A hobby but I would like to become professional to be honest.
Settled? Yes and no. maybe… I keep seeing other stuff.
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And 99% of the population have no idea what any of that means. Their iPhone takes a good sharp selfie.
My big Manfrotto tripod makes my pictures so much better 
Smoke and mirrors 
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‘Crunch talks’ and I think the point of no return has been met. Fishing rights are not the real killer. The evolution clause is the point of incommensurability, because there is no way to divide it up with a compromise number. Fishing can be fixed with a compromise percentage and a compromise term. UK laws being compelled to track EU laws just cannot be.
I have to think Johnson is simply keeping the nearly settled fishing issue alive so that the EU can drop one and win one.
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No pun intended but I think now they are merely boxing to save face.
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No offence, but did anyone outside of the British media bubble ever seriously think fish would be the hill this deal dies on? Bigger fish to fry, excuse the pun.
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No, but I wonder whether it really is the hill the UK are making it out to be. At this stage surely it’s more a case of posturing and seeing which side blinks first?
As for the EU dropping one and winning one, I’m resisting the urge to make a childish fart reference.
Shit, I just did.
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I guess my wording was incorrect English/misleading then. Of course it’s not the hill that it was made out to be, that was the point.
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Just as likely that the failure was my side! I do think fish is extremely important but more from a symbollic point of view. I heard someone describe it in fairly primitive terms of wanting to protect a resource that’s considered within a tribe’s territory - it goes to the fundamental human need to protect and provide for one’s own, hence why it seemingly appeals to people’s emotions - even if in the grand scheme of things it’s relatively trivial.
Of course, fishing rights, quotas etc already has a long history of antagonism and claims and counter-claims about exceeding quotas and over-fishing etc - it would have been an extremely easy and rich seam to mine when looking for something to make a big issue over.
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Bone dry dead eyes 
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Good to see the BBC concentrating on the real impacts of Brexit
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After watching pmqs today, it got me thinking: how does a country (or union like EU) sign trade deals that involve reciprocal environmental standards with multiple countries?? AFAIK CETA involved shared environmental standards. If the EU agreed to slightly modified environmental standards with UK, would that then require revisiting CETA to bring Canada in line with the EU-UK agreement? I’m guessing in these sorts of negotiations the bigger fish would get the smaller to fall into line?
I may be looking at this one all wrong so I would love some input. I am probably misunderstanding “environmental standards” in the context of an FTA.
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Only ‘slightly modified’ standards probably wouldn’t cause anything.
I think it is easier to agree convergence as is the case with most trade deals, than divergence which is what the UK want with Brexit.
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A key point is that the EU has much higher expectations of the UK than it does with Canada, due to the proximity and presumably the resultant potential level of competition. CETA binds the EU and Canada to apply international rules, sets some high level objectives, but largely recognizes a level of reciprocity between the two sets of regulations - with a good deal of implicit reliance on dispute resolution to keep them in alignment as necessary. If Canadian regulation veers wildly away from current standards, CETA might come into play, but there is no requirement that the regulations be directly comparable (ie. point of regulation, sanction processes, etc). That doesn’t appear to be the case for the UK-EU discussions. However, there is a certain logic to that - right now, there is a high degree of harmony between the UK and the EU, by definition.
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There’s also, quite frankly, a greater level of mistrust in the UK goverment’s intentions when it comes to post-Brexit divergence. Justified or not.
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Totally not justified.
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Seriously though…Both sides need to sell a deal to their audiences. The fear in Europe that the UK government will try to use any kind of trick in the book to do nefarious things to undermine standards for competitive advantage is as much a factor as the fear in the UK that any kind of (dynamic) alignment basically means slavery to Brussels.
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Where both positions are true.
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Just like most of our fish post-Brexit.
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