Re: Transition Period?
macjules,
Article 50 of the Treaties states that a member state choosing to leave has 2 years to make an agreement about the technical aspects of leaving that takes into account the future relationship.
That two year period started in March 2017 - after a bit of post-referendum thinking about it. It was then extended in March last year until October (with a small detour for a mini-extension first) and then that extended again to tomorrow - after Johnson agreed the revised withdrawal agreement but Parliament didn't.
So there's a transition period in that agreement up to the end of 2020 - with an option to extend it for another year after that. Although to be honest they can extend it to any amount they want, within reason - but Johnson is currently signalling that he wants to get it done very quickly.
Sadly the EU decided that they wouldn't even discuss the future relationship until July 2018 - and it was then discussed for about 2 months and a 26 page document on the "future relationship" agreed - but that basically talks about "making best endeavours" to agree only vaguely specified stuff. The Commission claimed that it would be illegal to even discuss the possibilities of a trade agreement until we were no longer a member - and we wasted the first 9 months of the 2 year Article 50 period pissing about discussing whether we should pay an extra few billion quid to settle various bits of left-over spending with the Commission refusing to even discuss the withdrawal agreement until that was done.
So sadly we haven't really got much of anywhere on the future relationship. If you take Johnson at his word, which I'm not sure about, it's going to be a pretty basic free trade agreement - because he's decided that whatever deadline is set the EU will push it up to the wire in order to try to gain maximum advantage from playing hardball. So he's going to cut that game off from the start (I admit I'm guessing here about his plans) - and see if he can't get some movement on the negotiations by forcing them to be too quick.
He says he won't sign up for the extension to the transition period - which he's now got the majority to do, if he wants to. But nobody likes to look like they've backed down - so I suspect (but have no way of knowing) that his plan is to negotiate some of the easier stuff quickly, then ask for an extension on negotiations on the longer stuff that amounts to a different transition period - but only in certain sectors. But hopefully one long enough to actually get the negotiations completed with nobody able to fuck about with the deadlines.
However he may just have decided that a quick and very shallow trade deal is what he's going to go for - on the betting that the British government can move faster on counteracting the disruption than the EU can - with the hope of maybe bringing them back to the negotiating table in a more accommodating mood.
That's assuming he actually has a plan of course.
However May has taken a lot of the blame for how badly the negiations turned out. And yet it was the Commission which exclusively designed the timetable - and rejected every suggestion May made - sometime without even officially studying them. Including proposals on the Irish border that they've since agreed with Johnson, having said they were literally impossible to May. So personally I blame the Commission for a lot of this, and May's biggest fault may have been accepting their timetabling. So although I have little faith in Johnson, I don't believe that the Commission have even been honestly negotiating until the final deal done with Johnson - and have little trust that they weren't going to start playing similar games in the transition period.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
