BREXIT positives and negatives

[optimista 5,840]

maybe the EU folk in Brussels have better things to do with their time than argue with UK. All over again. 

[murphaph 9,650]

The Euro is legally required of new members but the current rules mean it is practically possible to defer its adoption indefinitely. This is because the step before full Euro adoption, joining ERMII, is up to the member state itself so member states that are currently cool on the Euro, even new ones, can defer this step and this defers Euro adoption. Denmark is in ERMII but has an opt-out on full Euro adoption (even though being in ERMII is effectively being in the Euro as you must take the steps to keep your currency pegged to Euro, with very little wiggle room. Denmark is effectively using Eurotokens).

 

No, the Euro is the one "big thing" the UK could actually avoid if it wanted to, long term. I'm not convinced that the next generation of Brits will be as attached to the weakening pound with King Charles' mug on it though, especially if more and more EU states are Euro members. Croatia adopted the Euro this year so the Eurozone is still expanding, albeit slowly. Schengen would be unavoidable and of course the previous opt-outs would all be gone as would the UK's rebate.

[fraufruit 41,944]

From the article above-

 

Quote

Where are the Brexit Spartans? They don’t seem to be interested in this big picture stuff. They are too busy down in the trenches, fighting their last heroic battle – an attempt to force through a bill which aims to scrap 4,000 EU-derived laws by the end of the year.

 

 

10 hours ago, Dembo said:

The UK is a major economy in Europe, would qualify in every other way and as a former member it'd be an easier process as the UK is still mostly aligned with EU laws.

 

[Keleth 9,279]

2 hours ago, Dembo said:

pretty ridiculous to suggest that if the UK wanted to rejoin (won't happen) that joining the Euro would be an absolute, unavoidable and non-negotiable condition.

I didn´t say that though did I?

You said that you can´t see why they wouldn´t welcome the UK back, I did not say they wouldn´t. I merely asked for qualification on why you believe they would.

Nobody knows under what terms the EU would accept the UK back as a member, why do some people insist it would be the easiest thing in the world for the UK to rejoin? Maybe they´d welcome back the UK with open arms and under UK terms or they maybe want the UK to give up everything to rejoin.

 

It´s just like the sunlit uplands talk before Brexit only now it´s all about how easy it would be for the UK to rejoin the EU.

Some people still can´t get the idea that the EU needs the UK more than the UK needs them out of their heads.

[yesterday 1,979]

I have stated watching quite a lot of stuff from this guy ...

 

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Em9MQ8ZRdE  

 

He thinks it would not be in the UK's interest to re-join the EU if Britain had to take the Euro, because it would not suite the UK's economy.

 

He has done several vid's on BREXIT and the impact on the UK, all interesting stuff

 

So if the EU insist on it, then it could be a very very very long time before the UK could get back in. 

 

 

[keith2011 2,579]

1 hour ago, yesterday said:

So if the EU insist on it, then it could be a very very very long time before the UK could get back in. 

 

It's going to be a long time anyway, Labour are not suggesting rejoining and they will be the next government! The best we can hope for in the foreseeable future is joining the customs union or negotiating something similar that will help British business and resolve the Irish border issues and maybe even shut up the SNP (though I doubt it) for a while!

[dstanners 1,529]

Among its many flaws and potentially awful consequences, the Retained EU law bill is relevant to any attempt by the UK to have an improved relationship with the EU, which is doubtless one of the reasons why so many Brexit hard liners want it to be pushed through (I know there are exceptions).

As present, if the UK wanted some sort of improved relationship with the EU it would be possible in principle at least because there is still a level playing field: the UK has barely moved away from the legislative framework applicable to EU member states. That would change drastically and immediately upon the Bill being enacted.

 

[john_b 3,302]

Another own goal. Well done, Brexitists!

 

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/21/giant-brexit-border-control-site-sevington-kent-ukrainian-pets

[murphaph 9,650]

The retained EU law bill is the last chance these nasty right-wing fuckers will get to drive a massive wedge between the UK and EU. They see Brexit dying on its feet and they see poll after poll suggesting the population regrets Brexit. So, it's a last ditched attempt to sabotage any chance of the UK reversing it by diverging as quickly as possible. This is possibly why they are suddenly ok with the NI protocol just to allow them to get GB to diverge quickly and from their perspective irreversibly from the EU. It's now or never because the Tories are not going to be in power after the next election.

[alexunterwegs 540]

On 1/22/2023, 2:09:57, murphaph said:

The retained EU law bill is the last chance these nasty right-wing fuckers will get to drive a massive wedge between the UK and EU. They see Brexit dying on its feet and they see poll after poll suggesting the population regrets Brexit. So, it's a last ditched attempt to sabotage any chance of the UK reversing it by diverging as quickly as possible. This is possibly why they are suddenly ok with the NI protocol just to allow them to get GB to diverge quickly and from their perspective irreversibly from the EU. It's now or never because the Tories are not going to be in power after the next election.

