Let's kick off with a few facts:
- Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union is about leaving the EU. It's not about trade.
- Nobody serious expects a trade deal between the UK and the EU to be negotiable within two years.
- We have less than one year left
Whatever David Davis tells us, each time he and his hundred civil servants travel to Brussels to meet Michel Barnier and his supporting cast, they are talking about the terms on which we leave the EU.
They might eventually move on to the framework for a future relationship, parallel trade talks or some kind of interim or transition or implementation period, but the reason they're there is to agree on the terms of withdrawal.
Any trade deal (and probably an unknown list of other deals in the security, justice and regulatory areas) can only be signed once the UK has become a "third country" - after exit day - and will be negotiated under rules in a different part of the treaty.
There's a time limit on the Article 50 process. There's no lime limit on trade talks. Which is just as well if May & co really want a "deep and special" relationship with our "friends and partners".
One of the Leave slogans which is still quoted is that it'll be easy to come out with a trade agreement because we can just "carry on as we are now". But we don't currently have a trade agreement with the EU. We have a Treaty on European Union which the government wants nothing to do with. Any new deal needs writing from scratch.
As we should be reminded more often, nobody in history has ever tried what May & co have taken on, negotiating a less advantageous trade relationship than the existing one. The government's red lines mean that it cannot be as good. The only question is how much worse.
So what is our government actually doing? Pushing a bill through parliament based on the idea that every aspect of our relationship with the EU can either be discarded or copied over into UK law with any necessary changes on the way. All by a single exit date, which everybody assumes to be March 2019, not least because that's the only thing that's at all certain. There's nothing in it (yet) about either transition or implementation.
May's careful use of the phrase "implementation period" while everybody else talks about "transition" means there's not even agreement at the least detailed level about what can be delivered by March 2019. She seems to assume her "about two years" will be spent getting software up to date and helping business to fall in with new, agreed ways of working. No chance.
Unless the government's real intention is to walk away from the whole thing (and there are persistent rumours to that effect), I can only conclude that the majority of our political class (government and opposition) have deluded themselves in the same way and/or that none of them are telling us the truth.
Here's a prediction which I think is inescapable: if the end result is No Deal it will drag Ireland down with us, damaging both economies seriously and probably setting the peace process back decades. And I'm still being told not to talk the country down.
It is not talking the country down to warn against an incoherent and self-harming No Deal, or to argue that a mass delusion seems to be established in that crumbling palace on the Thames.
So when May and Juncker emerge from a Commission dining room and issue a statement to the effect that their talks have been "constructive and friendly" and that it was important to speed things up in "the coming months", my only response is: what have they been smoking?
