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Comment by contravariant | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure this is the only way to even get a 1246 page long 'agreement', because that amount of text is well beyond what any reasonable person could carefully read and agree to.

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The negotiation teams had years to come up with it, vet it, understand it and discuss it with the other side. The problems only come when the various parliaments have to understand the fruits of all that labor in a much shorter timeframe.

It's almost like the Brexiters had no clear idea of what exactly they wanted and how to achieve that.

The negotiators had 11 months not "years". The UK left the UK on 31st January 2020 and negotiations on this agreement didn't start (and couldn't legally begin) until then. The negotiations around the "withdrawal agreement" were a completely different thing and were solely about what the EU / UK relationship would be during the transition period which ends at midnight on 31st December this year. As part of that withdrawal agreement the UK government specifically negotiated a short transition period (off the top of my head the initial EU offer was five years), presumably because they thought that the increased time pressure on the EU would work to their advantage. Whether that has worked out as Boris and co hoped I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Well, also the UK had to keep paying in during the transition period.

> negotiations on this agreement didn't start (and couldn't legally begin)

This could have easily been worked around had there been any (good) will in Brussels (or more importantly in the washing machine!)... but there wasn't. Certainly the UK government at the time were desperate to negotiate everything in one go since, as the saying goes, "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed".

If the withdrawal agreement had been 2 years we can be sure it would have taken precisely 2 years to compile the agreement.

I'm afraid you have it backwards if you think the UK government were "desperate to negotiate everything in one go". "Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed" was a core principle of the EU negotiating guidelines[1] on the withdrawal agreement and was precisely what the UK were trying to avoid. The UK strategy was to try and cherry pick, or in the words of Boris, have our cake and eat it. This tendency was so strong among the British negotiators that "cakeism" is now a genuine term used across the continent to describe the tactics of an unreasonable negotiating partner who doesn't understand the need to make trade offs. I'd say it was amusing watching the Rupert's and their admirers screw up so badly and then pretend they've won a glorious victory except I actually have to live in this country.

[1]https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2017...

There's not any particular reason why they shouldn't copy and paste this, from a technical perspective. Everyone involved has clearly accepted that they're quite happy with SHA-1 and 1024-bit RSA being mandated as the standard for exchanging this information within the EU, and there isn't any reason why this would suddenly be more insecure now the UK isn't a member.

Of course, politically speaking there are obvious reasons why journalists at organisations like the BBC would kick up more of a fuss about this as part of the Brexit deal than as an EU rule, and indeed conspiciously neglect to mention the EU is presumably already using this insecure cryptograpy internally. Writing the article in this misleading way plays nicely into existing anti-Brexit narratives about it being an incompetent attempt to return the UK to the past and about Brexiters screwing things up by not listening to experts. That doesn't make requiring every EU state to upgrade their systems at the last minute any more practical though.

It's written and read by lots of people working in parallel.

...over multiple decades

Brexit takes ages, but not decades.

(And yes, the original text is decades old and it's quite obvious that the negotiation team stldecided to keep the existing process and therefore take the same legal framework)

Original text being collection of decades of individual collective works is key here. If we update this part to modern standards, why wouldn't we update all of the others too? And how long that process might take...

The point where is: The brexit agreement is not the forward looking thing, it is taking the status quo and extending it. The EU can go and improve it (if they see need) but requiring something differently/newer in Brexit negotiations causes more trouble. It is a complex transition already and brexit negotiators don't have a mandate to renegotiate EU treaties (which would be the consequence)

Doesn't mean that the "Sherpas" team, should not have picked that up earlier on.

Sherpas in this sense is the actual career diplomats who do the hard work - but I suspect they did not have subject matter experts to pick this up.

Oh yeah this definitely should have been picked up, all I'm saying is that I'm not surprised it wasn't. The sheer size makes it nigh impossible for anyone to fully understand what it says, so to the extent that there is any democratic control it's essentially based on hearsay.

Lawmakers need to do their job. They need to read and vet this stuff, not go on junkets and play golf with lobbyists.

Lobbyists are the ones who are reading and vetting it.

Lawmakers are not and can never be experts in your preferred subject, so they talk to people who are - either by retaining them as bureaucrats, or by asking lobby groups as-needed. I've not seen armies of programmers clamour for the former, so honestly, what on Earth do you want?

> I've not seen armies of programmers clamour for the former

You can count me out of that - I'm from governments that have the size they need to properly function and I'm happy to pay taxes to fund that.

I'd be happier if people richer than me paid their fair share but, unfortunately, due to budget cuts, a lot of tax legislation was written by their lobbyists instead of actual experts and, therefore, they don't.

npm install comprehensive_multilateral_free_trade_agreement && npm run brexit

hah! but perhaps closer to reality:

npm run brexit; npm install comprehensive_multilaterial_free_trade_agreement

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