I love the way Boris is assuring his European colleagues they have nothing to worry about.

Irony!

Thinskin

 

Overpaid BoJo et al!



Thinskin

 

There is a certain Brexit irony to the Germans flying in 80 tonnes of food too the UK!

Lufthansa flies 80 tonnes of fresh food to UK amid shortage fears
German carrier delivers fruit and vegetables as border issues persist despite end of French blockade

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...fears-fruit-vegetables-border-french-blockade

Thinskin

 

Bluff and brinksmanship: How Britain got a Brexit trade deal done

BRUSSELS/LONDON (Reuters) – As trade talks with the United Kingdom ground to deadlock on Dec. 9, one European Union official summed up the mood in Brussels, writing in a memo: “The Brits … are taking us for a ride, we must remain firm.”

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had just met for dinner in the Berlaymont building, the headquarters of the 27-nation EU’s executive in Brussels, and failed to resolve blockages on fisheries and competition policy.

Even though those differences and many others were resolved on Thursday with a deal to avert a ‘cliff-edge’ rupture to a $900 billion trade relationship, the pattern of mutual mistrust highlighted by the memo, seen by Reuters, remains.

That mistrust is likely to bedevil future relations as the UK and the EU address a huge slate of unfinished business ranging from trade in services to cooperation on criminal matters and security.

“Unfortunately, trust is not something that will come overnight,” said a senior EU diplomat based in Brussels.

The economic consequences of Britain’s acrimonious break from its historic European allies will be painfully evident – but the geostrategic implications will arguably be even greater.

For one of Europe’s main military and economic powers to shun the EU as the bloc tries to become a coherent counterweight to Russian and Chinese assertiveness will diminish Europe’s transatlantic community with the United States and Canada.

Britain formally left the EU last January, 47 years after joining and 3-1/2 years after its ‘Brexit’ referendum, but then entered a transition period during which rules on commerce and travel were frozen until the end of 2020.

EU officials and diplomats described the talks to put a post-transition trade deal in place by Jan. 1, 2021, as an exhausting exercise of bluff and brinksmanship.

On the EU side, the 27 member states remained united under their chief negotiator, Frenchman Michel Barnier, an unflinching defender of their single market of 450 million consumers.

The British side was harder to gauge because it sometimes sought to exploit differences between member states and often appeared to be guided by the vagaries of domestic politics, the EU officials said.

Yet to mass-circulation newspapers at home and Brexit ideologues in his government, Johnson’s tough line with Brussels on competition rules and access to UK waters for EU fishing boats was applauded as a much-needed assertion of sovereignty.

A BAD FIT?

Britain has always been ambivalent about the project to unite and rebuild Europe from the ashes of World War Two.

It joined, belatedly, in 1973, but its economic liberalism jarred with much of continental Europe, and it never joined the single currency, the euro, or the Schengen zone of passport-free travel.

British euroscepticism was fanned for decades by much of its press, whose members – including Johnson, a Daily Telegraph correspondent in Brussels in 1989-94 – panned the federalist ambitions of ‘eurocrats’ and lampooned the EU’s regulatory zeal.

Johnson once poked fun in an opinion column at rules that, according to him, forbade the recycling of a teabag or children under eight blowing up balloons.

For many Britons, Brexit has an intellectual rationale: that the United Kingdom should cut loose from the stagnating economies of the EU and compete with a project they are convinced is destined to fail.

Yet Britain’s uneasy relationship with the EU has been controversial at home, too.

Margaret Thatcher’s aggression towards Brussels led to a Conservative party coup that ended her premiership in 1990. The 2016 Brexit referendum gamble made by one of her successors, David Cameron, led to his departure and, with voters split 52-48%, polarised British society.

On the other side of the Channel, many have long thought that Britain is simply a poor fit.

French wartime hero Charles de Gaulle twice vetoed its attempts to join what was then the European Economic Community in the 1960s. Five decades later, President Emmanuel Macron pressed for a swift British exit after the referendum, worried that eurosceptic sentiment could seep across the continent.

Britain’s boldest step during the trade talks came last summer, when an inner circle around Johnson met to figure a way out of the deadlock. Their solution: trigger a crisis.
https://www.oann.com/bluff-and-brinksmanship-how-britain-got-a-brexit-trade-deal-done/

 

Everyone's hero!