Brexit discussion thread VIII (Please read OP before posting)

breatheme

Hi! Does anyone know where I can find a list and some details on the bilateral trade agreements between the EU and the US? Every time I try to look for something TTIP comes up.

Or actually, all the bilateral deals between the EU and any other country would also be nice! (India, China, etc.)

spacecoyote

breatheme wrote: »

Hi! Does anyone know where I can find a list and some details on the bilateral trade agreements between the EU and the US? Every time I try to look for something TTIP comes up.

Or actually, all the bilateral deals between the EU and any other country would also be nice! (India, China, etc.)

This might be what you're looking for:

http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/

breatheme

I tried that one, but while I'm able to search for the tariffs for individual products to and from the EU, I can't see a list of the bilateral agreements the EU has with those countries.

marno21

trellheim wrote: »

You will then see many migrants using this route as a road to the NHS, which will lead to a border in double-quick time.

If it's no deal and hard border the NHS will likely be ripped apart by whatever golden trade deals they do with other countries especially the US. In addition to the fact it'll be difficult to afford after the stunting of economic growth a no deal would cause.

otnomart

breatheme wrote: »

Hi! Does anyone know where I can find a list and some details on the bilateral trade agreements between the EU and the US? Every time I try to look for something TTIP comes up.

Or actually, all the bilateral deals between the EU and any other country would also be nice! (India, China, etc.)

Try this one http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/negotiations-and-agreements/

An Ciarraioch

The Barnier documentary on RTE One now is excellent on the Brexit process to date.

Inquitus

An Ciarraioch wrote: »

The Barnier documentary on RTE One now is excellent on the Brexit process to date.

Thanks, just put it on.

boggerman1

Getting to the juicy bit now about the border.god David Davis is some plonker

lawred2

boggerman1 wrote: »

Getting to the juicy bit now about the border.god David Davis is some plonker

It's the self satisfied look on his face the entire time despite him being completely inept and out of his depth.

FrancieBrady

May really was totally embarrassed/humiliated on the world stage by the DUP. Amazing to hear the EU side of it.

reslfj

An Ciarraioch wrote: »

The Barnier documentary on RTE One now is excellent on the Brexit process to date.

Is this documentary available on the web ?

Junkyard Tom

What's the name of the documentary?

Edit:

Is it this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT1FSmISCGw

boggerman1

Brexit,the clock is ticking.one thing is clear barnier and his team are running rings around the Brits.plus Teresa May has aged a decade or more in past 2 yrs

Capt'n Midnight

An Ciarraioch wrote: »

The Barnier documentary on RTE One now is excellent on the Brexit process to date.

French made. You can also see it here https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/078746-000-A/brexit-the-clock-is-ticking/

From June 2017 until January 2019, filmmaker Alain de Halleux was granted exclusive access to Michel Barnier, the European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator. Month after gruelling month, de Halleux gets behind the scenes of the tense, frustrating and long negotiations between the EU and the UK including interviews with important public figures (Donald Tusk, Tony Blair, Yanis Varoufakis) as well as ordinary British citizens. What next for Brexit as the clock carries on ticking?

rogue-entity

theguzman wrote: »

Who cares they are better off out and make their own laws as would Ireland also

I haven't seen you make a single cogent argument for why the UK or Ireland would be "better off out".
Please tell us why we should vote for: unemployment, eradication of our savings, vast reduction in buying power, eliminating the free trade we currently enjoy, eliminating the ability to live, love and work in 27 other countries without ornery barriers.

We already make our own laws, not all of them good ones, but we are entirely responsible for electing the TDs that make them.


My UK friends are, quite understandably, incensed at the loss of their rights. As one of them, a freelancer, put it to me "I'll now have to apply for a work visa, just to sell, and the cost and hassle isn't worth it for a week of sales".

listermint

rogue-entity wrote: »

I haven't seen you make a single cogent argument for why the UK or Ireland would be "better off out".
Please tell us why we should vote for: unemployment, eradication of our savings, vast reduction in buying power, eliminating the free trade we currently enjoy, eliminating the ability to live, love and work in 27 other countries without ornery barriers.

We already make our own laws, not all of them good ones, but we are entirely responsible for electing the TDs that make them.


My UK friends are, quite understandably, incensed at the loss of their rights. As one of them, a freelancer, put it to me "I'll now have to apply for a work visa, just to sell, and the cost and hassle isn't worth it for a week of sales".

Because obviously, the world burns. Yaay.. this is the mindset peddled by those that view themselves as disenfranchised. The Steve Bannon theme. It's peddled by wealthy individuals making money out of these so called disenfranchised. The sell them lies to sell them products. They get them to buy vitamins styled on being health or long life non lizard brain stuff. They sell them subscriptions. Books , tickets to shows about peddling more conspiracy theories.

