Jobbo wrote: ↑Wed Jan 30, 2019 9:43 am
GG. wrote: ↑Tue Jan 29, 2019 6:00 pm
"Voting against the deal" is a bit of a silly mischaracterisation of today's votes to be honest. The vote on her deal was had in the first meaningful vote - she lost that and these are votes on amendments to what her next plan of action is given she cannot get her deal past the house in its current form.
The DAG argument that this is in some way duplicitous and going back on an agreed deal is also silly - that argument would then apply to any deal or treaty which failed to be ratified and had subsequently to be changed, which in the EU's case on FTAs is numerous and frequent. I'm also not sure anyone would think negotiating the withdrawal from a longstanding involvement in a bloc which is deeply enmeshed within our legal system, controls our borders, etc. etc. is even remotely like negotiating a standalone FTA so this really has little bearing on that.
May goes to the EU, negotiates a deal which she then goes back to the UK with, sees it rejected, votes against it herself when given the opportunity and now has a mandate to ask the EU for something which goes against her own red lines.
This is playing out in public, and we're an utter laughing stock. No other country can negotiate with her (or the UK) in future with any certainty that what we say will actually happen.
She didn't "vote against it herself" - that's bollocks I'm afraid. She voted for it on the meaningful vote - that vote rejected ratification by a massive margin and made clear that it wouldn't be accepted by parliament without changes. The voting yesterday was on her subsequent course of action to try and ensure it would be passed. It was emphatically not a vote on the ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement itself, which has already been had and has failed.
This argument that she should not "double-cross" the EU on an agreed deal inescapably means that your opinion is that she should just keep going back to the house with the same deal and trying to get it to pass. You're essentially advising Theresa May to be more like Theresa May rather than making any attempt to build a consensus around a deal! I don't understand that at all I'm afraid.
At the end of the day, no independent country will ever sign up to a treaty it cannot get out of without breaching international law, whatever the context. It is completely perverse to immediately bring about the conditions they are trying to avoid by turning their face against say, a 2 year exit clause from the backstop which gives them 2 years of transition and two years of backstop to sign up a deal and avoid dealing with the border issue. In reality they are refusing to offer this, not because it doesn't make sense - they are refusing because they know that others in the EU27 will want to reopen other issues and/or they will see it as a concession and resultingly will not be able to get it ratified by the EU27 and parliament.
Perversely, much like Varadkar, in outmanouvering May and baking into the agreement a silly position which would never in reality be agreed, they've made any sensible compromise look like capitulation. Any good lawyer would realise that you cannot, in real life, engineer out all possible risk from a deal. You have to build in mechanics which go as far as they can to allay such risk whilst remaining acceptable to both sides - this pragmatic principle seem to have completely bypassed them.
