EU. In or out?

[lancashirelad]

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[HedgeHopper]

Well, the skullduggery continues from those who want to throw away the referendum result.

It's all abit Hotel california sung to the tune of Das Lied der Deutschen, soon to be followed by Tommorow belongs to me.

Welcome Euro-Zealots to your Brave new World, you certainly deserve it

[Jak*]

The Euro brave new world may well be preferable to the current US one that Boris will have us joining. That is a bit more ‘California Uber Alles’
Cheers Jak

[HedgeHopper]

Hehe, Boris wont last 5 minutes.

We aint leaving the EU, I'm voting Labour next GE and looking forward to the country falling apart

[Jak*]

Unfortunately I think the country is already falling apart, due to the Tory’s austerity policies and privatisation agenda. Many people believed that this was down to the EU and therefore voted Leave. Hence the mess that we are now in. None of the main leaders of Leave are pushing for it for the benefit of the common people, it is just self interest for the rich and the rest of us will pick up the tab. Still we will be free to sell our country to the Yanks or the Chinese.
Cheers Jak

[daveuprite]

due to the Tory’s austerity policies and privatisation agenda. Many people believed that this was down to the EU and therefore voted Leave.

...because that is what they were told Jak - by lying politicians and the right-wing media - and instead of questioning it they chose to believe it. But now that it's been amply demonstrated that this was all a pack of lies, everyone should be reviewing their vote back in 2016. Sadly there are those (lots of them) who confuse regret or a change of mind with weakness, and are therefore not prepared to concede their mistake. It's become a psychological issue as much as a political one. Most polls are currently showing roughly 54% remain / 46% leave. Still close but clearly the country is still far too split on the issue for it to be safe or fair to pursue any kind of hard un-negotiated brexit, which is certainly not the 'will of the people'.

But it suits Johnson and his type well. It will line their pockets. Will folk really allow this tory toff coup to take place? Revocation before it's too late is the obvious course, cuts the huge losses, and solves all kinds of future hardship. At the very least a fresh referendum to confirm or otherwise whether the country really wants this nonsense.

[HedgeHopper]

This from the Times (one of the few remaining rags with intelligent contributers able to see beyond the crap fed to the sheeple)


William Shawcross wrote:

Should we be concerned for the health of Sir Simon Schama, distinguished historian and passionate remainer? In a recent tweet, he denounced the new prime minister as “fatso”. Using capitals (the online version of green ink), he declaimed: “YOU ARE NOT CHURCHILL, fatso, and the EU is not the Third Reich.”

Boris Johnson may not be Winston Churchill, but we should remember that that great “fatso” suffered similar unhelpful comments from equally intemperate voices of his day. Until, that is, he proved in the summer of 1940 that he was the only man who could save Britain from the real Third Reich.

Let’s hope that Boris and his team can do the same in the face of lesser but still serious dangers. In the past fortnight they have made a strong start in their attempt finally to honour the result of the only real people’s vote, the 2016 Brexit referendum. To achieve this, Boris has had to threaten a no-deal Brexit in the hope that that gambit, never tried by Theresa May, will finally convince the EU to search for a new consensus with Britain.

Highly placed and angry remainers insist they will fight more furiously than ever to stop no-deal — though it is the default position that parliament signed up to in voting for article 50 in the first place. Some are still plotting to overturn the original vote and to keep Britain in the increasingly undemocratic and unstable EU. Senior remainers even threaten, with total irresponsibility, to drag the monarch into the political arena.Professor Schama is right that the EU is not the Third Reich. But it has indeed become an empire. Orders are dictated to the provinces by an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels.

The creation of the European Economic Community as a peaceful alliance of states was an entirely understandable response to the horrors of the Second World War. But since then, its vaulting ambition to compel nations into ever-closer union has become, to say the least, very harmful. As national loyalties thereby lose strength, governments and institutions lose respect and populism grows. This is clear not only in Brexit but also in France, Italy and Greece, to name but a few.


The 2016 referendum vote for Brexit was a vote of confidence that we would be far better off outside the constraints of the increasingly imperial, one-size-fits-all requirements of Brussels.

Since then, the EU has not dealt with us in good faith. This has been critical. Sir Peter Marshall, the perceptive veteran British diplomat and former deputy secretary-general of the Commonwealth, considers its behaviour to be “illegal”.

He points out that when Mrs May invoked article 50, she stressed (in her letter of March 29, 2017 to the European Council) that under article 50 (2), “the framework for our future relationship” with the EU should be negotiated alongside the arrangements for our withdrawal. She was right. Such co-ordination is explicit in article 50, which instructs the EU to “negotiate and conclude an agreement with [the departing] state, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union”.

