41–50 of 85 posts
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> Boris Johnson is out of parliament, making millions from speeches and newspaper columns.
I'm pretty sure Boris thinks he succeeded just fine. The rest of the country, not so much.
> All the key Vote Leave characters have left the stage.
I get why you'd want to try to forget about Nigel Farage but the article even has a graph showing how spectacularly Reform is surging in the polls. They'll probably not quite get to the level they need to take a chunk of seats, as their voters are probably quite spread out, but if they get anything close to these numbers in the vote today, that would be pretty impressive. Politically at least.
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Fast forward to today and you can still come up with an easy list of 20 countries that exhibit human rights abuses on their own people on a day to day basis.
I've always thought actually Brexit supported the left much more than the right. I think we see that with two of Labour's key manifesto pledges would be either impossible or very difficult to do with EU/SM membership. Firstly - VAT cannot be levied on private school fees under EU law. Potentially you could argue for some exemption but I think it would be very slow. Secondly - Labour's idea of "nationalising" the UK r…
> VAT cannot be levied on private school fees under EU law. Given the long history of people the in the UK spouting absolute nonsense about what is or is not possible under EU law, do you have a reliable source for that claim?
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You weren't promised any specific policies in the aftermath, or rather to be accurate you were - you were promised a plethora of inconsistent, contradictory and mutually exclusive policies. You got Liam Fox's easiest trade deal ever, you got Dan Hannan's "absolutely nobody is suggesting we would give up our position in the free market in Europe". You got your Canada plus and your Norway minus. You took back control on immigration!
May I suggest, given that what you were told in the lead up to the referendum was clearly self-contradictory nonsense, we might have predicted exactly this implementation.
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... Eh? Is this the new line now? Brexit was a disaster not because it was an extremely silly idea, but rather due to saboteurs? I mean, I suppose you can tell yourself that if you want, but...
> Brexit was a disaster not because it was an extremely silly idea, but rather due to saboteurs? The mostly likely things that has made Brexit not work, if it could ever have worked, and other than the people in charge being terrible at their jobs, are the enormous headwinds of Covid and the war in Ukraine.
Covid was largely in the rear-view mirror by the time the UK _really_ left; the really disruptive changes didn't start til mid 2021.
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> VAT cannot be levied on private school fees under EU law. Given the long history of people the in the UK spouting absolute nonsense about what is or is not possible under EU law, do you have a reliable source for that claim?
Please see the guidelines[0] on how to treat people. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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> VAT cannot be levied on private school fees under EU law. Given the long history of people the in the UK spouting absolute nonsense about what is or is not possible under EU law, do you have a reliable source for that claim?
The EU VAT directive is long misunderstood. Countries have extreme room for interpretation of the VAT rules. For example, Ireland beat the UK on making period products tax exempt by about 20 years, something supposedly disallowed by EU directives. I know Greece charges VAT on fee-paying schools, and the EU doesn't do anything about it.
But yeah, very little stopping the UK following Ireland's lead, particularly on relatively trivial matters like the private school fees thing.
So labour will decide, they'll decide to align on some rules in exchange for reducing some friction. That is what Brexit meant. It meant tearing up the deal we had with the EU. Now it's torn up, we have to get on with deciding what our new relationship should be.