Reply With QuoteWhat is the people's will, though? The referendum was so vague, I don't think there's any justification to describe any one scenario as "the people's will". Anyone who claims to represent the people's will in this is disingenuous and/or stupid.
So a soft Brexit that nobody wants. Democracy's been great at achieving that this year.
I mean correct me if I'm wrong, but did many that voted for Brexit, if anybody, want this?
And if few to none did, what's even the point?
It's not upholding the people's will.
What is the people's will, though? The referendum was so vague, I don't think there's any justification to describe any one scenario as "the people's will". Anyone who claims to represent the people's will in this is disingenuous and/or stupid.
Exactly.
It's the shitastrophy that keeps on shitting.
Soft Brexit is still preferable to no deal at all. The EU market is something you can ill-afford to ignore, especially when you're situated right next to it, and regulatory barriers are still one of the biggest obstacles to trade, so the UK will have to follow the EU's rules anyway, at least in some areas.
On the plus side, the UK will get to renegotiate trade deals with more flexibility, though this time it's without the leverage of the huge EU single market and the advantages of being one of the three top players in it.
Either way you twist and turn it, it's lose/lose. Nobody wins, except possibly Boris and Rees-Mogg, who will both benefit financially.
Lol in thinking that Trump wants to make a trade deal more advantageous to the UK. XDThe BMG survey for The Independent showed more people thinking it was wrong to invite him to Britain, supporting protests against him and thinking Theresa May should be more critical of her opposite number. But it also revealed a pragmatic streak in public opinion, with more people thinking the UK should make “every effort” to oblige the US leader and believing a quick trade deal is possible after Brexit.
Have they been paying attention to anything coming from the American cesspool? Trump wants to wage a trade war with the UK and other allies by irrationally hiking tariffs and making them economically suffer, even at the cost of the US suffering more. In part that was just really bad timing that these two movements coincided, but it's shit show enough without the delusional ridiculousness of people still insisting that something good can come out of this.
Last edited by demagogue; 8th Jul 2018 at 06:27.
I'm not sure the people's will counts for much and nothing good will come of it.
As well as Russia reportedly giving a load of dosh to UKIP (very pro-leave) it now seems that "The official Brexit campaign is expected to be found guilty of four charges of breaking electoral law".
I've not heard anything official about dodgy dealings on the Remain side (there may be) but this sort of news about one side's campaign doesn't give you much confidence in the process.
I don't think I know a single exiteer who feels anything other than complete contempt for Trump and couldn't care less about trade, they just don't want immigrants.
(Hope you're alright where you are, dema)
You have it right Gray, it’s lose lose. Previous Prime Minister Cameron thought he couldn’t lose a referendum and for his own benefit ploughed into a stupid stupid decision.
We are now suffering the consequences and will carry on suffering for many years to come. There is a move to rerun the referendum but then what does that say about democracy in this country? It is a huge political mess created by the right wing of the Conservative party.
Rant over...
There were always plenty of Brexit options on the table - EEA (Norway), EFTA (Switzerland), Canada-style agreement etc - but the headbangers wanted the impossible; single market membership without freedom of movement.
It's taken them 18 months to realise that you can't pick and choose which of the four freedoms of the European Union you want, and that you take them all or you take nothing.
I'm still hoping that Brexit can be stopped, or at least be the softest of Brexits, although quite frankly the British deserve to be hoofed out without a deal and with the inevitable mega recession and chaos that would follow. At least then people may finally realise what the benefits of being in the EU were.
What a monumentally pointless act of self-harm this entire fiasco has been. And all so David Cameron could stop haemmorhaging a few votes to a disorganised rabble of borderline racists led by that braying arse-pimple Farage.
I don't know if there ever were that many options. EFTA doesn't really want UK, for example. And Switzerland has negotiated bilateral agreements for decades to make it kind of sort of work. And EEA is politically unacceptable in the UK. And the Canada-style agreement (a free trade deal, basically) is politically risky in that it would create a "hard border" between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
I don't see how they're going to have immigration controls and basically no border control (around Northern Ireland). I really don't see any way to shimmy out of that contradiction. Those interests are straight-up competing.
I read some proposal about treating N. Ireland specially and having the strict immigration and customs control between N. Ireland and Britain. I didn't think that could be serious (it's like saying you're okay with N. Ireland not being fully British), but I also couldn't think of how they were going to do it in any way that wouldn't involve some form of that, short of admitting that strict border control was an unworkable idea to begin with.
The question I have though is, with these latest Brexit resignations, who do you think has the worse job, being a Brexit handler or a Trump handler? A Mattis or a May? Both of them have the sad task of trying to control the uncontrollable, to win the unwinnable, to improbably squeeze some kind of benefit out of something dead set on wreaking havoc ... all the while with a raging public demanding the impossible.
Brexit doesn't tweet.
(Not literally, anyway. Plenty is tweeted ABOUT it, of course. But that's not the same.)
Just judging by the number of people that have quit, I'd say the Americans win on that one. And by win I mean lose.
If I'm not mistaken, nobody in Brexit negotiations is even contemplating the sort of trade wars that Trump has been avidly pursuing since someone inadvisably let him know that he doesn't need congressional approval to do it.
Let me clarify. What I'm saying is they're all, essentially, off the shelf options; arrangements that have been proven to work. But rather than working to one of these realistic templates, the UK has wasted three quarters of the negotiation time seeking a bespoke deal. The vision of the Brexit lobby was a complete and utter fantasy, in which we can leave the EU and have frictionless trade with the rest of Europe while being able to end freedom of movement. Ignorant politicians were given a mandate to do the impossible by ignorant voters who were swayed by decades of lies and misinformation about the European Union.Originally Posted by Starker
It's kinda worked so far, whilst there has historically been more of a border than there is now (at times quite a bit more) that's generally been rather more concerned with bombs and guns crossing it than people.
