Who is to blame this time? The Irish? The DUP?

I can't for the life of me see how the following situations can coexist.

1. Free trade between NI and Eire - no border.
2. NI to be a normal part of the UK
3. UK to be out of the free market.

Moreover, if Northern Ireland can enjoy 'special status' with the EU, why not London, or Merseyside, or Scotland?

What an awful mess it all is. The only way I can see of resolving this is to stay in the common market. We'll have to accept free movement of people too of course and have no say in the rules that govern the market, but hey, we'll be out of the EU!

It is getting more and more idiotic by the day!

A similar model already exists for the Isle of Man and the Channel Isles both of whom who are not members of the EU.

Rules can be changed, nothing is hard and fast, they do what they want when they want, look at Spain suddenly being given a veto over Gibralter, that wasn't in any rule book.

one option get out with no deal and pay them nothing

That would mean a border would have to exist between NI and the republic, The DUP walking out and probable collapse of the government. It would probably mean at least partial collapse of the UK economy too.

The Common Travel Area agreement isn’t an EU directive, if the UK doesn’t change it then the Irish border is up to the EU to sort out, they have a choice of doing something or nothing.

Pity you are not on the negotiating team then.

Mind you, it is a pity our dog wasn't. I doubt if she would go into talks as ill=prepared as our hapless piss-poor PM evidently did.

Labour is right. They are an embarrassment. It appears that there is no situation, however bad, that they cannot make a lot worse. We need to get rid of them, fast, before they do anything even more stupid.

Be sure Tony Bliar is muddying the waters in the background somewhere..

I imagine Blair is quite happy to watch the tory party tear itself apart and cock-up brexit without any input at all from him.

For someone that can be so hard-faced to her own people, May seems extremely meek in these negotiations. Perhaps its all a ploy to stall the talks indefinitely.

In reality if the money we agree to pay is money that we have (apparently) all ready agreed to pay, then its no big factor in negotiations as we'd pay the same extra money whether we stayed or left.

What it does highlight is that our Government agreed to put more money into the EU than previously let on, no doubt to help grease some future careers.

The facts are that the UK has NO cards worth a bucket of warm spit worth playing in these negotiations. Our contribution will be missed - a bit - but remember that the EU also saves the money that it would spend in the UK too. It is, in any case, a very tolerable loss.

"They need us more than we need them" was always a transparent lie. I can't imagine why anyone would have been so foolish as to believe it. A group of 500 Million can manage perfectly well when 60 million leave. With businesses and banks preparing to leave the UK for Europe they will inherit a lot of our financial assets anyway.

May has no option but to be 'meek' as you put it. She can do little but damage limitation, but even there she lacks the resources and ability to do much about what is happening. When you jump off a cliff, there is very little you can do to mitigate the situation.

We pay into the EU (gross contribution which includes the rebate)
We receive money from the EU (receipt)

And that's why we normally talk in terms of net contribution (gross minus receipts).

Our net contribution is the second highest by far, third place is France who receive double the money in receipts from the EU than us despite in most respects being similar to us.

Our net contribution is planned to increase ENORMOUSLY in the next few years, around a 25% increase next year.

Our current net contribution is about £8bn.

But then there is the income from trade balance as well which the EU benefits from us - and we lose of course.

Overall our impact on the EU will be about £20bn a year but looking forward this increases to £25bn next year.

France is doing extremely well out of all this and are nowhere near pulling their weight, the books have always been cooked in France's favour and against ours, the rebate was a partial acknowledgement of this but still didn't force France to pay a more realistic figure.

In fact many articles state that Frances net contribution has been greater than ours whereas in reality their net contribution has been half of ours.

Considering our total budget is not far from £800 billion, This is almost lost in the noise.

Incidentally out trade balance is hugely negative for us. If you are counting this as a cost, it is a voluntary one. We could export more and/or import less. You can't blame France or any other country for this. It would be a lot worse without out money-lenders, but they are all off to Europe soon anyway, so we can expect it to get a lot worse. They earn a few billion every month and that more than covers any of the contributions that brexitees obsess about.

What a pity the government has not produced any studies to quantify all this. Perhaps they know how bad it is going to be and don't want the foaming brexiteers in the tory party upset by a leakage of facts.