While the British continue to offer themselves as guinea pigs for allergies in every vaccine that comes out (I wonder how much it would have cost Pfizer to find 500,000 candidates to test the vaccine on a real population), the EU-CHINA treaty I was talking about has arrived.

the news was also published in the Italian newspapers , and arrived in the times I had foreseen in the last post .

Even the German government says it is satisfied with the agreement , and it has also appeared in the English edition of the London agency Reuters (albeit with some gnawing).

Regarding the timing:

1. Brexit had to be concluded (in any way), or from December 30 onwards.
2. Biden was not yet to be in power, that is, before January 20.

and so came the announcement.

It is an agreement with respect to which brexit becomes a completely secondary problem. But even less.

The strategy was effective enough.

The first problem in dealing with two large agreements in parallel, between entities that also interact with each other, is to prevent parallel negotiations from arising. That is to prevent the Chinese from trying to get to England by saying “we allow more in the EU-China agreement if you in exchange negotiate our access to the EU-UK agreement.

Interferences of this kind are quite common, but somehow Bernier managed to keep the deal with the UK distinct from that with China.

The second point was to prevent the British from throwing discord once they went out without an agreement (as they did by pushing Reuters, which is based in London , to publish fake news on vaccines in Germany), for example by making provocations. via press or acting in Hong Kong.

By announcing an agreement on the very same day that the British parliament approves (??) a 2,000-page agreement in just a few minutes, they wanted to blow the English off their timing. The agreement is now signed and official by both Brussels and Beijing.

The second front is the American one.

The agreement is an absolute political novelty. For the first time, China accepts the principle of reciprocity, and for the first time it removes the clause that forced foreign companies investing in China to transfer technology to the Chinese. In practice, the EU has passed the "great wall" for the first time in history. The Americans have tried to do something like this, but have never managed to have a political (and not just a commercial) commitment from the Chinese side. This treaty, on the other hand, is not commercial, but political .

Equally obviously, the deal is a big, fat cod thrown in the face of the US president. Who is still called Donald Trump today.

It was totally important that the cod landed on Trump's face, because if the deal had been made after Biden's takeover, it would have hit another face.

Even if the US government protested today, it would do so with the face of Donald Trump taking a cod in the face from Von der Leyen and 27 states that are theoretically their "allies". (in reality the negotiations were handled by Merkel and Macron, on most of the dossiers). Even so, Biden will still have room to say that it is Trump's defeat (that is, the cod has come in his face) and that it is Trump's isolationist policy to blame that the US is losing allies.

You can well understand that the agreement with China COULD not come after January 20.

The interval between 30 December and 20 January was therefore the only useful window for announcing the agreement.

Is there any way this impacts the British? Definitely, and bad.

As Hong Kong is integrated into the Chinese system, the British space in China is shrinking. Soon the Hong Kong stock exchange will be cut off from the NYSE "trusted" services, with the result that after Brexit, given this agreement with the EU, the "bridge to China" is Europe.

If the British also wanted to negotiate an agreement with the Chinese, what weight would they have? A market of 90 million people versus a market of 1,500,000,000? At one time they would have offered themselves as "the door to the European market", but after Brexit they can no longer.

The British need, a DESPERATE need, a free trade agreement with the US. Otherwise they have nothing to offer to third countries.

Only with a free trade agreement with the US could the British hope to be a "bridge to the US" and offer themselves as a proxy to the Chinese. But being the last chance, the Americans will impose very harsh conditions on it.

And this isolation explains to you why Labor joined in droves in the vote for the deal .

Incredible support, which not even the fact that the owners of the fisheries are Labor (the fishing companies on the sleeve were put on the market in the Blair period, and the partners are almost always members of Labor), can explain.

They can't EVEN afford the no deal.