It’s not one part of the strategy that is now under pressure. Increasingly it’s every part, home and abroad, present and future, each impacting the other in the way that happens if politics spins out of control. The publication of the repeal bill – no longer “great”, just long, complex and unwinding – shows how the domestic political context of Brexit is shifting. A year ago, the two main parties were united in their need to pay homage to the Brexit vote. Now Labour’s six conditions that must be satisfied before the bill can go ahead show the sharp stiffening of the oppositional impulse, while the Tory party is split every which way on Brexit, as the select committee elections showed this week.
The negotiations with Europe are an increasingly embarrassing mess too. In Brussels, Michel Barnier leads an organised, rational team of negotiators whose professionalism is a credit to the system. Meanwhile in London, amateurs, ideologues and chancers rule. No one can really say what the Brexit policy is. Three government papers published on Thursday are as clear as mud. May is too weak to stop the hand-to-hand wrestling for control of the policy between David Davis and the increasingly assertive Philip Hammond. And everything is complicated by the leadership manoeuvring for the post-May era.
As is her way, May continues to repeat her Brexit mantras. She is getting on with the job, working to get a good deal, always talking as if the outcome is certain. But it’s not certain at all. The lack of detail is persistent and has become disabling. May remains an optimist on Brexit, but close observers think even she makes the fatal mistake that sank David Cameron, of thinking all this can ultimately be sorted between politicians. Boris Johnson lazily makes the same error.
...
May is trapped by the toxic politics that put her into office a year ago and the growing realisation that Brexit is heading to be an economic and diplomatic disaster for Britain. Her essential stance in the election was that the country should rally behind her Brexit strategy. The country demurred. She still has not faced what this means. It means she has to reconfigure Brexit and go for a Norway-style transitional deal inside the European Economic Area (EEA), with the European court of justice remaining a central part of the arbitration system. If she won’t do that, she risks being deposed.
Yet still the fantasy goes on, nowhere more so than on trade. Last autumn the Treasury produced an unpublished internal paper that concluded that the costs of hard Brexit far outweighed any potential gains from Liam Fox’s free trade agreement strategy. The idea that 20 to 30 bilateral agreements could compensate for the losses of Brexit was idle thinking, it said. Hammond, who thinks Fox is a fantasist, told the cabinet that the costs were too high. Elsewhere in government, fact-free denial of these realities still reigns.
...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... rade-deals
That's the point you're incapable of getting. I'm not going to try again. 
