The deal is done. Farage, Leave.EU, and the ERG have all fallen into line behind Boris. The deal is being heralded as an imperfect victory. Even the ‘betrayal’ on fishing, as Farage describes it, is worth it in the round in his view. The war is won, the Leavers have declared.
This trade deal was done in under a year, when those who continued (post-referendum) to agitate for Remain, revoke, or the second referendum told us that it would take a decade. Aside from our EU deal, the UK has signed 58 deals, from Switzerland to Turkey, which either roll over the agreements that were pre-existing, or improve on them, as with the new UK Japan deal. Boris renegotiated a new withdrawal agreement at breakneck speed, when the likes of Yvette Cooper and Hillary Benn were telling us the reopening of talks itself was an impossibility. The UK managed to secure an EU trade deal, which the Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey told us was impossible. And now that deal will command the support of most-all Tory MPs, and likely the majority of Labour MPs. It was all said to be impossible by the same MPs who time and time again blocked, delayed and hamstrung the UK’s capacity to make the deals. They were prophets of doom, doing their best to bring their gloomy prophetic utterances to fruition.
It’s easy to forget that one of Labour's main attack lines in the 2019 election was the claim that it would take a ‘minimum’ of 7 years for the UK to negotiate a trade deal with the US. Chances are a deal will be secured next year. We were told by authoritative experts that countries would not roll over their existing agreements with the EU, onto the UK. Yet they are, and in huge number. We are now being simultaneously told by the Liberal Democrats, the latter-day equivalent of Japanese soldiers fighting in the Philippines 30 years after the wars end, that these equivalent roll over deals represent a bad deal for the UK, and that they will on that basis vote against it in Parliament. Ed Davey has gone from ‘Revoke’ to Mr. No Deal in record time.
With an 80 seat majority, and the will to get it done, Boris has done what was said to be impossible. It serves to demonstrate that the intransigent party in these negotiations were neither the UK government, nor the EU, but British MPs who worked their hardest to sabotage the Brexit vote. If MPs would have got behind the Brexit agenda in 2016, instead of hamstringing the government’s ability to threaten no-deal, voting thrice against the WA, walking away from cross party talks, putting the opposition in charge of votes and motions, fighting two general and one European election on the basis of a settled referendum, voting against Boris’s WA and then doom mongering about the impossibility of a trade deal – and instead had worked their hardest to help bring about a good Brexit, and presented a united front, imagine how much better the good deal we have, could have been.
