With "Crash-Out" Looming, Brexit Re-Vote Likely

Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith has never lost focus on the Brexit negotiations between the Europe Union and the United Kingdom. She has been skeptical of Tory promises and Tory tough talk. She sees a calamitous "crash-out" coming Britain's way.

This is from Friday's "EU (Finally) Slaps Down UK on Fantasy Irish Border Solutions":

[T]he UK is now on track for a crash-out Brexit. There is astonishingly still no comprehension of what leaving the EU entails among, it seems, both houses of the legislature, all of the ministers, and virtually all of the UK punditry. That means they will not come up with solutions to the problems they are trying to remedy. It also implies yet more incomprehension as the UK will pose approaches to the EU that are non-starters in light of how the EU operates, which the EU will reject them for what ought to understood as perfectly logical reasons. But that will elicit more outrage and upset from the UK, which will instead regard yet more EU rebuffs as proof that the EU wants to punish them by forcing them into the worst possible Brexit, when it will be the UK that has gotten itself in that mess due to unprecedented incompetence. 

Shorter: assume the brace position.

She was back with her doom and gloom this morning in "Hoisted from E-Mail: Brexit, Security, and the UK’s Coming Poodledom": "[A] Japan-like relationship with the US is the endgame for the UK, this will make a mockery of the Brexit selling point that that UK would be reclaiming its independence."

I lost interest in tracking the Tory twist and turns on Brexit because I think the May government's strategy is fairly transparent. It's running the clock out until such time as a re-vote can be engineered. Stephen Castle provides proof of this in "Could the U.K. Vote Again on Brexit? The Prospects Are Rising."

Castle assesses May's options once a deal is struck with the EU:

Any withdrawal deal struck by Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, will need approval from Parliament, where she has no reliable majority.

Were lawmakers to reject her agreement, Mrs. May would then face three choices, says Dominic Grieve, a pro-European rebel lawmaker in her own Conservative Party. She could try to renegotiate it — unlikely, in view of domestic political pressures and resistance from the European Union — call a general election or put her Brexit plan directly to the people.

If Yves Smith is right, if there is any deal at all, it will be horrible. Parliament is bound to reject it. Then new elections would be inevitable, all with "crash-out" looming.

It could be the gift of the outgoing government to put in place a Brexit re-vote. Infrastructure is already being put in place for the Remain campaign. That's one of the points of Castle's article.