Hard Brexit or Hard Brexit

[Rum]

I can see why you might say that but to put an alternative hypothesis forward, without unity at this point in time any sort of negotiations with the EU will collapse completely and the 'no deal' scenario with all its rather unpredictable fallout - and quite possibly serious short to medium term economic woes, would be the result. I have no love of the Tories but I also think the general public underestimate the sense of public service many politicians still hold. May I suspect is one of those.

The cabinet have just struck a deal it seems after their 12 hour away day. Its all over the news so I won't post a link. It all looks a bit glossed over in terms of details. Over to the EU now I guess.

[PsychoSerenity]

The cabinet have just struck a deal it seems after their 12 hour away day. Its all over the news so I won't post a link. It all looks a bit glossed over in terms of details. Over to the EU now I guess.

It seems to me that it contains many of the same vague and self-contradictory ideas that the EU have already rejected several times in the past, just with new names for them. We've been given several distinct options by the EU but our government keep insisting that we want to mix and match between them - because that's all they can agree upon amongst themselves. It's been two years and all we've got is a three page statement that is almost certainly not acceptable to the EU, and going on their track record I'd be surprised if the cabinet all stick to it for long either. The level of incompetence is staggering. They can't just keep trying the same thing in the hope that the problem will go away. We're so far behind schedule I think the only way to avoid a cliff edge is to call the whole thing off. Hopefully somehow that will happen. Otherwise I suspect we're fucked.

[Brian Peacock]

Yeah. The headline splash is that the cabinet agreed s soft Brexit, but I wonder what the price of this conspicuous public unity will be? Also, her statement talks about unified regulations for "industrial goods and agricultural products" traded between the EU and the UK, which is an aspiration she's had all along but at the same time nobody has been willing to acknowledge the EU's view that cherry picking on trade isn't a workable option. The Tory unfaithful are ramping up the rhetoric about how a soft Brexit makes UK business "a rule taker rather than a rule maker" even while the CBI and others say that they're quite happy with that arrangement. All eyes will be on the Moggster, Boris, Foxy and co now. The Sunday politics shows are going to be interesting this week - if it's junior ministers put up to represent the government against the Brexitarian heavy hitters we'll know she's lost the farm.

[rainbow]

Brexit Simplified:

[Scot Dutchy]

Nice rainbow.

[mistermack]

Nice rainbow.

Do you find pictures easier??? I should have known.

[Scot Dutchy]

You find facts difficult. We all know that.

Just a few months; I cant wait.

[cronus]

You find facts difficult. We all know that.

Just a few months; I cant wait.

Scotland and The Netherlands are gonna both be the biggest losers apart from Wales.

[Scot Dutchy]

You find facts difficult. We all know that.

Just a few months; I cant wait.

Scotland and The Netherlands are gonna both be the biggest losers apart from Wales.

Can you justify such a claim or is the MM sickness spreading.

[cronus]

You find facts difficult. We all know that.

Just a few months; I cant wait.

Scotland and The Netherlands are gonna both be the biggest losers apart from Wales.

Can you justify such a claim or is the MM sickness spreading.

From the horses mouth...

https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2018/01/a ... -to-e620m/

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 85621.html

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/1561 ... th_Brexit/

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/85527 ... rexit-Bill

etc..

[Scot Dutchy]

You find facts difficult. We all know that.

Just a few months; I cant wait.

Scotland and The Netherlands are gonna both be the biggest losers apart from Wales.

Can you justify such a claim or is the MM sickness spreading.

From the horses mouth...

https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2018/01/a ... -to-e620m/

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 85621.html

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/1561 ... th_Brexit/

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/85527 ... rexit-Bill

etc..

Some bloody horse! Must have been an old nag because they are all out of date. Btw Dutch News is untrustworthy. It seldom gets things right. It comes out the same stable as "De Telegraf" which is the daily express/mail of this country.

[Scot Dutchy]

Revealed: Arron Banks met Russian ambassador 11 times

The Leave.EU founder was offered lucrative deals in talks with the envoy

[Brian Peacock]

Arron Banks met Russian ambassador 11 times

Brexit’s biggest funder, Arron Banks, met the Russian ambassador at least 11 times in the run-up to the EU referendum and in the two months beyond, documents seen by the Observer suggest – seven more times than he has admitted. The same documents suggest the Russian embassy extended a further four invitations but it is not known if they were accepted.

