Brexit discussion thread XII (Please read OP before posting)

VinLieger

Bit cynical wrote: »

Well there's such a concept as cross-party support in order to thwart the hard-line brexiteers. But that never happened because remainers never fully accepted the referendum result therefore their goal was to cancel brexit rather than tone it down.

And May never fully accepted that 49% of the country voted against brexit and she ignored them for the entire process, hardly leading by example when it came to cross party support was she?

Bit cynical

VinLieger wrote: »

Its.the.exact.same.deal

Well there are a couple of differences. It is similar to an early version of May's deal before the backstop was extended to the whole of the UK. The other difference is that Stormont can end the requirement for the UK to uphold the border-free arrangement in Ireland.

VinLieger

Bit cynical wrote: »

Well there are a couple of differences. It is similar to an early version of May's deal before the backstop was extended to the whole of the UK. The other difference is that Stormont can end the requirement for the UK to uphold the border-free arrangement in Ireland.

Indeed but they weren't the reasons the ERG et al really objected to it, they wanted no deal and used NI and the DUP as cover.

The fundamentals that true no deal brexiteers opposed are basically the same in johnsons deal

stefanovich

No more childish insults please.

ballsymchugh

Bit cynical wrote: »

Well there's such a concept as cross-party support in order to thwart the hard-line brexiteers. But that never happened because remainers never fully accepted the referendum result therefore their goal was to cancel brexit rather than tone it down.

May's red lines shot down any chance of cross party support.

Bit cynical

VinLieger wrote: »

And May never fully accepted that 49% of the country voted against brexit and she ignored them for the entire process, hardly leading by example when it came to cross party support was she?

Why then did the UK parliamentary remainers vote the same way as the ERG and hard-line Brexiteers if they were so concerned with the 48%?

The only conclusion I can reach is that they did not know what they were doing whereas the hardliners did. The remainers were so intent on cancelling Brexit that they did not assess the chances of succeeding in that endeavour and nor did they assess the consequences of failure.

Christy42

VinLieger wrote: »

Indeed but they weren't the reasons the ERG et al really objected to it, they wanted no deal and used NI and the DUP as cover.

The fundamentals that true no deal brexiteers opposed are basically the same in johnsons deal

Rather than May's deal it is closer to the EU's first offer.

I can really see Boris going full blown soft Brexit while calling it hard brexit and being cheered by the hard core brexiteers. I can see it working. Just tell them they are separate from the EU and they get their sense of identity. The details are unimportant.

Christy42

Bit cynical wrote: »

Why then did the UK parliamentary remainers vote the same way as the ERG and hard-line Brexiteers if they were so concerned with the 48%?

The only conclusion I can reach is that they did not know what they were doing whereas the hardliners did.

Why did the ERG vote with the remainers if they were so concerned with the 52%.

The only conclusion I can reach is they did not know what they were doing.

See the logic doesn't really lead to a conclusion and can be used either way.

VinLieger

Christy42 wrote: »

Rather than May's deal it is closer to the EU's first offer.

I can really see Boris going full blown soft Brexit while calling it hard brexit and being cheered by the hard core brexiteers. I can see it working. Just tell them they are separate from the EU and they get their sense of identity. The details are unimportant.

100%, its been evident since 2016 the majority of them don't understand the EU or how it works so if someone like Johnson tells them black is white they will believe it and be happy to go about what they were doing being none the wiser.

joe40

Christy42 wrote: »

Rather than May's deal it is closer to the EU's first offer.

I can really see Boris going full blown soft Brexit while calling it hard brexit and being cheered by the hard core brexiteers. I can see it working. Just tell them they are separate from the EU and they get their sense of identity. The details are unimportant.

That is the hope in all this but with such a large majority he could go either way. Hopefully sense and reason win out.
The annoying thing is that despite his massive majority in Westminster it is still only 44% of the electorate.
The majority of people in the UK voted for either remain or second referendum parties.

Bit cynical

ballsymchugh wrote: »

May's red lines shot down any chance of cross party support.

Well no. MPs may have chosen to use that as an excuse to shoot down the deal but they were not forced to do so. If that was the best deal that was available from their own point of view then logically they should have voted for it. There's no legal requirement to vote against everything just because they are in opposition.

I think the problem was that they believed incorrectly that they could reverse Brexit by bringing down the deal however they should really have known better.

Seth Brundle

Tony on the ball in terms of trade between the UK, NI and the EU (and will "have a long read piece on this on the @rtenews website on Saturday")...

https://twitter.com/tconnellyRTE/status/1205183474476474369

newport2

Quotes of the day so far:

"In 400 years, children will ask why people all drag their fridges out into the streets and dance around them every 13th December"

"The turkeys haven't just voted for Christmas, they've climbed into the oven, stuffed themselves with Paxo and turned it up to gas mark 4."

