Launching The Cheese Submarine

 Creating a workable Brexit agreement has been compared to building a cheese submarine. While there is a model for what England might want (the so called Norway model) but it was unappealing to Hard Brexiteers. What Boris Johnson has negotiated is a greater remove than Norway has to the European Economic Area, but I could see Britain move closer to the EEA over time. 

The potential trouble created by a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland was at the center of the difficulty in creating a workable solution. It looks like the new Brexit deal basically is EEA-lite and there will be almost no tariffs between the UK and the EU. That means no taxation issues with goods moving from the UK and EU, so the border will not need to have customs posts. There are still some regulatory issues that will need to be worked out. The UK wanted to escape EU regulations, but British goods headed to Northern Ireland will "technically" be entering the EU, which could cause some problems.

The basic idea of free trade is that competitive advantage allows for differing areas to provide different goods and services at more reasonable costs. Productivity increases as prices fall. The problem is that in some sectors, wages fall as jobs leave. This dynamic of economic displacement among manufacturing and agricultural workers is not only at the heart of Brexit, but Trumpism, Victor Orban, Poland's rightward lurch, Bolsanaro and the other Rightist populist demagogues. 

There is some evidence that Brexit will cost Britain more in terms of GDP loss than the pandemic. Whether it reaches the 4% decline in GDP - and this EEA-lite approach should mitigate that - it seems likely that Britain will suffer more economically from living the Union than from staying in. Meanwhile, the Scots are restive, and I could see them demand some sort of relationship similar to what Northern Ireland has. This is the logic of secession: where does it end?