Membership of a free trade area with no customs is "lefty" now. The world's gone mad - or rather the Tory party has.

I would love to be a member of that club as that's the one we joined. However it isn't just that is it? But you know that of course

First country to ever request trade sanctions be applied to itself... and then keep asking for less favourable terms.




Would you have been happy with a future relationship in line with the withdrawal agreement negotiated by Boris Johnson, which was ready to go... and avoided the further uncertainty of Labour’s back to the drawing board approach? Or are you happier that they’ve binned that off to pursue whatever they’re doing now?

There isn't a unicorn version of what you want unfortunately. To make trade barrier free and frictionless you have to concede certain aspects of "sovereignty", be it the right to impose tarriffs, the right to inspect goods without reason, the right to overtly prop up industries that are competing with companies in other countries, the right to separately negotiate external trade deals etc etc. Either we decide we want enjoy mutual prosperity with our neighbours or we don't; but the kicker of course is that we end up following so many EU rules anyway given our proximity and relative size to the EU market - except now we have no say in the framing of those rules any more, many of which had been so carefully crafted in the UK's favour over many years.

When we voted to join in the 70's it was sold as a free trade agreement and that's what we signed up for. It was a blatant lie. Nobody voted for what we ended up with. If the full intent had been put before the British public before that vote we'd have never joined.

This is a bit of a trope unfortunately.
But, regardless, this "stop the world, I want to get off" worldview is thoroughly impractical. You need to deal with the world as it is, not as you'd wish it to be. And the reality is that the planet is divided into huge trading blocs - and we've just extracted ourselves from the one we were, logically, part of and are now hoping to get deals with everyone, few of which will be better - and most of which by matter of law can't be better - than we had already under the EU.

Anyway, just you wait until you see the state of the unelected bureaucracy of the World Trade Organisation

Your struggle with comprehension continues - the "lefty" refers to the notion that lefties know what's best for us all and we should bow down to their superior knowledge (sic).

Is that unique to the left though? Doesn’t the right feel that its approach is best?

There may be a difference in tone sometimes (lecturing and sanctimonious versus angry and wanting to tear down shibboleths), but who is on which side of that changes issue by issue.

There is a pleasing symmetry to the manner of our departure then, I suppose.

Whether its Socialism, Marxism, Communism it is about central control - they know what's best and those that can play the political game do best not those who generate most - does that remind you of any organisation? Its a race to the bottom - not bring the bottom up its bring the top down - that's the essential difference between left and right - we have never found a better way of improving overall wealth than Capitalism yet the likes of you despise it yet enjoy its benefits?