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I actually respect the commission for their decision. Brexiteers simultaneously complained about Germany using the bloc to advantage themselves to the detriment of smaller countries and are now making light of the fact that Germany have been prevented from doing exactly that by the commission, which is it?
As much as I praise the rollout efforts and foresight to invest public funds into the AZ vaccine, I can't help but wonder how bad this would be going if AZ/Oxford was at the same stage as the many other vaccines. We effectively have a preferential deal with one of the few vaccines to have reached the market, we hit the jackpot.
The UK have always been at the forefront of scientific and vaccine development and the EU have always had the benefit of that knowledge and expertise in the past. They are now finding out what life is like after Brexit and their prevarication and dithering over this is typical of how they operate and when that fails they revert to the good old ‘bully boy’ tactics to try to get what they want and cover up their ineptitude. Well they can jog on.
It is a fact that the finance sector (as Sludge says, a huge generator of taxable income and jobs) is losing influence, although not just to Germany . Already, thousands of jobs and trillions of pounds in assets have left the country. That’s not scaremongering - my wife was involved in an asset transfer worth hundreds of billions and that’s just one of many going on.
I imagine all the countries left in the EU will be saying thank goodness those self-serving tossers from the UK have now left us and we will now be able to create an improved EU.
The reverse is probably true specially in some of the samller/weaker countries. They relied on UK to face up to the likes of France because they didn't have the clout to do so, and they were worried about UK leaving for fear of being bullied into every little whim the leading lights thought up.
So you could say, if we're going to continue this notion that we were the sensible ones keeping everyone on the level, we have now washed our hands with that kind of role. Mind you, on the other hand, we've been perceived as "Perfidious Albion" for a fair while too.
But on the other hand, we have also long been seen as "Perfidious Albion".
I'm amazed that things aren't much worse than they actually are with regards movement of goods from the UK to the EU and vice-versa. I had imagined that every French "jobs-worth" over there would be scouring every single document for the slightest typo or unticked box in order to reject a shipment with consequent queues of lorries building up on either side of the channel. That clearly hasn't happened as the BBC would have been sure to find at least a couple of disgruntled truck drivers or their transport managers having a whinge, much to the delight of the ever optimistic Laura Kuenssberg.
It's nothing to be light-hearted about unfortunately.
Wales has benefitted enormously from EU funding, particularly over the last 20 years and the money will or cannot be replaced by the Welsh or British Governments.
The problem isn't the spin doctors and downright liars who influenced the referendum, it's the gullible and ignorant who voted to leave.
I know for a fact that the financial services sector in the UK is now prevented from advising European business and all those jobs will now go to Europe
And I know for a fact that China is the world's leading manufacturer and it comes through Europe, to the UK
And it means goods are going to more expensive to buy
We don't make anything anymore and almost everything we consume is made in China
That snazzy Japanese hi tech smart TV? Made in China
And its still going to be coming through Europe to get here
Except we are not part of Europe anymore so its going to cost us , big time
We could of course trade with another major world market on our doorstep and be part of that but I think the nearest one is a 7 hour flight away
how do you think stuff from China arrives in the UK
How does it get here ?
Where do you think the major terminals for manufactured goods are for distribution to this country ?
Why do you think Dover , Rotterdam , Hook of Holland are so important to trading links between the UK and Europe and beyond
Planes are important but what else do you think brings goods from China to Europe?
In other news, water is wet.
The UK will always be in some form of negotiation - or negotiations - with the EU for as long as either exist. Brexit doesn’t really end, until either or both does. This is just what neighbouring sovereign states that have interdependent economies outside of the EU do (Switzerland, Norway, etc). States within the EU do just the same. This is politics, no?
Sovereignty was deemed the guiding principle for the current UK government and it negotiated with the EU with that red line primarily in mind (with some flexibility of course, arrangements for Northern Ireland for example). The economy was secondary in comparison - to an extent, this is Brexit in a nutshell.
There will be economic damage to the UK in the short and medium term whether there was a pandemic or not, I think that is a fairly unanimous position amongst economists, but most who have advocated for the UK leaving the EU tended to downplay the significance of that damage and deemed it a price worth paying. Although there are economic cases that can be made for Brexit, from my experience I don’t think they made up the main thrust or groundswell of support for the campaign to leave that ultimately saw the UK vote to do so.
I think its fair to say that a sizeable proportion of those people who voted to leave in areas that directly benefitted from EU grants and Investment were gullible and ignorant of the help their areas got from our membership of the EU , they were lied to by the vote leave campaign regarding the NHS etc and had their opinions swayed by false information .
Thats different from saying bert from porth in the valleys is thick and ignorant for voting to leave . And I think that's what B Oddie is saying .
I don't.
And despite your constant complaints about people being lied to, this was made quite clear at every possible moment for over 3 years yet in Dec 2019 people still voted to leave by their actions at the General election.
And now you'll repeat the not 50% ofthe vote thing again. How many labour governments would we have had if the 50% rule was appled all the time?
You keep on conflating two different things.
Did people 'vote to leave' by splitting the Remain or 2nd Referendum vote between Labour, Lib Dems, Greens and the nationalists - who together got the majority of votes in the 2019 election?
It is fair to say that Labour took a hit in 2019 because a significant part of their 'red wall' votes from 2017 and earlier went to the Tories mainly in response to 'Get Brexit done'.
But majority of seats for a Brexit Tory party and a majority of votes for parties who held the opposite position can co-exist - and did!
People keep quoting this, didn't get 50% of the vote mantra, but we all know that this is the way elections are and always have been decided in this country.
Yet every time labour, and in this case remainers, lose they trot it out like it's a shock, outrageous and shouldn't be allowed. They just cannot accept that they lost and move on.
And the longer they are in that mode the longer it will take to have an effectgive opposition in Parliament.
It really is time to give it a rest.