I was discussing Brexit last night. My co-discussant made a good point that is worth sharing.
Eighty five per cent of votes cast in the general election were for parties saying they would take us out of Europe. Like it or not, that debate appears to be over.
The difficulty that remains is in finding anyone with a shred of credibility to negotiate a deal. In that case is a referendum back on the table again?
Suppose it was agreed now that there would be a referendum in late 2018 on the deal available, with the alternative being hard Brexit; that is, the no deal option. So this would not be a "do we stay after all?" referendum because that option has gone. But it is a real choice.
The point my co-discussant made is not that this changes the UK's position, whatever that might be, but it does change the EU's. If they don't want a hard Brexit they then have the chance to put a soft Brexit to the people of this country who could choose it as opposed to there being no deal available, which seems to be the choice most political parties in the UK are going for, Labour included if John McDonnell is to be believed.
I see some merit in that idea.
That would be taking back control.
And it would mean that a soft option would have to be negotiated.
But that is precisely why I also can't see it happening. The Jacob Ress-Mogg brigade wouldn't want that.
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Your 85% figure masks the fact that many, many of those who voted Labour were Remain people who ‘lent’ Labour a vote to get the Tories out, or a hung Parliament. As is being pointed out fulsomely on Twitter at the moment.
So your “debate is over” point seems to depend of a flawed assumption; and I doubt it is true.
Also, it may be that one of the effects of the hung parliament and abject idiocy of May is, ironically, that the Mogg brigade become less powerful. See Prof Colin Talbot’s analysis at https://colinrtalbot.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/the-asymmetry-of-potential-tory-rebellions-over-brexit-spoiler-hard-brexiteers-look-away-now/ for why that may be so.
Pragmatically there is no time for a different outcome unless there is another general election
And Labour say they will leave
I think in reality the debate is over
I do not wish to leave to EU, however I had little choice in who I voted for given the corrupt, non-representative voting system that we have. My only choice was to vote for the party most likely to defeat the Tories in my constituency. Everyone seems to want to interpret the vote as upholding their own view. E.G. The “country” has voted for Brexit when in fact most people eligible to vote have not voted for it, and now anyone can fill in the gap of what Brexit actually means given that there was no definition in the vote so no one really knew what they were voting for.
Couldn’t agree more with Heseltine who said Brexit is a cancer destroying the Tory party, except to recognise that it is also destroying our country.
At this moment in time (that is considering Tory arrogance and obduracy) I cannot see anything other than a complete mess being made of this issue.
The Tory tactic is to play for time. They don’t really care about us anyway and they are effectively in power (they did win the FPTP election).
My worry is that the longer this goes on, the risk is that Labour will lose it – make a mistake on policy or some other issue.
I would favour a soft BREXIT because I think that we would end up going back into the EU anyway at some time. A Norway style deal also attracts me.
This is because I’m having nightmares about our coastal roads backing up for miles with HGVs waiting to go through customs at our ports.
If import duties do come in for the Eurozone, an already financially stretched nation will face further squeezes on their income as prices rise.
Or how about the bodies of dead migrants washing up on the beaches of Dover, Margate and Folkestone as we ‘take control of our own borders’?
The other concern is just what the EU position is. If the EU are too soft on us, this might be seen as an incentive to the same forces on the EU mainland who want a looser Union. Why would the EU want to do that?
What a mess. And all because of Tory misrule.
I saw Rees-Mogg on Channel 4 news last night alongside Kier Starmer. He made Starmer look like a real statesman.
Rees-Mogg has no idea or does not even care about how BREXIT will make the lives of ordinary people in this country much harder. Including his ex-nanny.
You don’t need the comparison with Rees-Mogg to make Keir Starmer look like a statesman – he largely does that on his own. Or at least he looks competent, capable and effective, in complete contrast to David Davis and co. AKA as “Rag, tag and bobtail”.
Rees-Mogg does not inhabit the same reality as the rest of us. He’s far out there in some hogwarts-esque world.
I was in Dublin over the weekend at the 40th reunion of Class of ’77. There was pretty universal belief that the British have taken leave of their senses with Brexit and worry about Ireland and in particular Northern Ireland.
The election of course have had the outcome that NI may be more central to negotiation on the UK side with the DUP forming some sort of alliance with the Torys. This has been the case with the EU as priority will be given to people, money and Ireland.
