For All SNS Members:

In a call with my friends at Deloitte yesterday, I made a joke, noting that all one need do to feel better about the state of the US government is to look at the UK government. We all laughed.

The repeated rejections of PM Theresa May's various plans by the Parliament, as recently as a day ago, have been providing the final tragi-comic elements to the two-year-long train crash known as Brexit. Walled in by an exquisitely difficult, and mutually exclusive, set of parameters, the various governments of Britain, Scotland, and both Irelands find themselves frozen in place, unable to move either forward or back.

And with the March 29 deadline now days away, the path that May has tried to follow – a non-inclusive process based, apparently, on the false hope that the deadline alone would force her team into support – is dead.

What does this mean for the UK, the EU, and the rest of the world?

Those members following my predictions for 2019 will know I suggested one of two outcomes for this process: either a hard, crash-out Brexit (the direction we're currently headed in) or a delay and a new referendum.

Based on all of the noise around the process now, both in the UK and the EU, it seems most likely that the following events will occur:

1. The delay. While May has been muttering about a time frame of two months, my best guess is that certain unnamed members of Parliament have been meeting on the side with Juncker and the EU team, waiting for just this moment. The delay is likely to be much longer, and will be justified on the European side by allowing the democratic process of a new referendum to unfold. Something around 18-24 months should do it.
    
2. The goal. A new British referendum on leaving the EU.
    
3. The outcome. Although Parliament would vote for Brexit again today, there is no reason to believe that the Parliament matters anymore. The people of Britain, the Labor Party, and some fraction of the Conservative Party would all vote in favor. I expect Brexit to fail this time around. The prime reason derives from the prime reason it passed before. Then, it was powered by German chancellor Angela Merkel's disastrous decision to allow over a million immigrant refugees into the Schengen zone, overwhelming past numbers and current plans for integration. (Germany today is back down to about 40k immigrants per year.) With this "threat" removed, the impetus for Brexit disappears.
    
4. The PM. I see no future whatsoever for PM May. The only reason she's in power now is that no one in power wants the result of her departure. They'll get over it, and quickly. May is done.
    
5. Ireland. Nothing changes, all are happy.
    
6. The EU. Wins, avoids gloating, goes back to making wine and cars.
    
7. The UK. It will take years to overcome the feeling of complete self-government breakdown. There will be plenty of material to keep our friends at the BBC analyzing what happened for a decade.

In summary, this set of events, should they transpire over the coming weeks and years, is the best one could have hoped for. It will be good news for the good guys, and bad news for the bad guys, such as Russia, which helped make the problem, and China, which worked to benefit from it commercially.

Your comments are always welcome,

Mark Anderson

CEO
Strategic News Service