An excellent comment under an article about Brexit in today’s Times
I guess I just don't understand. You can talk about stuff 'in a spirit of friendliness' but the logic of the situation is wholly against the UK.
If we leave the EU we will no longer be part of the EU's political, legal, insurance and logistical framework. For both ourselves and for the EU there would be divergence. A border would automatically form to express this! Most of the EU's border is sea luckily but where it is not (the notorious Polish-Ukrainian border!) it is a nightmare. If we are not in the customs union and the single market then this has to be expressed as a hard border.
But we can't have a hard border because of the sheer bad luck that the EU/UK border runs across a sensitive island with an international treaty about there not being a hard border. This has been made clear by the EU and by the USA and by rational people in the UK. Nobody imagined the UK would be thick enough to leave the EU so no provision was made for such a self-hating change. Ireland is not, as many Brexit people seem to believe, a sort of 'optional country' that should go away or grow up or whatever. It is part of the vastly larger EU.
There is therefore a limit on how separate we can in practice be from the EU. This was expressed in May's deal. May's deal got us out within this external constraint. It is also helpful to us as the resulting alignment stops us absurdly 'crashing out'. In practice almost nobody at all in the UK who is sane cares about this level of alignment. It formalizes what is there anyway: that as an offshore set of islands next to the rest of Europe that is still in the EU, the UK will not call the shots! But that is what we voted for.
The UK government might as well declare that we can in fact drink saltw..er or hold our breath indefinitely.
If we leave on 'no deal' in this context (and with the EU, Japan and the USA all saying this would be unacceptable) then the entire government should be put on trial for stupidity as much as for treason. We will still wind up doing what the EU tells us, but not as a serious partner but as a laughed-at supplicant.