Have you got a book of putdowns? :biggrin:
Printable View
The problem was the EU Referendum was Cameron v Johnson. There was no mention of Ireland and the realities of leaving the Single Market and Customs Union. Cameron led a dreadful Remain campaign. Now as reality dawns the practicalities of Brexit are becoming ever more problematic.
Even now 20 months after the Referendum this Govt has not got a clue what it wants.They are hopelessly divided. In comparison the EU will stick by the rules of membership. Why should they do any differently?
So Corbyn is irrelevant, yet you spend the entire thread going on about him?
The real scandal is that we are 20 months on from the vote and the government has just had a meeting to decide if they can agree on what we want as a country.
Labour initially said that their role was 'to hold the government to account'. They tried to do this and picked up certain issues that were important to them and then people (a number on here also) made the point that Labour didn't have a plan themselves and therefore were just criticising. Now they make a plan and they get moaned at for being presumptuous about their prospects of being in power. You couldn't really make it up, thankfully you don't need to these days.
Your understanding is incorrect. Retaining membership of the single market entails the free movement of goods, people, services and capital. The EU customs union relates to managing the tariffs and quotas for goods at the border of the custom union and the elimination of them within it. YYou would be able to manage your own immigration policies and still be able to be part of the customs union. You lose the right to negotiate trade deals as this is done by the EU.
Labour has been silent on the matter due to thier internal struggles and what appeared to be self doubt from them to support remain .
Thier positioning now us just pure electioneering, which any party would apply, I suppose the supporting mantra of JC not to play party politics has disappeared somewhat , everyman for himself now I guess , I'm waiting for the Sinn Féin the left-wing of Irish politics to take thier seats at Westminster , in support of the latest bout of ping pong .
I was hoping you might have a name. Boris? Would he be doing a great job of negotatiations and sorting out the Tories? Davis? Rees-Mogg?
I do love this idea that you have of an invisible group with overarching power to choose who leads the Tories to keep Brexit from happening - when the same invisible group didn't bother to a) stop the referendum happening b) make it near-impossible for Leave to win by asking for 70-30 c) stop Boris from doing a great job in charge of the Leave campaign etc
I've always believed, and always will do, that the result of the Referendum can be put down to one subject and one subject only - immigration. The tired line that all Leave voters were racists is bollox as far as I'm concerned, but if you are talking about enough people whose vote was decided by a desire to "get the foreigners out" to have made the difference between a Remain win and what actually happened, then I believe that's a different matter.
Any claim the result of the referendum was an endorsement of a hard Brexit, a soft Brexit or any other type of Brexit is a spurious one - all that the vote proved was that on a particular day, more of those who could be bothered voting thought we'd be better off out of the EU than in it.
It needed about 635,000 of those who voted leave to vote remain and the result would have been different. The total number of votes was 33,551,983, so I make it that it needed about 1.9% of those who voted to have changed their vote to remain for it to have won - I believe it's entirely possible that just over half a million of those who voted did so on a get the foreigners out basis.
Christ, you love a good ramble. If the government believe that remaining in the customs union is the best possible form of "Brexit", as opposed to a "hard Brexit" which would royally screw us over, then we should stay in the customs union.
Your first paragraph is a fantastic argument for remaining in the EU. We were able to influence the EU whilst we were in the EU, now we'll be on the outside looking in at one of the biggest trading bloc's in the world
We're in a weak position for negotiations because A) 27v1, B) They have a lot more things we need than the other way round, C) We had an election jut weeks before negotiations started which distracted and weakened the government and D) Nobody knows what the f*ck to do
From the environment I found myself in I heard and understood the following :
Big percentage over 50 wanted out.
Previous Labour voters were drawn into UKIP Johnny Foreigner taking over our life mantra , but couldn't grasp that the fact eastern Europeans migration would be replaced by sub contingent arrivals.
Youngsters wanted to remain with passion .
Over 60's just hated Europe in any shape or form and took the chance to put two fingers up to them .
Business men believing there was a better and new opportunities to expand trade,and unravel itself from bureaucratic laws that fail to allow companies to grow.
A lot of folk who believed our laws are our laws not for Europe to decide what the correct wattage a Hoover should be.
Me I voted to remain now I want out , as I now see and hear the true colours of the selflish /bullish ,greedy European community.
Perhaps they should provide even benefits and minimum working wage accross its boundaries, not use successful generous countries to be used and abused to shift popluations to eleviate the inadequacies of others.
It would appear from Theresa May's speech today that we want to embrace most of the EU's bureaucratic laws and in several cases pay for the privilege of doing so. Just before she set out her vision of new trade deals with other countries Donald Trump proposed 25% tariffs on all steel imports to the US including the £360m of annual steel exports that the UK (mainly Wales) makes to the USA. If you think that the people who are promising us great trade deals to replace the ones we have in the single market when they have to make a choice between the survival of Pittsburgh or Port Talbot you are probably wearing the same star spangled specs as Fox and Farage!
Isn't China one of our key trade deals post-Brexit? What are we going to offer beyond the weight of the EU that makes our trade better? Are you seriously saying that when we take back control one of our first acts as global Britain will be to signal that we are closing the huge trade gap between us and China by establishing new tariff barriers to protect UK industry?
I take your point on you not being an international trade negotiatior, particularly as you seem to think that we have left the EU! The only authoritative economic analysis we have seen is the leak from the UK government which estimates that post-Brexit trade deals with the US, China, India, Australia, the Gulf and the Asean bloc would add between 0.3 and 0.6% to GDP in the long run. When all these deals are completed Brexit is still estimated to leave the UK 2-8% poorer than we would have been had we remained. I am not clear whether this anticipated Trump's trade war or not.
I gave no allegiance to the USA however one could suggest since WW2 it has built a remarkable economy, and that he based on looking after your own, that drifted somewhat under the democrats and homeland jobs were lost in the quest for profit , strangely a business man is trying to reverse that, the rust belt of American and the rich of the East coast of the USA are why Trump is in power.
So why don't we look inwardly and look after our own , we have been more than generous to other nations and free movement , more than most, the EU should recognise that .