The Politics Thread

To the surprise of nobody, those that voted against it included Kate Hoey, Graham Stringer and Ian Austin - aka those who'd rather the Tories were in power than their own party with Corbyn at the helm (which is also why Hoey lost a No Confidence vote from her own constituents last year)

 

Don’t forget Dennis Skinner.........

 

Skinner's been against the EEC/EU since the days of Ted Heath

Of course this hasn't stopped Dan Hodges talking about tweets he's apparently imagined...

 

The course of Brexit negotiations reminds me of the words of a man who ended up serving years in prison for trying to break out of jail for a crime he was later found not to have committed:

"No matter how bad a situation looks, if you just put your mind to it and give it your best shot, you can always make it worse."

 

Don't think this bunch of corrupt incompetent twats (of all parties, but predominantly the Government) have either put their minds to it or given it their best shot! Or their minds are so feeble this is the best they can offer.....

 

That depends on the honesty now of both sides.
All I want to know is whether between the leave result and
the finalising of citizen Mays' "deal" :

1. Did the UK at any time propose full withdraw from EU
economic regimes, but offer zero tariffs on all EU imports

2. Were other things (giving the EU the 39bn they need to help
fund their bureaucracy etc) made conditional on #1 being accepted

3. What the EU response was. In particular :

- what tariffs did the EU propose (they have to impose something)

 

“There is a free trade zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey that all European nations have access to, regardless of whether they are in or out of the euro or EU. After we vote to leave we will remain in this zone. The suggestion that Bosnia, Serbia, Albania and the Ukraine would stay part of this free trade area - and Britain would be on the outside with just Belarus - is as credible as Jean-Claude Juncker joining UKIP. Agreeing to maintain this continental free trade zone is the simple course and emphatically in everyone’s interests.” - Michael Gove, April 19th 2016

"Increasingly the Norway option looks the best for the UK" - Arron Banks, 30th November 2015

"To repeat, absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market" - Daniel Hannan, 14th May 2015

 

So in summary, you don't have info on what I want to know
(nor even info that relates to the stated time window) .

 

Those quotes clearly suggest that the Leave campaign at the very least implied the UK would remain in the customs union in one form or another, yet their current Narrative is that we voted out so that means we should burn any agreements with the EU to the ground and salt the earth so none will ever grow there again - especially since Gove's quote is from an official Leave campaign press conference

What this implies is that, from the outset, the Leave campaign had no plan other than leaving the EU and were happy to say anything to make that happen - and then spend two and a half years denying it, as that would involve having to take responsibility for dumping the country into the mess of their creation, hence we have scenes like Boris Johnson running away from Michael Crick a couple of weeks ago when quizzed on his comments about Turkey being granted full EU membership

 

I am interested in what actual horse-trading has been proposed
by both sides during the time window I stated, not what
was "implied" by those involved in the campaign.

Things are heading towards WTO terms, and the time
has come to learn who on each side is due a proverbial "kick-in"
for their hubris/incompetence driving things to there.

Do you have links to the information I seek ??

 

You should be interested in what was suggested in the leadup to and the duration of the referendum campaign, because when either remaining in the Customs Union or adopting the Norwegian model is the carrot that is offered, seeing the No Deal option used as a stick almost as soon as the result comes in indicates quite clearly that there was no plan in place and they were hoping to fudge their way through it

Look at how the negotiations with the EU have gone: there were weeks of threats from the Dire leader and bluster from Davis before the first negotiation opened, yet within fifteen minutes of those negotiations opening Davis caved in and the Dire Leader didn't sack him on the spot for gross incompetence, which is another clear sign of no real plans being in place and they hoped they could muddle their way to the finish line

 

The whole thing is an embarrassment to the UK ( as is this so called Gvt).

It was clear from the start that May and her motley crew had no clue as to what they were dealing with, or how to deal with. From the early arrogant assumptions and pronouncements of the likes of Davis, Fox, Gove, Johnson etc, these clowns clearly thought that they held all the aces and were in charge. All they had to do was present Johnny Foreigner with a list of our demands and they would cave immediately in the face of the almighty Brittania,

Then there was the ridiculous rush to invoke A50 without even a hint of plan. Instead of waiting, putting in place at least an outline of a strategy, May goes wading in there size 12’s first and dumps the A50 notice on the EU, kicking off the clock on the 2 yr countdown.

Where are we now? Almost 2 yrs down the road and up **** creek without a paddle. May will toddle of back to Brussels, where she’ll get a pat on the head, be turned around and sent home empty handed.

 

The interesting thing is how the use of the No Deal stick has changed in the last couple of years: at first it was a stick to threaten the EU with, saying if they don't give Britain what it wants they'd willingly sabotage their own country just to say "I told you so" - but in the last few months it's now being used as a stick to threaten people who won't back the Dire Leader's deal, which is no doubt linked to the hardest Leavers now saying we should erect a wall around our coast, fill the English Channel and North Sea with more mines than anyone can count and place machine gun nests at the Channel Tunnel entrance to make sure nobody can get in or out

The fact this mania is now expanding to people outright saying that Ireland should return to the warm chokehold of the British Empire, not least John Humphreys on Radio 4 the other day, says this plan hasn't worked...

 

We have been told that for 2 yrs "negotiations" have been going on
between "both sides" . Therefore by definition what citizen May
presented to parliament was agreed beforehand to "both sides" .

