Mr Juncker suggested that this timetable was "too optimistic", pulling out of his bag "two piles of paper" - Croatia's EU entry deal and Canada's free trade deal - to highlight how complex talks are likely to become.
Of course, what these 'piles of paper' really demonstrates is the utter failure of bureaucrats like Juncker. That is these 'piles of paper' are clear demonstrations as to how, if you put bureaucrats in charge of anything, their incentives are entirely satisfied by the own self serving self interest to string the job out and create lots of pointless rules and regulations.
I estimate that you could probably draft an entirely suitable 'free trade agreement' (an oxymoron in itself) on about 8 pages of A4, double spaced 12pt Arial.
17 comments:
It follows directly from their having a legal system based on the idea that everything is illegal unless the State expressly permits it. The whole concept of a Free Trade anything is anathema to them; unregulated and therefore by definition, a nightmare.
How much paper does it take to write: "We won't charge tariffs on imports of your goods and services. We hope you won't charge any on our exports to you, but if you do we hope you'll recall that we buy £60 billion a year more from you than you from us, and furthermore we're free if we wish to reduce corporate taxes to whatever we like.
And we've been wondering about the number of German cars on our roads. They're so common these days; they must be too cheap. Capisce?"
Yours sincerely
etc
L, I agree.
FT, I very much agree!
We signed an agreement which made it quite clear that disengagement was difficult as it affected the interests of 27 other countries all with an effective veto.
We have to negotiate with the situation that now obtains, not say that we prefer to negotiate with a simpler set of arrangements .
Theresa May, by trying to enlist UKIP and other far right anti-immigrants,and taking this aggressive plucky Britain stance, has doomed her diplomatic efforts ,and us, before she starts.
There is far too much romantic yearning for the simpler days of Victorian laissez faire.Harold Macmillan gave his "You've never had it so good speech" following real wages increases of 20%, in 1957 when we had a full range of nationalised industries,collective bargaining,resale price maintenance and Neddies where the unions talked things over directly with the employers.Within six years Modernising Tories had started junking the lot, claiming to be simplifying the system and ridding it of bureaucracy leading to Thatcher and State violence and bribing the electorate with property owning democracy.
They have now dropped this and are getting us chucked out of the EU. Well done Snowflakes!
FT. Yep. One of my primary reasons for voting out was the fundamental philosophical difference between the UK Common Law tradition and the EU Roman Law tradition. these are incompatible.
Our tradition is broadly summed up as 'don't kill people, don't steal their stuff, take your personal responsibilities seriously. Off you go'.
The EU nations tradition is 'here is a big list of stuff that you can do. If it's not on that list you can't do it'. This by its very nature creates the opportunity for bureaucrats to reign. Essentially you have bureaucrats setting rules. Whereas what you need for an orderly and peaceful society is rules for bureaucrats. Not by them.
DBCR. You really have a distorted view of history. MacMillan's policies and those that came before and after him set the seal on the decline of the UK from 1945. You also ignore that the Unions' agenda was never industrial. It was always political.
And under international law it is accepted that any nation can renounce any treaty at any time. I fully accepted that the EU would be un-negotiable-with when voting to Leave as it is a morally bankrupt crony corporatist bureaucratic racket. And its bureaucrats in the European Commission, who have the most to lose by us leaving and being successful, will do all they can to make us fail. I always thought they were nasty and vindictive and devious, and so they are proving.
The lesson that they have not learned from history is to 'never go a bear on the UK'.
That there is a Canada free trade deal illustrates that free trade can be agreed between a non EU country and the EU consisting of terms that pertain only to trade.
> formentory
having read some free trade deals its astonishing how detailed some have been. Down to the level of defining where the raw materials are to be sourced for the imported final product.
Rather than free trade agreement its more like prescribed trade LOL!
Actualy "trade deal" is a better terminology than free trade deal.
D. Correct. A 'free trade deal' is an oxymoron.
IMHO the main point of 'negotiating' a 'free trade deal' is to keep bureaucrats in work, (a) during extended negotiations and drafting and (b) in enforcing it thereafter.
Lola
One of my primary reasons for voting out was the fundamental philosophical difference between the UK Common Law tradition and the EU Roman Law tradition. these are incompatible.
