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Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

nytimes.com

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Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#621

Post by stephen_g »

philwelch wrote: post #476
hardlianotion wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those negotiations were not made on the basis of threatening to leave the EU. (edited for clarity)

British Euroskepticism has been a political force for decades and the risk of a Brexit has always been an implicit source of negotiating leverage for the UK.

I think people undersell this - I can't find the really good analysis I recall reading about this right now, but what it said was polling over the last couple of decades shows there has actually been majority support (often over 60%!) to at least reduce participation in the EU for the last 20 years.

According to this other polling [1], the appetite to do a full exit has not been as high, but still close to 50/50. I think in general people are doing a massive disservice to their own understanding when they try and take a minority "fringe racist" view and try to say that is the reason for all voters of Brexit, when reality is more complex and long-term.

(I say this not really having a horse in this race, never having even been to the UK and only having been to Europe a few times).

1. https://theconversation.com/polling-history-40-years-of-brit...

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#622

Post by celticninja »

sparkie wrote: post #343
paganel wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Juncker tweeted about an hour ago that “time is almost up” for the UK. That means that the EU won’t sweeten the proposed deal.

They will make concessions. I'll put money on it. The UK leaving with no deal would be the beginning of the end of the EU. There is already growing anti-EU sentiment in Italy (4th largest economy in the block), Hungary, Austria, Poland. The UK leaving could set off a chain reaction which would either end the EU project or drastically reduce its size. The EU simply can't afford to have the UK leave completely, because…

But surely the best move for the EU in that situation is to offer the worst deal possible, take it and you get fucked over, making staying in the union more attractive and you have a nice example to show anyone else who considers leaving? I don't get how you think that the EU would offer a sweeter deal to allow the UK to leave easier?

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#623

Post by chii »

jandrese wrote: post #375
lizknope wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where are the people who initially brought in Brexit- why are they not supporting May? They resigned. Boris Johnson the Foreign Secretary resigned. David Davis who was literally the "Brexit minister" resigned. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/theresa-mays-gov... Here are more people who resigned. https://news.sky.com/story/the-ministers-who-have-quit-over-... My view is that these people lied to the publ…

The problem is that literally nobody wants May's job right now. Given the shit sandwich she has to work with she's doing the best she can, but the best they can do is make a terrible situation slightly less terrible.

I don't get why she can't just rescind article 50, and get rid of brexit altogether.

The leave voters will just complain, but it avoids all the chaos and cost associated with leaving, when there's no clear benefits.

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#624

Post by stephen_g »

avar wrote: post #384
jpfr wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A "no deal" outcome, which is clearly bad, is still the best thing brexiters can actually deliver. It could go much much worse than just "bad". The UK imports a lot of food from EU neighbors. In case of a hard Brexit, this will just ... stop. The question is whether all supermarkets can immediately redo their supply chains. That is not likely. Especially since the UK will loose all trade agreements with the non-EU…

> The UK imports a lot of food from EU neighbors. In case of a hard Brexit, this will just ... stop. A hard Brexit doesn't mean the EU will impose an embargo on the UK. The EU now happily exports food to WTO members outside the EU, and doesn't impose export tolls or restrictions on those that I'm aware of. Of course the UK might impose its own tolls, quotas and other import restrictions after crashing out of the EU,…

But of course. I have also heard people seriously suggest that the UK will cease to uphold any human rights without the EU. As somebody who lives outside the EU and still somehow has human rights, I expect this is also an exaggeration...

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#625

Post by yholio »

philwelch wrote: post #338
yholio wrote: post #41

The Brexit promise is something nobody can deliver on. It was a lie, you cannot force the EU to accept an unfavorable trade deal. If only for the reason that it would set an exceptionally bad precedent and everybody would want their own deal, to pick and choose the parts of EU membership that are favorable to them, leading the EU to implode. Somebody needs to own up to that lie and accept that a "no deal" outcome, wh…

> If only for the reason that it would set an exceptionally bad precedent and everybody would want their own deal, to pick and choose the parts of EU membership that are favorable to them, leading the EU to implode. The UK already picked and chose the parts of EU membership they wanted. They opted out of the Euro, they opted out of Schengen, they opted out of the Charter of Fundamental Rights--all of this, and more,…

I think UK had some serious negotiating leeway for simply being the UK. EU countries really want the UK inside the Union because it makes for a better union: it's a G8 country, a nuclear power and permanent member in the Security council, an economic behemoth with a large international clout, post-colonial ties and strong industrial and technological heritage. It has a massive internal market and rich consumers.

