Let me get this straight: you like the hypocrisy, the pseudo-scientific Silicon Valley and evo psych fetishism, the utter contempt for parliamentary procedures, the law breaking, the petty power struggles in number 10, the closeness to Russian oligarch money, the far right think-tanks, the eugenics thinking?
You like that walking personification of the Peter principle crossed with the Dunning Krueger effect? That alternate universe evil Karl Pilkington?
Blimey how did you read me this well!
I see no other way of interpreting your statement
Because legislation once passed never can be changed. Ever. No taksie backsies. I mean, if you can NEVER change things, than the Queen can do whatever she likes, yeah?
I mean, in this case it can’t. The UK has left the EU. It could theoretically apply to rejoin (though that’s very unlikely in the short to medium term) but that doesn’t change the fact that Brexit has happened. Sorry if that sounds harsh but the denial that Brexit has happened is something I usually see from low-information Brexit voters and it grinds my gears almost as much as the writings of Dominic Cummings. The damage is done and there is nothing that can repair it. It’s still possible to limit it a bit but there is no scenario where the UK or parts of it are in the EU in, say, a decade’s time. (Even in the best case scenario an independent Scotland would be on the way to membership by then and hopefully have association agreements that mimic many of the advantages but it wouldn’t be a member yet. And that England will ever rejoin is increasingly unlikely but even if it did we are talking at least one generation)
On top of that, the EU offered a further extension of the transition period in consideration of the exceptional circumstances caused by COVID-19. Johnson did not take it up, because he needed to signal his determination to Get Brexit Done and, preferably, force the EU to make last minute concessions to secure a post-Brexit trade agreement.
With or without a “deal”, there will in principle be customs checks on all cargo, because the UK refused to accept the conditions that the EU required for “frictionless” free trade (freedom of movement, regulatory alignment and jurisdiction for the European Court of Justice). Hence the UK government’s insistence that physical customs checks could be replaced by online clearance systems and, now, the rush to build inland clearance facilities.
There are less than two months to go before the UK departs its 40-year relationship with the EU and it is still working on the IT systems needed to make the new arrangement work.
According to a report from the Institute for Government [PDF], one of the IT systems vital to cross-border commerce is still being tested and is not ready to roll out.
The Goods Vehicle Movement Service (GVMS) is set to handle trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland and transit traffic crossing the GB-EU border from January.
The United Kingdom is set to base its post-Brexit management of goods crossing the EU border on software that is still yet to be introduced, leaving little or no time for stakeholder testing.
According to spending watchdog the National Audit Office (NAO), the Goods Vehicle Movement Service (GVMS), which is set to link information on cross-border customs declarations of goods with the vehicle that is transporting, remains under development by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.
An IT system designed by people who couldn’t manage to stage a fake traffic jam.
No worries. There is a Plan B:
While true now, until relatively recently it could have been reversed. A second referendum was a real option to undo this omnishambles, and I believe that the EU leadership would have jumped at a do-over that made it all go away. A competent Labour leader could have backed the People’s Vote, made it the centrepiece issue of an election, and would probably be PM right now.
But yes, as of last December, that option was gone.
That’s about right: three years to achieve independence, at least another five years to become a member in the EU (with some of those Norway-style association agreements kicking in earlier). Scottish independence is one of the few separatist movements I support, based as it is not mainly in ethnicity or language or religion but rather in economic and political concerns. A Scotland free of the malign influence of the Tories and re-connected to the benefits of the EU is one I’d like to see, all the more so if it provides a haven for those looking to escape Little England.
I would seriously support a proposal that, for a period of five years, every single high-profile Brexit supporter be required to live directly adjacent to a facility or motorway in Kent that’s going to have to serve the new customs regime.
That’s only if there is zero acceleration to the standard timetable. Which is designed for new entrants to the EU, not countries that were until recently in perfect alignment with all EU rules. There is certainly scope for speeding up the process, especially if it would be politically expedient to be generous to five million ex-EU citizens who had that status unwillingly torn from them.
There are a couple of impediments. From what I’ve read, the main one is that the Scots are a little hesitant to accept the Euro (I get it to a certain extent). There will also be an understandable desire to have a special border arrangement with the rump state of the UK. I do agree that the goodwill and incentive would be there on the part of both an independent Scotland and the EU to speed things up.
