Talk:Brexit negotiations in 2018

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"Trade" deal terminology

I think there is a major issue in this article - and the other year-by-year articles for 2017 and 2019, but this one is the worst offender - where the negotiations on the withdrawal agreement are referred to as negotations for a "trade deal". For example:

On 26 July, Barnier held another meeting with Raab and both stated afterwards stated in a joint press conference that "sufficient progress" had been made in the trade negotiations.
Barnier also stated that the only other challenge in the trade negotiations was finalizing an agreement between both sides [...]
On 21 August, Barnier said that the EU and Britain would not reach a trade deal by the October EU summit and that an emergency summit would have to be held in either November or December'

In my view this is misleading: in all these examples (and others) what's being referred to is the withdrawal agreement. In some senses this is a "trade deal". But a) it's very different to most other trade deals such as the EU-Canada trade deal (CETA) because it's not primarily about tariffs or other barriers to trade; and b) once the UK signs the withdrawal agreement there will be new negotiations on a traditional trade deal of that kind. This future agreement is what most media and political discussion of Brexit refers to with the phrase "trade deal", so I think the language in this article is very confusing.

I've checked the sources on a few of the sentences where this confusion occurs, and so far the original sources refer only to "a deal" rather than "a trade deal", consistent with what I'm saying is the standard usage. So I think these should be corrected, except in the handful of instances where the article actually is referring to the future trade deal. But there are a lot of individual instances of this so I wanted to discuss first. 5.148.106.4 (talk) 11:41, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It has never been properly described as a "trade deal", it is still a proposed "withdrawal agreement", loosely called "a deal" for no reason that has been clearly explained to the public by the negotiating parties. Qexigator (talk) 16:29, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Right - that's why I think the terminology here should change. If there's no disagreement in the next few days I will start to shift the language in that direction. 5.148.106.4 (talk) 13:48, 11 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]