It gives a sense of being in a club . But it's all about money. Theses people have always existed. Stylised in the past as snake oil sales men. Smooth talkers telling falsehoods to ears that would listen. They prey on loss.


And in today's world the internet let's then reach a wider audience. Motive ... Money.

McGiver

L1011 wrote:

Most of the EU uses the same system though. Only a few use STV

That's right, virtually all EU countries bar France, UK, Ireland, Malta use party list system. Germany uses party list & fptp. Although in about half of the ones that use party lists preferential votes are possible i.e. you vote for a party but you can select your preferred candidate on the list.

CelticRambler

McGiver wrote: »

That's right, virtually all EU countries bar France, UK, Ireland, Malta use party list system.

France uses the list system. For "lower level" elections - e.g. municipal councils - the parties are typically ad hoc formations rather than established parties.

reslfj

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

French made. You can also see it here https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/078746-000-A/brexit-the-clock-is-ticking/

Used the English version linked by Junkyard Tom - but thanks.

Got into bed far to late last night watching it all.

Not only is Michel Barnier excellent in his negotiation job, but also in keeping the 27 united - politicians and Brexit exposed groups e.g. fishers and Ireland.

And what a team, he has

Lars

Sam Russell

It was a great piece to watch. Spoilt a bit as we knew the ending - a bit like watching Titanic - we knew it ended in tears.

Barnier is a magnificent character. He was ahead of the game at every point, whereas the British side were not even at the races.

serfboard

Sam Russell wrote: »

It was a great piece to watch.

What was most amusing to me while watching it was that they were able to skip forward months at a time, and still nothing had happened ...

Possibly worthy of its own thread, but definitely tied in with Brexit and English nationalist claims regarding sovereignty/ "taking back control" is this forthcoming study of land ownership in England, Guy Shrubsole, Who Owns England?. It has made today's New York Times and The Guardian, among other papers.

New York Times: Half of England Is Owned by Less Than 1% of Its Population, Researcher Says

The Guardian: Who owns the country? The secretive companies hoarding England's land

Some relevant quotes for perspective:

... Of particular interest were companies based in offshore tax havens, a wholly legal but controversial practice, given the opportunities offshore ownership gives for possible tax avoidance and for concealing the identities of who ultimately controls a company. Further FOI requests to the Land Registry by Eriksson hit the jackpot when he was sent – “accidentally”, the Land Registry would later claim – a huge dataset of overseas and offshore-registered companies that had bought land in England and Wales between 2005 and 2014: some 113,119 hectares of land and property, worth a staggering £170bn.

Less than 1 percent of the population — including aristocrats, royals and wealthy investors — owns about half of the land, according to “Who Owns England,” a book that is to be published in May. And many of them inherited the property as members of families that have held it for generations — even centuries.... He reached a striking conclusion — that in England, home to about 56 million people, half the country belongs to just 25,000 landowners, some of them corporations.... But Britain has greater wealth inequality than peers like Germany, France, the Low Countries and Scandinavia — though less than the United States. And Britain has not seen the kinds of wars and revolutions that over centuries wiped away sprawling estates owned by nobility in most of Europe.... Who owns the “green and pleasant land” of the English countryside can be a well-kept secret, in part because a large segment of it does not even figure in public records. Government efforts to make a public accounting of land ownership date to the 19th century, but according to the Land Registry, about 15 percent of the country’s area, most of it rural, is still unrecorded.

“Much of the land owned by the Crown, the aristocracy, and the Church has not been registered, because it has never been sold, which is one of the main triggers for compulsory registration,” the registry, which covers England and Wales, says on its website.

Mr. Shrubsole began documenting England’s estates after the referendum on Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, known as Brexit, in 2016. “If Brexit really meant ‘taking back control of our country,’ then I’d like at least to know who owns it,” he wrote in an op-ed in The Guardian a year after the vote.

Real estate prices in England are among the highest in Europe and have soared over the last generation. Mr. Shrubsole’s book documents ownership, maps unregistered land and argues that the concentration of ownership helps keep available land scarce and expensive.... The ancient idea that wealth meant land does not always hold true in modern times. But, in Britain, land accounted for half of the country’s net worth in 2016, according to data from the Office of National Statistics — double that of Germany and higher than in countries like France, Canada and Japan.

Enzokk

Sam Russell wrote: »

It was a great piece to watch. Spoilt a bit as we knew the ending - a bit like watching Titanic - we knew it ended in tears.

Barnier is a magnificent character. He was ahead of the game at every point, whereas the British side were not even at the races.

The tightrope that Barnier needs to walk to satisfy all 27 other leaders and then the EU parliament as well makes it even more astonishing that he was able to achieve that when May could not even get her party on board. Who knows what she promised the cabinet to get on-board but even that was not to last long.