Given the inevitable response by parliament, a scientist/engineer
now wants to look thru the "log books" and see :

1. all proposals by both sides
2. which were accepted/rejected/refined, and why

That is all there is to it. Nothing more, nothing less.

All that is left is to determine (as I stated) which individuals
have let their hubris/incompetence destroy all of the
reasonable solutions possible, and to give them a serious
"kick-in" .

 

I think you are confusing the arrangements under which we leave which is what the deal is about and the future arrangements with the EU which are still to be negotiated. The Deal buys us some breathing space to negotiate the future but doesn't actually specify how that will look. So tariffs have yet to be discussed.

 

No confusion whatsoever.

The current "Deal" is not going thru parliament.
The EU is not going to change it in any way to make that happen.

Therefore I want to know (as I have stated umpteen times) what
other proposals were discussed that are not in the current "deal" ,
and (once again) why they were rejected.

 

I think the answer to your first question is that by invoking Article 50 we did indeed ensure full withdrawal. Future arranngements including tariffs can only be discussed once the Terms for withdrawal have been negotiated and agreed. These include payments already required by the Treaty and for the transition period we required. The Article 50 process is almost entirely about an orderly exit. It has been constrained by May's red lines and there has been very little horse trading.

 

The simple answer to that is May and her Brexit team who, as I explained, charged into this knowing next to nothing about what was involved and with nothing vaguely resembling a coherent plan that was actually negotiable with the EU.

 

I suspect that something reasonable was up for grabs until the moment
citizen May effectively lost the 2017 general election (thus becoming
beholden to the DUP when the Ireland EU/UK border has always been
high on the list of delicate matters to resolve) .

 

There's two issues with trying to single out certain individuals and hold them to account: firstly that implies there was a plan to begin with, which genuinely does not ever seem to have been the case, and secondly it's oversimplifying the situation by assuming one or two events are to blame.

There's a theory out there known as disaster dominoes that states that it's very rare for a disaster to have a single catalyst (barring something like a tsunami or volcanic eruption) and instead it's a systematic failure where several things go wrong one after the other - be it over a period of hours, minutes or seconds. For example, the Titanic disaster can be traced back to either the day the ship set sail because the lookout forgot his binoculars, a couple of weeks before the ship set sail when they were granted a safety certificate due to regulations using the ship's tonnage as the basis for number of lifeboats required instead of number of passengers and crew, or several years in advance when the ship was in its design stage due to the combination of the ship having a double bottom but no protection to the waterline while the bulkheads weren't watertight as they didn't continue to deck level

This is why pinpointing a single person or event where promises were made or broken over Britait becomes difficult, as there's so many to choose from, for example...
December 2015: Arron Banks waffles on Twitter about following the Norway model
February 2016: David Cameron states that, in spite it being an advisory referendum, if Remain lose he will trigger Article 50 the very next day
April 2016: at an official Leave event Michael Gove states that the UK will not leave the Customs Union in the event of a Leave victory
June 2016: having cocked the whole thing up, David Cameron legs it out of Downing Street as fast as his little legs will carry him
July 2016: Michael Gove stabs Boris Johnson in the back to become leader...then discovers nobody wants him to become leader so he drops out anyway, soon followed by Andrea Leadsom being bullied into stepping aside so Theresa May can become leader and (by default) Prime Minister
March 2017: Theresa May triggers Article 50 in spite of not having a plan
April 2017: Theresa May calls a General Election, assuming a straightforward victory that will stop European Research Group led by Jacob Rees-Mogg (which also includes Gove and Leadsom among its members) from trying to backseat drive her government
Early June 2017: having spent three months planning for an election instead of a negotiating strategy with the EU, that straightforward win didn't materialise and instead she has to bung a billion quid the DUP's way to keep her in power
Late June 2017: David Davis meets to negotiate with the EU for the first time, only to cave to the timetable set by the EU's within the first fifteen minutes of talks beginning to give Michel Barnier control of all further talks
December 2017: when the subject of the Irish border first came up, Boris Johnson dismissed concerns out of hand while Davis suggested it was a relatively minor issue that could be put off for later - in doing so this gave the DUP leverage to get a pound of flesh to go with their billion quid

That's why looking for one person or one catalyst doesn't work: it could be very easy to lay all the blame at Cameron's feet for his idiotic pledge to trigger Article 50 and for running off and leaving an utter mess behind him when he would have had to live up to a promise he should never have made, but by that same token Cameron wasn't planting seeds in the heads of the electorate of the Norway model or remaining in the Customs Union, nor did Cameron gamble with the electorate (a second time...) that ended up with the DUP being in a position to dictate terms while reminding the government that without their ten votes they'd be toast (which the MP for Innsbruck North, Nigel Dodds, doing just that in the House of Commons after the No Confidence vote) nor did Cameron give the EU detailed directions in how to walk over him in negotiations

Removing the Article 50 promise may have prevented some of the immediate carnage that happened but even if he didn't the likely scenario is he would've been gone by the end of 2016 anyway, either with the ERG taking aim at him in much the same way they've taken aim at May since she got in and forcing a No Confidence vote, or he may have resigned after the result anyway - and if it was the latter, we'd probably have had Boris Johnson cocking everything up instead...