Friday, November 16, 2018

The Absolutely Mad Proposed Brexit Agreement

By Robert Wenzel

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May has reached a proposed agreement with the European Union on Brexit. It is 585 pages long and maintains a £39 billion ($50.7 billion) so-called "divorce bill."

It is causing an uproar throughout the United Kingdom.

Two of the Prime Minister's top cabinet members have quit her government, Dominic Raab, her chief negotiator on withdrawal from the European Union and Esther McVey, the work and pensions secretary. Two junior members also resigned.

The British pound has fallen on foreign exchange markets amidst the turmoil.


Presenting a calm exterior, May addressed the House of Commons and said in defending the proposed agreement:
What we agreed yesterday was not the final deal. It is a draft treaty that means that we will leave the E.U. in a smooth and orderly way on the 29th of March, 2019, and which sets the framework for a future relationship that delivers in our national interest.
But that is part of the problem. The draft has more ambiguous loopholes than an American team of crony lobbyists would be able to put together in the months she had to put together a deal. It is a framework for serious problems down the road. It, in fact, may be a worse deal than the UK just remaining.

Consider that a part of the agreement makes it more difficult for Britain to leave the EU under certain circumstances. Yes, more difficult! Listen to this summary of the deal by Sky News:



So the pro-Brexit people have plenty of reason to be upset, and they are. They want May gone:



But even the remainers are unhappy with the deal.

The New York Times reports:
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, called Mrs. May’s agreement “a leap in the dark, an ill-defined deal by a never-defined date.”...

“Parliament cannot, and I believe will not,” accept the arrangement, he added.

That view was echoed by Ian Blackford, a lawmaker from the Scottish National Party, who said the prime minister was “trying to sell us a deal that is already dead in the water.”...
The lack of support for the agreement from lawmakers in both major parties had kept the pound down. “What we need to see is ministers who have not resigned come out and back the deal,” said Jordan Rochester, a foreign exchange strategist at Nomura Securities. “It’s not the P.R. campaign we’ve expected.”
The entire Brexit thing has always struck me as a very mixed deal. It is one thing to get from under the thumb of the ever-expanding EU cultural Marxist laws and regulations but it strikes me that in the pro-Brexit crowd you have anti-trade operators who would like to see Brexit go well beyond a desire to escape the social justice trend of the EU. It seems their desire would be to significantly restrict trade with the EU as part of Brexit, in a type of confused Trump-style mercantilism.

The May deal just makes it all worse. It makes more things ambiguous from almost all directions. And ambiguity is where the cronies like to lurk.

A libertarian designed Brexit would reject the European Court of Justice but keep trade open.

It's really quite simple.

End connections to EU courts, tell the EU to forget about a £39 billion divorce bill and open all trade to all member countries of the EU. And declare Brexit!


Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of






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