 

That and holding tight until (they hope) Trump or similar gets re-elected, which would help ease through a UK-US trade deal.  However, that would probably only offer them too little, too late. 

 What Labour and the other opposition parties need to do, is to get their collective fingers out and start spelling out the link between the downturn in the UK economy and Brexit. It looks like they are still running scared of their so-called Red Wall of Brexit supporters, but that must be an ever-diminishing number now.  When I listen to the problems the NHS is going through, the ambulance drivers, doctors and nurses, its obvious they are struggling because of the EU staff they have lost due to Brexit. What's stopping Labour making that simple connection and then acting upon it in terms of their stance on freedom of movement?

[alexunterwegs 540]

On 1/12/2023, 8:00:15, Keleth said:

 

 

This bloke is starting to look more and more pathetic. He set up his Ministry of Brexit Opportunities, and then asked Sun readers to write in with examples of Brexit success stories. That doesn't look like it was a resounding success, so now he's trying to blame Remainers for making Brexit a dismal failure. Does he really believe that his Bill scrapping remaining bits of EU derived law will do anything to help businesses and farmers trying to export into the Single Market  post-Brexit, or help the NHS trying to recruit staff? The bloke is more interested in implementing his insular ideological doctrine than in helping anyone in the real economy.   

[keith2011 2,579]

5 hours ago, alexunterwegs said:

 

That and holding tight until (they hope) Trump or similar gets re-elected, which would help ease through a UK-US trade deal.  However, that would probably only offer them too little, too late. 

 What Labour and the other opposition parties need to do, is to get their collective fingers out and start spelling out the link between the downturn in the UK economy and Brexit. It looks like they are still running scared of their so-called Red Wall of Brexit supporters, but that must be an ever-diminishing number now.  When I listen to the problems the NHS is going through, the ambulance drivers, doctors and nurses, its obvious they are struggling because of the EU staff they have lost due to Brexit. What's stopping Labour making that simple connection and then acting upon it in terms of their stance on freedom of movement?

 

You forget that the UK has had a low growth, reduced real income economy since 2010 which was one of the reasons why people were looking for a change and voted brexit in 2016. The fact that so much has continued to decline since then probably has more to do with the continued abject failure of the Tory government than brexit which only really got actioned in 2021 anyway. The rejoining  the EU magic wand won't make everything better any more the brexit magic wand did!

Labour need to get the country going again and try and heal the divisions not aggravate them further.

 

[Fietsrad 386]

Stopping economic growth is good, there is more than enough stuff already, growth uses resources. And there is enough stuff for everyone, it just needs to be redistributed.

 

There are far too many cars, for example. Production should be stopped! Now!

[murphaph 9,650]

Brexit remains the cult it always was. They rarely end well for those involved. Unfortunately for the British people, that's them. Brexit and especially the uncertainty about what kind of Brexit it was going to be caused a massive reduction in investment in UK industry from pretty much immediately after the vote. There were patches of optimism along the way when some believed that the sort of Brexit GB has now would never come to pass but now we have exactly that and investment remains low and if anything British companies are investing in EU locations to be able t serve EU customers, thus robbing GB of even more employment. All under the advice of various government departments. You couldn't make it up. Things were declining in the run up to Brexit but to think that Brexit hasn't accelerated that decline is incorrect. It has massively accelerated it as all the comparative growth charts show. The UK has performed much worse relative to the other G7 nations, Covid or no Covid. The difference is Brexit.

 

Rejoining the SM and CU would be like stabilising the patient, moving them from intensive care to a normal ward, but the patient is still unwell. The UK needs to abolish FPTP as a matter of urgency. The issue isn't the unelected Lords, who have actually done more to protect the UK from the elected lower house full of red (now blue) wall yes men, subordinate to a below par government filled with and led by extremely rich people who wanted Brexit to avoid scrutiny of their tax affairs, see Zahawi scandal (by the way this alone should be enough to bring the government down and would have been 30 years ago yet the man is still an MP!). The then Chancellor of the Exchequer is under investigation over underpaying millions of pounds in tax. You couldn't make this up either. The man with ultimate responsibility for tax collecting was himself a tax cheat while in office. That man is still the current chair of the Conservative Party! Zelenskiy runs a cleaner ship in the middle of a war!

 

The UK needs to rejoin the SM and CU to stabilise the patient but needs to go much further and reform itself politically. A good PR system is an absolute must at this stage, if such lurches to the right (and theoretically to the left) are to be avoided and a politics of consensus be built. Westminster is a joke now. It should have moved with the times and it didn't. It relied far too much on gentlemen behaving gentlemanly. It has far too few checks and balances. There is no written constitution acting as a guide. All these things need fixing to get the patient out of hospital. If Brexit causes these things to happen it will at least have done some (considerable) good!

 

 

[keith2011 2,579]

2 hours ago, murphaph said:

The UK needs to abolish FPTP as a matter of urgency.

