If there is to be no Trade Deal with the EU then our prospect of credible and effective Trade Deals with any other nation or group of nations in the world are very unlikely. In addition the impact on our economy will be severely destructive and we will be facing many years in a economic state that will remove us from groups such as G7 or G8 in the UN and this will mean our role in the world will become very insignificant. Based on the last 6 weeks at least 3 Tory Ministers stated very clearly that the Withdrawal Agreement would be retained. Sadly however these three people along with the 90 or so other Ministers are not accountable to us in any real way. Some of them did not get elected and the ones who did are elected to serve as local MPs for up to 5 years and then they are free to step down or can get not-elected and at no point is there any real sense of accountability for the rest of the nation. It seems very clear from the information in the news that Johnson is intending for us to walk away without a deal. One of the problems with some of the people who are writing about negotiations is that they are basing their rational on a very negative form of agreements. There are of course two ways of getting deals. The worst case deals are based on the assumption that there are a certain number of resources and one of the two people, groups or nations will gain them. Therefore the best form of negotiation is if the party involved goes away with all of the resources and the other party gets none. However most negotiations are based on the setting where the more open the two sides are to what they have available and what they want to achieve is a win for both sides if they can strike a deal. Any lack of a deal or any inadequate deal will mean that both sides will benefit the least. In todays Guardian the following item appears as part of the article

However, investors said Johnson could take a tougher Brexit stance because his reputation with backbench Tory MPs has been damaged by his handling of Covid-19. Gilles Moëc, the group chief economist at Axa Investment Managers, said:

“Getting Brexit done by year-end with a minimum of concessions to the EU is probably now a matter of political survival for Boris Johnson. “So, the probability of a no-deal Brexit continues to increase, unfortunately.”

So we need to find a way of communicating with a significant number of members of the Tory Party and explaining to them that a minimum of concessions to the EU will also lead to a minimum of concessions to our nation. That whatever the prospect of political survival for Boris Johnson, that our nation and indeed our ability to work with other nations is much more important than his political career. One of the reasons for doing this is to remind them what was in the 2019 Conservative manifesto which referred to Brexit 61 times and although most of these carried no meaning the second reference was on page two which stated under the guarantee from Boris Johnson

If there is a majority of Conservative MPs on December 13th, I Guarantee I will get our new deal through Parliament. We will get Brexit done in January and unleash the potential of our whole country.

and then about half way through the 27th reference was

Once we get Brexit done, we can use our new freedoms to ensure that Britain’s businesses can unleash their enormous potential – that they can invest, hire, export and grow

According to today’s Daily Telegraph front page “Brexit deal never made sense, PM to tell the EU – Johnson will say Withdrawal Agreement is ‘contradictory’ regarding Northern Ireland.” Now of course if he is finally waking up to the fact that the Northern Ireland position is being severely damaged by our departure from the EU, this is clearly something that makes sense. Many of us identified this challenge back in 2016. However failing to make a deal with the EU will not help Northern Ireland, indeed it will place them in an even worse position than if we can secure a deal. Indeed many of us would argue that given the failure to find a Deal, that we should extend our transition period by 24 or 36 months while a meaningful way forward is obtained. The alternatives are not very appealing and if we cannot resolve matters with the EU our prospects of doing so with other nations dramatically drops down, simply because our skills are clearly very low and our credibility along with our economy will make us look a great deal weaker and therefore place our potential elements very much lower.