thecrashingisles

Being propaganda doesn't necessarily mean it is false, but I'm sure you can think of a reason why it is extremely misleading to compare January 2020 with January 2021.

This is SNP propaganda. You can tell from the reference to "Westminster" and the "Yes" beermats.

These figures really aren't comparable because of the different ways GDP is calculated. The pandemic effect for the UK is particularly distorted.

The question is how you define a better relationship. If it's a variant of being subservient to the EU institutions from the outside then I think it's a non-starter politically. The only intellectually coherent way to reverse Brexit, if that's what people want, is to rejoin fully without any opt outs.

I'm just positing an alternative to my suggestion that we will have 'moved on' when we have an election where all the main parties have platforms that are 'pro-Brexit', for want of a better formulation. At the moment a lot of people seem to think that Labour will seek a 'closer relationship', defined as something like joining the EEA.

At what point will it be in our interest to follow rules without any say, or to rejoin on terms that mean joining the Euro?

No it isn't. It's a sober assessment of the political landscape. Trying to reverse Brexit is a futile endeavour.

Domestic politics probably won't fully settle down until there's a change of government to a PM from another party who is not seeking to reverse Brexit in any way.

The actual concrete thing is the TCA. The discussion around adjustments to the operation of the NIP is in many ways a sideshow. My view on that is simply that the anti-UK moralising is wrong and that a revision is both desirable and achievable.

Your comments make me wonder whether you actually read what I say, or have just decided that if it looks like a witch, it must be a witch.

The same thing can be said in reverse. People take it as an article of faith that the four freedoms are a priori a 'good thing', regardless of any real world distortions they observe that result from their rigid application.

I think the idea that standards are a simple question of higher versus lower is very misleading. They are highly political and often something that might constitute 'higher standards' on paper isn't in reality. For example the EU contains some of the worst offenders in the world for the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, even though they have officially been banned for use as a growth promoter. You're obviously right that remaining in the SM/CU would have avoided a lot of difficult questions around Northern Ireland, which is why people who were opposed to leaving the SM/CU did so much to highlight them, and so little to think creatively about how to resolve them. Even now rejoining the SM/CU is held up as a solution by people who think that Brexit itself is heretical.

I'm not denying it; I just don't think it's a useful premise. The referendum was about which fork in the road to take rather than about destinations.

Lexit is short for "left Brexit". It's not the Peter North variety but the Corbyn/Galloway variety, so it really just means a hard Brexit with a left-wing government. Even the Peter North type people favoured a hard Brexit eventually but just convinced themselves that to do it 'safely' we needed some kind of Norway-style transition, and in any case they are a faction of a faction with no real political relevance.