I’d like to think that, but I’m doubtful, considering the number of traditionally Labour seats that went to the Tories in 2019. I don’t think a Labour commitment to a second referendum would have changed that, and may well have made it worse. The only explicitly anti-Brexit parties that gained seats were the SNP, the Alliance and the SDLP, all regional parties in regions that voted against Brexit.
That reflects more on Corbyn’s bungling and in-fighting in the party – voters just throwing up their hands and giving the Tories their opening. Perhaps that would have still been enough to offset the benefits emerging from an explicitly anti-Brexit Labour that promised a second referendum, perhaps not (as I’m contending, given the general sentiment that Brexit was a huge mistake). It’s all counterfactuals now, in any case. The UK is in for a rough time no matter what, and I’m more interested in seeing how Scotland extricates itself from this mess going forward.
I don’t know about that. I looked at the returns from a bunch of Northern seats that flipped Tory wondering how they could vote for those fuckers but they didn’t. They voted Brexit party in exactly the number that the Labour vote was down. Labour going full remain was not going to win them the election. They knew that too.
I think they should have done it anyway to be a credible opposition but Brexit tore up the party.
I’ve just been looking at the on-going polls on Brexit regret, and basically you’re seeing the usual Know-Nothing 27% still fully supporting Brexit and another 23% willing to go along (but half of them worried the Tories will cock it up). The other 50% or so thinks it’s a bad idea, and that number continues to increase with each poll.
But, yeah, polls. With hard election results like the ones you’re talking about, perhaps a lot of respondents are just lying.
The process of joining the Euro is separate from joining the EU, though.
All countries that join the EU have to commit to joining the Euro in the future (unless they negotiate an opt-out like Denmark), but there’s no actual mechanism to force a country to make any progress towards joining. So you can fudge the issue like Sweden has and keep your old currency indefinitely
So the Euro is not an impediment to membership of the EU, but the wider currency question is an issue that will have to be resolved for indy to happen. I’d go into it further, but that would probably derail the thread even further.
That seems to be the state of play at the moment. About 3-4% of people who voted leave have flipped to remain, the rest are split between full-bore gung-ho isolationism and “this isn’t what I expected but I hope it’ll turn out ok”. There’s very little movement between leave and remain camps, because UK politics is so polarised and we’ve not seen the full impact of it yet.
It would be foolish to not let the UK back in at some point, though. I understand how pissed everyone is right now about Brexit, and rightfully so. But 10 or 15 years on, things will be different, leadership will be different in member states, in the EU parliament, etc.
No, but some new situation can and will take it’s place. Europe has already rebuilt and reconfigured itself multiple times over the past century and a half, out of circumstances that were much worst than this round of British nationalist stubbornness. You rebuilt (with our help) after Germany actively tried to wipe out an entire people! Yet now Germany is arguably the leader of Europe and often on the right side of human rights issues.
Of course, at this point, given the problems the EU is having with countries like Poland and Hungary, who are still in despite trampling all over EU human rights provisions, who knows what the EU will look like in a decade from now, especially if the far right keeps surging in France and Germany.
I get that people are pissed at the UK government right now. But the EU was not meant to be a tool for the leaders, right? It was meant to build a safer, more stable Europe for Europeans and the world, was it not? Despite what shitty leadership exhibited by the conservative party right now in the UK, UK citizens are still Europeans, are they not? Isn’t the EU about the people of Europe and preserving their rights?
The trouble is, Boris, Nigel and their Brexit wrecking crew have just gone and proved de Gaulle right- everything he said about the UK being a disruptive force trying to upturn the European project has been vindicated by history. It’s going to be a long time indeed before anyone can trust the UK to stick to any sort of diplomatic agreement (including international law), now that the current bunch of spivs and wasters in charge have burned down the UK’s reputation to the ground. Who would enter into any sort of agreement with a country that makes it this clear that it will renege on any agreement it likes for temporary domestic political advantage. It’s just a matter of trust.
If the EU wants to help the people stuck on these islands, the best it could do at the moment is to revive the proposal for separate EU citizenship for all those of us who have had it taken from us.
The UK is enjoying the second extension of the transition period which will end on the 31st of December
No, this is the minimum transition period. The Withdrawal Agreement included an option to extend by 1 or 2 years, but that option expired at the end of June. An extension now would likely require a new treaty agreed by all EU members.
(The trade agreement currently being negotiated will likely include another short “implementation period” where nothing much changes, but the agreement still needs to be signed off by the end of this year to avoid a cliff-edge.)
