581–590 of 878 posts
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This has been brewing since George W Bush. Obama made a valiant attempt at normalising relations with Europe but I don't think any future US president has any hope of reversing this now.
Europe was skeptical ever since 'nam and at the latest Bush Sr's Iraq adventure.
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One thing that is common about middle democracies is that prioritize a bureaucratic elite structure over an entrepreneurship culture, while both the US and China embrace entreprenuership wholeheartedly. If they changed that they'd perhaps become world powers themselves.
You're getting downvoted now, but it's the Europeans who are running out of money for healthcare and public services (and voting for neo-fascist parties promising fixes that will never come). European sentiment is totally out of touch with European reality. They'll post gleefully online about how much better their life is and then go back to their sardine flat where they can't afford to pay for heating, and it never…
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Canada will be competing in Eurovision 2027 in May. :)
Also, being a European Broadcasting Union (EBU) "Associate Member" is the name for the mechanism that allowed Australia, Canada and other countries to be admitted into Eurovision. If you've been around the ESC scene, you know there's a lot of embassy involvement (parties in embassies are a thing), the scene is catnip for those interested in politics, the politically active, and to some extent politicians. Eurovision…
_Terrible_ naming.
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> Carney was asking for freedom of movement of goods, people and services, but without full monetary and legislative integration. > no payments into each others budget. Not going to happen! To enable free movement of goods and services the EU insists that the goods and services are produced in an identical regulatory environment. Even when the regimes are basically identical - eg the UK - then the EU doesn't permit i…
It's actually going to raise questions as to why the EU are A-OK with this now when a possible interpretation of associate membership is it's what Cameron was trying to negotiate the UK into when complete inflexibility on the EU side triggered the Brexit referendum. All depends on what an associate member is of course.
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I don’t think Cameron did much serious negotiation on this front. He resigned the evening of the referendum results. It was a deliberate choice by his successors to pursue a hard Brexit. A softer Brexit was always possible and likely would have been more acceptable to the EU, as it would have had less financial impact and disruption to trade.
That's what happened afterwards. The referendum was triggered by a failed negotiation between Cameron and the EU in the first place.
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Trump is a symptom not the disease, when he's gone the people who supported him and voted for him still exist and another Trump-like figure is almost inevitable given they've basically ploughed and planted that field to grow the next one and who's to say NeoTrump isn't going to be smarter . The other democracies can no longer count on the US as a stable ally the way we have in the past (whether that trust was misplac…
When Hitler was removed did another Hitler variant take control of Germany? No, Germany recovered from that dark period. The same will happen in the US. We will recover from this dark period. The comparison to Hitler is not baseless, btw. His own vice president once called Trump America's Hitler.
I don't think even the most hardened bsky communist seriously expects the outgoing administration to be literally taken out and shot.
If that be the case, maybe we the USA ought to take the UK and Ireland as an associate state of the USA.
As far as an offer goes, polls find that almost third of the UK now regards the USA as a threat rather than an ally.
https://www.opinium.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Opinium-U...
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I don’t think Cameron did much serious negotiation on this front. He resigned the evening of the referendum results. It was a deliberate choice by his successors to pursue a hard Brexit. A softer Brexit was always possible and likely would have been more acceptable to the EU, as it would have had less financial impact and disruption to trade.
That's what happened afterwards. The referendum was triggered by a failed negotiation between Cameron and the EU in the first place.
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I mean, not really, since the UK was trying to renegotiate an existing deal (which they profited from for decades) towards a deal that would favor the UK more than the EU and would trigger an entire blow-back of other member-states wanting to renegotiate on their EU responsibilities without losing the advantages that this deal brought, whereas the deal with Canada is a new deal where the EU gains better trading and l…
> Also, the Brexit referendum was a campaign promise of David Cameron that was going to trigger if his conservative party won the 2015 general election That is iff the renegotiations with Brussels failed, which they did. > The UK renegotiation was a net loss for the EU, this Canada deal is a deal where both parties gain something. V. hard to see what Canada gets out of it. All the roadblocks to Canadian trade with th…
No. The Conservative party promised an EU membership referendum by 2017 in its 2015 manifesto. That was not conditional on a failure of renegotiations. Nor, indeed, did David Cameron even concede that the renegotiations had failed, so that can’t possibly have been his stated reason for calling the referendum.
You can check the summary of the manifesto at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32302062, or page 30 (printed page number) of the original document at https://www.barnetconservatives.co.uk/sites/www.barnetconser....
Another clear indicator can be found in this article: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/10/david-camer.... Here, Cameron is directly quoted as saying:
> My policy is to hold a renegotiation and then a referendum. That is what we promised in the manifesto and then to abide by what the British public say.
So you can see that there was never any suggestion that the referendum would be called or not called depending on the outcome of the renegotiations.