Brexit discussion thread XIII (Please read OP before posting)

Enzokk

DangerScouse wrote: »

They'll be fine after a couple of years. They've seen worse than this. We on the other hand will not be.

Our government have handled this absolutely horrendously.

Please enlighten us on what they should have done differently.

listermint

DangerScouse wrote: »

They'll be fine after a couple of years. They've seen worse than this. We on the other hand will not be.

Our government have handled this absolutely horrendously.

They actually haven't seen worse than this. This is a first for any country in the world.

And its evidently obvious you have not been following anything the Irish government have been doing the last number of years.

Capt'n Midnight

Pablo Escobar wrote: »

She can't. But the Lords will likely stop it. Johnson, then, could force it through in the next Parliamentary session, but that will not be in 2020.

It wouldn't be the first time the Brexiteers have messed about with sessions.

BonnieSituation

ExMachina1000 wrote: »

My opinion is different to yours. Learn to live with it or better yet dont reply.

No need to be insulting.

There's little substance to "your opinion" though. It's a just your common-or-garden anti-EU rhetoric.

Professor Moriarty

Professor Moriarty wrote: »

You think they will be welcomed back? I don't.

I expect that the terms for rejoining would be completely unacceptable to any future UK government, so never.

listermint

[Deleted User] wrote: »

I expect that the terms for rejoining would be completely unacceptable to any future UK government, so never.

Future English government. For clarifications sake

GazzaL

Pablo Escobar wrote: »

Based on the EU not blinking yet? If the UK walk over that cliff, it's a hell of a lot less damage to the EU. The UK has no leverage. At this point the consensus is to let them go. You can't reason with their brand of politics at the moment.

I agree, and I think the biggest mistake we make in Ireland is hanging onto hope that common sense will prevail and a deal will be done whilst occasionally guffawing at some of the characters like BoJo or Mark Francois. If they want to go, leave them off. If a deal can't be done, leave them off. If you can't buy goods or services from the UK unencumbered by bureacracy or tariffs or contractual issues, buy them from elsewhere.

Many British businesses don't even realise that they've already left the EU and that they are in the transition period.

Capt'n Midnight

DangerScouse wrote: »

They'll be fine after a couple of years. They've seen worse than this. We on the other hand will not be.

Our government have handled this absolutely horrendously.

The silent alarm was pushed as soon as the Tories put Brexit on their manifest .

ERSI report came out in November 2015.


It's not by chance that the EU is focusing so much on the border.

Imreoir2

DangerScouse wrote: »

They'll be fine after a couple of years. They've seen worse than this. We on the other hand will not be.

Our government have handled this absolutely horrendously.

Yawn, the UK are far more reliant on the EU than we are on the UK. Our government is not making itself a laughing stock by breaking a treaty it signed less than a year ago.

Charles Babbage

DangerScouse wrote: »

They'll be fine after a couple of years. They've seen worse than this. We on the other hand will not be.

Our government have handled this absolutely horrendously.

If by "we" you mean NI then you might have half right, but otherwise you are wrong on both counts.

View

ExMachina1000 wrote: »

It's a political play. The UK are playing a blinding bluff. If it backfires though the UK will be looking to rejoin after the next election with a labour government at the helm

The Labour Party are just as hostile to EU membership now as the Conservatives are, merely less rabid about it.

Both parties are chasing the xenophobes vote.

Akrasia

ExMachina1000 wrote: »

UK will end up with a free trade agreement and be able to act as a full sovereign country.

Barnier will blink

The UK will end up with no international trade agreements with any of their biggest trading partners and sanctions opposed against them by the EU for violating both the withdrawal agreement and the good friday agreement

Akrasia

Pablo Escobar wrote: »

She can't. But the Lords will likely stop it. Johnson, then, could force it through in the next Parliamentary session, but that will not be in 2020.

Can they not just end the session again? pretend that all of the business from the current session relates to getting brexit done, now that the talks are off and they're crashing out, he can 'prorogue parliament' to prepare for the next session dealing with the UK's exit from the transition period.

AlmightyCushion

ExMachina1000 wrote: »

UK will end up with a free trade agreement and be able to act as a full sovereign country.

Barnier will blink

People have been saying that the EU will cave for years and it still hasn't happened.

10000maniacs

Johnson seems to be getting more irritated with everyone on a daily basis. Did anybody see the death scowl he gave at the end of his Covid briefing last week? One of the experts contradicted him.
He will come to blows fairly soon with somebody. The volcano is erupting.