Bit cynical

Christy42 wrote: »

Why did the ERG vote with the remainers if they were so concerned with the 52%.

The only conclusion I can reach is they did not know what they were doing.

See the logic doesn't really lead to a conclusion and can be used either way.

They voted against the deal because they reasoned (correctly as it turned out) that voting against it would lead to a harder Brexit than voting for it. They knew what they were doing. They won.

The only way they could have been defeated is if there was at least some degree of cross-party support for May's deal but that did not happen.

I think the lesson is that if you are thinking of shooting down something you have to assess the direction in which things are going to go should you succeed. It is OK to not happy with Brexit but blindly opposing anything connected with it does not serve your interests.

Christy42

Seth Brundle wrote: »

Tony on the ball in terms of trade between the UK, NI and the EU (and will "have a long read piece on this on the @rtenews website on Saturday")...

https://twitter.com/tconnellyRTE/status/1205183474476474369

It is hilarious for all the loyalty the DUP show to the union great Britain is still delighted to drop them in a heartbeat. It was called here months ago that Britain has little care for Northern Ireland.

Duke of Url

Christy42 wrote: »

It is hilarious for all the loyalty the DUP show to the union great Britain is still delighted to drop them in a heartbeat. It was called here months ago that Britain has little care for Northern Ireland.

Loyalty or Bribery?

Christy42

Christy42 wrote: »

It is hilarious for all the loyalty the DUP show to the union great Britain is still delighted to drop them in a heartbeat. It was called here months ago that Britain has little care for Northern Ireland.

This has been posted lots for the last few years but still make me smirk.

Edward Carson wrote:

I believed all this. I thought of the last thirty years, during which I was fighting with others whose friendship and comradeship I hope I will lose from tonight, because I do not value any friendship that is not founded upon confidence and trust. I was in earnest. What a fool I was. I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster, and so was Ireland, in the political game that was to get the Conservative Party into power. And of all the men in my experience that I think are the most loathsome it is those who will sell their friends for the purpose of conciliating their enemies, and, perhaps, still worse, the men who climb up a ladder into power of which even I may have been part of a humble rung, and then, when they have got into power, kick the ladder away without any concern for the pain, or injury, or mischief, or damage that they do to those who have helped them to gain power.

Headshot

It's a good day, Nigel Dodds losses his seat and all caused by Brexit I think. The DUP have really destroyed themselves.

Brings joy to me to see something they backed (Brexit) is blowing up in their face

Hopefully Foster is next to get cut

reslfj

Bit cynical wrote: »

Well there are a couple of differences. It is similar to an early version of May's deal before the backstop was extended to the whole of the UK. The other difference is that Stormont can end the requirement for the UK to uphold the border-free arrangement in Ireland.

1. The EU got the UK wide CU removed. The UK will now have to renegotiate all of the benefits the CU provided e.g. no tariffs for fish, farm and car export
and pay a price for each negotiated benefit it obtains.

2. The backstop is now a permanent 'front-stop' and all talks about strange 'alternative solutions' are no more.

3. A majority in Stormont to remove the 'front-stop'? Very unlikely and becoming even more unlike as NI demography develops. Look at the avg. age of DUP supporters.

It's all a little positive for Ireland and the EU27.

Lars

Akrasia

Thargor wrote: »

Looks like the people of Scotland have made their intentions clear aswell, possible end of the UK there.

You couldnt ask for a better Tory lineup to face the humiliations to come when they leave and try to turn all the unicorn promises into reality, Johnson is despised in Brussels. Id say after 5 more years of listening to them lying through their teeth and refusing to answer basic questions people will be well sick of them.

Lib Dems nearly wiped out.

You’d think that, but they’ve been in power for 9 years and still campaigning on blaming everything on Labour. The Tories are being led by a pathological liar and they are backed by the majority of the UK media including a decreasingly balanced BBC, and they have already gotten away with hiding from any journalist who might hold them to account when it matters....

It’s going to be a dark time in the UK. Johnson will fail but he will blame it in everyone who he should have listened to, and the UK public will be convinced that Eastasia has always been at war with Oceania

Seth Brundle

Headshot wrote: »

The DUP have really destroyed themselves.

They still won the most seats for any individual party which says a lot about the electorate in NI!

Akrasia

maebee wrote: »

This was a Brexit election and (it appears) the Brexiteers have won. We Europeans now need to let them go. They don't want to be part of us so we should shun them as they have shunned us. Let them deal with the rest of the world. The EU should not help them in any way, imo.

