A Third Way.

So Saturday is straightforward now.  Deal or no deal, if we are to believe President Juncker who ruled out granting an extension to the UK.  Mind you, I'm not sure he talked to everyone else at the EC before he spoke.  So what’s new! 

But assuming he’s is right, and why wouldn’t he be, the EU refusing an extension means for MPs there is genuinely this New Deal or No Deal, no matter how much parliamentary trickery they engage in.       

So at the Super Saturday’s sitting, MPs will be presented with a single motion, a choice between Boris’s new negotiated deal and no deal. This will be entirely compliant with the provisions of the Benn Act, rendering it meaningless.  By voting against the deal MPs would have given consent to leaving on the 31st without a deal.  Genius in its simplicity…      

Interestingly, as Arron Banks noted, if you step back from entrenched positions that exist in NI, the deal could turn NI into an economic powerhouse with a foot in both camps.  Thye would benefit from UK trade deals and inward investment from UK co.  Talk about win win!!  

Paradoxically, it would stop a United Ireland becoming reality.  Why would the population of NI throw away their new found status and riches to join the Republic of Ireland, a withering economic branch of a failing EU empire.  

But there is a third way (sorry Tony Blair).   

Given no deal is agreed till its signed, on Saturday, and assuming the Commons is sitting, perhaps the prime minister should tell MPs he has changed his mind.  He can tell them he has just pressed the reboot button and taken us right back to the stage before Mrs May ludicrously agreed to Brussels’s sequencing of the talks (in its favour) in which she agreed to hand over £39 billion without knowing what we were getting in return.  So an extension will be used to run both the agreement and trade talks in parallel which can be signed together in three months’ time.     

Now, that would get my vote!