Carryfast:
Rjan:
It will only leave us free of ties if we do no further business with them anymore - same with decisions and courts, we will only be any freer to make decisions if they have no interest in the outcome. The simple fact is that anything that impugns trade with the EU bloc will cause the Tory government to fall - because even aside from the DUP’s stake in the issue, the reality is that the Tory party itself will fracture and the bosses will swing behind the moderate candidate (Corbyn).
Same with the money question - it’s like the wife pretending that if she gets rid of her husband, she’ll be free to spend the mortgage money. The mortgage has still got to be paid, regardless of who in the household physically spends the money on it.
If we do deal with anyone else in the world, we will be back in the same position of either having to respect mutual rules, or be back to saying “no deal” with them too. And how do you fancy free movement with India? That’s what they’ve already demanded as part of any trade deal.
Beneath the shallow rhetoric, there’s no sense in your position.
Which precedent would suggest that trade and national sovereignty are mutually exclusive.
What sort of precedent will you accept?
Do you accept that Scotland does not have independent sovereignty at the same time as having free trade with Britain (it accepts the sovereignty of Westminster, where it has MPs)? Do you accept that Britain’s former colonies did not have sovereignty when we had a global empire? Do you accept that many non-colonies did not have sovereignty, because of gunboat diplomacy? Do you accept that many Middle Eastern countries do not have sovereignty, because of the global reliance on oil extraction from those places (i.e. they are not permitted to simply walk away from world trade, but are compelled to offer an acceptable oil deal)?
The only semblance of sovereignty on both sides, comes when both sides are on roughly equal terms. But then we have the two world wars to consider. France lost its sovereignty, Poland lost its sovereignty, Germany lost its sovereignty. Japan also lost its sovereignty. They all lost it temporarily because they were on the losing end of the conflict. But Britain was not free from loss of sovereignty - our factories, homes, and cities were in fact bombed extensively, the economy totally reorganised, the lifestyle of the citizenry was turned upside down, families torn apart, and lives decimated. And we could not choose not to do those things - other countries decided for us, because they had the power (irrespective of any decision made at Westminster) to disrupt us and impose war on us.
Part of the underlying reasons for these wars were precisely the need for each nation (within the logic of nationalism) to preserve equal power with the others, and protect the portion of world trade on which they each depended (for raw materials and export markets).
Sovereignty doesn’t mean simply dealing with other people, or the right to choose who you deal with - since you can deal with other people without having any effective sovereignty, without any overall power, and you can always walk away into the wildnerness on a cold night.
Sovereignty means having the power to set the terms on which the deal is done, and indeed to compel that a deal is done if that is your desire, and you can only do that when your counterpart is (and stays) far weaker than you are. You cannot impose on peers because they can walk away and refuse to deal too, and they can also inflict as much damage on you as you can on them if you try to impose, and you certainly cannot impose on those who are far stronger (in that case you end up subject wholly to their sovereignty).
If Britain leaves the EU but strikes a new trade deal with the EU, it will simply be entering back in through the door through which it left (or never left, as the case may be), with a red line painted on the floor that says “sovereignty ends here”. If it doesn’t strike a new trade deal, then it will lose a chunk of its market (or have to pay tariffs, which are a form of taxation), which will impair its economic and military power further (as Japan did up to the mid-19th century), so that 20 or 30 years down the line, the EU will have even more power relative to Britain.
And if Britain does a deal with the USA for example, it will be disproportionately on their terms - because they are a much stronger and larger nation, and their agenda will not be to integrate with us politically (they fought a war of independence against British subjugation, when the boot was on the other foot), but to extract the maximum economic advantage for themselves, and only for themselves and their electorate.
And if Britain strikes a free trade deal elsewhere to replace all European markets (an imaginary notion rather than a realistic option), then it will simply pass through a different door with the same red line on the floor saying “sovereignty ends here”, because you will then be bound by a deal that imposes (at least if the deal is to continue) constraints on what you can and cannot do in relation to the interests of the counterpart nation.
You can’t square the circle. Dealing with other sovereigns, entails a loss of sovereignty on both sides. And the greatest irony of the whole thing is, Britain is choosing to pretend that it has sovereignty over what is collectively a much stronger entity (the EU), and the EU is the one entity in the entire world at the moment that is likely to give Britain the best terms, precisely because it is explicitly designed to promote further integration (which means it has to give Britain a good, mutual deal, and a seat at the table where its collective decisions are made, which it already has given us).
Indeed, the EU has been bending over backwards for decades to keep Britain inside the tent, with various idiosyncratic rebates, concessions, and opt-outs - which even the big boys like Germany and France don’t enjoy, let alone all the other peripheral countries.
