I am so very very tired of brexit. I am most tired of people talking nonsense and pretending they’re talking facts, pretending that they’re providing useful information, when in reality they’re just propagandists for a movement that they cannot possibly believe in anymore. Why are they still so invested that they’re willing to tell outright public lies, with no shame. because after one or two times of having the lie identified and corrected, then it cannot be called a mistake. It is deliberate.

I am tired of the MEP who keeps retweeting that we can’t possibly belong to a customs union with the EU to solve the Irish border problem because Turkey has a customs union and also still has a hard border with the EU.

And he writes this knowing that the UK is nothing like Turkey, would not have the same type of arrangement with the EU and that one customs union could be very different to another. He writes this without providing any alternative answer to the border in Ireland.

You have no idea how wearing it is reading people who say that a hard border would be Ireland or the EU’s “fault” and Ireland’s responsibility,  totally ignoring the fact that we have chosen to leave and create the problem in the first place. It also totally ignores the realty that WTO rules would require a hard border between the UK and EU if we leave the EU, the single market and the customs union without a comprehensive free trade agreement. Under WTO we are simply not allowed to offer other countries preferential treatment i.e. a soft border.

I have gone beyond weariness when it comes to people suggesting we should just bomb out onto WTO like all the other countries.

Other countries, Mauritania excepted, do not trade on WTO rules. Not even N Korea trades on just WTO rules. Countries like China, the US, India etc all have decades of treaties built up so that they can trade on better than WTO terms. There is an excellent EU database that lists nearly 1,000 treaties with third parties that we are walking away from as part of brexit (http://ec.europa.eu/world/agreements/searchByType.do?id=1)

And some of these will be about trade and some will be on other topics like security, health and safety, aviation, shipping etc.

None of them are trivial. And the UK has made no progress to resolving any of these issues. Our joint application (with the EU) to the WTO to split our trade schedule has been rejected by key countries such as NZ and Australia. Third party countries are refusing to simply grandfather our treaties via the EU e.g. the US suggesting it want better access to our airspace now we’re leaving the EU and vulnerable to a bit of shoving around.

I am tired of the MP who writes that we can have a perfect trade arrangement just like Switzerland, without being a member of the single market or the customs union, who is just choosing to ignore the fact that Switzerland is a part of EU schengen, that it has freedom of movement without control of immigration numbers above and beyond that within the EU.  And then this person goes beyond ignoring uncomfortable truths and just lies when they describe it as trouble free, ignoring the vast amount of customs declarations and inspections required to avoid VAT fraud.

Can I tell you how tired I am about those people who claim that outside of the EU we will enter some tariff free existence and food prices will fall because the EU insists on high tariffs. And clearly no one has actually looked at a breakdown of what tariffs are paid in reality, the kind of data to be found on the ITC site https://www.trademap.org/Country_SelProductCountry.aspx?nvpm=1|826||||0702|||4|1|1|1|1|1|2|1|1

Obviously most of our imported food comes from our nearest (EU) neighbours so is entirely tariff free, or from one of the many countries with a trade agreement with the EU (Kenya etc) so pays no tariffs, And even when tariffs may be a technical possibility (importing tomatoes from Morocco) there are quotas that mean in practical terms tariffs are rarely applicable. Plus there are Entry Price Requirements that allow individual countries such as the UK within the EU to set their own criteria for tariffs.

Because let’s be clear: removing all tariffs on agriculture would seriously fuck with our farming sector.

And can I just point out to the newspaper that the MP suggesting that our trading future is golden, just like that of Australia and NZ, is not a bright young star with novel ideas but a shocking fuckwit who seems not to recognise that NZ and Australia have an exceptionally comprehensive free trade agreement in place, that includes freedom of  movement for people. In other words they have something approaching the system that we’ve just voted to leave. Could she also please acknowledge that Canada and the US have a hard border, something we’re committed to avoiding in Ireland, despite belonging to a free trade agreement called  NAFTA.

But most of all I am tired of people who pretend that this is what they voted for and what they want. You did not vote for the UK to become poorer.

You did not vote for us to become a free trading nation, wheeling and dealing our way around the planet at the cost of a hard border in Ireland and screwing up the Good Friday Agreement. And to those few sad bastards who did vote for that fairy tale: take a look at how our government’s negotiations have played out and tell me that you still think it was a good idea.

You voted to limit immigration, mostly living in places where very few immigrants live and fundamentally out of fear that, one day, they might decide your neighbourhood was somewhere they wanted to live and that you might have to cope with someone who was “different”.

And the reality is that most immigrants have always come from outside of the EU, but you told yourself that you weren’t being racist, that you didn’t mean immigrants like the ones you know, the ones that you’re friends with. Still friends now? Seriously? That’s not friendship. You told yourself that no one you knew would be affected and if they were, you just wouldn’t tell them. You wouldn’t tell the doctor or the nurse or the health visitor, not because of shame but… Well, okay maybe out of embarrassment.

You voted to turn back the clock, without regard to the impact that might have on the younger generation because, let’s be honest the 1960s and 1970s were actually pretty shit to live through.

And even though 10,000 people die each week in the UK, around 9,000 pensioners 80% of whom voted leave ie. 700,000 leave voters dead since the referendum and even though 500,000 predominately remain voting teenagers have arrived on the electoral roll since the referendum, you still bleed on about the “will of the people”

As if electoral fraud in the form of criminal funding of the on-line campaign hadn’t happened. As if 32m people could not have been persuaded by entirely legitimate arguments or racism to vote in either direction, yet if only 800,000 were persuaded by criminality then the entire referendum would have gone the other way, because the vote was narrow and probably a cheat.

I am so tired of this shit show.