So it was always accepted that the UK can get more concessions than the average country, simply because they bring more to the table. But there's a limit to that, not even the UK can get what Brexiteers promised: unfettered access to the internal market coupled with full sovereignty to set any tariffs and enter any trade deals. That would effectively be the end of the EU.

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#626

Post by crispinb »

itissid wrote: post #114
simonbarker87 wrote: post #47

I voted remain but I spend a lot of time with group of people who voted leave. Some of them have realised the leave campaigners basically had no evidence to back up their claims and so feel lied to but, sadly, the others are just angry - and I mean really angry. They want out at all costs because the “EU is telling us what to do”. Revoking article 50 would be a bad idea for civil stability but going through with it s…

> the others are just angry - and I mean really angry. Out of curiosity, how has "EU is telling us what to do" affected these people to make them so angry?

> Out of curiosity, how has "EU is telling us what to do" affected these people to make them so angry?

I left the UK a couple of decades ago, but my extended family (mostly in Yorkshire), all Brexiteers, hate "foreigners" and have always done so (scare-quotes necessary, because many of these "foreigners" are actually UK-born "Pakis"). There's really nothing they aren't willing to blame on some unBritish person somewhere. They're all comfortably off, certainly not victims of the Globalisation bogeyman. They're just straight up xenophobes.

I found this to be so common in much of England outside of London, that, not liking cities much, I spent most of my adult UK years in Scotland and N.Ireland (both of which have their own issues of course, but generally are more pleasant).

Still, I'm glad to have had the opportunity to leave a nation that I found to be in large part vituperatively small-minded.

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#627

Post by candiodari »

Beldin wrote: post #239
nostrademons wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then that's what we get. There's no guarantee of a good outcome: if the majority of people want to do stupid things, a democracy will let them. In such a case we'd probably be fucked regardless of what form of government we had. A dictatorship, monarchy, or oligarchy lets a minority of people do stupid things, and if you have a majority, it's fairly likely there is a powerful minority contained within them.

The majority of EU citizens did not vote in the Brexit referendum. They shouldn't have to suffer the consequences [edit to clarify] of a war resulting from this vote.

The majority of EU citizens that voted whether to join the EU or not ... voted against doing that. Ditto with expansion of the EU, constitution of the EU.

Should that be fixed too ?

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Constitu... (see "ratification")

The EU has a long history of ignoring democratic elections. That, to me, does not seem like a good thing at all, and yet it's becoming ever more clear that if you want the EU to exist at all, ignoring elections will be the cost: Both the current Greek and the current Italian government made promises of leaving the EU to get elected. Both have reneged, but of course other parties are springing up with more forceful leave rhetoric. Now French and German extreme-right parties promise to kill the EU if they get elected, and the more mainstream is forced to also take a more anti-EU stance in each country.

If either France or Germany decides to leave, then the EU experiment is over.

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#628

Post by anigbrowl »

Perhaps now there will be a reckoning with the blatant illegality (in addition to the ordinary level of rampant political dishonesty) of the Leave campaign. A pragmatic recognition that the UK cannot haul anchor and sail off to some other latitude would not hurt either.

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#629

Post by gonehome »

cm2187 wrote: post #165
gonehome wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the consequences are instability or large scale war?

War between who and who?

I was the OP - my thinking is that things are trending poorly.

The west and what it stands for is threatened both directly (Russian involvement in attacking elections both in the US, in the UK with brexit, and elsewhere) and indirectly (rise of authoritarian power/censorship in China). This is ignoring smaller, but still violent direct threats like ISIS.

With the remaining powerful moderates in Europe struggling (Merkel, Macron) and extremists waiting at the sidelines to be elected, increased nationalism and division from brexit could lead to more instability creating a situation where a large scale conflict is more likely or a west that isn't as united and can't respond as well to aggression from Russia.

Re: Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament

#630

Post by anonu »

rtkwe wrote: post #270

The issue with the referendum since the beginning was leave was such a nebulous cloud for the entire range of Brexit from barely-there-Brexit to Britian-stands-alone(-get-those-people-out)-Brexit while remain had a very definite meaning. Because of that everyone could pour all their displeasure at anything wrong into leave and think the deal would take care of it. That's why I'm always annoyed at the 'another referen…

The original referendum was just wrong to begin with. There are some decisions you cannot give to the people. You end up with Boaty McBoatface situations.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_McBoatface
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