Mostly immigration into the UK is enforced by landlords and employers having to check the right to live and work in the UK. How much the UK and Ireland have enforced each others immigration policies at point of entry has varied depending on how similar they were at the time, whilst both being members of the EU has increased that similarity it has little to do with the origins of the way it's dealt with.
...Because a "soft" Ireland border and EU free movement rules are inherently compatible.
Yes, but one of them has been there rather a lot longer than the other.
And now that "old" thing is likely to have to coexist with a UK/EU border control zone that has never existed before. It can remain "soft"... It can become "hard"... But it can't be both simultaneously. Seriously, am I just not explaining this right? You can have an border with no checks like Ireland/Northern Ireland seems to want, you can have a border with immigration controls like Brexit is principally concerned with, you could even have a hard border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK like nobody wants. But satisfying those conditions simultaneously? Not so easy.
Ireland isn't in the EU's Schengen free movement zone.
People wise the new situation there is exactly the same as the current one it just applies to more people.
If Ireland were to change their minds about that then sure the EU would require them to put up serious border controls there. The two areas where there are real issues going forward are in standards recognition and import tariffs.
I don't personally see that there needs to actually be any issues over standards of things like food but the potential is there and it needs to be agreed upon and it'll be more about dispute resolution than anything else.
Very few people in the UK would want to see any reduction in quality and safety standards and I doubt anyone would expect we could drag the EU's standards up anywhere we might think they're lacking.
The only thing that really is a very real problem is the tax.
Philosophically, I see Pyrian's point. They want to have their cake and eat it too. But legally and treaty-wise, it shouldn't be an issue, and practically, it doesn't need to be an issue either.
As caffeinatedzombeh alluded to, the open borders area that covers most of the EU was created by the Schengen agreement, not an EU treaty. There are EU members who are not in the Schengen area and non-EU members which are in the Schengen area. Ireland and the UK are not currently in it, and they are not obliged to join because they were given the right to opt out by EU treaty. Ireland and the UK and the other British Isles have their own common travel area that pre-existed the EU. Brexit need not change any of that.
From a practical point of view, the UK already allows visa-free travel from the rest of the EU and a whole lot of other places even though it's not in the Schengen area, and Schengen area countries similarly allow visa free travel from the UK and a whole lot of other places. I know there is a proposal to change this so that visitors to the Schengen area would have to make an electronic visa application and pay a fee to visit, but I suspect that is an empty threat since it will affect a large number of other countries besides the UK and Ireland. And even if they go through with it, and the UK reciprocates, EU citizens will still be able to travel to the UK easily without having to go to Ireland first and cross the border.
One thing I assume that's definitely going to change if Brexit proceeds is removal of the right to work for EU citizens. That will reduce the rate of legal migration into the UK for work, which seems to be one of the chief aims of the Brexiters. But that seems to be independent of what you do with the Ireland border.
There are basically two ways that people illegally migrate. First, you can enter legally under a false pretense such as tourism or business and then just stay and work gigs or under the table. That will still happen no matter what happens with Brexit. The other way people get in is to sneak in. Sneaking into the UK is a lot easier than sneaking into Ireland because they can come across the channel, so closing the border with Ireland probably wouldn't do much to limit illegal migration.
The tax issue doesn't seem to be insurmountable either. One obvious solution is for the UK to remain in the EU Customs Union after Brexit. There are already a few small states which are part of the EUCU but not EU members, so there is precedent. Business interests would love that, but I assume this solution is unpalatable to the Brexit supporters because it wouldn't leave the UK enough freedom to pursue an independent trade policy. A second option is to leave the EUCU but establish a customs union agreement with the EU that largely preserves the status quo for now but allows the possibility of diverging trade policy in the future. In other words, a soft exit. The announcement last week made it sound like the latter option is the goal of the UK government, and the EU has customs union agreements with other states already so there is precedent for that too.
But even if there is no customs union, it's not the end of the world. It depends on how strict you want to be with customs enforcement with Ireland. A loose option is to leave the border as is and require the businesses who are importing and exporting across the border to self-report, and audit them as necessary, the same way as other taxes are collected. Obviously there's a greater opportunity for fraud and smuggling with no border controls, but until/unless that becomes a significant problem I don't see the justification for putting up checkpoints and conducting customs inspections.
I don't know how people are thinking about it over there, but from this side of the Atlantic it seems like the border issue is a case of the tail is wagging the dog. The NI/RoI border is only one of many places where goods enter and leave the UK. The value of goods crossing that border is a relative pittance, a very small percentage of the total imports and exports of the UK, and also a very small percentage of total imports and exports of Ireland. The vast majority of trade between Ireland and UK doesn't go across that border. If there isn't a customs union with the EU, there are going to be a lot more UK businesses impacted than those who transact across that border.
I think there almost has to be a customs union arrangement in order for Brexit to succeed, otherwise the economic impact will be too great. Of course it begs the question: if the goal is to not impact commerce, so business is going to be like it is today, do you need to Brexit? What have you gained besides getting rid of the right to work?
Does anyone know anything about what's going on with Brexit? I see May has just lost the MPs vote (massively) but I've not been paying attention to it all so don't know what that means. Might we be so lucky, lucky, lucky that we don't actually leave?
Edit. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-46885828
This image summed up the present state of affairs to me.
It's like they're trying to square a circle, like the fundamental thing they insist on doing is the thing they can't do.
Sorry it doesn't answer your question though. The whole thing is well outside my ken. I want to think no-deal is a brinkman's tactic to push for a second referendum, but that's a risky game to play. (I'm American so my opinion doesn't really count anyway.)
The problem of a second referendum of course; where does it end? The best of 3 or 5. Democracy demands good losers.
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