Spleodar

ExMachina1000 wrote: »

UK will end up with a free trade agreement and be able to act as a full sovereign country.

Barnier will blink

And then what? The UK will have a hissy fit about some minor technicality of the free trade agreement and attempt to rewrite it because the Daily Express told them so? Credibility is gone now.

Unfortunately, this isn't going to have a happy ending. It's just going to have an extremely unnecessarily expensive and disruptive one for all of those who had nothing to do with this fiasco in the first place.

The 2020s just seem to be the decade we will one day be looking back at as an era of utter stupidity.

joeysoap

BluePlanet wrote: »

Taking the mood of the current situation, it's heading to a hard border.

Personally i think the government here has missed a trick.
They should have been preparing for this since ages ago, pouring concrete and standing up actual border infrastructure.
Heck at this point they should have given the brits notice and had a weekend trial of managing border crossings.
Standing up infrastructure would show Ireland means business insofar as protecting the Single Market.
It would detooth the Tory gambit who are betting that Ireland buckles and carries it's water for them regarding dealing with the EU.
Could imagine the infrastructure could include a massive billboard that says something like, A United Ireland removes this.

Pretty obvious you don’t live in a border county.

Spleodar

It's an incredibly frustrating position to put Ireland in. The EU has bent over backwards to try and come up with a solution to this in Northern Ireland's interests really, and the Tories (often with the full support of the DUP) have burnt every bridge that's been offered to them.

England gets its Brexit. The EU probably won't suffer significant damage at its core, but Ireland gets screwed over one way or the other because of partition of the island by the UK.

We've a choice between putting up a border or undermining our entire economy by having loss of free flow to the EU and all because of the folly a bunch of jingoists in England.

I wonder if Biden gets elected, if Hillary Clinton might be interested in becoming special envoy for peace in Northern Ireland? She's already the Chancellor of Queens University Belfast and I'm sure she would like to protect the legacy of the peace process which she was very closely involved in.

I've a feeling the UK-US trade deal will be a VERY bumpy road. Wait until the US demands something like an end to all UK subsidies for agriculture, the sale of the NHS (probably to be branded as the opening of the health market) and so on and the liberalisation of the medicines market and and that's before even mentioning the delicious chlorinated chicken.

Ultimately, it comes down to English politics not giving a toss about any of its neighbours and I think there's some rather serious lessons to be learned about reciprocity. Soft power's not gained by stamping on people's toes, laughing at them behind their backs and kicking them when they're down.

joeysoap

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

People have been saying that the EU will cave for years and it still hasn't happened.

Except if read the express or telegraph. These have the EU backing down daily ( even hourly)

fash

ExMachina1000 wrote: »

UK will end up with a free trade agreement and be able to act as a full sovereign country.

Barnier will blink

If the EU "blinked", it might as well cancel itself now. It is literally nothing if it were to do so.
If.

Peregrinus

ExMachina1000 wrote: »

My opinion is different to yours. Learn to live with it or better yet dont reply.

If you don't want people to discuss your opinions, best not post them to a discussion board. Just sayin'.

murphaph

Professor Moriarty wrote: »

You think they will be welcomed back? I don't.

Maybe before this carry on this week, but not now. Trust is gone. They'll be a long time waiting to get back in but I wouldn't expect an application for decades anyway. They will apply for EEA membership, which is no skin off our noses to grant them.

fash

murphaph wrote: »

Maybe before this carry on this week, but not now. Trust is gone. They'll be a long time waiting to get back in but I wouldn't expect an application for decades anyway. They will apply for EEA membership, which is no skin off our noses to grant them.

Even that is a long way away at this stage. UK needs to go through its midlife crisis - and hopefully lose Scotland and NI in the meantime.

Peregrinus

murphaph wrote: »

Maybe before this carry on this week, but not now. Trust is gone. They'll be a long time waiting to get back in but I wouldn't expect an application for decades anyway. They will apply for EEA membership, which is no skin off our noses to grant them.

I think the question is moot. There have to be fundamental political change in the UK before the would consider applying, and even more so before such an application application would be favourably entertained. And fundamental political change takes time. Who knows what kind of a world we'll be living in before this becomes a live question?

But this applies equally to EU membership and EEA membership. All the things that are believed about the EU in Britain would be equally applicable to the EEA, and as long as the UK isn't ready to contemplate EU membership it won't be ready to contemplate EEA membership. And, on the other side, the concerns that EU members states would have about admitting the likes of the UK to membership would be shared by EEA member states. The EEA, like the EU, is a treaty-based entity; it will be no keener than the EU to welcome member that pisses all over the treaties it has made.

