I confess I do not understand the Brexiteers these days at all. Consider Clive Crook. It used to be the case—before George W. Bush's "victories" in the 2000 election and in the Iraq War—that I disagreed with him but that his arguments were coherent and made sense. Ever since then, however, he seems to have lost coherence. And now there seems to be no reason.
He says that the Britain-EU relationship is a very valuable thing "achieved to great mutual advantage" but had the drawback that it did not allow Britain to throw citizens of other EU countries out when it wishied. In this case one would think the Theresa May deal would be an acceptable thing, because that is what it delvers. But no. Let's try to follow his thought, and fail: Clive Crook: The European Union Could Also Use a Brexit Policy: "Europe could have avoided Brexit altogether... agreed to the request for modest concessions on free movement of people... David Cameron made.... Europe wasn’t really saying it couldn’t be done; it was merely refusing to do it. The result of that intransigence was the referendum and Brexit...
And, indeed, he does seem to believe that aside from "modest" flaws with respect to Britain's powers to kick out lowlifes from the continent, side from that that the European Union was a wonderful thing, writing about:
the economic integration achieved to great mutual advantage over the previous decades...
Well, Theresa May's agreement with the EU gains for Britain the power to throw citizens of other EU countries out when it wishes. Otherwise maintains the economic integration achieved to great mutual advantage. But does Clive Crook like it? No: Clive Crook: May's Brexit Deal Has a Fatal Defect: "The terms are... Britain would remain... as part of a stripped-down customs union (preventing the U.K. from cutting its own trade deals)...
...bound by various “level playing-field” restrictions (making it impossible for Britain to make its own policy on an array of economic questions)... subject to rulings of the European Court of Justice across an expansive range of issues. Britain would be a disenfranchised EU rule-taker, with no voice on policy, and no option to quit.... All parties in this epic of incompetence have failed. That’s a given in Britain’s case, of course. But Ireland’s government and the EU’s puffed-up negotiators have failed, too. Either the U.K. parliament rejects this deal or May somehow succeeds in shackling her country to it. Neither result would stabilize the EU-U.K. relationship in a way that advances Europe’s interests.
If Britain’s parliament rejects the deal... as it certainly should, the EU will suffer serious collateral damage from the pain inflicted on Britain..... If... the deal goes through... the EU will have converted a potential friend and partner (the world’s fifth biggest economy and a valuable military and intelligence-gathering ally) into a humiliated subordinate, primed for vengeance...
And the deal that the EU has offered—the one that gives Britain what it wants while preserving the benefits of economic integration—is:
calculated ruthlessness on the EU side. Once Britain had decided to leave, it had to suffer and be seen to suffer, so other countries wouldn’t try to do the same. (The Soviet Union applied the same basic logic, albeit with less subtlety, to Hungary in 1956)...
So what is going on here?
... ...
#noted
