“You are sad!” said my friend believing that I was going to be the only person to actually read it.
The truth is that while I have read every single word I can’t claim to understand it. It took me all this time to read because there was so much to look up. I didn’t even know where the South Sandwich Islands were or if there were any North Sandwich Islands (near the Falkland and I don’t think there are).
Then there was the legal language, which did get easier as it went on but all this ‘party of the first part’, ‘notwithstanding’ and ‘by way of derogation’ takes a while to tune into. Even when you are tuned in they throw foreign words in like pari-passu, which just means doing stuff at the same time on a equal footing. Oh, I’ve just seen why they used it: 585 pages of unintelligible words are quicker to write than 2000 pages that we can understand. I also have a problem reading anything financial. My brain feels like it’s going to explode as soon as there is any talk of amortising or non-amortising loans and as my brain has had a lot to cope with recently, I thought I should take it easy.
For a long while I got stuck on the conundrum of why they had left page 301 blank. I have no answers to this that don’t make me sound like a mad conspiracy theorist.
“What do you think?" is the questions I get asked when I tell people I have read it. Mostly, my answer is that I don’t know, so I’m going to use the rest of this post to try and work out what I think.
I’m going to number my thoughts but only because I like a list and it’s easier to read.
1. The draft Brexit agreement probably isn’t the first thing you should read after recovering from a
panic disorder that was rooted in your inability to control anything. It has left me with a feeling that we are in an antebellum age, where the slightest thing could tip us into war.
2. This is a draft and still has to be agreed. If it has taken me this long to read it, I can be fairly certain that my MP won’t have time and so when asked to vote on it he won’t be doing so fully informed.
3. Any break up is tricky but this is like a divorce between 27 people who have thousands
of children and one cat. How do you decide who gets the cat?
4. This document doesn’t actually say anything very much. It doesn’t say who is going to get the cat, just how everyone is going to behave while we try to decide who that cat will live with.
5. There are deadlines for agreeing most things, which is very sensible. Most of these dates are
between 2020 and 2027, which almost certainly means that if the agreements haven’t gone well the fallout will be the problem of a different government.
6. OLAF isn’t a snowman.
7. There are several things that we would like to still use that belong to the EU. Some of those things they won’t let us use (like the Galileo satellite system - which is alright by me because I love a map!) and some things they will charge us for during the transition period (like OLAF who deals with
international fraud and Tom who controls anything nuclear - more on Olaf and Tom later). The draft agreement doesn’t say how much these things will cost but does say we will get the bill in 2020. (Again: problem for next government)
8. I’m still cross that the public was ever asked to vote on something that was too complicated to
deliver. There is an analogy doing the rounds on social media where someone has a cake and wants to get their eggs back out of it. I confess that I am someone who preferred cake to eggs but most of my anger comes because it’s cruel to show someone a cake and tell them that they can have the eggs.
9. I belong to the gym and know that if I only swam 3 times a week it would cost me more. We don’t know how much of the EU we are going to use and how much that’s going to cost us because that is still to be agreed but it won’t be free and I suspect it will be more than three swims a week.
10. Much of the draft agreement refers to laws that are already in place and says what we will stick to or can ignore (and I was often confused about which way round that was) but without the original articles in front of me I had no idea what we might still have to do or not have to do.
11. The draft agreement has worked hard to protect the Northern Ireland boarder but loads of people won’t like it because if we can’t agree we stay in a customs union indefinitely.
12. Actually, it might not be indefinitely (I’m not sure if I’m the only one to have read this) but it says : "If the application of this protocol leads to serious economic societal or environmental difficulties liable to persist, or to diversion of trade, the EU or the United Kingdom may unilaterally take appropriate measures."
13. Fish: I have sympathy for the fishing industry and can completely understand why they want Brexit. The EU helped to destroy the small fishing industry but did help to replenish fish stock with quotas.
14. Fish: Agreeing anything about fish is going to be difficult and so the deadline date for agreement is 20XX. I'm assuming that gives us 82 years to agree, which I don't think is very optimistic.
15. Fish: We have agreed to stick to quotas on two types of fish, neither of which I've ever heard of.
16. Lawyers qualifications will be recognised in the EU. I shouldn't have been surprised that this was one of the first things in the document written by lawyers.
17. There is a lot of information about protecting the pensions of people who work at the EU. This confused me but I think they are OK.
18. I think we are always going to need OLAF and Tom. Tom owns our nuclear power stations and controls the radioactive material for scanners and cancer treatments. We might have given OLAF most of his data but he now owns that data.
19. The agreement does state that we will be able to 'control our boarders' and that we intend to develop a points based immigration system. If you voted for Brexit to keep Polish people from coming to England unless they have skills we can't provide here (which could be being prepared to work for small amounts of money) then you have got what you wanted.
20. There is something about people who have been working in the EU and their rights to access UK benefits. I think it means that if you've worked in the EU then you will have to pay for NHS treatment (although I'm not sure).
Having read it and now listed my thoughts I'm still none the wiser about whether I think it's good or not. Generally, people like me, who are in the middle will be roughly alright whatever happens but I do worry about the people on the edges. Any change affects them the most.
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