I drafted an article 10 days ago predicting that the next week or two would see the breakdown of the Brexit talks.
Wish I had got around to publishing it.
Amongst other things I suggested that the EU would finally have to face the fact that the failure of their system was nothing to do with xenophobic little countries in the Balkans, or corrupt east European dictatorships, or incompetent Mediterranean democracies in permanent crisis.
No this disaster - the disaster that finally reveals just how impossible the European 'project' is - will be at the hands of the morally superior, self righteous goody two shoes of Europe... principally France and the Netherlands.
And it will be for the obviously domestic partisan, (and completely ethically unfathomable), reason, of protecting the unnatural rights of a few fisherman who have had the unlikely and unreasonable benefit of unfettered access to British fishing waters for the decades that Britain has been in the EU.
(An unwarranted privilege for which they probably should pay compensation... Certainly if Britain was an 'unjustly persecuted' Asian or African country instead of an 'obviously evil' European one, compensation for this unnatural practice would be a demand of every new age propagandist of any colour.)
Nonetheless I have been amazed at the number of column inches wasted in the last week as some journalists try and pretend that it must be the British who are being unreasonable. Or indeed that there is even a remote possibility that the EU could ever come to an agreement, no matter what the British do. (Short of the British admitting that it was all a ghastly mistake, and submitting to total and permanent subservience to the benign dictatorship of the Brussels bureaucrats of course.)
The truth is that the EU is completely incapable of accepting any agreement, because that presumes that 27 individual nations can agree to overcome the drag of their own domestic policies to agree on a common good. (Or on a common decency that would require even the slightest domestic discomfort in one or more of their members.)
Realistically, if you give 27 disparate political entities a veto on the behaviour of a group like the EU, you are creating a 27 to 1 bet that nothing will ever be achieved.
In fact I doubt that the odds are really as good as even a 3.7% chance in 100!
If any Euro politician or bureaucrat had an inkling of past European history they would know exactly why this can't work.
it is a repeat of the political structure of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth was an early attempt to block the Divine Right of Kings problem, and varied from the British and French versions - Constitutional Monarchy after beheading a King who went to far, or Republic/ghastly dictatorship/empire of the most bloodthirsty conquorer Europe had seen since the fall of the Roman empire after beheading a king who went too far.The Polish-Lithuanian solution was a 'Sejm' or parliament (just of the nobles at the start of course, it takes centuries to add knights and commons, burghers and yoemen). But in their system every single person in the Sejm had the right to stop all proceedings (and even nullify any legislation passed already in the whole session) by simply uttering the veto "I do not allow".
Unsurprisingly, many an insignificant but pompous (or scheming) petty nobleman had enormous fun with the veto; or made their fortunes selling it to interest groups; or indeed to foreign powers.
(Or all 3, but I think Macron fits in the first of those three options... just where he and his self righteous ilk claim their beleaguered contemporaries in Hungary or Poland or Greece have always been...)
Of course the veto system caused the inevitable stagnation and collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Just as it will of the EU.