There is a good article from Fintan O’Toole (Fintan was named European Commentator of the Year recently for his work on Brexit http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/fintan-o-toole-named-european-commentator-of-the-year-1.3055399) which is worth reading. The DUP want a soft border with the South (seamless and frictionless) but as Fintan says:
“The DUP’s bottom line has the virtue of clarity. Nigel Dodds spelled it out: the DUP will block any attempt to avoid a hard Border by giving Northern Ireland a ‘special status’ within the EU. But to think that a hard Border can be avoided without a special status for Northern Ireland one must, to misquote the Queen in Through the Looking Glass, be prepared to believe three impossible things before breakfast.”
Full article here: http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-theresa-may-faces-irish-obstacle-on-the-brexit-tracks-1.3117224
Another comment from Eamonn Mallie who knows the DUP intimately: Country people have a great way with words – “lie down with dogs and you’ll rise with fleas” was part of the vernacular of my childhood days in rural Northern Ireland
On another matter the Irish should get an openly gay PM of Indian descent tomorrow in Dr Leo Varadkar; sadly he is a neoliberal which is what is being discussed in the Irish press. Ability to do the job is foremost on peoples minds.
The Brexit dabacle and the ensuing negotiations cannot be separated from the concomitant financial repercussions.
A financial plan must be in place at the outset and this plan must be adjusted as each segment of the negotiation is locked into place.
Currently the public sector planning approach is based on three year settlement periods the final year of each period forming the basis of the next three year settlement.
How will this be dealt with. Will we see a running negotiation account showing the income / cost impact of leaving and how the net balance will impact upon the public settlement and the wider economy.
Richard
The so called Norway option appears to be a good deal for the UK as it maintains single market access and continued participation in the EU’s science and education programmes, but it would distance the UK from the EU institutions. Numerous powers are repatriated and we would have the ability to negotiate are own FTAs – which was a major part of the vote leave campaign.
Yet, a lot of commentators and politicians are usually critical of the deal because they believe that we would essentially continue to be subordinate to the EU institutions but without the ability to influence any new laws. What is your opinion on the Norway deal and what – in your opinion – would an ideal soft/ progressive brexit entail?
Candidly, right now this is my best hope
There is even some migration flexibility
I am a Remainer, but the facts – as I see them – “remain” as follows:
1. The EU does not care whether the UK wants hard or soft Brexit. It will make an example of the UK and enforce a hard Brexit to discourage other Eurosceptic countries from trying to do the same (at least until a trade deal is finalised, which will be years after Brexit happens).
Like it or not, the UK WILL face a hard Brexit.
2. As flawed as it is, the British people voted in David Cameron’s Tory party on a manifesto promise of an “in-out” referendum, and then voted in that “in-out” referendum.
Sadly, there was no promise of a second referendum, or a promise to have a say in the type of exit from the EU.
We could have not voted for a party proposing an “in-out” referendum. We could have not voted “out” in that referendum. We could have voted for a party that promised a vote on the type of exit. We could have voted in a party last week whose manifesto said they will reverse the Brexit decision.
Like it or not, we did none of these things. We made our own bed, and now we must lie in it. That is democracy, as imperfect as it is.
As much as it pains me to say it, let’s rip the plaster off and get this thing over with, and start trying to pick up the pieces. All this hand wringing is useless and is counter-productive against the speed of recovery after we hard Brexit.
** sigh **
I am not at all convinced the EU wants anything but the UK being worse off
The Norwegian model does that
Yes but why?
Because if the EU gives us some form of dispensation then other member countries may want the same?
You can’t blame the EU for taking a certain view.
And it is also hard to defend BREXIT anyway considering the lies that were told and the hash that was made of it. A vote and a choice that should never have happened.
It’s got to be soft BREXIT though.
What do you mean by a “soft” Brexit? What features would it include?
We can’t have a deal like Norway (that is, membership of the EEA) if we reject free movement of persons, EU budget contributions, and the superior jurisdiction of a European court (the EFTA court in this case, instead of the ECJ). While membership of the EEA means unfettered access to the EU internal market, notably it does not mean an absence of customs duties (for example, on food).
A deal like Switzerland would involve membership of EFTA, and about a dozen bilateral arrangements that took Switzerland decades to negotiate, but does not include financial services (mainly as a defensive measure, to protect the Swiss financial services industry). Switzerland also contributes to the EU budget, so we won’t be getting back all of the mythical £350m per week.
If we want to emulate Turkey, it took from the Ankara Agreement in 1964 until 1995 for Turkey to negotiate a customs union with the EU. And Canada’s free trade arrangement (CETA) took the best part of a decade to agree.