 

I really can't see how that could work and why it would help. The last thing the UK need from future elections is  coalition government which might have to include those Brexiteer Tories   or the SNP (with most of Scotland)! I do agree the current constitution is a mess, a reform of the 2nd house is years overdue, although some alternative to direct elections imo would be the best approach and why has England not got its own parliament like the other nations and has to suffer getting local legislation through the "high" parliament!

Perhaps King Charles, like his earlier namesake should close parliament and rule directly without it. After all its only the money parliament controls and there ain't much left.

[murphaph 9,650]

Here's an alternative history with PR in place:

UKIP establishes itself as a right wing anti-EU party and gets about 10% of the seats in the HoC. It is a loud mouthpiece but not much more than that. It finds itself made a mockery of in debate after debate over the EU. It finds no coalition partners willing to work with it (a la the AfD here). People attracted to their anti-EU politics join them and leave the Conservative party as they have a genuine chance of getting MPs elected. The centre right and centre left politicians work in coalitions with the liberal parties and smaller centrist parties like the Greens (the UK has 1 Green MP, despite Brits being pretty conscious of the environment!) and the nationalist parties. The Conservatives would be in power far less as their ERG membership would have exited to join UKIP long ago. The ERG would basically never have formed under PR, or would have been a tiny fringe group within conservatism because the "outlet" for such politics would exist in a viable UKIP. The fact that millions of UKIP votes never got them a single MP elected was the problem. They didn't give up though, they infiltrated the Tory party instead and this turned out to be far more dangerous and undemocratic because a right-wing cabal of ERG members was able to hold the one nation Tories hostage and get Brexit through.

 

The current UK government is often referred to as an elected dictatorship. This has some* basis in reality because with just 30% of the popular vote the winner takes all approach of FPTP means the ruling party can have an outright majority and push any legislation through that it likes, despite 2/3 of the electorate voting for somebody else! That's an appalling system.

 

*The UK is not a dictatorship before anyone thinks I believe that, but the system is so grossly unfair that I consider it undemocratic in some fundamental ways. If you live in a safe seat, your vote is meaningless. That is just wrong and there are PR systems that ensure the opposite is true, that almost every vote counts. That system is actually used in the elections to the Scottish parliament, and to Stormont. 

[alexunterwegs 540]

14 hours ago, keith2011 said:

 

You forget that the UK has had a low growth, reduced real income economy since 2010 which was one of the reasons why people were looking for a change and voted brexit in 2016. The fact that so much has continued to decline since then probably has more to do with the continued abject failure of the Tory government than brexit which only really got actioned in 2021 anyway. The rejoining  the EU magic wand won't make everything better any more the brexit magic wand did!

Labour need to get the country going again and try and heal the divisions not aggravate them further.

 

 

Obviously, many of the deep-seated problems of the UK economy go back many years before Brexit. Covid and the Ukraine war have also had their impact, which indeed most other countries have also felt. However, it doesn't help pretending Brexit is irrelevant to all of this. I haven't heard of any organisations representing UK business, large or small,  with a good word for how its going. With the new redtape and bureaucracy, as well as the extra tarrifs imposed through Brexit, common sense tells you it will hit trade and business. And unsurprisingly there has been a sharp decline in UK exports. Rejoining even the Single Market /Customs Union won't cure all the earlier UK economic  problems, but it will be a major step in redressing the latest ones. There is now a clear majority in the UK who think leaving the EU was a mistake. Even about a quarter of Brexit voters think so.   If Labour won't face up to that, then they are little better than the Tories. 

[john_b 3,302]

Another win for the Brexitists

 

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jan/27/number-eu-students-enrolling-uk-universities-down-half-since-brexit

[keith2011 2,579]

On 25/01/2023, 15:49:57, alexunterwegs said:

However, it doesn't help pretending Brexit is irrelevant to all of this. I haven't heard of any organisations representing UK business, large or small,  with a good word for how its going.

I certainly don't pretend that brexit is not a major factor of the mess the country is in but again it was down to the government's failure to mitigate the very obvious impact on business both in terms of the type of brexit they delivered and the ongoing strategy of dealing with it. The Tories have made a hopeless mess of the economy both before and since brexit. I blame them both for brexit itself and the terrible state the UK is in, rather than brexit per se.

[alexunterwegs 540]

On 1/27/2023, 2:22:30, keith2011 said:

I certainly don't pretend that brexit is not a major factor of the mess the country is in but again it was down to the government's failure to mitigate the very obvious impact on business both in terms of the type of brexit they delivered and the ongoing strategy of dealing with it. The Tories have made a hopeless mess of the economy both before and since brexit. I blame them both for brexit itself and the terrible state the UK is in, rather than brexit per se.

 

The 'type of Brexit' the Tories delivered was a Hard Brexit, by seeking to distance themselves as much as possible from anything containing the word (Euro)pean in it. Specifically, they rejected any kind of compromise through seeking membership of the Single Market or Customs Union.  Their strategy for dealing with Brexit  wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't tried to destroy as much of the existing trading network and cultural links as they could.  Its up to the other parties in the UK to properly address that, but its not what I'm seeing (aside from the SNP)