The contrast in emotion once they knew their hard work was done and the UK government had accepted the deal in all of it's glory only to have that shattered when the first vote in the House of Commons was done. That Barnier was looking at May making her speech after the vote to see what new plans she has is revealing as well as surely May would have known she was not getting the vote through that night but didn't have the courtesy to send a message to Barnier's team to let them know to expect the worst.

20silkcut

Those UKIP candidates Carl Benjamin and mark Meechan they really take things to a different level altogether joking about raping women.
If they are the future of English politics then that’s it England is finished.
How has it come to this??
Insane. UKIP should be wiped out in the election with these guys standing.
But then one of them has 940k subscribers on YouTube and earns 12 grand a month from it so it’s anyones guess.
Hard to fathom what way England is heading.
Worrying from the point of view they are our much more powerful neighboring country .

ancapailldorcha

20silkcut wrote: »

Those UKIP candidates Carl Benjamin and mark Meechan they really take things to a different level altogether joking about raping women.
If they are the future of English politics then that’s it England is finished.
How has it come to this??
Insane. UKIP should be wiped out in the election with these guys standing.
But then one of them has 940k subscribers on YouTube and earns 12 grand a month from it so it’s anyones guess.
Hard to fathom what way England is heading.
Worrying from the point of view they are our much more powerful neighboring country .

Worrying yes, but perhaps not as bad as it seems.

The Brexit party is ahead of UKIP in the polls at the moment. UKIP are simply providing Farage with a boogeyman to rail against in the forms of Markus Meechan and Carl from Swindon. We've heard that the UK uses PR for these elections but that's... not entirely accurate. Ireland, both North and the Republic use the Single Transferable Vote (STV, short explanation here courtesy of CGP Grey). Mainland Britain uses the d'Hondt system, named after nineteenth century mathematician & lawyer Victor d'Hondt.

The main distinction is that votes for the lowest polling party are not transferred over so we see the tendency of larger parties to dominate reminiscent of FPTP (example on Wikipedia here). The Greens, Lib Dems and UKIP do so well because of abysmal voter turnout (UK turnout tends to hover at the 35% mark) and a desire to kick the main parties in the teeth.

This affects the remain side as well of course. I am a liberal, social democratic remain voter. Who should I vote for? My options for first preference are as follows:

• Labour
• Liberal Democrats
• Change UK
• Renew Party

London has 8 seats. Because of the d'Hondt system, tactical voting might be advisable. Usually, it involves picking the lesser of two evils but here things are much murkier.

Here is the polling from April summarised by Politics.co.uk:



And below the predicted seat distribution:



Ideally, these parties would work together but there's very little chance of that happening. Natalie Bennett, then leader of the Greens tried this in 2017 and got burned. Labour are too big so any such pact would disproportionately benefit them. Change UK seem intent on standing alone while the Lib Dems are generally barely visible.

Because of their media prominence, most of the attention will be on the new parties, Change UK and the Brexit party. Farage shrewdly started his party at the last minute to keep a clean image and can now point to Gerard Batten's collusion with far right figures like Benjamin, Yaxley-Lennon & Meechan as reasons why Brexit voters, along with Lexiteers like George Galloway should vote for him. It's a cult of personality but it remains to be seen if the cult of Farage can successfully supplant the UKIP brand but it's far from impossible IMO.

That there are millions of EU citizens here eligible to vote who were denied in 2016 and 2017 will make this a very interesting election if nothing else.

Spanish Eyes

The fact that UK is participating in the EP elections at all is just bizarre to me, but I suppose it has to be done, on the premise that there will never be such a thing as LEAVE now. (Maybe there will, but I don't see it just yet, even in October or at the review in June).

However, it does give Farage and co. a chance to annoy the EP for five years (if UK is dithering or gets numerous further extensions).

The concern is though, that the EP elections are really a proxy vote on Brexit, and in that case if the Brexit Party clean up, well they and others will enjoy that and it is full circle again.

Ugh.

An Ciarraioch

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

Worrying yes, but perhaps not as bad as it seems.

The Brexit party is ahead of UKIP in the polls at the moment. UKIP are simply providing Farage with a boogeyman to rail against in the forms of Markus Meechan and Carl from Swindon. We've heard that the UK uses PR for these elections but that's... not entirely accurate. Ireland, both North and the Republic use the Single Transferable Vote (STV, short explanation here courtesy of CGP Grey). Mainland Britain uses the d'Hondt system, named after nineteenth century mathematician & lawyer Victor d'Hondt.

The main distinction is that votes for the lowest polling party are not transferred over so we see the tendency of larger parties to dominate reminiscent of FPTP (example on Wikipedia here). The Greens, Lib Dems and UKIP do so well because of abysmal voter turnout (UK turnout tends to hover at the 35% mark) and a desire to kick the main parties in the teeth.

