I TOLD YOU SO... https://twitter.com/moggmentum/status/1342434293214310401

Last year (2019) I did a thread explaining why Boris’s Withdrawal Agreement deal was worse for fishermen than Theresa May’s. I don’t think anyone believed me.

I explained that under May’s deal the ultimate threat of “No Trade Deal” would have meant that a U.K. wide customs union would be created by the Northern Ireland backstop. This would have guaranteed 0% tariff access for all U.K. seafood into the EU if no trade deal was reached.

What’s more it would have meant that French (and other EU) boats would have no guaranteed access to U.K. waters. For the EU this meant that fishing ceased to be a lever for a deal.

Boris’s deal changed this. The EU never wanted to concede tariff free access for U.K. seafood so early in the process and their original proposal was for a Northern Ireland only backstop, with tariff free access for NI seafood only.

Unsurprisingly the EU were happy to agree to the NI only backstop in the Boris deal. They knew that if the last issue in the negotiations was fish, then the threat of ‘No Deal’ was neutralised. They knew that No Deal would damage the Scottish seafood industry in particular.

Once fishing became the last issue to be resolved it was inevitable that the U.K. would have to compromise as to which sectors of the U.K. fishing industry it favoured.

This was a critical error by Johnson and his crew. It was, not surprisingly, an overestimate of the effect of maintaining No Deal as an option.

Anyone who has ever negotiated for a living knows that threatening to walk away seldom helps. It is usually counterproductive! At some point the other side will say ‘Go on then, look at what you’ll be losing.”

In this case Boris managed to put himself in a position where losing meant losing tariff free access to U.K. seafood (apart from NI). A truly dumb move, by a truly dumb Prime Minister.