(tweet) Merkel is happy to welcome 1mill immigrants to Germany but not to guarantee Britons a life there. I think that tells us all we need to know.
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Off Topic The Politics Thread
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Perhaps if the Britons were fleeing a war and in fear for their and their loved ones lives with good reason she might have a different attitude.
Or do you not believe that a war which has killed hundreds of thousands of people is actually happening in Syria?
Can you imagine if May had said all EU citizens working/living in the UK are safe to do so? Well played by her for not letting Merkel know what she is doing. May is turning out to be doing okay.
A lot of posturing and silly scaremonger headlines from SKY and BBC won't make May show her hand.
Good on you May and stick by your guns!
Just remember half of these sabre rattlers won't even be in power in a year. Lets see how mouthy they all are when Italy votes on the 5th?Ask some of the German woman that have been raped, groped and abused after welcoming in these people? Always 2 sides to a story. Yes agree we should always help people in need but when some abuse it then others will ask why.
Not all the immigrants are refugees, but anyway, it's a matter for Germany who it lets in. But Merkel is being ridiculous in not agreeing reciprocal arrangements guaranteeing individuals the right to remain in the UK and the rest of Europe. It must be unsettling for them. May is doing her best to resolve the situation.
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Can you imagine if May had said all EU citizens working/living in the UK are safe to do so? Well played by her for not letting Merkel know what she is doing. May is turning out to be doing okay.
A lot of posturing and silly scaremonger headlines from SKY and BBC won't make May show her hand.
Good on you May and stick by your guns!
May has been wise in not waiving this issue, without the EU waiving it in return.
The EU are playing hard ball, supported by the BBC and SKY, Clegg, Tin Tin Farron and the like. Brussels are looking to shaft a recalcitrant. Gentility and detente have left the stage for now. We're in a battle to get a fair outcome.
Wow how much Kool Aid have you drunk? May could say today that all EU citizens currently in the U.K. are welcome to stay, whatever the rest of the EU says about British citizens living over there. But she won't because these people are bargaining chips. She's just done her bland, non commital usual crap, seeming to say nice things without committing to anything. But apparently it's having an effect, according to Ellers. I'm just too blinkered to see it.
First rule in negotiating - you don't concede anything without the other party conceding something too
Apologies, my original post specified Syrians, so you're right, most would have been refugees. Rest of my post stands
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Damned if you do, damned if you don't. The main reason I don't contribute to this thread much now is because what ever happens with Brixit (good or bad) people will always look at the negitive. The 48% will look for anything to complain about.
May is actually doing okay at the moment. Even someone from the Labour party said last night that "she is doing a good job". She is keeping tight lipped about it and so she should. Remember she was in the 'remain' camp and was left with a mess (if you call it that) now she is getting on with it.
A long way to go and many twists and turns. I will come back when there is something major to discuss because at the moment it's same old same old.
She certainly inherited a conundrum, agreed. There'll be many twists and turns along the way
Agree, I cannot believe how one sided Sky has been with Brexit. I have stopped watching Sky News (on Brexit). BBC have always been a bunch of 'Liberal yoghurt kitters' however I expected a more balanced veiw from Sky.
It was the same with Trump. I have started watching other news now.
I think SKY are worse than the BBC at the moment. At least the BBC has a duty to be impartial, even if it fails quite often. SKY doesn't even try
Gents - sometimes, things just don't turn out the way you'd like them to. You can either deal with the truth or be delusional about it. It's happened to me. It's happened to you. It happens to us all.
I've no idea about Sky News - I don't have Sky. The BBC has bent over backwards to meet the accusations from the left of right-wing bias and the accusations from the right of left-wing bias. These days, we no longer give credence to the people who calmly explain what the answer should be. Instead, we give credence to the people who get it wrong but shout louder and longer about it.
But, hey, I'm a centrist, small "L" liberal who likes to look at things from as many sides as I can, so I would say that, wouldn't I?
Which means some people on the right will be calling me a radical loonie-leftie Corbynista and some people on the left will be calling me a UKIP fascist. They're both wrong.
