Vince Cable questioned the Prime Minister yesterday when she made her statement on the political declaration of the EU withdrawal agreement. He highlighted one particularly worrying aspect of it:
This is essentially an agreement to have an agreement, and it is full of worryingly vague aspirations. How, for example, can the Prime Minister justify paragraph 24, which relates to medicines, chemicals and aviation safety, where we currently have strong agreed co-operative standards? She has managed to negotiate an agreement to
“explore the possibility of cooperation”.
That is pathetically weak, and it will cause great anxiety to millions of people who depend on high standards of safety.
Ultimately, this deal is a massive kicking of big issues into some very long grass. Nothing will be decided before we leave the EU. This makes it more important than ever that we stop Brexit.
May’s response just emphasised how uncertain this all is:
In relation to these negotiations, we are not able to put legal texts together until we have left the European Union and are no longer a member of the European Union—that, of course, is what we will be able to do when we leave on 29 March 2019.
Brexit is a leap into the fog. We owe future generations better than this.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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2 Comments
Has someone told Stephen Lloyd? He’s planning to vote for it.
https://twitter.com/Andrew_Adonis/status/1065861928046735360
It smells of doing something so the process can be progressed without actually agreeing anything, so the negotiators can go to bed feeling fulfilled and have a better night’s sleep. The only way to discover what is going on is to have a people’s vote and force all sides to come clean on their plans.