E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

Ah, disagree with me and you're prejudiced. Awesome. I'd be tearing my hair out.

Hell he's not even a Tory, he's a Borissy.

He cares for no party and has no agenda other than promoting himself.

 

How it started....................................and how it's going:

 

You Remoaners and your Project Fear, it's all a bunch of nonsense.

 

Weren't they being delayed? Or some of them being delayed. I seem to recall seeing something along those lines.

Indeed. Unfortunately the chest thumping over crown stamps, imperial units and blue passports is so strong with some people, it's all they care about.

I don't think thats the first one I've seen of those, though I think some of the comparisons were used in the others. Either way, I do like the contrast. Shame they didn't add dates on them.

 

Yes they re generally all a bit out of context and out of date but makes a nice fun post.

 

How are they out of context?

Can't say I find them funny TBH.

 

whilst yes the a and bs are certainly nice sensationalist headlines, it's not the full story is it

On the farming side of things A is a story on cheap labour possibly going and not being about to produce due to brexit, B is talking about export difficulties, quite unrelated articles as farmers must be producing to have export difficulties in the first place, there there's an element of wanting to have their cake and eat it, many wanting out of the EU for reduced regulations to provide lower cost farming via things GM food and pesticide regs, but also hoped that UK would make up for the farming CAP grants which I don't think it has done, the EU were cutting that funding by about 50% anyway, meaning many farmers would be in trouble, great for big business ready for these changes, not so good for smaller outfits, this happens, no route or reform is going to work for everyone and there will no doubt be consolidation.

On the fishing one, it's an article moaning about the EU having access to our waters and companies struggling because of red tape etc, this was in March of course there were teething problems but also an element of companies with head in the sand not doing enough for themselves, on each side there are problems, UK fishermen moaning EU have access, EU fishermen claiming they don't, Macron is trying to win his election on this little nugget, who's right, probably an element of both with Johnson and Macron willy waving, both needing to seem strong for votes, but what was the strong driver for the UK fishing community in voting for Brexit in the first place, the view that the EU killed the British fishing industry due to CFP quotas, well now what they have is a 5 yr taper and a stronger position at the end, maybe, what would they have as part of the EU, the status quo, which was not good enough for them in the first place, is Johnsons deal for fishermen great, well its certainly not a good one, the taper is not enough but did anyone really expect a blanket ban of EU boats, after all in some twisted fishing mashup, UK fisherman don't want to sell us fish, they want to sell it to the EU and EU boats want to sell here, and to allow that trade to continue there are compromises, a blanket ban would have stopped any trade and bigger problems.

On the roaming charges, no a lot you can say to that, EU banned roaming charges, we are not part of EU so companies revert to what suits them giving them a nice brexit blanket to sweep it under, its not like it's a tariff imposed by EU that's greedy business doing greedy business things, despicable, remember we used to actually pay these in the past whilst part of the EU.

The thing I worry about most in all this Brexit stuff is all the workplace welfare stuff that has come into place because of the EU now going, I mean we have pretty good laws in that respect as we were part of the EU, that's where I can see things going really bad once UKGov starts to unravel this stuff to 'benefit UK businesses to allow us to compete', will we become a mini China, yay 996 everybody.

Costs are going to be mental for the foreseeable (mostly transport and production cost related due to fuel/gas/shortages etc ) and sure there's bound to be red tape but most of these big food giants who deal with our supply chain ship this **** worldwide and know how to do this stuff, there's an element of unknown about the implications and costs with respect to the new borders and so businesses have to prepare and inform shareholders of such impacts but the biggest hikes will only come about if article 16 is triggered and tariffs imposed. It will be a bigger issue for small business who've only dealt with EU but there's been plenty of warning, how long can we use the Brexit excuse for poor management.

 

I'm afraid the reality hitting many small/medium businesses can't be explained away by just poor management or the Brexit 'excuse'.

Big business will thrive, I worry small/medium businesses and workers will be stuffed.

It'll be fantastic for a small portion of society though.

 

The UK's politics is in a shite state of affairs, to be quite frank. Every day I lean more and more towards giving the English regions autonomy and breaking up the UK. Westminster, by and large, doesn't give a rat's arse about you or your community, and any control your local government might be able to exert is hamstrung by Westminster's control over the purse strings. We do get more autonomy in Wales (and Scotland is better still), but we still have to go cap in hand and beg for table scraps because we don't have control over our finances.

