Restart Brexit?

I see that the Independent today has an article with some Tories calling for the government to restart Brexit talks. Social media has therefore gone into a whirlwind of people laughing at Brexiteers and the government, and the notion of "Get Brexit Done", and so on and so forth.

The thing is, of course the government should be restarting talks, in at least some form. In fact, they should never have stopped.

Three reasons:

Firstly, the notion of "Getting Brexit Done" was always a nonsense. Yes, leaving the EU was an event, and ending the transition period was also an event. But the reality is that we remain intimately tied to the EU in a wide variety of ways, large and small. Some of those are ties that we want to retain long-term, some we may wish to allow to diminish... and there are some that have ended that we might well want to renew. So we should talk.

Secondly, it is a fact that the eventual withdrawal agreement was negotiated and signed off with almost indecent haste, especially towards the end. That inevitably means that it is flawed in a variety of ways, with some parts not working for us, some not working for the EU, and some not working for either party. So of course talks should continue, to see if improvements can be made for mutual benefit.

But thirdly, the EU remains our closest and most important neighbour, and unless it ceases to exist as an entity it will always remain so. And, despite our recent issues, it remains an ally. As anyone who has a neighbour knows, it is much better to have a good relationship with them than to have a poor one - and an antagonistic relationship can be all sorts of awful. So we should talk, and keep talking.

#9: "The Star Wars Book", by Pablo Hidalgo, Cole Horton, and Dan Zehr