In 16 minutes Great Britain will FINALLY be free of the fucking EU
(media.patriots.win)
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A free trade agreement is better than 'no deal', purely because it reduces the cost of trade between countries and trade increases the wealth of both parties (resulting in small things like qualify of life, health care and being able to fund a functioning military).
The UK has agreed a trade deal with the EU. It's not a perfect deal, with a lot of noise over minor things like professional recognition and pet passports (all of which would be a non-issue if the EU didn't impose barriers, but good luck getting the people making the noise to blame the EU for those), and wish fishing. The fishing situation is marginal improvements over the next five and a half years, following which the UK has full and complete control; while that five year delay is undesirable it was a relatively easy compromise that on which the EU placed insanely high value, so we got a lot in return, and the UK fishing industry will take 3-4 years to properly gear up anyway.
The real concern with it are around Financial Services and access to EU markets, but the EU's been afraid and jealous of London for decades and was always going to cause problems in this area. The current deal doesn't assure access, but is also at worse the same as WTO terms anyway, so it isn't a bad deal in that regard either.
What the deal does do is remove EU involvement in UK legislation, remove the ECJ as arbiter of the law, and free the UK to make its own policy. As an example, seconds after the transition period ended the UK removed VAT on sanitary products, something that EU law prevents. (Of course, the feminists that demanded this change are now upset that it's been politicised as a benefit of Brexit, while studiously ignoring that it was only possible because of Brexit).
So it's not a great deal, but it is a good deal, and it's better than no deal. Given most people that voted to leave the EU did want to keep a healthy friendly trade relationship across Europe this is a good outcome, and one that's actually unsettled many EU and EEA politicians because they genuinely didn't think the UK could do this.
What is VAT and why was removing it on sanitary products important? Also I'm not surprised the EU is unsettled by Brexit, because Britain just showed the rest of the EU countries that are getting fucked by the EU that decoupling can actually work.
VAT is 'Value Added Tax', a form of sales tax.
Taxing sanitary products was portrayed as sexist and also unfair on poor women, who 'needed' those products, even though the taxes raised didn't even come close to the funding received by various 'womens' organisations from Government, and even though re-usable alternatives exist that provide a significantly lower TCO (total cost of ownership).
However, as the UK does have a general approach of not taxing things like food, medication and books it wasn't unreasonable to add sanitary products to that list of exemptions. This was however not permitted under EU rules, which mandated a minimum 5% VAT rate. (Bear in mind that the EU received a cut of VAT revenues).
So the Government were legally unable to remove VAT until the UK left the EU, even though many people wanted it and the rest of us just weren't terribly bothered one way or another.
Cool, thanks for explaining this. I imagine there's probably going to be a LOT of regulations getting cut in the UK over the coming months. I can't help but imagine the EU loaded down Britain with entire truckloads of pointless regulation in order to unfairly tax and drain the wealth from the country so it could be spread around the rest of the EU.