This affects the remain side as well of course. I am a liberal, social democratic remain voter. Who should I vote for? My options for first preference are as follows:

• Labour
• Liberal Democrats
• Change UK
• Renew Party

London has 8 seats. Because of the d'Hondt system, tactical voting might be advisable. Usually, it involves picking the lesser of two evils but here things are much murkier.

Here is the polling from April summarised by Politics.co.uk:



And below the predicted seat distribution:



Ideally, these parties would work together but there's very little chance of that happening. Natalie Bennett, then leader of the Greens tried this in 2017 and got burned. Labour are too big so any such pact would disproportionately benefit them. Change UK seem intent on standing alone while the Lib Dems are generally barely visible.

Because of their media prominence, most of the attention will be on the new parties, Change UK and the Brexit party. Farage shrewdly started his party at the last minute to keep a clean image and can now point to Gerard Batten's collusion with far right figures like Benjamin, Yaxley-Lennon & Meechan as reasons why Brexit voters, along with Lexiteers like George Galloway should vote for him. It's a cult of personality but it remains to be seen if the cult of Farage can successfully supplant the UKIP brand but it's far from impossible IMO.

That there are millions of EU citizens here eligible to vote who were denied in 2016 and 2017 will make this a very interesting election if nothing else.

Why not the Greens - they're broadly left of centre in England, and pro-Remain. This article was written before Change UK was given party status, but basically states Remainers should vote Green in Yorkshire, East Midlands and the East of England, for the Lib Dems in the North East and West Midlands, and can vote for either party in the other English regions.

https://medium.com/@Metatone/a-strawman-on-ep-election-tactical-voting-for-remainers-9b17edcdbcfd?_referrer=twitter&source=

---

nav_reg

So, from that Barnier documentary, Britain has 750 international agreements to come out of and it signed a 7-year international agreement to pay 15% of the EU's budget over those 7 years. Did anybody mention that cost when the NHS £350 million per week lie was being peddled? Did anybody mention Blair's point that Britain had more trade with Germany than with all British Commonwealth countries combined? Or how its massive trade with the small Netherlands was greater than the trade with Canada, Australia and a load of other countries combined? That all these silly claims about trade deals with India and other farflung destinations based on some romanticised "connection" between coloniser and colonised are rubbish because most countries do most of their trade with neighbouring countries? (and how much would it add to the cost of British goods/British competitiveness to transport them to these exotic nirvanas on the other side of the planet?).

Was this Brexit referendum campaign the most dishonest referendum in post-WWII European history? This is the sort of duping of an entire population that we'd expect from some tinpot dictatorship in the Third World.

The tone from that documentary gives the strong impression that the British are in a very cold and isolated place internationally. They have absolutely nobody, no organisation or no other country to blame for this. All those chickens from scapegoating the EU for the past 45 years are coming home to roost. It is only a misplaced national pride - or, rather, a conceit - that is preventing otherwise rational British people from accepting they have been hoodwinked by their Tory rightwing for decades and that the EU has, in fact, enormous benefits for Britain.

Barnier's reflection regarding fishing was instructive to the effect that "Yes, EU fishermen fish in British waters much more than British fishermen fish in the rest of the EU so what we're trying to say to the British is that if you continue to give our fishermen access to your waters, we'll continue to give you access to a market of 450 million people". That would seem like a reasonable exchange for the British. But will they go for it? There's a lot of "pride before the fall" politics going on from the British side. The sheer and utter self-defeating stupidity of it all, however, is my strongest sentiment about the cliff these Brexiteers are pushing their country over.

Thrashssacre

Ah come on lads the two UKIP lads are hardly far right, there just part of that internet bubble so there lumped in with that crowd. Yes they make some risky jokes but that doesn’t really reflect their politics. Both of them are actually centrists so further to the left then nearly any other UKIP candidate. Seems their just being demonized for being outside the mainstream news and Eaton school of thought and are being attacked from all sides of the media for it. They can use YouTube and their own social media are there platform and that’s fairly dangerous if you’re a journalist working for an agency who’s viewership is in decline and rapidly aging.

listermint

Thrashssacre wrote: »

Ah come on lads the two UKIP lads are hardly far right, there just part of that internet bubble so there lumped in with that crowd. Yes they make some risky jokes but that doesn’t really reflect their politics. Both of them are actually centrists so further to the left then nearly any other UKIP candidate. Seems their just being demonized for being outside the mainstream news and Eaton school of thought and are being attacked from all sides of the media for it. They can use YouTube and their own social media are there platform and that’s fairly dangerous if you’re a journalist working for an agency who’s viewership is in decline and rapidly aging.

Yeah sorry but no. I watched his videos. Talking about raping a women in public and on tv and then doubling down on it is not normal .

Not anywhere.

So forgive me if I think these guys are the dregs. Send them back to what slime they crawled out of.