Quote:
Originally Posted by nomadking
They are LOCAL issues, not national ones. Just as in the US, individual states cannot pass laws in certain areas, they are done at Federal level.
A trade deal with the EU should've been easy, if it wasn't for the Remain side sabotaging it by giving the impression that the UK would give in to whatever the EU demanded. "No deal" would be bad for the EU, but they are constantly given the impression that one way or another that a "bad deal" (as far the UK is concerned), will be the final result.
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We've spent the last two years not negotiating a trade deal but faffing around with a withdrawal agreement. As I understand it, we could have negotiated a trade deal in this time so that when we left on 29 March, we would have a trade deal with the EU and some deals across the world ready to sign at the annointed hour.
I genuinely think it would have been easier if everyone had acknowledged that the Irish border was a genuine issue, did not come up with daft red lines and we spent more than the four days a year that David Davis did on negotiations!
We came up with a whole bunch of red lines, ignored the Irish border hoping it would either go away and magically hoped everything would sort itself out.
But let's not pretend that trade deals are a simple matter of cut and pasting UK in place of EU. As Simon Jacks, the BBC's Business Editor notes, "For products to enjoy preferential terms under a trade deal, there is a requirement for them to be predominantly made of components from that country. In the trade deal the EU has with South Korea, 55% of the car components must be from the EU.
If the same test was applied to the UK as a stand-alone country, none of the cars manufactured here would pass a test requiring 55% of components to come from the UK."
That's not Project Fear. It's reality.