Brexit

May couldn’t bully a paper bag at this stage.
Still only a fool would bet against her holding on, one thing is she is tenacious. It’s not as if another PM is going to be on more stable ground.

She was bullying her cabinet a few days ago. But that was then.

She’s dangling from a cliff. Of course she won’t relinquish her grip.

She appointed her cabinet you’re off your rocker.

You seem to be taking this all personally for some reason. Does she even know you exist?

You seem unhinged but completely normal. :joy:

Well, at least he bought a book.

I don’t really see what that has to do with anything. I’m more-or-less onside with you; I dislike gross inequality and would like to see something done about it. However you’re pointing at trivialities; the EU argument concerns vastly more important issues, ie., issues of power and sovereignty over entire countries.

Whatever you might think of them, Cameron, Boris, etc have got to their positions by hard graft. The one-percenters are only 1% of the population for a very good reason. For the other 99% of the population, yes, life sucks. It always has sucked. However it sucks a lot less in modern Britain than it did in, say, 1540. Or even 1940. And you can’t make it less suckier by making poor life choices in order to pretend you’re Prince Harry.

I’ll broadly agree with that, but I never suggested exiting the EU will fix everything that’s wrong with Britain.

I agree that the problem is lack of consensus. The economy is tanking not because Brexit is inherently damaging, but because nobody is making any decisions. All the businesspeople want is certainty: if they know what’s going to be done, then they can plan for it. The government just needs to get on with it already, instead of wringing their hands and begging for crumbs from the EU table. Every day that goes past Britain loses a little more respect, and it’ll end with the EU bureaucrats giving the country a right good kicking - deservedly so - simply because the UK leadership are too cowardly to do anything except sit there and whimper like a pack of stray dogs.

Playing to lose has only one possible outcome: losing.

Cut the ropes so that the UK can float away, somewhere near the US. It can become a US territory, like Puerto Rico and Guam.

Can you please, be quiet? I don’t need you right now.
Why would demonstrators listen to this request if their purpose is to get their words out?
The English and their Brexit is a big junk of hypocrisy.

Also, watching the British debating, it’s only about what can we get out of it. How can we get the most for England etc.
This never was the idea of the EU.
They never really were a good fit for the EU.

At Teresa May you always had control over your borders, or at least to a much greater extend than the rest of the EU.

To all Brexiters: I hope you get a hard brexit and that the EU will take control of the border to England with passport checks, visas, checking your luggage and at times shoving the middle finger up your asses to see if you carry anything not allowed the EU.

https://youtu.be/9lZ8a5WIWzI?t=440

Somebody has to be a good fit for the EU?

For whom is the EU a good fit?

There was always something childish and creepy about the whole project. But what’s really revealing is how tone deaf and preachy their propaganda is:

Seriously, Captain Euro. You’re not all that. You want to talk down to the world, you have to earn the right.

From Wikipedia, for what it’s worth:

Nobody has been to Europe, really. There is no Europe. Once you accept this, all sorts of cognitive dissonance resolves itself.

The UK is arguably another granfaloon. No poet ever said, “Oh, to be in the UK in the summertime.”

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Rowland, have you ever even been to the EU or UK?

What I don’t get it how.the whole Brexit agenda has become hijacked by a very much minority hard.brexit approach.

To be clear May’s so called soft brexit is already a form of hard brexit ruling out an EEA type arrangement from.the outset.

The problem of course is there was never any detailed options put to the British public . Binary in or out with basically half for in and half for out on a given day.

From a Russian perspective perhaps!

True, but the public sentiment was pretty clear, I think. On both sides, there was a lot of subtlety in their views, and one point of consensus (correct me if you think I’m wrong here) is that everyone likes Europe and Europeans, but they don’t like the EU power structure that comes with it. The only difference between ‘leavers’ and ‘remainers’ was whether they wanted to dump both, or neither.

I doubt there were many people who voted to leave simply because they don’t like European people. Apart from the French, obviously.

Kidding.

My point is that the leavers view the breakup as something that has to happen because the relationship has run its course; it just “isn’t working out, no hard feelings”. The EU mandarins are taking this very personally and doing the psycho xiaojie thing. Now, that doesn’t surprise me, because it’s they - and not the ordinary European or Brit - who stand to lose. “Soft Brexit”, or whatever you want to call a loose, mutually-beneficial union, is not what they want. Power is the goal, just like in Nineteen Eighty Four. If it were not the goal, there would be nothing to get upset about: just thrash out another deal that works for everyone and get on with life.