It is the third time the number of such meetings has been revised upwards. For two years, Banks insisted his only contacts with the Russian government consisted of one “boozy lunch” with the ambassador.

After the Observer revealed a month ago that he had had multiple meetings at which he had been offered lucrative business deals, Banks told a parliamentary inquiry into fake news he had had “two or three” meetings.

Last week, when pressed by the New York Times, he admitted a fourth meeting. But the Observer has seen evidence that suggests there were at least seven more. When questioned about this, Banks offered no response...

[Brian Peacock]

Theresa May’s EU deal under fire from hardline Brexiters

Theresa May’s desperate attempts to unite her party and country behind a new Brexit blueprint are under severe strain, as more than 100 entrepreneurs and founders of UK businesses dismissed it as unworkable – and hardline anti-EU Conservative MPs warned it could mean an outcome worse than “no deal” at all.

There were also signs that Brussels was less than impressed after an initial examination of the plans, which were thrashed out and agreed by the entire cabinet at an all-day summit at Chequers on Friday.

...

[T]he Tory MP and leader of the European Research Group (ERG) of hardline Brexiters, Jacob Rees-Mogg, questioned whether signing up to elements of the EU rulebook would amount to Brexit at all.

He warned that abiding by a common rule book could make “trade deals almost impossible”, adding that “it is possible that this deal is worse” than a “no-deal” Brexit.

The Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns said the danger was that British business would “continue to be a rule-taker from the EU”. Jenkyns indicated she would back a leadership challenge against May if she concluded that the plans agreed by the prime minister amounted to a watering down of Brexit.

...

However, although many Eurosceptic MPs on the ERG are waiting to see what the prime minister says to the House of Commons on Monday, a damning briefing circulated among ERG members on Saturday night warns that the plan amounts to a “worst-of-all-worlds Black Hole Brexit where the UK is stuck permanently as a vassal state in the EU’s legal and regulatory tarpit”...

Brexitarians crow and carp on about no-deal being better than a bad-deal, but they show no inclination to define and argue for a good-deal as they see it. They sermonise about the a presumed horror it the UK being a rule-taker rather than a rule-giver, or existing as a subservient vassal state(!!), but they offer only obvious, crude, and disparaging rhetoric to bolster their pleas: no alternatives, no policy proposals, no arguments for only arguments against - no reasons.

The UK is leaving the EU, but while Brexitarianism has arrogated to itself the supreme right to divine the nation's true interests it accept absolutely no responsibility for demonstrating how the consequences of their desired cliff-edge exit will improve the life of the nation - beyond unfalsifiable platitudes about the perpetually sunny uplands which await us or, when that doesn't seem to be working, how a generation or two of dire economic hardship will administer the kind of moral corrective the country needs to avoid sliding into a complacently comfortable sense of security.

Brexitarianism has but one doctrine; it defines the entirety of its ideology, and thus it is the only precept to which the faithful must adhere - an unreasoned hatred of the EU. Brexitarian claims for the inherent superiority of the UK, for the land of milk and honey which awaits us after their favoured clean-break exit, for the unpatriotic betrayal of the judges who ruled MPs should have a say in the process or the essentially sabotaging nature of any suggestion of compromise, is predicated on this single precept.

Leavers and Brexitarianism holds fast to lie of a tyrannical EU in order to justify the nation's liberation from it, but now we are to be liberated (in whatever form that eventually takes) they avoid at every step any and all responsibility for the consequences thereof - that responsibility, and thus all blame, falls to those whom they reflexively denigrate and oppose out of theological habit: to Mrs May and their own government, to the civil service, the judiciary, business, and then when necessary it falls to the Irish, or Brussels, or immigrants, or anybody else they can think of.

Brexitarianism claims, at heart, to be a deeply instrumentalist faith, yet it is one which paradoxically rejects all instrumental approaches to social and economic change. It's not that Brexitarians simply avoid articulating their predictive model for society for fear of revealing some divisive hidden agenda, they just don't deal in alternatives - because they do not have any to begin with. Consequently, because of this gnawing absence they are forced to cast their own intellectual and moral failures as virtues - virtues bestowed upon them wholly by dint of their self-declared true-blue patriotism.

As Spiderman reminds us: Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

[Scot Dutchy]

The Brexiteers are also very worried about one thing; their offshore money. Fuck the UK as they will be alright.