“This isn’t what Brexit is meant to be,” he tells Euronews Travel, “I voted leave to make things simpler, to stop having to follow rules made up by someone I didn’t vote for. This is worse than it was before.”
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Sweet summer child seems a tad bit generous in this case. These are data roaming charges for British travelers in the EU…as in…the place that he specifically voted to leave.
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Am I misinformed? My understanding was that just as “Oh, bless your heart” means “I hope you die in a fire”, “Oh my sweet summer child” means “Oh my god you really are a thundering moron.”
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I could be wrong, but I always thought that it was pointing at naivety (like saying, “Were you literally born yesterday?”), rather than outright idiocy. I just thought that voting to leave the EU and then getting upset that he is now treated like some kind of foreigner within the EU goes beyond mere naivety. Then again, it’s not really a common expression in the region where I grew up.
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Summer in this sense could mean membership in the EU.
Winter is coming.
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It gets worse:
Referring to the same chap:
Formerly a landlord, David sold his tenanted properties in the UK shortly after the Brexit vote. He planned to move to Portugal permanently when he retired in 2018, but didn’t manage to sort residency.
So he voted to leave the EU, while planning to go and live there…
Thereby of course ensuring that (even if he somehow managed to ‘sort residency’ - which wouldn’t have been an issue as a citizen of an EU member state), he would be living under the rule of people he wouldn’t be allowed to vote for - even at the municipal level which he would have been able to vote in as a citizen of an EU member state.
Still, Brexit was supposed to make all this so much simpler somehow…
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The schadenfreude is damn near palpable…
All of these people wanted, as the Italians say, “avere la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca”.
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Or as the PM had it:
Critics had said “you couldn’t have free trade with the EU unless you conformed with the EU’s laws”, said the PM. and “that that was having your cake and eating it”.
“That has turned out not to be true,” he added. “I want you to see that this is a cakeist treaty.”
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Ah yes, the oven ready cake: so half baked at best.
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Yes, it goes well beyond mere naivety and into the realms of utter stupidity, where in fact this gentlemen will be in good company. As we’ve seen many times in this thread, leave voting business owners and expats realising that’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this works. I should have used a Picard facepalm i suppose but i’ve used the gif so much it’s knackered.
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When you have to accuse the poles of being criminals and then they refuse to drive trucks for you anymore…
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It’s not just Europe. Both Biden and Congress said back during the fight over the protocol, and in the context of a US election. That there would be no trade deal with the UK if a border went up in Ireland. Or anything negatively impacted the Good Friday accord.
We seem to have back burnered any and all trade talks since. There hasn’t even been a start on an actual agreement. And the US government has been pretty vocally and consistently backing up the EU here.
So Johnson is basically playing chicken with access to the worlds largest economy.
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IIRC one of the UK’s stated reasons for not maintaining regulatory alignment with the EU on food standards was to remove a potential obstacle to a UK-USA free trade agreement. But the lack of regulatory alignment causes problems in Northern Ireland, so it is actually counter-productive in relation to securing a trade deal with the USA.
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As far as I’m aware a free trade agreement was never really on the table, and certainly not before Brexit. The suggestion grew out of Brexiter’s instance that they could just substitute US relationships for EU ones, and it seems to be the UK unilaterally discussing and proposing the possibility. It does seem to be a proposal with the very recent, and first talks on trade. Which resulted in multiple statements from our government that any deal was a no go if Britain kept on.
In the US no one seems to be talking about Free Trade ™ with the UK, even as a generality. Not on the order of something like NAFTA. Or even anything specific as goes eliminating tariffs and customs checks. Which seems to be what the Johnson side things wants you to think.
Even Trump, big Brexiter that he is, merely took the step of notifying Congress they intended to start talks about a general trade agreement. And doesn’t seem to have specifically pushed Free Trade. Certainly didn’t do anything after that step.
The UK has applied to join the successor to the TPP (which Trump killed), weirdly. And that was another of their “hey we’ll just do that, everyone will want our jam” suggestions.
Japan is apparently backing them. But the the US is not currently part of the CPTPP, though we’re sort of expected to sign on eventually. And presumably we would not if the UK rat fucks the Backstop. As it would then be a potential trade deal with the UK. Or we could probably pretty easily pressure the rest of the block to leave them out.
The current stated position has been that the UK will be stuck with WTO rules if they step out of line. But there have even been floaters about punitive tariffs and trade restrictions if things go bad in Northern Ireland.
So again. More. The UK is threatening to tank other nation’s trade deals, and the closer they come to stepping on the Good Friday Agreement. The more they flirt with actual sanctions. The less than stated threat from the US is that we will use trade pressure to enforce the peace deal.
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It’s laughable really…
If we really started a trade war with the EU? We’d lose, instantly.
All it’d take would be for france to close borders and cut off the electricity supply… We’d be instantly into blackouts and starvation mode…
The brexiteer meme was ‘we hold all the cards’ for trade, the utter opposite is the reality…
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The xenophobic right and the grifters were lying? Say it ain’t so!
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Yes, I know it’s the Daily Express, but it still needs attention
BREXIT BRITAIN is on the cusp of a huge win after the “game-changing” technology of fusion power was unveiled at COP26.
Fusion was decades away 20 years ago, it is still decades away. I guess the only difference now is we have a desperate government who want some kind of distraction from their ineptitude.
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Brexit developed fusion power? That’s impressive.
It’s bullshit propaganda obviously but you know. Neck like a jockey’s bollix to write that
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They’ll be using the power of imagination. So, no change.
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