What a bloody mess.
> “The EU doesn't want us back," he said.
While I doubt the veracity of this statement, there's a saying on the continent that God knew why (s)he put the Brits on an island. I'm starting to believe that…
The UK's Brexit dream is dead
51–60 of 85 posts
Re: The UK's Brexit dream is dead
#52> Sorry Boris, your Euroskeptic vision has failed in so many ways. > 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 spectacularl…
Well, yeah, they basically say it in the office; Boris got to be famous, and paid millions, which is, one assumes, what he was going for in the first place. The idea that he was doing any of this out of deeply-held principles always seemed... a bit naive.
Re: The UK's Brexit dream is dead
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the immediately likely things after the election is for Labour to rejoin various eurpean standards things, like on Chemicals, accepting the EU rules with no direct say in them, just like Norway and Switzerland. > [Labour Chancellor] Reeves said she does not think “anyone voted Leave because they were not happy that chemicals regulations were the same across Europe”,
She is correct. I really doubt anyone will care in practice, unless they're conditioned to care.
Thing is, the UK _was_ conditioned to care about this sort of thing, over a period of decades. Remember the bendy bananas? Basically since the UK joined, the UK's media engaged in a sustained campaign to convince people that EU regulations were unreasonable.
The EC actually had a website for this at one point: https://web.archive.org/web/20200131192225/https://blogs.ec....
Re: The UK's Brexit dream is dead
#54I think in some ways Labour is going to deliver Brexit in a way that the Tories just couldn't. All the promises that Brexiteers made were the upside of deals, but without the willingness to pay the cost. Yes, our regulations could diverge and in some cases we might have good reason to. But Brexiteers want frictionless trade, and you can't diverge and have no friction. So we just didn't chose. We didn't diverge, becau…
Middle ground? Unheard of! I think you're supposed to be telling me which side eats babies.
Re: The UK's Brexit dream is dead
#55[flagged]
What utter nonsense.
We have left the EU. Both the main parties, left and right, say we are not going to rejoin. The only power the EU has over us is the same they have over any external coubtry who wants to trade with them.
We can improve our trade deals with the EU and harmonise where it makes sense, instead of burdening business with two parallel sts of regulations and testing regimes. This isn't rejoining the EU.
Re: The UK's Brexit dream is dead
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of the three Prime Ministers we’ve had since leaving the EU, two had campaigned for Brexit. (The other was outlasted by a lettuce.) If Conservative Prime Ministers aren’t part of the establishment, who is?
We've had four: May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak.
May was prior to leaving the EU; even if you accept that it left in 2020 (it formally left in Jan 2020, but realistically was still part of the EU for the remainder of the year), she was already gone.
Re: The UK's Brexit dream is dead
#57Did the opposition to Brexit before the referendum campaign all or mostly on why Brexit would be bad, or did they put any significant effort into arguing that even if you were very pro-Brexit you should vote "remain" on that particular referendum because that particular referendum was flawed?
The question on the referendum was "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?" and your choices were "remain" or "leave".
The correct referendum would have been something like "Should the United Kingdom (1) prepare a detailed plan for leaving the European Union and negotiate the necessary trade and travel and military agreements between the UK and the EU that implementing the plan would require, and then (2) hold a referendum on whether to enact that plan and ratify the accompanying agreements?"
From what I've read a lot of pro-Brexit voters envisioned a quite different Brexit than the one they actually got.
Re: The UK's Brexit dream is dead
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I mean, if anything, the invasion of Ukraine likely _masked_ problems for longer; continental Europe was far harder hit than the UK by energy deficits (most UK gas comes from the North Sea fields and Norway, and it also had LPG importation facilities on a greater scale than did, say, Germany on the eve of the war). Without it, the economic divergence would look worse, not better. Covid was largely in the rear-view mi…
The divergance might look worse, but - jealousy aside - the real measure is absolute improvement / decline, not relative.
Re: The UK's Brexit dream is dead
#59What a bloody mess. > “The EU doesn't want us back," he said. While I doubt the veracity of this statement, there's a saying on the continent that God knew why (s)he put the Brits on an island. I'm starting to believe that…
I would say that EU might be accepting, but it will probably take 10 or 20 years of political change. And being much more accepting of EU in general. Also possibly higher integration with things like Euro and Schengen...
What is the point accepting someone who would not want to play together.
Re: The UK's Brexit dream is dead
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, if anything, the invasion of Ukraine likely _masked_ problems for longer; continental Europe was far harder hit than the UK by energy deficits (most UK gas comes from the North Sea fields and Norway, and it also had LPG importation facilities on a greater scale than did, say, Germany on the eve of the war). Without it, the economic divergence would look worse, not better. Covid was largely in the rear-view mi…
The divergance might look worse, but - jealousy aside - the real measure is absolute improvement / decline, not relative.
Yeah, seems unlikely that Ukraine made any difference there.