Marshall considers that the prime minister’s “trigger” letter was “as positive, co-operative, forward and outward-looking as one could wish”.

But, by contrast, Brussels refused to discuss the future framework until the withdrawal agreement had been settled. The EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, told the European parliament on April 5, 2017 that Mrs May’s (entirely proper) proposal was “too risky”.

Marshall considers that since the withdrawal agreement and its associated documents do not fully comply with article 50, “they are manifestly incomplete, as well as out of line — therefore illegal”. The backstop, he said, “would never have arisen if account had been taken of our future relationship alongside the withdrawal negotiations”.

And, he added, it requires “serious infringements of national sovereignty and integrity which no democratic government could possibly accept”.

It is not just Marshall and the European Research Group who think that. Marcel Fratzscher, head of the German Institute for Economic Research, has said that no sovereign nation could accept the tyranny of the backstop. Sigmar Gabriel, who was German foreign minister for a significant part of the Brexit process, stated that the world was far too dangerous a place for the EU to punish one of the western world’s greatest powers. EU countries, he said, “are the last political vegetarians in a world of meat eaters. When the British go, everyone will think we have become vegans. Brexit will damage Europe’s role in the world in a way that we Europeans seem unable to grasp.”

[DaveCon]

Remainers go on about "what we weren't told by the pro-Brexiteers during the referendum" but you never hear mention of what we weren't told by the Remainers. Anybody that thinks we could remain in the EU and everything would carry on without changing is very mistaken. There are plans for ever more integration together with increasing powers wielded by Brussels at the expense of national self-government.

Individual nations are less important to Brussels, it is the "EU Project" that matters and holding that together is a priority. But what happens when it goes wrong? The EU relinquishes responsibility to the real politicians in the countries they are trying to overpower. Take the financial crisis; the EU was pretty powerless other than to state "The Euro must not fail". The German government stepped up and so did the UK even though we are not in the Euro and were excluded from all the crisis meetings. Despite our own problems the UK bailed out the Irish government to the tune of billions, something they seem to have forgotten in the Brexit negotiations.

If you think our politicians are working toward Brexit out of self interest rather than the greater good of the Nation should take a look at the ego trip EU bureaucrats are taking on the huge gravy train we are financing. Junker's departure is coming a bit late for Brexit but I think it would have been a totally different story without his belligerent and dogmatic approach.

My heart sank when it was announced Barnier, a French politician, would be leading the EU Brexit team. The French do not do negotiations. Their insistence on the total destruction of Germany at the end of the Great War only fueled the resentment leading to WW2. The same skills are being brought to bare again and it's not working. Barnier has seen off three Brexit negotiators form the UK, why have there been no calls for him to move on? Possibly because Junker is from the same mold.

There was never any doubt in my mind that we would leave without a deal. The chance of getting so many disparate interests and opinions across Europe, never mind Westminster, to agree on an exit plan is zero, and that is part of the problem with the "United States of Europe". The Prime Minister must take us out of Europe without a main overarching deal. But he must have in place many minor agreements and contingency plans to keep us moving forward smoothly while the dust settles.

Well that's what I recon anyway

[Jak*]

I think you are absolutely right Dave. Other nations see the ‘EU project’ as more importantly at times than the needs and desires of the individual states. This will always cause a certain amount of stress at times and it is one of the great strengths of the EU that it has, by and large, been able to successfully manage this. The reason that other nations accept the dominance of the EU project is that they understand the rational behind it. In the current world order the individual nations of the EU would be dominated by the US and China. If the EU splits or individual nations leave, it will be the US and China who dictate the terms of trade. You only have to look at the rhetoric coming out of the US and the way that Johnson is kowtowing to Trump to see the truth of this. Personally I would rather the UK stays in a strong EU trading block than becomes tha 51st state of America, but I understand that there are many who would prefer the opposite, however I do not believe that this is what the majority of remainers voted for. Unfortunately they were sold a dream based on the fantasy that the UK can stand on its own as a global trading force, I think that option ended a long while ago and without our membership of the European project for the last forty years we would be in a much poorer position than we currently are.
I just wish we could sort this mess out and get on with the dealing with the far more serious issues of pollution and global warming. To be honest it doesn’t matter who we trade with or how if there is not a world to trade in.
Cheers Jak

[scutty]

Great post Jak - I totally agree but I think you put 'remainers' when you meant 'leavers'?