"The Ladykillers" is a classic 1955 film starring Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Frankie Howard and Herbert Lom. It is about a bunch of incompetent crooks who intend to carry out a bank robbery in London, but end up killing each other. It's well worth digging out and watching. Jean Claude Junker, Michel Barnier, Christine Lagarde and Donald Tusk are now seeming to recreate the film in real life as they try to rob the UK during farcical Brexit negotiations and progressively damage the best interests of everyone on the continent. The only difference is that this group of clowns aren't funny.
The human race has been able to land people on the moon, span the Forth river with three magnificent bridges, even send probes to the edge of the galaxy, but signing off the EU accounts as accurate and finding out where all the money has gone to has been beyond even the best of us. The organisation is the very epitome of corrupt and inefficient and the British people have had enough of allowing it control over our laws and paying for its largess. We voted to leave the madhouse despite the EU and its many cronies loading the dice to stop us. So what caper can it come up with now? Got it, charge them for an exit bill that goes against all natural justice. How much can we get away with asks Guinness of Sellers?
Sorry, I meant Junker of Barnier. Let's try 100 billion Euros, that's a nice round figure.
Negotiating with people who are trying to fleece you
This must be done in a determined, believable way. That is why we can't have people like Cable or Corbyn involved. Those people have said right at the start we will pay anything to stay within the single market.
That position tells the Ladykillers that they have all the cards. That you will allow free movement of people to continue even though the population voted against it and that you will pay the 100 million Euros ransom and comply with any other nonsense they dream up, like the European Courts having precedence on issues relating to EU nationals living in the UK.
They do not have all the cards. We can trade using World Trade Organisation rules and will be little worse off as we import far more EU goods than we export. This situation would also encourage us to produce more of our own goods and increase our self-reliance. We would save any brexit bill and be able to immediately strike up trade deals with the many dynamic countries that wish it. The USA, India, Canada, Australia, Japan, Brazil, China to name a few of the biggest.
It's just plain wrong
This deal the EU is trying to impose is clearly wrong for two principal reasons. 1) We have been the second biggest net contributor, after Germany for many years. If we must pay for leaving, natural justice says we should take with us what we have paid for.
If we did that the EU would be bankrupt, I know it soon will be anyway but that's beside the point. 2) No one ever suggested when we entered there was a rule that said, oh don't worry you will have to pay very little for the first seven-year cycle, that money is the already paid commitments of Germany and France and the rest. It was committed before you entered so obviously you don't have to pay. More recently no such agreement was made with Romania or Bulgaria. Indeed no such commitment has ever been made. Just like always, the EU wants the money on both sides.
No legal basis. Just say no
The best legal minds say there is no basis in law for the mad bill. I do not believe that any negotiator has the right to agree to pay money the EU is not legally entitled to.
Apparently, during the negotiations, David Davis insisted that any payment required must be interrogated and justified and then produced a young lawyer who went point by point through the nonsense illustrating all the unjustifiable demands within the documentation. Normal practice you would have thought, but not for the EU. How Barnier and Junker and Sellers and Howard seethed at being required to follow the procedure that every business has always had to complete.
Sorry did I get the names mixed up again? It's just that they are so alike in attitude and actions I have trouble telling them apart.
Anyway seething or not these demands are ridiculous. What Teresa May said all those months ago, that no deal is better than a bad deal and that the UK would walk away if we need to, is the basis we must use in these negotiations. And all the other EU apologists like Blair and Heseltine should shut up and learn how to play poker with villains.