Agree, as I have got older I have probably become more cynical and liberal. I like to look at all sides and make my on judgement and not have people like Faisal Islam tell me what I should be doing. Which is a shame because Faisal is a good reporter and it's only his bias that lets him down.
The BBC were relatively even-handed in the run up to the referendum. Since then, they've been gloom merchants, reflecting the feelings of the majority of their journalists, but I can live with that if they're constructive devil's advocates and don't deal in propaganda
SKY is simply EU-rophile. It doesn't pretend to be anything else so far as I know - but they're out of sync with the mood in the majority of the country and it makes their News pretty one-sided
To be honest, I've learned to prefer reporting where the bias, even if I don't like it, is obvious. I read The Times, where the news reporting often contradicts the editorial. I think the BBC has an impossible job trying to be even handed, but it doesn't do it very well. Every single pro Brexit person they have chosen for 'person in the street' interviews for months have been moronic, and I know there are some articulate, reasoned Brexit voters out there.
Same with Sky recently (which I posted)
Well Done Sky!
You have done the same thing you were doing all the way through the Brexit vote and Trump election.
They interviewed 4 people from a company in Chesterfield, 2 ‘remainers’ and 2 leavers.
The ‘remainers’ were the General sales manager and the services director.
The leavers were a welder who couldn’t have been dirtier or thicker and some bloke who looked like the coal man from My fair Lady. (Funnily enough the actor that played the part was called Holloway and that's not knocking the chosen one).
Talk about chalk and cheese!
Every question from the interviewer was negative about leaving and as soon as the ‘remainer’ mentioned paying a bit more after the initial Brexit he pounced on that.
This is why we left the EU and Trump won. If you get treated like idiots you rebel.
What are your credentials in negotiating Goldie? You have a very old fashioned view of negotiations. If you regard your negotiating partners as your enemy, they will be your enemy. From what I have heard I think "Dr" Liam Fox and people like Jacob Rees Mogg share your view.
For people who do it for a living the first rule is to work out what areas of mutual interest can be part of the negotiation. Often this comes as part of the discussion.
Second is to work out the value of the different negotiating areas to your negotiating partners - and what is relatively more important to you. This usually happens as part of the discussion. The key word is value. Some things that you thought were worthless can be of surprising value to others.
Then you negotiate, giving and taking as it goes. It either fails, there is grudging agreement, or both sides walk away content. If one side is happy and the other isn't you needn't have bothered with negotiating in the first place, it's more of a diktat, as one side is much stronger than the other. I don't think that is the case with Brexit, though bizarrely the EU can walk away more easily than we can.
The worst possible thing you can do is work out everything you want to the last T and present it as done. We have to talk to get this done. Invoke article 50 tomorrow, get talking, I am sure that the two year deadline will be extended if the discussions are making progress.
Of course it only works if both sides see an advantage in reaching agreement, and are prepared to actually negotiate rather present demands and draw lines in the sand. In the case of Brexit we are in a lose-lose negotiation (unless you believe that we can keep the trade with no free movement of people) which the EU doesn't really want to have. We also have no experienced negotiators to conduct it, and I think the cards that May is keeping so close to her chest are much weaker than the ones the EU holds, particularly if the negotiation is confrontational. The only cards I can spot are the UK as an export market (trumped by the value of the EU as a market for us) and the value of the UK as a place for EU citizens to come to live and work, which she can't play without giving up what a lot of people who voted for this farce in the first place really want.
Most of us negotiate every day without even realising that we are doing it. It's only when we think 'this is a negotiation, they are out to screw me over' that we **** it up.
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I was a commercial litigator for 20 years, Stan and negotiated many settlements in contentious cases. I also worked closely with NY lawyers, and believe me, those boys have the art of negotiating down to a fine art.
What you are describing is mediation. We are not in a mediation, yet anyway, and for the purposes of Brexit, Junker and his cohorts are not our partners. Their aim is to hammer the UK, bleed it dry if possible for the benefit of themselves and the remaining member, and in this respect, there is no goodwill.
It's significant that Corbyn pressed May to unilaterally give rights here to EU workers. May will only do it reciprocally, and today we hear that Merkel will not discuss granting UK citizens rights in the EU.
What will defeat us is gullibility.