Britain was by far the most annoying of the two during the whole negotiation and didn’t even play fair. The Home Office is currently being sued by the EU for not respecting its engagements related to foreign nationals.
The current situation is not punishment. The UK wanted to leave the single market and is now out of the single market. Turns out that leaving a common market including your main import and export partners is somehow disastrous for your economy. Who could have guessed? Certainly not the experts who spent months explaining at length to the UK population before the referendum.
This sentence doesn’t make sense. The trade agreements are part of being in the EU. Wanting to leave the EU is literally wanting to stop being part of the single market. Obviously they have worse trade. They decided to leave the trading union.
This is not punishment. This is literally what Britain asked for.
There are other trading unions and agreements that are possible besides EU, and it seems like EU has prevented UK from re-establishing the trading unions and agreements it had prior to joining the EU.
We can only speculate why, but it seems plausible and rational that EU is doing this as kind of a punishment and warning to other nations considering leaving the EU. UK benefits more from these agreements, while EU benefits less from these agreements.
On the other hand, EU is under an existential threat, and will disintegrate if other nations follow Brexit. So it is kind of rational (albeit only for the short term) for the EU leaders to think that EU benefits from preventing these agreements from happening if it prevents or hinders the disintegration.