I'm not going to try and pick apart everything there, but as a general point I will re-iterate this yet again: There has yet to be a single convincing argument or piece of evidence presented in favour of leaving the EU.

The reason we haven't had roaming charges for a long time in the EU is because the EU stood up to the greedy businesses and said "No, that's greedy and it's unfair, you can't do that any more". Our government could have done the same but they didn't, and they won't.

That is exactly the problem: how do you prepare for such massive disruption to your business when you don't even know until the 11th hour - and beyond - what that disruption will look like?

 

The full story is: lots of promises were made about the benefits of Brexit, and they all turn out to be ********.

 

It's not they won't, they can't.

The companies themselves could have also chosen to do the right thing for their customers, they did not, the regulation capped what companies could charge each other in EU and EEA, but of course now we are out, the EU companies have decided can charge the UK what they want like the old days, the UK government has no powers to force an EU company to do anything, at the very least the government have put in place enforced spending caps and notification, my first >1k phone bill was a bit of an eye opener when I was a lad working in Sicily, as was the time I was running a remote location LAN gaming session and left my 3G data card shared to 20-30 people, noob mistake : that was big ass bill Vodafone took some convincing to let me off those thousands.

I guess the only thing you can hope now is that the UK companies charge the bollox off the EU companies and there might be some trade off and common sense to roaming termination fees etc, unlikely as the companies for the most part are multinational an high charges both ways ups their profits, having their cake and eating it.

It's not like they don't know anything, all the documentation relating to imports/export classification and what needs to be done has been available for a long time and plenty of warning given in the UK, there's just no incentive to make the transition easy on the other side of the border is there, the EU is after all a fragile union of a few rich countries and some disgruntled poor ones, there's a vested interest to make an example of the UK so that others aren't inclined to leave.

Yup I don't disagree with that sentiment right now but I hold out hope because it is where we are, no amount of moaning is going to change things in the short term and there have been glimpses of what could be done when you have autonomy like the initial vaccine response, but not seem much else, both Brexit and Covid at the same time has not helped things really.

what is it 2yrs left to do something useful, there's still time, if not then we can choose a different bunch of muppets.

 

I'm sorry, what?

As the head of the MHRA said they procured vaccines in accordance with EU legislation, legislation that was still in place during the transition period.

Any member state of the EU can grant temporary authorisation for a medicinal product if they deem it necessary to fight an infectious diseases in their country.

We were under the same rules at the time, there was no 'autonomy' at work.

Now, how the EU went about things afterwards is a different conversation.

All that said, most member states caught up and surpassed us. By mid December all other Western European nations had fully vaccinated more of their population than the UK.

 

So we were not getting vaccines when the EU request nations to stop doing there own thing? okay then

 

You can refer to what the head of the MHRA said at the time if you're interested.

 

The MHRA said nothing about EUs request to move as one as far as I recall, and sure it was just a request from EU not a mandate, but its a bit like when you're going out with the lads for a few nights more than is acceptable to your missus' and she says sure it's OK, but you know it's not really

MHRA did say that regulations allowed temporary authorisation based on public health need and would have done so on the pre amended regs as part of EU, is that what your are referring to?

 

The short answer with all of this is that a tiny group of ultra-wealthy people have pulled one of the biggest con-jobs in history by lying to an entire country for their own personal gain.

Frankly at this point there are only two things that could possibly give me hope for politics in the UK, either: introduce proportional representation on a national level; or, break up the UK into four independent and autonomous nations.

 

Hope is not a strategy. Nor is it a Brexit plan.

The initial vaccine response was when the UK was still officially a member of the EU, and a legitimate response for any EU member.

Which will be as useless as the present bunch of muppets. Because there is no Brexit plan or strategy. There never was, and never will be, else the government would have articulated it by now. We're at stage 3 of:

1. Get Brexit vote
2. Leave the EU
3. ???
4. PROFIT!

And there is no stage 4.

 

Indeed. There is no post-Brexit plan because Brexit was the plan. The Brexiteers got theirs, they've moved on now. Civil servants aren't even allowed to use the word anymore.