• Remember when a big, beautiful trade deal – the best deal – with the United States was going to make the United Kingdom forget all about the European Union? Well, shockingly, negotiations with Donald Trump are off to a bumpy start.
FT reported that Trump went all “apoplectic” on Boris Johnson in a call over Johnson’s decision to include China-based Huawei in building out Britain’s 5G infrastructure.
The US also wants to force the UK to lower its food standards to allow in chlorine-washed chicken and hormone-produced beef from the States. Lowering food standards is one of the few things that could united left and right in the UK in opposition.
Axios has the best summary of all the issues complicating “the special relationship” the UK needs so desperately to leverage against the EU.
• Dutch immigration authorities are tracking a trend – more Brits are moving to the Netherlands while the flow of Dutch people to the United Kingdom is drying up.
In 2019, about 6,700 native British people relocated to the Netherlands, a 60-percent increase over 2015, the last pre-Brexit year, according to Statistics Netherlands, the government’s statistics bureau. By comparison, In 2019, about 2,600 native Dutch people emigrated to the UK, the smallest number in 20 years.
• Foreign Policy has an outstanding post titled “Brexit is Fake News.” In it, Chris Miller contends that Brexit never really happened, nor will it ever happen because the United Kingdom is inextricably bound to – and economically subservient to – the European Union and its enormous single market.
From the post:
Brexiteers will describe this as betrayal, but it is especially good news for them. They can keep blaming everything that goes wrong on Brussels. It will feel almost as if Britain never actually left.
Miller is an assistant professor at the Fletcher School, the Eurasia director at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and the author of “Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia.”
Finally, negotiations have to wrap by 26 November to give the European Commission time to debate and discuss the final agreements on an EU/UK trade deal.
If the UK or the EU walks away from the table, the UK ends up in the World Trade Organization, looking at higher tariffs with the EU in some industries than the UK had as an EU member state.
The UK has 11 months to work out a long list of agreements with the EU and other trading partners including:
• trade
• the final details on the Ireland/Northern Ireland border
• immigration
• fishing
• university research programs
• security and intelligence
• environmental protection rules
• data sharing & communications
• Transition talks toward new treaties seem to be over before they start. Boris Johnson has said there’s “no need” for Britain to adhere to any of the EU regulations … and by the way, the UK demands zero tariffs and zero quotas on exports. Johnson doubled down on his position saying the UK will walk away from negotiations if there’s even a hint from Brussels that it will have to align with EU rules on anything.
Ursula von der Leyen and chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier counter that the more business the UK wants to do with the giant EU, the more of its rules it will have to follow.
All preliminary posturing before negotiations get real? Probably.
• As for her part in this Kabuki dance, von der Leyen is going out of her way to tell a certain former EU member that life outside the single market is going to suck. Suck real bad.
The European Commission president said on Brexit Day that “access to the European Single Market — the largest single market in the world — will become more difficult for our British friends,” according to Politico.
As we’ve noted since 2016, divorces are always ugly.
