9 Lessons in Brexit Quotes

“No developed country has left a trade bloc before,”
― Ivan Rogers, 9 Lessons in Brexit

“The battle for free trade policies – always difficult in the US – has, after all, gone rather convincingly backwards in both major US parties in the last 20 years. I am tempted to say it’s only much of the Tory Eurosceptic Americanophile establishment which appears not quite to have noticed that, and seems to view President’s Trump’s administration as more of a bastion of free trade than it seems to the rest of the world.”
― Ivan Rogers, 9 Lessons in Brexit

“For all the imperfections of the Single Market, services trade between Member States is, in many sectors, freer than it is between the federal states of the US, or the provinces in Canada. The US government is unable, even if it were willing, to deliver on commitments in many areas in international negotiations, just as it cannot bind its states on government procurement, on which many federal states are as protectionist as it gets. Not that one ever hears a squeak on this from those who rail at EU protectionism.”
― Ivan Rogers, 9 Lessons in Brexit

“You cannot simultaneously argue that it is perfectly fine to leave a deep free trade agreement with easily our largest export and import market for the next generation, and trade solely on WTO terms because that is how we and others trade with everyone else… and argue that it is imperative we get out of the EU in order that we can strike preferential trade deals with large parts of the rest of the world, because the existing terms on which we trade with the rest of the world are intolerable.”
― Ivan Rogers, 9 Lessons in Brexit

“It really helps, in a negotiation, actually to know what you are doing and be stone-cold sober about the real interests of the other players.”
― Ivan Rogers, 9 Lessons in Brexit

“What, really, are these “equivalence” and “adequacy” stories about? They are the EU projecting power – which it does quite as well as, and probably more effectively than, Washington, in multiple critical regulatory areas – and using its pooling of internal sovereignty to impose its values and standards well beyond its borders.”
― Ivan Rogers, 9 Lessons in Brexit

“But others who have chosen to pool their sovereignty in ways and to extents which make you feel uncomfortable with the whole direction of the project, have done so because they believe pooling enhances their sovereignty – in the sense of adding to their “power of agency” in a world order in which modestly sized nation states have relatively little say – rather than diminishing it.”
― Ivan Rogers, 9 Lessons in Brexit