No deal won’t ‘get Brexit done’

Brexit talks between the two sides are deadlocked. Boris Johnson’s latest bid to ‘divide and conquer’ – pledging to visit Paris and Berlin to try and talk Macron and Merkel round – looks set to fail. The EU, it seems, has stayed united on Brexit, all the way to the end. We shouldn’t be surprised. 

Like it or not, this is what the country voted for in 2016. Unless something huge happened subsequently to prevent it, this is always the situation where we were likely to end up. Why? Because the EU was never going to back down on anything they perceived as a genuine threat to the single market. Brussels was also more relaxed about no deal once the Northern Ireland protocol had been agreed. So if the UK insisted on pushing the sovereignty issue to the nth degree – as it has – then no deal was going to start to become inevitable.