So, are a left with trying to formulate and then negotiate a sui-generis divorce settlement and free trade arrangement from scratch in just 21 months. That sounds ambitious. Courageous, even.
A route that might be achievable in the time available would be some sort of soft transitional period that starts in April 2019, where we just carry on much as we are for a time, perhaps through EEA membership. (That could be open-ended: we have been applying transitional VAT measures since 1973.) While that would deliver a Brexit, of sorts, as we would leave the EU, I’m sure membership of the EEA is not what the more vocal Leave campaigners would want.
‘Brexit’ has descended into an historic ‘Omnishambles’ of unprecedented proportions.
Tne Tories are traditionally the party that promotes itself as representing ‘business’ and ‘capital’. Many of their Cabinet members have served on the boards of large companies and acted as international business consultants, e.g. the Chancellor himself. Yet the government set about negotiating the most important political-socio-economic agreement since the UK’s first application to join the EEC 1961, without anything that remotely resembles a basic Business Plan – something they would have insisted on in their commercial incarnations. If that isn’t complete and total incompetence, then what is? Yet they’ve never really been held to account, at natonal level, on this basic issue of professionalism until now. Certainly much of the electorate has been fooled. Maybe it will now wake up. You can’t trust the Tories with anything, not even their (alleged) commercial expertise.
A sign that serious cracks are opening up within their ‘natural constituency’ is indicated in Peter North’s blog today. He is a Conservative supporter of ‘Brexit’, most of whose views I don’t share but on ‘Brexit’ he makes interesting criticisms: http://peterjnorth.blogspot.ca/2017/06/not-optimistic.html.
And something else that I find puzzling. Why did those supporters of UKIP, who want to ‘take back control’, vote Conservative? Voting for the Tories is handing control over to a neo-liberal political party that represents the oligarchic interests they most dislike in the EU, with no intention ever of devolving any power whatsoever down to these people. Cognitive dissonance rules OK. I imagine social psychologists are having a field day analysing the voting habits of the English electorate.
Anyhow, in the end the UK will do what it has always done which is to muddle through. Some sort of compromise deal will be made because, ultimately, that’s what trading is all about. My main fear is that in the process the social and cultural benefits of EU membership will be sacrificed on the altar of commercial expediency. One can only hope that to mitigate against the excesses of ‘hard Brexiteers’ there is some form of cross-party consensus.
One of your comments that the UKIP voters and supporters all voted for the conservatives. I felt they dropped their support of UKIP and instead voted Labour.
Actually they want both ways
Tend to agree with Andrew’s comments above.
The elephant in the room here is what do the EU countries think ?
I don’t see any discussion or hint of remorse etc from anyone in Britain. It’s all ‘we can do this, we can take that’. Well it’a time to wake up. The UK cannot waltz in to the EEA/EFTA because those countries (Norway etc) have to agree to let the UK in – and why would they do that ? Why would those smaller but wealthy countries want the hulking giant of the bombast UK entering into their group and trying to take it over and make changes, which the UK always does. What have Norway got to gain from this except lose any power within the group.
Think about what the UK have been saying about European leaders – think of all the smears, lies, bad taste jokes and slander that has emanated from these shores from the likes of May, Johnson, Farage etc. Crikey, it was only a few weeks ago that May was accusing Europe of interfering with our own election.
This stuff resonates around Europe, it’s not forgotten. From what I’ve read in the European press, many countries are sad to see the UK go, but crucially they have an acceptance of the reality- that business and their economies will be affected negatively but that is the choice and right of the UK.
Politicians and economists from Europe want them to stay, but the people of Europe may have a very different story to tell. The sense that I get is that many just want the UK to bugger off now, being fed up with the insults.
Ask yourselves, if you were a European, would you want the UK to stay after all thats happened ?
Please don’t do that Richard. Please don’t accept that the debate is over. It isn’t and it won’t be until people accept that it is. I agree that a disappointingly large proportion of MPs and political parties are keeping their heads down on this but the alternative is to be ritually slaughtered by the neo-Nazi press. I can’t however believe they’ve completely given up.
Yes we must respect the 17m who voted leave but we must also respect the 15m who voted remain, the 12+m who didn’t vote because they feel utterly disenfranchised by our (allegedly) democratic system and the 15+m who didn’t get a vote because they are children or UK citizens living outside the UK (i.e. those who have most to lose by leaving don’t get a vote!).
The debate will be over when tolerant, compassionate people with a desire to get on with their neighbours give up. Please don’t give up. You are one of the stars by which many steer their ship. If you give up, so will others. And then hope will fade.
Noted!