I don't say this lightly, but the UK is degenerating into the kind of populist psuedo-democracy that Orban and Duda hope to build in their own countries. It will frankly be a relief to the EU not to have to confront this problem yet another of its member states; we'll be thankful that the UK left before this happened rather than after. To that extent, we've missed a bullet.

McGiver

Peregrinus wrote:

But this applies equally to EU membership and EEA membership. All the things that are believed about the EU in Britain would be equally applicable to the EEA, and as long as the UK isn't ready to contemplate EU membership it won't be ready to contemplate EEA membership. And, on the other side, the concerns that EU members states would have about admitting the likes of the UK to membership would be shared by EEA member states. The EEA, like the EU, is a treaty-based entity; it will be no keener than the EU to welcome member that pisses all over the treaties it has made.

I assume you mean EFTA. Actually EFTA membership is even less likely - it's an elite club of small wealthy countries with good governance, low corruption and niche economies. And they all have one equal vote there. No way they would allow the brutish, boorish and bullying UK into the club. And no way the UK would accept their vote to have the same weight as Liechtenstein's.

Peregrinus wrote:

I don't say this lightly, but the UK is degenerating into the kind of populist psuedo-democracy that Orban and Duda hope to build in their own countries. It will frankly be a relief to the EU not to have to confront this problem yet another of its member states; we'll be thankful that the UK left before this happened rather than after. To that extent, we've missed a bullet.

It is actually worse than Poland or Hungary now, and it's really heading into a Russian pseudo-democracy. UK is a mock democracy, which is essentially time limited one party government, where each government has always by default a constitutional majority and huge powers (more to come), there are almost no checks & balances in the system to keep the executive and legislative in check, there is no codified constitution, the legal system is dualist (which can be easily abused - see the internal market bill) etc.

CelticRambler

ExMachina1000 wrote: »

UK will end up with a free trade agreement and be able to act as a full sovereign country.

Barnier will blink

Blinking is a normal physiological phenomenon, practised by even the hardest of poker players. Brexiters are the wide-eyed madmen who think they're in a staring competition.

In the same way that the DFA won't hand you an Irish passport if you don't send in a completed application, the EU is not going to grant access to the single market unless the UK provides all the necessary paperwork. For reasons only the Brexiters know, they have so far refused to submit anything, despite several reminders that their application is time-limited.

Blinking (or not) doesn't feature anywhere in the process.

Peregrinus

ExMachina1000 wrote: »

UK will end up with a free trade agreement and be able to act as a full sovereign country.

The UK is already able to act as a fully sovereign country. It's just becoming embarrassingly apparent that it is governed by an outfit that has no idea what sovereignty means or how sovereign countries act.

ExMachina1000 wrote: »

Barnier will blink

As in "blink and you'll miss it"? He'll choose not to notice the UK's violation of law,principle and commitment and pretend it hasn't happened?

No, he won't.

ExMachina1000

Peregrinus wrote: »

The UK is already able to act as a fully sovereign country. It's just becoming embarrassingly apparent that it is governed by an outfit that has no idea what sovereignty means or how sovereign countries act.


As in "blink and you'll miss it"? He'll choose not to notice the UK's violation of law,principle and commitment and pretend it hasn't happened?

No, he won't.

The UK is not being permitted to act as a fully sovereign country. The EU has said they must stick to EU standards regarding food, labour etc
The EU are demanding access to fishing waters and the rest.
The only way around this is either no free trade, the EU gives in it the UK does.

Recent moves by the UK show that they wont be giving in.

moon2

ExMachina1000 wrote: »

The UK is not being permitted to act as a fully sovereign country. The EU has said they must stick to EU standards regarding food, labour etc
The EU are demanding access to fishing waters and the rest.
The only way around this is either no free trade, the EU gives in it the UK does.

Recent moves by the UK show that they wont be giving in.

Don't confuse "sovereignty" and "being unable to reach a mutually agreeable compromise as part of negotiations". The UK have always been the former, and people have recently begun misinterpreting the latter as the UK "being soverign".

BluePlanet

joeysoap wrote: »

Pretty obvious you don’t live in a border county.

Correct. If you do, you have my empathy. People unfortunate to be near the border are sacrificial lambs on the altar of Brexit.

There are no great options for Ireland here. Can't bring a referendum for a UI, can't compel the UK to do a damn thing. Maybe offer a relocation grant for the worst effected and compulsory purchase orders to create a DMZ at crossings.