Bloomberg is pro-business, pro-Europe and anti-Brexit but this is the second demolition of May's deal that it's published (by Clive Crook)-
Serious negotiations on the U.K.’s longer-term economic relationship with Europe haven’t actually started. Despite its inordinate length, the draft agreement is almost exclusively concerned with the terms of Britain’s departure: what it owes, what arrangements will apply during a 21-month transition period before Brexit comes into effect, the rights of EU citizens living in Britain and vice versa, and what steps will be taken during the transition and beyond to ensure that no hard border will be needed between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. A short section will be appended on the shape of the future economic partnership, but unlike the rest of the deal this will be non-binding and amount to little more than a statement of intent.
The so-called backstop arrangement for Northern Ireland has played a pivotal role throughout. One of Britain’s biggest mistakes from the beginning — that’s a high bar, heaven knows — was to let this issue assume such importance. By its nature, the backstop had to extend beyond the transition and connect the exit terms to the yet-to-be-determined future relationship. But the question was, how far would it shape and constrain that eventual outcome?
The new feature is that the backstop not only envisages an arrangement much to the U.K.’s disadvantage, but also in effect commits the U.K. to endure it indefinitely, until the EU decides otherwise.
In this new text, there’s no time limit on the backstop, and no exit clause. The terms are that, unless the EU says different, Britain would remain in a relationship that suits the EU pretty well — as part of a stripped-down customs union (preventing the U.K. from cutting its own trade deals), bound by various “level playing-field” restrictions (making it impossible for Britain to make its own policy on an array of economic questions), with a border of sorts between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K., and subject to rulings of the European Court of Justice across an expansive range of issues. Britain would be a disenfranchised EU rule-taker, with no voice on policy, and no option to quit.
Once Britain has acceded to this, what reason is there for the EU to agree to any other kind of deal? Why look for other solutions to the Northern Ireland issue — for instance, to a comprehensive free-trade agreement plus technological solutions to keep the border open? Europe will be empowered to prolong any such discussion indefinitely, and will probably choose to do just that. Why agree to a long-term trade partnership more to Britain’s liking and less to Europe’s, once Britain has allowed itself to be chained to this in perpetuity?
At this stage of the negotiations, both sides should have merely declared that they would avoid the reimposition of a hard border on the island of Ireland, and leave it at that. How tough a problem the border question proves to be is uncertain until the terms of the long-term relationship are clear. There was no reason to suspect the U.K. of resiling from that commitment, because its interest in avoiding a hard border and any inflaming of sectarian anger in the North is greater than Ireland’s and vastly greater than the EU’s. If it was necessary to say more than that, the backstop needed a time limit and/or an exit clause, and it needed to be equally objectionable to both sides as a permanent dispensation — an outcome both would see as a last resort and strive to avoid.
The text provides for none of this. As a result, under the terms May has accepted, the backstop isn’t a backstop at all — it’s the whole deal, the best long-term arrangement Britain can now expect, as good as settled before negotiations on that future economic relationship have even started.