Having yesterday posted an article that I felt summarised the main Remainer positions of 2020 - I came across this article which I think sums up some of my thoughts on some key issues nicely:
Re Johnson:
"...….the potential fly in the ointment in all this is Boris Johnson’s increasing personal participation in the talks. His making disadvantageous concessions just for the sake of a deal, either out of his habitual distaste for fine detail or a desire to appease opponents of No-Deal for purely domestic political reasons, can’t be ruled out."
Re the constant blather about the City of London losing out to Frankfurt etc.
"Well that wasn’t in the anti-Brexit fanatics’ Project Fear script, was it? Britain remaining the European country most attractive for foreign direct investment (FDI), suffering the least decline in inward FDI of all European countries in 2019, and beating the rest of Europe as the most attractive destination for financial services FDI post-Covid-19 by a margin of 40 per cent to a mere 8 per cent."
Re the prospect of an extension to transition:
"In fact, extending the transition period would be not merely unproductive but counter-productive. As our own economy struggles to recover, we would continue to be liable both for current EU contributions and any additional ones the EU demanded as part of its own Covid-19 recovery package without any input into determining either their scale or qualification criteria."
Re fishing - and its leverage in negotiations rather than narrow thinking of what we eat and how big our fleet is - and also my concern of how it is likely that leverage will be mishandled/traded away:
"...….Considering the degree to which the EU’s fishing industry is dependent on such access, this looks like a blatant subterfuge, and should be dismissed out of hand.
The scale of leverage Britain enjoys over that dependence is such that it’s being suggested it should be partly traded away in return for major EU concessions on ‘rules of origin’ trade rules. Given that the EU has a history of either accepting concessions while offering non-equivalent ones in return or of demanding even more, that too should be approached warily. Time and time again Brussels has shown that it is neither honest broker nor reliable interlocutor.
Rightly or wrongly, fishing and the sovereignty of its national territorial waters are symbolic issues, by which Johnson will be judged whether he has either succeeded in extricating Britain from the authoritarian, rapacious maw of the EU or capitulated to it, however disingenuously the surrender would be spun. We would be unwise to bet against the latter outcome."
https://conservativewoman.co.uk/tcws-brexit-watch-brussels-is-still-after-our-fish/
