Visegrad Group Reveals The Difficulties Of Brexit

A smallish Brexit news story briefly trended on Twitter last night and hasn't survived the Darwinian process of selection to make it into the mainstream news coverage.  The Visegrad Group of countries announced their intention to block any Brexit deal that didn't give their citizens the right to live and work in Britain.  


It is easy to see why this didn't make the cut in newsrooms.  It wasn't entirely clear whether they meant all their citizens or just the ones already in Britain.  And these kinds of statements are often made for internal consumption so without some knowledge of the politics of the countries in question it's hard to tell how serious they are.  And it wasn't even necessarily an official announcement as it didn't come through quite the correct channels.  And quite apart from all that, who exactly are the Visegrad group anyway?

I didn't know so I looked it up.  they turn out to be a grouping of the 4 countries that were at one point the four most eastern ones in the EU - Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.  They all share a very particular history with regards to relationships with the old USSR and have some obvious common economic interests.

The interesting point for me was not so much the details of what they were asking for as that they are going through the thought process to assess where their self interest lies.  Scuppering a Brexit deal for them would probably not be especially damaging so they have a good position from which to extract concessions in return for their co-operation.

The same calculations are no doubt being done around the continent.  Countries Britain does a lot of trade with like  France and Germany would no doubt want to come to a reasonable agreement - as the Brexiters pointed out it is in their interests to do so.  They'd no doubt want to keep face as well, so ideally we'd lock the mouthy little gobshite Farage up for the duration of the negotiations.  But some kind of deal would be obtainable if we negotiate with a bit of skill.

But there are a whole raft of countries who can put a spanner in the works without too much of a downside.  I suspect most of them can be bought off with some kind of concession.  But I think it is going to be expensive.