That was exactly my principal reason for voting out, combined with a belief that because they're incompatible and membership obliges us to work with their rules, our Common Law tradition wouldn't have lasted long. I couldn't give a monkey's fart about most EU migration - I'm a helluva sight more worried about immigration from other parts of the world which will irrevocably and irreversibly change (have changed?) our relatively civilised society for the worse.
The half-way option of a Norway / Iceland style EEA is no good to man nor beast because the treaties oblige acceptance of EU law in key areas and lay down a zillion conditions in return for the agreement.
Trade deals, as Dinero describes them, are nothing more than the manner in which politicians and industrialists conspire to bribe each other and protect their entrenched interests. A bit like "International Aid" is just State-level bribery of politicians and industrialists dressed up to look as though it isn't.
FT. Seconded.
The more Alf Garnett rants we get about bureaucrats interfering in the beneficent natural order, then the less likely it will be that we will ever effect a change to LVT, this being an interference in the God-given rights of property ownership, that the most cunning radicals(present company included) have not been able to dress up as a blessing at first glance (which is all the idea ever gets).
Having been chased up and down the street by Mosleyite Blackshirts re-badged as the Union (with Europe) Movement, I feel justified in quoting Sir Oz himself in his critique of international trade without checks and balances "A home market of 300 million people will be large enough for all requirements of industry, as well as being secure from dumping,under-cutting, cheap labour competition etc."
Personally I hope Silly May gets her big majority so she has to clear up the mess her Conservative simpletons have created since Macmillan.
None of the Labour Party's responsibility.
Bureaucrats believe that, if only you get enough detail into the regulation, trade deal, legislation etc, then you will catch out all the bad guys and the kingdom of heaven will be recreated on earth. I know this from personal experience, in that I was once a very minor form of bureaucratic life. One day I realised that almost nobody reads the regulations, trade deals, legislation etc so it really doesn't matter what you put in there, you're just wasting your time.
DBCR, what you and most of the Bremainers appear to fail to understand is that very few leavers actually want to leave the EU free trade area. Most don't give a damn about EU migrants either. What they want to leave is almost everything else to do with the EU, especially its avowed purpose to become the United States of Europe.
@B The idea that the Beleavers don't want to leave the single market and or can abide immigrants shows no congruence with their observable behaviour.
For all the hippy fantasy that we can dance on the beach and the world markets will be kind to us, the spectre of " dumping, undercutting, cheap labour competition" raised by Mosley is present in the frantic efforts of Trump to build a wall against Mexico and his railing against China for undercutting American industry.
Beleaving in Tinkerbell is not going to make cheap labour go away.
Beleaving in Tinkerbell is not going to make cheap labour go away.
Oh, DBCR. You haven't been reading your Bastiat, have you? Naughty little fantasist.
DBCR. There ain't nothing wrong with 'cheap labour'. That's good in and of itself. It's the price system working. And the vast bulk of 'cheap labour' becomes more expensive labour as it gets (a) better at what it does and (b) become more productive - i.e. gets more capital to work with.
The problem as we all know, is that as labour gets better and more productive more of its rewards get swallowed up by rents, that is private rents and public rents - taxes.
DBCR.
You are ignoring bad money. The root of most of the evils we see today. Fiat money has just ends up as rents of one sort or another.
Trump may rail against China but it's largely a fiat Dollar hegemony problem.
"The idea that the Beleavers don't want to leave the single market and or can abide immigrants shows no congruence with their observable behaviour. "
DBCR, have you been believing what the news media tell you? How many Beleavers have you personally observed?
Generally, my impression is that only those with a strongly held opinion can be arsed to get that opinion out there. This means that almost 100% of what you read in the news media or on the internet is biased. If it didn't represent someone's opinion, i.e. reflect their biases, then it wouldn't be there. No-one goes to the trouble of getting into print, running a website or a blog, or even comment on the internet, simply to say "whatever, I don't have an opinion on the matter".
How many times have you seen a headline like "Immigrant family are hard-working homeowners and supporters of their local cricket team" or "School kids from sink estate found to be polite and well spoken" or, indeed, "Man who voted for Brexit says he "doesn't give a damn" about immigration"? Never, I expect. That sort of thing, along with "Dog bites man", just isn't news.
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