I remember at work there was a guy who couldn’t attend a close because he had a wedding or something, but he assured us that everything would go fine, you just had to press a button on the spreadsheet and it would all be fine. I tested this in advance of close, as you do, and it failed completely. I left a few voicemails and was somewhat panicked.
He phoned in on the day of close, explained that he’d dropped a massive bollock, and there were a couple of major issues. With his guidance as to where the issues might be, I managed to fix it and everything was fine.
I am expecting this to be a poor analogy for Brexit.
When is a customs union not a customs union? When it’s a “time-limited goods arrangement.”
Mad thinking when the services sectors etc are swinging in the breeze.
See also The Telegraph’s firewalled article, or The Guardian, Times, FT etc. The sheer front on Mrs May who when asked if the UK was climbing down over leaving the customs union, insisted it wasn’t. She did say the usual tired rubbish:
The United Kingdom will be leaving the customs union, we are leaving the European Union.
Of course we will be negotiating future customs arrangements with the European Union and I have set three objectives, the government has three objectives in those.
We need to be able to have our own independent trade policy, we want as friction-less a border between the UK and the EU so that trade can continue and we want to ensure there is no hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
Note that she did not deny the substance of the story at all.
Interesting round up here (I’m linking Grant as it gives a link to the free FT article which doesn’t normally work when directly linked)
.@MESandbu predicts a likely landing zone for HMG on N Ireland: UK in customs union, N Ireland alone in single market for goods. This seeks likely to me. Good that he cites @SamuelMarcLowe's recent @CER_EU piece. https://t.co/NzXSRyVoNE
Ever so quietly there seems to be a view emmerging, I think, that invoilves the Maybot navigating skillfully (given the band of merry fuckwits at her disposal) toward a pretty soft brexit.
I’m not at all sure I buy it, frankly, but either way there’ll be blood on the floor by the end of it. Probably hers.
Edit: here’s Matthew Parris writing as eloquently as ever and, one has the impression, not in entire agreement with my assertion above.
