E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

Well that's embarrassing.

 

Because they did such a stellar job assembling Plan A in the 30 months they had.

 

Any plan B that is closer to the EU than the May withdrawal agreement would get voted down by leavers, any plan B further away from the EU than the May withdrawal agreement would get voted down by remainers, would plan C then be to resurrect the May withdrawal agreement? Or something else (2nd ref, GE etc)?

 

The cake is a lie.

 

You know, I did wonder whether Theresa May's operating system was based on GlaDOS...

 

Maybot is more Wheatley... In any given situation she's all but guaranteed to make the dumbest decision possible.

 

Some Tory MP earlier spewing out the old chestnut that if we leave with no deal we can have a 10 year WTO grace period that is tariff and quota free.

Another who is misinterpreting the rulebook.

 

Only while thrashing out a trade deal with the EU, and if the EU agrees to that arrangement. Of course the EU won't without conditions. Effectively it's a "transition period" in all but name, but of 10 years instead of 18 months.

 

If you think that's embarrassing, wait until you get a load of this.

Taking back control!

 

That's a totally unfair comparison. Wheatley at least had character and was funny.

 

IIRC they already have, pretty sure DFDS secured some of the no-deal ferry contracts [though all the headlines went to the shady af Boaty McNo-Boats company getting some of the contracts].

Doesn't get more British than Det Forenede Dampskibs-Selskab.


...wait til they learn about who got the contract for the blue passports too.

 

At least Brexit might cause some savings - The after Britain leaves the elimination of those 74 British MEPs means that the size of the European parliament will fall by 46 MEPs. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/...meps-to-be-reduced-after-eu-elections-in-2019

Well I guess you don't want to go saving too much money at a time like this

 

73 MEPs, though in all honesty, it's more like 72.

Well I guess you don't want too much democracy at a time like this.

 

It would think it odd to measure democracy by the number of elected politicians. That's like judging an artwork by weighing it.

 

Or by having the number of politicians that represent a country that is underrepresented increased so that they are better represented when it comes to things like votes, perhaps?

As for your art analogy, I'd probably go with pixels representing an image, the more pixels the better represented the image is, the less pixels the less well represented it is to the point it's useless. It's all well and good if the top 1/10th of the mona lisa is super hige resolution, but if the rest of it looks like someones smeared fudge cake over it the overall picture is gonna be crap.

The question that should be asked, which I'll admit i didn't read the entire article you linked, is are those countries that will be underrepresented, currently underrepresented? If they are, are they underrepresented to the same degree pre and post UK MEPs leaving? If it's the same or worse now than it will be after the UK MEPs leave, why has nothing been done up to this point?

 

Sensible folks might suggest that the way to re-balance for population changes is to move around the allocations within the existing total. But obviously that means some countries would have to give up some MEPs and the parliament thought that would be too horrific to suggest. Oh and can you explain why Germany didn't get any more?

There is much to admire in the EU. The European Parliament is another matter.

 

It's not the numbers it's the distribution.

Because people keep moaning about the countries with the highest populations being over represented and ignoring places like Malta and Luxembourg.

It's better than ours where the SNP got 3% of the vote and 35 MPs while the LidDems got 7.4% and 12 MPs.

 

France and Spain gained 5, Italy and the Netherlands gained 3. Perhaps a formula was used, but if so is it published? And shouldn't there be an automatic process without needing to add ever more MEPs?

The point is that even when the EU is losing a large net contributor, the Parliament won't give up even the most obvious cost saving.

 

Yes and no:
There is an upper limit on total MEPs and MEPs per country plus a rule that distribution should be based on population size, but there is no specific rule saying one MEP per million people or something like that.