”

“There will be no legal vacuum.”

Stealing another's words:

This is potentially revealing. I say potentially because it's possible Fox simply has no idea what he's talking about and everything he says must be discounted.

The quickest and easiest way for us to write up some provisional schedules is to exactly replicate all the arrangements we have under the EU. That means that tariffs stay the same, the tariff rate quotas are worked out on the basis of the last three years’ trade flows and subsidies stay the same. This is invariably what we’ll do, because it’s the only way not to get into all sorts of complex wrangling with all the other member states.

But note what that means: Nothing changes. All that talk of taking back control during the referendum was illusionary. We will keep things exactly as they are, because that’s the only way to make the journey from the single market to WTO rules even vaguely doable. We're not taking back control. We are desperately trying to make a massive and perilous change in our economic arrangements without triggering huge job losses. And that means that we will copy whatever our EU arrangements were and paste them onto the WTO schedules.

But even that approach, which betrays all the rhetoric of the Brexit campaign, doesn't solve all the problems. Take rules against steel dumping, which protect our workers from competition from China. We’re obviously going to want to maintain those but the Chinese aren’t going to be having any of it. They’ll fight us on it, demanding that we demonstrate domestic injury and unfair trade. And at the moment we can’t fight back, because we don’t have an investigating authority capable of dealing with trade remedy measures. So even in this cheeriest of all possible worlds, we’ve got some major problems on our hands.

Although the comment about the lack of a legal vacuum makes you wonder.

Fox is wrong here. It’s not that there’ll be a legal vacuum in the future. There’s a legal vacuum now. There are no WTO rules on what we’d be doing if we revert to their system.

There are rules on becoming a member, but we already are. There are rules on modifying a schedule, but we don’t have one. That’s why the WTO’s lawyers are bickering over what our status is and how to proceed.

This is ridiculous. We need solid negotiations, with an ambitious plan tempered by pragmatism. All these guys have offered so far is the exact same thing they offered during the referendum campaign: dogmatism.

In between that you have Boris Johnson, having suddenly changed his mind about hordes of Turks invading the UK having joined the EU regardless of our objections (we had a hard veto that had absolutely no mechanism to be worked around) insisting that the UK would support Turkey's accession to the EU. This after the ongoing, brutal crackdown on freedom of the press, any objection to Erdogan's rule and basic civil liberties.

For those few people who hadn't yet grasped that Boris is a weak, vapid hypocrite with little moral code or principle obsessed with his own career and nothing else this should make it abundantly clear.

This is not good for Britain, regardless of whether you are a 'Brexiteer' or a 'Remoaner'. How did we end up with politics going so low that the most important constitutional change in recent history is in the hands of these three, while the opposition are torn between trying to emulate UKIP and trying to emulate the Socialist Workers' Party?

This has been a general rant against the abysmal quality of the politicians we have representing us and the lies they were happy to tell to try and convince us to vote as they wanted us to for their own self-interest. They'll still have their subsidised Westminster bar and expenses, as always if things go boobies up it'll be the poor who suffer first.

---------- Post added at 14:08 ---------- Previous post was at 13:40 ----------

Unsure if people can read it as it's behind a paywall but this is interesting.

https://www.ft.com/content/5763950a-...#axzz4LTssqwly

Acknowledgement that the EU can and should be improved, along with a plan to do it.

Sarkozy vows to offer UK exit from Brexit if he wins French poll

Former president plans revised EU treaty that could persuade Britain to remain in bloc

Nicolas Sarkozy would offer Britain a chance to reverse its Brexit vote by negotiating a new treaty for the bloc with Germany immediately after winning back the French presidency next year, he said on Tuesday

Speaking to business leaders in Paris, the former French president said that if elected, he would fly to Berlin with a draft of new EU treaty the day after the second ballot of the presidential election to secure the support of German chancellor Angela Merkel. On May 8, the day after, he would travel to London.

“I would tell the British, you’ve gone out, but we have a new treaty on the table so you have an opportunity to vote again,” Mr Sarkozy said. “But this time not on the old Europe, on the new Europe. Do you want to stay? If yes, so much the better. Because I can’t accept to lose Europe’s second-largest economy while we are negotiating with Turkey over its EU membership. And if it’s no, then it’s a real no. You’re in or you’re out.”