Oh ye of little faith! Once we vote in Boris on December 12th, Brexit will be done! Finito, Benito! All over by Christmas! Onward to Moscow! Or is it Stalingrad or Kursk?https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/11/coming-brexit-farce/601558/"If you thought a Boris Johnson victory would put an end to Britain’s Brexit crisis, spoiler: It won’t.The central thrust of Johnson’s election campaign is that, unlike the Labour Party, which wants to hold a second referendum on whether or not the U.K. should leave the EU, he will “get Brexit done” so Britain can move on to its core domestic priorities. Labour’s policy, he charges, will simply prolong the crisis.For a country yearning for the three-year saga to just be over, it is a potentially appealing pitch. It is also almost entirely misleading.While Johnson is right to say the U.K. could legally be out of the EU within weeks of an election result that returns a majority Conservative government on December 12, the reality is that this only closes the first chapter in the Brexit drama and opens up the next (and Chapter 2 is already beginning to look a lot like the first).As soon as Britain leaves the European Union, under the terms of the divorce settlement Johnson negotiated with Brussels, two brand-new deadlines immediately loom into view. First, the U.K. government must decide by July 1 whether or not it wants to extend the so-called transition period, which essentially keeps Britain inside the EU’s economic bloc for a temporary period to avoid a “cliff edge” economic shock while it negotiates a free-trade agreement.Here, the second deadline emerges: December 31, 2020, when the transition period is due to run out. Most experts and EU officials believe there is next to no chance that the two sides can agree on a free-trade agreement in the 12 months between next month’s U.K. election and this scheduled end of the transition period. It took Canada seven years to agree to its trade agreement with the EU. Even in the United States, which tends to be quicker than the EU at tying up trade deals, agreements take time—Washington’s FTA with Australia took 14 months to negotiate, for instance."
David Ainsworth ● 2561d