[parcifal]

Ondertussen blijven bepaalde Brexiteers erop gokken dat de EU, last-minute, tot verregaande concessies zal overgaan en Teresa May verregaand tegemoet zal komen en dus de Backstop zal laten vallen (hetgeen trouwens origineel een BRITS voorstel was, niet vergeten!)

Ze dromen.

Ian Dunt, bekend als editor van politics.co.uk en van The Remaniacs podcast, in The Washington Post onlangs :

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlo...=.40e99c1cf8ee

The collective madness behind Britain’s latest Brexit plan

The nation is ignoring reality as deadlines loom

On Tuesday, British Prime Minister Theresa May demanded that her party reject her own Brexit plan so she could go back to negotiations with the European Union and dismantle an agreement that her government reached with the continent, on an impossibly fast timeline, during talks that have already been ruled out. On every level, it is an insane way to behave. The British government is actively sabotaging the work it has spent the past two years completing and then doing a victory dance.

The problems all lie with something called the Irish backstop. You wouldn’t know it, given how deranged the party has become about it, but it is a Conservative idea. Their problem was simple: They wanted two contradictory things. On the one hand, the Brexit campaign during the referendum promised to “take back control” from Brussels. That meant returning regulatory decision-making to London. But on the other, it promised that everything would continue as before, with no effect on trade. That is impossible, because as soon as you take back regulatory powers, you have delays on the border with Europe.

The whole issue with the border is based on the concept of trust. In the European Union, member states share laws, courts and enforcement procedures. They know that the rules on the slaughter of cattle, the electronic components of cars or the chemical compounds in children’s toys are all the same. They can take someone to court if something goes wrong, even if they’re in another country, because they have the same institutions. This creates trust. And that’s why goods cross over national borders freely, with no checks.

...

But then Brexit came and blew it all to pieces. Instead of grappling with the hard choices the vote required, May pretended that Brexiteers could have everything they wanted: London would get back control of regulatory decisions. And the border with Ireland would stay open. The fact that these two promises were incompatible was never addressed. She just kept on pretending that it was all possible and that people should have greater faith.

The country is now on the verge of disaster. On March 29, unless something is done, Britain will fall out the European Union without a deal. That will affect every aspect of the economy. It’s likely to block cargo at the border; pulverize agricultural exports; trigger shortages of food, medicine and radioactive isotopes; spark employment chaos by suddenly canceling the mutual recognition of qualifications between British and European institutions; halt the legal basis for data transfer overnight; and lead to massive and sudden flows of immigration in both directions. The list goes on and on. There is no part of society that is unaffected. And yet not only does the British political class not seem to understand the consequences of what it is doing, it is lost in populist fantasies instead of addressing the cold reality.

Britain is one of the richest and most advanced democracies in the world. It is currently locked in a room, babbling away to itself hysterically while threatening to blow its own kneecaps off. This is what nationalist populism does to a country.