Reasons to be cheerful - or entangled?

So, while I was urging our negotiators to have some backbone (Part of the Union, 7 December), David Davies's civil servants were scurrying around finalising the wording of an agreement (it's called a joint report actually) so Theresa May, having had to walk out of her lunch with Juncker, could get on a plane at stupid-o-clock this morning to go and have breakfast with him and seal the deal. Is this a Reason to be Cheerful?*

Well, I'm sure a decent deal would be better than no deal. But we won't know if this paves the way for a decent deal for some time. I suspect it doesn't. The reason is, rather than presenting the EU and Ireland with a crunch and trying to get them to take at least joint ownership of the problems, an enormous dollop of fudge has been applied and we've kept the problems of finding solutions all to ourselves.

Having read the report* for myself (go on, it's only 14 and a bit pages!) it's pellucidly clear that the EU side has succeeded in all its main objectives for the first phase of the negotiations. Those objectives started with making us agree up front on the things that we could otherwise potentially use for leverage in the broader negotiation, especially the financial settlement.

However, the biggest problem I have is over the Irish border. I quote here the relevant paragraph in full (it's paragraph 49):
The United Kingdom remains committed to protecting North-South cooperation and to
its guarantee of avoiding a hard border. Any future arrangements must be compatible
with these overarching requirements. The United Kingdom's intention is to achieve
these objectives through the overall EU-UK relationship. Should this not be possible,
the United Kingdom will propose specific solutions to address the unique
circumstances of the island of Ireland. In the absence of agreed solutions, the United
Kingdom will maintain full alignment with those rules of the Internal Market and the
Customs Union which, now or in the future, support North-South cooperation, the all-island
economy and the protection of the 1998 Agreement. (My emphasis in bold)

So the onus remains entirely on us to bring forward ideas to fix the potentially unfixable. The EU side can just refuse to agree to anything they or the Republic don't like. They don't have to do anything other than say "non". In Ian Dury's song, sometime after repeatedly singing "why don't you get back into bed?" (which surely Theresa May was thinking this morning) he sings "yes, yes, dear, dear, perhaps next year, or maybe never". And, potentially to infinity, the UK is trapped maintaining "full alignment" with the single market and customs union. This gives the EU side the most enormous lever in future negotiations. I'm sure they won't hesitate to use it.

This all puts us firmly waiting in the lobby of the Hotel California, with the Eagles singing:
'Relax' said the night man,
'We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave!'

Though, as of today, I'm feeling it's more like the Genesis song Entangled:
"Well, if we can help you we will,
Soon as you're tired and ill.
With your consent
We can experiment further still.
Well, thanks to our kindness and skill
You'll have no trouble until
You catch your breath
And the nurse will present you the bill!"

The bill being around €50 billion it seems. Both Hotel California and Entangled have a nightmareish quality...

Our only get outs are that the word "alignment" is apparently not defined legally in the EU and that paragraph 5 of the agreement has the caveat that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.

I am thinking hard and trying to identify anything, however small, that the UK side has won the argument over in the negotiation to date. The only thing I can think of is that initial reports were that the EU was looking for a financial settlement of €100 million, which may well have been the number Boris Johnson said they could go whistle for. I don't count this as a "win", as it feels to me like the EU took the number they actually wanted and leaked double that number to put the wind up the other side. So Brussels has got us to commit to paying everything it wanted. And agreeing on everything else. Which just goes to show how weak a position we are in and how desperate we are to get a deal.

If we were always going to cave in on everything, why didn't we just save time and do it 6 months ago, one might ask. Except that the 6 months of hassle were necessary for the government to get its Brexit hardliners on board, everyone had to see for themselves how difficult it was. Remember, this whole thing has always been - and will be through to the end - about the Tory party trying to keep itself in one piece.

I've written the above after reading the joint report but without looking at what other commentators are saying. But I couldn't resist looking at what the Times has to say just now. Oliver Wright refers to "carefully phrased fudge" over the Irish border. "So what we have is no regulatory barriers between north and south and no regulatory barriers between east and west while in Westminster Mrs May insists that Britain will be free to change EU regulation after Brexit to strike free trade deals. Frankly, whichever way you look at it, it really doesn’t stack up in the real world." However, he says that doesn't matter as both sides have essentially agreed to kick the can down the road because the problem can't be fixed independently of the future trading arrangements. (D'oh! Of course, that was always obvious, wasn't it?) He concludes "But that is not the same as saying the ultimate problem has gone away. It hasn’t and frankly it is as divisive and difficult to solve as it has always been."

Sam Coates, also in The Times, writing under the headline "Theresa May's weakness becomes a source of strength..." notes that Mrs May's position as Tory leader remains safe for a while yet. "The fight endlessly postponed by Mrs May is coming soon, however. The party faces a choice between keeping Britain closer to European rules or whether it is better to allow divergence. Alternatively the party may choose a third way: continued fudge and the promise of the ability to pull away in certain sectors at different speeds in effect left to future generations of politicians, meaning that EU negotiations go on for decades. That could see Mrs May clinging on for longer."

I don't care about Mrs May, but negotiations going on for decades is exactly my concern. Entangled indeed.

PS 1020 pm update. Watching the smirking Irish Tea-shuck (sorry, too much wine on a Friday, can't be arsed to look up the proper spelling) on the BBC tv news, quoting Churchill at us ("end of the beginning") prompted me to throw something at the tv.....

*Reasons to be Cheerful part 3 was, of course, a big hit for Ian Dury in 1979. When I get back to writing about more enjoyable things a piece of nostalgia about the gigs I've most enjoyed is in the back of my mind. The Ian Dury and the Blockheads gig we saw in 1979 would feature prominently in any list of either mine or Mrs H's

**The Joint report from the negotiators of the European Union and the United Kingdom Government on progress during phase 1 of negotiations under Article 50 TEU on the United Kingdom's orderly withdrawal from the European Union is at https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/joint_report.pdf