Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

CETA is not a customs union- there are still customs controls between Canada and the EU. If you don't have EU regulations enforced in Canada, those controls do it at the border with the EU. That works. But if you want into the customs union (and therefore being allowed to just walk things across the border to the EU, no checks) you have to sign up to pretty much all the EU regulations. And that's the point that the four freedoms kick in, and you have to take freedom of movement.

If you have a Canada-style deal, you need customs controls, which could be built at Dover, but the sticking point is, and probably always will be, the Northern Ireland border. Put the checks on the border, and you're imperiling the peace process. Put them in the sea, and you're splitting the UK into two regulatory zones. It's an impossible problem.

As you say, it's a complicated topic.

> However the UK gets far more economic benefit than it spends, and the poorest of communities like South Wales have had far more spent on it in targeted social programmes by the EU than has ever been spent by Westminster.

The UK contributes more to the EU budget than it receives back. Ceteris paribus, the UK could fund all the same programmes, and have huge buckets of cash left over.

> A large number of farming labour jobs have been filled by people from Europe - particularly Eastern Europe - because they are prepared to do work locals are not, at a price that locals will not consider.

If locals don't want to do the work for the going rate, and there aren't foreign nationals willing to undercut them, the going rate will rise.

Anybody that has made even the slightest attempt to follow events knows that May tried alternative attempts to get a deal (including a framework signed off by all the Brexiters in her Cabinet) and the EU repeatedly rejected them.

Anybody that has a solid grasp of the facts knows that the issue is not that the EU "offered the UK nothing" but that the Irish government will veto any agreement which implies the creation of a customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and May's critics are equally adamant that the UK, including NI, must have a different customs regime from the ROI. It's not an issue of give and take, it's a matter of mutually incompatible red lines.

The city is actually unlikely to be affected significantly. Large banks already have subsidiaries in the EU or are in the process of setting them up. They will move a limited number of people (as few as they can get away with). A lot of the 1 trillion number will be back-to-back to the UK.

The impact on trading goods I think will also be limited. Past the initial logistical disruption, EU tariffs aren't massive outside of a few products, and this is nothing that cannot be offset with a weaker pound.

I think where a hard Brexit will hurt the most is small service companies, which aren't large enough to have operations within the EU, and which won't be able to cover the EU from the UK.

> A "no deal" outcome, which is clearly bad, is still the best thing brexiters can actually deliver.

It could go much much worse than just "bad".

The UK imports a lot of food from EU neighbors. In case of a hard Brexit, this will just ... stop. The question is whether all supermarkets can immediately redo their supply chains. That is not likely. Especially since the UK will loose all trade agreements with the non-EU countries as well. Because they had been made by the EU with the UK participating.

Our western societies are very efficient but also very fragile. If supermarkets can no longer fill up their shelves, people go hungry fast. If supermarkets can only fill 80% of shelves, people panic and start hoarding food. Those who are too late to the party go hungry. With enough people hungry for a few days, society collapses.

Like ... corpses in the streets.

We know what happened when the Soviet Union went down and shelves went empty. This scenario would end a lot worse for the UK. The Soviets had massive redundancies, inefficiencies and fallbacks that could be exploited. Such as people growing potatoes in their Dachas.

See the material by Dmitry Orlov on how the "soviet scenario" would play out in a western country:

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-12-04/closing-collap...

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-p...

Update:

What do you think "chaos at the border" means? Everybody will try to get as much stuff over the border as possible. Everybody will work together. The EU, the UK, the US, everybody. With the best intentions. But this could still go very very bad.

Every truck, train and ship has to get the papers checked where they could just drive through before. But there are not enough qualified officers to actually check all the papers.

So goods will come in at a trickle. Even with the best intentions.

This the UK governments own statement. Chaos at the border for six months:

> Britain’s government has revised its worst-case Brexit scenario estimates for chaos at the country’s borders, which it now expects to last for six months rather than six weeks, the political editor of The Sun newspaper said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-borders/uk-now...