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There is no more incentive for the UK to make this mutually-beneficial if they don’t agree to free movement.
The way it worked till now is that Germany, for example is outperforming the other members, but at the same time, people from all over the EU are free to move there and have part of it.
The same it is for the UK, why do so many people from the EU move there? Can it be that the UK was doing very well under the construct of the EU?
So, in other words, you want to take all the advantages of the EU, but when people from disadvantaged member countries want to move to the UK, you want to deny this .
You also don’t want to contribute to the costs of development in the EU.

I personally hope that the EU doesn’t go for a foul deal. Let it be harsh on both sides for a while. Maybe the UK can join the UDSSR!

Enjoy!

I think that EU membership is broadly popular across the population of the EU . It’s not just the EU mandarins.

Even in the UK a second referendum wouldn’t be guaranteed to have a majority for leave. Best of three ? :).

It very much depends on the options put forward to the voters. The ridiculous promises that the NHS would be paid for by stopping payments to the EU amount to vote buying and weren’t even true (and I read about the vite leave campaign and insiders say they deliberately chose this message realising it was a very powerful simplified argument about why to vote Leave…Vote Remain struggled to put together a similar simplified message , supposedly the anti immigrant message wasn’t actually a big vote better being a negative message…But it attracted a lot of media attention and those people are very vocal ).

Has anybody else here actually read Dominic Grieves insider account of the campaign?
Its very illuminating and yes their targeted Facebook campaigns were very effective .

I mean any government can shift money around and claim it came fromnthis or that but ignore all the other consequences from their decisions (such as increased debt, reduced taxation, increased taxation ).

That’s why I said another general election would be better for the UK to settle the negotiating position, part of this is caused by Labour leadership also not putting forward a coherent position .

Now personally I wouldn’t be against EU lite proposals for countries like the UK but they definitely will have reduced membership benefits. It’s true that the EU wasn’t just a commercial endeavour but supposed to bring Europe and Europeans closer together and enhance their human rights, social and work rights.

You can’t just keep talking about sending money to Europe as if it is just a financial club, it isn’t and was not from the outset. It’s more like a club of Europeans supposed to stick together and prevent conflict and enjoy prosperity .

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It depends what you mean by ‘free movement’. If you mean of people, I would say that’s an unmitigated bad thing - for everyone. The world is a crowded place, and the UK is a crowded island. There are hordes of refugees camped out at the “easy” points of entry to the EU precisely so that they can get access to “freedom of movement”. It’s not Britain who has to deal with that front-line crap; it’s those countries on the borders with the Turd World.

There’s nothing wrong with a simple vetting procedure to ensure that people who wish to migrate have some economic contribution to make in their target country. If set up correctly this could be very simple to administer (‘set up correctly’ being the stumbling block, of course: the Dilbert Principle applies).

If you mean goods, well - up to a point that’s a good thing. But it shouldn’t be subsidized or manipulated, as it is in the case of agricultural produce.

Not at all. But as I said, the UK is a small place. It has a certain ecological (and economic) carrying capacity. We have enough trouble dealing with our own dead weight - we don’t want to add to it.

The flip side of that is that foreigners with something to offer are more than welcome. All we ask is that you take one of our chavs in exchange for every German engineer :wink:

Again, it all depends what you mean by “development costs”. Most EU development money is wasted. IMO it’s a myth that you can spend your way to “development”, and the problem with an EU fund for it is that spending someone else’s money is a lot easier than spending your own. The outcome of locally-funded projects is likely to be better.

TL;DR: people voted to leave because of some relatively small, fixable problems. But the EU leaders either don’t get that they’re problems, or don’t want to fix them.

Freedom of movement could have been restricted by UK first.
Then the UK could have seen if the EU will budge when the UK called a referendum.
Similar to what Poland, Hungary are doing now.
Cameron was a very poor PM.

What’s done is done now so let’s see where it goes from here.

When those in authority refuse to fix small problems, you’ve got a big problem. But authority and power are not the same thing:

A psycho xiaojie will break into your house and boil your bunny. Will the EU attempt something like that? Given the sad state of their militaries, it might be comical.

Bluffing, or delusional… it doesn’t matter which. Never yield to the weak.

Don’t return Captain Euro’s calls.

Some nocturnal musings Rowland? Brain ejecting the unwanted thoughts for fresh ones in the daytime?