We Europeans have never prevented them from going, but we shouldn’t shun them either. We should treat them the same as every other non EU country. No special treatment for good or for Ill

Akrasia

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Safe to say that the SNP will be as much a distraction in the HoC as UKIP/Brexit party have been to the European parliament over the past few years.

With Johnson’s Majority the SNP can be safely ignored. The only threat to Johnson is from the ERG but they have won. They can push for the hardest brexit possible and refer back to their overriding’get brexit done ’ manifesto

Bit cynical

reslfj wrote: »

1. The EU got the UK wide CU removed. The UK will now have to renegotiate all of the benefits the CU provided e.g. no tariffs for fish, farm and car export and pay a price for each negotiated benefit it obtains.

Lars

Well although the EU weren't particularly happy about the UK wide CU, it was the ERG who were adamantly against it as it meant EU rules for the whole of the UK. The only people who liked it were the UK unionists. I don't think Johnson was too keen on it either but he dropped it in an attempt to gain support of hard-line Brexiteers in his own party.


But regardless, if you were looking for a fairly soft brexit then May's deal was that.

ballsymchugh

Bit cynical wrote: »

Well no. MPs may have chosen to use that as an excuse to shoot down the deal but they were not forced to do so. If that was the best deal that was available from their own point of view then logically they should have voted for it. There's no legal requirement to vote against everything just because they are in opposition.

I think the problem was that they believed incorrectly that they could reverse Brexit by bringing down the deal however they should really have known better.

because it wasn't a deal that labour brexiters could vote for (bar a few kate hoey types). if it was a norway style deal or had continued customs union, then it could have been wrapped up ages ago. May alienated moderates in her own party, never mind the opposition.

Enzokk

I posted earlier about the vote being roughly the same as the referendum but it seems like it is more for Remain than Leave,

https://twitter.com/adamboultonSKY/status/1205379073675018240?s=20

So it seems like the votes are 52%-48% for Remain parties. Doesn't matter now.

As for Johnson, I believe he said in his speech all the same rubbish as before, taking control of their laws and borders and trade. So unless he goes against his word, likely, then a hard Brexit will ensue. We will know which way he will pivot regarding his policies and Brexit when he announces his cabinet in Monday.

If he keeps most of the same people he had before then it will be hard for the people that are not well off. If he pivots to more centrists ministers then there is some hope. The problem I see is he expelled the moderate Tories and he is only left with the MPs that are on the extreme spectrum of politics.

This is because of reports that Johnson isn't big on details and he is most likely only interested in the position than the work. So I suspect it will be a hard Brexit because of Cummings and then because of that it allows for ministers to strip away what they want as there will be very little alignment with the EU. Varadkar is delusional if he thinks this result means closer alignment.

sondagefaux

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Can Johnson end the extension early now so the trade talks can begin? I seem to remember that being a possibility.

No. The UK's membership of the EU ends on the last day of the first month after it ratifies the Withdrawal Agreement (i.e. on January 31st), or on January 31st if it hasn't ratified the Withdrawal Agreement by then.

Whatever happens, the earliest it can leave the EU is 31st January.

sondagefaux

Kermit.de.frog wrote: »

This is all total nonsense feeding in to a narrative that countries have to belong to the EU to be successful.

No one is falling for that one and it will certainly stir a lot of debate across countries in the EU when the UK is perfectly fine and perfectly successful outside it.

This is what the EU naturally fear. They know the French, Italian, Germans will be looking on and it will drive debate.

It will certainly blunt the EU taking more sovereignty, that's for sure as countries ask why they have to abide by rules inflicted on them from Brussels and Frankfurt - particularly through the ECB.

This should be seen as a positive thing for meaningful reform of the EU and repatriation of powers to individual countries. We can also put an end to nonsense like an EU army and Parliament. We don't need any of these things.

Never did.

I never said that a country needs to be in the EU to be an economic success, although Ireland at least would be far poorer if it wasn't for EU membership and its levels of wealth have massively increased since the advent of the Single Market.

Apart from the European countries that participate in the Single Market either through participation in the EEA (Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein), or via bilateral treaties (Switzerland), can you provide us with a list of European countries that are thriving economically, socially and democratically outside of the EU?

Albania? Belarus? Bosnia-Hercegovina? Georgia? Kosovo? Moldova? Montenegro? North Macedonia? Serbia? Russia? Turkey? Ukraine?

