E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

Because you cant clog the mogg.

 

Well, I'm sure we could find some wooden shoes in his size... (the Dutch have big feet).

 

Well...

 

While I have 5 mins:

Labour policy on leaving the EU is clearer thanks to Barry Gardiner MP shadow international trade secretary:
Brexit means leaving the single market and the customs union. Here’s why

 

Since when did leavers have four objectives, it's incredible how politicians use simple binary answers to infer so much.

 

"Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market" --Daniel Hannan MEP

"Only a madman would actually leave the Market" --Owen Paterson MP, Vote Leave backer

"Wouldn’t it be terrible if we were really like Norway and Switzerland? Really? They’re rich. They’re happy. They’re self-governing." --Nigel Farage, UKIP

"The Norwegian option, the EEA option, I think that it might be initally attractive for some business people." --Matthew Elliot, Vote Leave chief executive

"Increasingly, the Norway option looks the best for the UK" --Arron Banks, Leave.EU founder

Apart from that article containing some inaccuracies, I wouldn't read anything more in it than in the quotes I listed above. It is just re-arranging the mental deckchairs on the Titanic. Brexit means whatever politicians want to believe that it means today. Tomorrow they will tell us it means something else again. Because they never really worked that out in the first place, and still haven't. It becomes increasingly clear that what Brexit really means is whatever the UK manages to negotiate, and that won't be much at all. Expect that 'implementation period' to never end.

But since we're posting articles, here's mine: http://uk.businessinsider.com/forme...ndled-brexit-in-the-absolute-worst-way-2017-7

 

Intentional so.

Not having an exit plan was an integral part of Vote Leaves campaign as they knew the public were uneducated when it came to matters concerning the EU and it was all but impossible to convey the complexity of leaving to them, they wanted the public to idealise what leaving would be like because if they discovered the realities they wouldn't have voted to leave.

And all that is based on the misguided assumption that a vote to leave would most likely result in a renegotiation of Cameron's deal and a second referendum, boy did the EU call our bluff.

 

Indeed. Richard North tried hard to get the leave campaign to have a clear plan (the Flexcit proposal) but was overruled by Dominick Cummings who told him that if they tried to be specific about Brexit they would not win the referendum, as there were such wildly different and incompatible ideas about what the future arrangements should be. So they won by deliberately hiding this. And now we are confronted with this fragmentation, hence the schizophrenic floundering of government as it is confronted with this irreconcilable mess.

There clearly was an assumption that the UK could just threaten to cut itself loose from the EU, and the EU would fall over itself to fudge a special opt-out arrangement (again) in which the UK is released from free movement, the ECJ and membership fees but still in the Single Market because fifth largest economy, German cars, French wine and cheese, Italian prosecco etc.

Instead the EU just methodically prepared the operating theatre for amputation surgery.

The government meanwhile, will have to decide which bits of Brexit it is going to betray.

 

Norway and Switzerland both have freedom of movement with the EU.

Look at how Farage is foaming at the mouth over the thought of that:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...al-has-begun-tories-have-sold-british-people/
(Moronic paywall, but the bit that is visible makes it very clear that he would go absolutely berserk if someone suggested the Norway / Switzerland option today).

 

Which just illustrates that despite having had 20 years to think about it, he barely knew what he was talking about. Like all the other Brexiteers.

Farage has fantasies that his opinion still means something, but he is just media fodder. He ran away when it was time to deliver, because he doesn't actually have a clue what to do about Brexit, like all the other Brexiteers. He made a nice living from it while it lasted, he is going to finish his term as MEP to get his pension, and he'll carry on ranting from the cushy comfort zone of LBC Radio and the Torygraph. But he is never coming back. Only his cult followers are still desperately in denial of that.

 

"As a British EU negotiator, I can tell you that Brexit is going to be far worse than anyone could have guessed"

Wooo...

 

Never in the history of mankind has the phrase of the nail meeting the head been so apt.

Speaking anonymously to the (paywall) paper, a pro-European minister told Sylvester that the concept of a "global Britain" was far-fetched: (quote courtesy of Indy100)

...

 

That would have been an easy choice: destroy the country to save the Tory party. They're very Milton that way: better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.

But the choice is: cancel Brexit and the Tories destroy themselves; carry on and they destroy the country and themselves. Either way they're screwed.

So what I suspect will happen is that they will bumble on under the guise of "will of the people" and when things get really bad they'll go: "Er, the people didn't vote to be poorer of course..." and the chorus will go: "No, we didn't!" and some compromises will be fudged and sold as a victory.

Farage will be unhappy of course, but he will be either dead or ruined in five years anyway so there's an upside to everything.

 

I disagree that they'll destroy themselves, they'll be seen as saving us from *insert name hear* just like they have been in the past.

 

Maybe, or maybe not, because they keep expanding the timetable for brexit, see below for example:

http://news.sky.com/story/liam-fox-any-brexit-transition-should-end-by-2022-10958831

If they keep extending the timeline like that there is a pretty good chance that public opinion will shift significantly before anything is really implemented.
Of course it is isn't really possible to predict in which direction it would shift, so it could still backfire on them.

 

Well, I guess the Brexit can is being kicked down the road a bit further: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-40734504

 

I love how the government is commissioning a "detailed assessment" of the costs and benefits of EU migrants a full year after they held the referendum, i guess they didn't think information like that was important at the time.

At what stage does ineptitude turn into willful ignorance?

 

I guess that's because Brexit was never a rational argument based in facts.

Cameron didn't need facts because he thought he would win the EU referendum anyway; Vote Leave didn't want facts because they would only distract from the emotive argument on which it reckoned it could win the referendum. And Leavers don't want facts because this is not a rational decision for them. They'd had enough of experts, remember?

This study will only confirm what the ONS already knows. And the Brexiteers will simply dismiss its results as partisan, rigged, flawed etc. This is just a stalling tactic to not have to come up with an immigration policy yet, because the truth is: that policy will be whatever the negotiations with the EU dictate it to be.

 

The government's take on whether freedom of movement ends with Brexit or after the 'implementation period':

 

1984 is not a manual.
Little Britain is not a speech writing guide for politicians.
What comes next? Will we have to explain that Ripley = good, Facehugger = bad?