I doubt you have any personal experience of just how relatively poor most of Ireland was in the 1970s and 1980s (and long before then) but the census and population figures from 1926 onwards (the first post-independence census) show that the Irish state's population has fallen in 31 of the 97 years since it was founded, with 28 of those years being in the 43 years from 1923 to 1965.

Why? Not because there were less children being born than people died: contraception was effectively illegal up to the early 1970s.

It was because so many people emigrated because the standard of living was so poor.

This didn't begin to turn around until the state began to open up the economy to foreign investment and to to trade more freely with the UK: Ireland and the UK had a free trade agreement from the mid-1960s, and Ireland applied to join the EEC soon after, although its application was rendered null when DeGaulle vetoed the UK's application.

Ireland, along with the UK and Denmark, eventually managed to join the EEC in 1973.

In that year, about 90% of Irish goods exports went to the UK and about 40% of all Irish goods exports were live animals and agricultural products.

By 2018, only 11% of Irish goods exports went to the UK, and the vast majority of exports were high-value industrial goods.

EEC/EU membership has transformed Ireland from an extremely socially conservative society with a mainly agricultural economy way too over-reliant on the UK (what do you think happened when a country that Ireland sent 90% of its goods exports to went into recession and bought far fewer Irish goods?), with such a poor standard of living that its population fell in 28 out of the first 50 years of independence, to a country that is ranked third in the world in the UN's Human Development Index, is far wealthier than it could ever have been if it had remained outside the EEC/EU, is no longer almost totally reliant on one country for its exports, has become one of the most socially liberal in the world, and is so successful that it has attracted hundreds of thousands of people to come to live and work, mostly facilitated by the free movement rights they enjoy under EU law.

Will the UK thrive outside the EU? Not one economic analysis, including the ones carried out by the UK government, says that it will grow as fast as if it remained in the EU.

Even the pro-Brexit Economists For Britain group acknowledged that much of the UK's manufacturing industry would disappear in the event the UK has no customs union with the EU and is outside of the Single Market.

The worst affected areas will be in northern England, especially the North-East of England, one of the regions that voted most enthusiastically for Brexit and where Labour lost a significant number of votes and seats to the Tories yesterday.

Decades of relentless right-wing and anti-EU diatribes in the comics that pass for much of the British press seems to have made significant numbers of voters in the poorer regions of England and Wales blame anyone but the Tories for the many years of economic and social decline they have experienced, even though this can be directlt linked to the Tories imposing harsh ideologically-motivated austerity policies that have hit these regions the hardest and the inability of any post-1973 UK government to develop and implement policies that would have enabled these regions the huge advantages afforded by EEC/EU membership, advantages that Ireland has been expert at exploiting to the great benefit of its economy and society.

As to your other 'points', we don't have an EU army and it specifically says in the EU treaties that the Treaty of Lisbon does not provide for an EU army.

The EU treaties can only be changed by unanimous agreement of all the member states.

So the only way there will ever be an EU army is if every member state wants one, and in almost all EU countries, there are amendments to the constitution to permit each country to participate in a common EU army. I don't foresee the people of Ireland voting in favour of that in my lifetime, but perhaps you know better...

No need for an EU parliament? The EU has powers to make laws, and to adopt and implement budgets and other policies that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

But you don't want a parliament directly elected by citizens of EU countries to control those laws, to examine and either accept or reject proposed budgets, to be able to scrutinise the executive and hold it to account by either firing it or forcing it to resign?

What a strange way of supporting democracy...

An Ciarraioch

Ireland, Spain and Cyprus have obtained what effectively amounts to a veto over the elements of the Withdrawal Agreement regarding their respective national concerns:

https://twitter.com/tconnellyRTE/status/1205509343900241925

https://twitter.com/tconnellyRTE/status/1205509348308455425

RobMc59

An Ciarraioch wrote: »

Ireland, Spain and Cyprus have obtained what effectively amounts to a veto over the elements of the Withdrawal Agreement regarding their respective national concerns:

https://twitter.com/tconnellyRTE/status/1205509343900241925

https://twitter.com/tconnellyRTE/status/1205509348308455425

This could all become a struggle for power between the EU and a UK which in effect will be nothing more than a vassal state of an increasingly voracious US which sees the EU as a threat.I suspect this could be the case regardless of who is in power in the whitehouse.
The UK as we know it is done for imo but the new version that emerges could potentially be an even more destabilising toxic place,more akin to putin`s russia.
Any kind of success on a world stage for this new Britain/UK will be a threat to the EU`s ambitions for the future.
I hope in the future that the UK realises the disastrous course it has taken is a mistake and will attempt to rejoin the EU but I think the rest of the EU has quite rightly had a bellyful of the UK.