Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Something that most of the Brexit side forgot the moment they had their win. We should have immediately started looking at ways to find a new relationship with Europe that satisfied the majority of the country not just the ones that voted Leave. The sadness is that the majority of the Tory party were too dumb to realise that they were supposed to lead for the whole country.
Wasn't possible in the face of a determined effort to overturn the referendum result.
All sides were equally guilty of trying to get their own extreme ways. Blaming the Eurofanatics in Parliament whilst excusing the ERG mob is very partial thinking.
True, but I'm talking about moderate Leavers who were firced to accept a harder Brexit than they might have liked because there was nobody on the other side to work with in the crucial weeks immediately after the vote.
I think May is as much to blame as anyone. Her Lancaster House speech back in early 2017 created a whole list of red lines that were incompatible with any reasonable compromise with the remainers, and guaranteed a problematic position in NI. That and triggering article 50 before she needed to.
True enough, but by the time of Lancaster House, the FBPEers had made clear that compromise was impossible.
“FBPErs” were by no means a significant faction in parliament at the time - limited essentially to the Lib Dems, SNP and a few labour backbenchers. Even those were mostly cowed and dared not admit they supported remaining for the first few months. Even the likes of Chukka Umunna. And we had a Corbyn Labour front bench avowedly in favour of pressing in with Brexit, plus a comfortable conservative majority. Back then even the ERG were fairly on board and not yet creating too much trouble.
May created the parliamentary impasse to follow with her Ill judged election.
Looking back, it seems bizarre that the parliamentary majority for invoking Article 50 was so emphatic. May had already set her "red lines" at this point. Why did so many remainers vote to invoke?
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of every-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
IIRC, an EU employee's pension can in theory be revoked if they act in an un-european way after their retirement. Doubt it would ever happen, but still creepy as fuck.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Something that most of the Brexit side forgot the moment they had their win. We should have immediately started looking at ways to find a new relationship with Europe that satisfied the majority of the country not just the ones that voted Leave. The sadness is that the majority of the Tory party were too dumb to realise that they were supposed to lead for the whole country.
Wasn't possible in the face of a determined effort to overturn the referendum result.
All sides were equally guilty of trying to get their own extreme ways. Blaming the Eurofanatics in Parliament whilst excusing the ERG mob is very partial thinking.
True, but I'm talking about moderate Leavers who were firced to accept a harder Brexit than they might have liked because there was nobody on the other side to work with in the crucial weeks immediately after the vote.
The challenge for anyone writing an alternate history of 2016-19 leading to a softer Brexit is getting it past the ERG wing of the Conservative Party.
One of the reasons that the years after 2016 were so painful is that there was a double lock to open. Any Brexit deal had to have a majority in the Commons and a (separate) majority in the Conservative Party. The first was needed to get the thing through Parliament, the second was needed to stop the PM being VONCed by their own party.
Maybe there was an arrangement that could do that. But I'm not sure what. But anything EEA-like certainly wasn't that arrangement. (Go on, imagine a lineup of the people in Vote Leave and Leave.EU. How many of them went to all that trouble to stay in the single market?)
That is why the situation demanded an attempt to create a national consensus over what to do with Brexit. A Royal Commission, or a Citizen's Assembly, or cross-party talks.
Instead Theresa May decided to not even involve her own MPs in a discussion of what to do. That's the key failure that led to the others.
Any form of Brexit was going to lead to large compromises of one sort or another. People have to be walked through the logical necessity of that over time. It's common for many on here to say that "Norway for now" was the obvious solution, and it's what I assumed would happen immediately after the vote, but even that solution involves masses of compromise and leaves lots of problems outstanding.
Instead of parroting empty slogans like "Brexit means Brexit" or "We're going to have a red, white and blue Brexit", we really needed a Prime Minister who was going to lead the country through a national debate on all the pros and cons of the different options.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of every-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
IIRC, an EU employee's pension can in theory be revoked if they act in an un-european way after their retirement. Doubt it would ever happen, but still creepy as fuck.
Yep. And "creepy as fuck" is an apt description of the inner philosophies of the EU, once you begin to dig. It is "building a superstate by stealth", in essence
Anyway we are now out of this stupid pile of lying wank, and Remoaners like @Scott_xP can spend the rest of their futile lives lamenting it. Perhaps if they'd been honest earlier they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Lesson learned: docnot go on Twitter and criticise Trafalgar.
Nate Silver fan boys do not take it well.
I've literally got one saying it doesn't matter if its fraudulent the numbers are good!
I recall someone on here saying something similar about them(or some other similar 'pollster') in 2018 supposedly being pretty spot on even if they were not actually polling and were only close by power of a random guess.
JFC, now he's saying Trafalgar have done well in 2022. I'm out. I'm fucking out.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
It’s rather telling that the referendum winners are still trying to define what happened in the past. If Brexit were a success, why would it matter ?
It matters because there are still too many fanatics on both sides - Remainers who want to reverse the whole thing and Hard Brexiteers who want to ensure we have no relationship whatsoever with the EU - who are still dominating the debate. It needs people in the middle on both sides to say that we have the opportunity for a reasonable relationship with the EU in which neither of those extreme visions wins. There are plenty of us who had a reasonable vision outside the EU which did not involve continual conflict and actually we are starting to see some politicians who are willing to embrace that rather than fighting yesterday's wars.
But doing that needs Europhiles to accept there was and is a political dimension to the EU that was unacceptable to many (even plenty of those who voted Remain) and Brexiteers to accept there was and is a huge amount of benefit to be gained from having a good trading and diplomatic association with the EU and that many people want a close and harmonious relationship. People like Roger (who was the source of this today's bout of Euro-debate with his rant about diseased Tunisians) and Scott (who would blame Brexit for the weather if he got half a chance) do nothing to help the Europhile side. Nor, to be honest, does Bart with his belief we can just rip up treaties like confetti and expect everyone else to smile and indulge us.
There was and is a vision of Brexit that would have been acceptable to the majority of the public once we had actually voted to leave. As I never tire of pointing out, it wasn't my idea but I articulated it on here the day after the referendum. But the fanatics on both sides ensured that we are now 6 years down the line and still fighting yesterday's wars.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
And yet hundreds of millions of people in apparently pretty sophisticated countries across Europe are pretty content with the status quo and make little disguise of their disinterest in integrating further. Denmark, Sweden, Poland, much of the rest of Eastern Europe. They know it’s in their power to choose their own future.
The British Eurosceptics always seemed so much more frightened of the power of the central institutions than other countries: the commission in particular. Perhaps that was a vestigial island mentality and resistance to continental empires, but the Danes are pretty independent minded and seem a lot less in awe of Brussels. Yet despite the fear the same people believed we could negotiate the best of both worlds and could bend the EU to our will in the way out.
Again, it’s this odd mixture of under- and overestimating Britain’s agency and power that I don’t get.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of every-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
IIRC, an EU employee's pension can in theory be revoked if they act in an un-european way after their retirement. Doubt it would ever happen, but still creepy as fuck.
Yep. And "creepy as fuck" is an apt description of the inner philosophies of the EU, once you begin to dig. It is "building a superstate by stealth", in essence
Anyway we are now out of this stupid pile of lying wank, and Remoaners like @Scott_xP can spend the rest of their futile lives lamenting it. Perhaps if they'd been honest earlier they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
It’s also worth making the point that 'post-Brexit' was meant to be a chaotic mess. If there had been a solid plan on offer, like exit into the EEA, it would have been a greater incentive to vote for it.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
And yet hundreds of millions of people in apparently pretty sophisticated countries across Europe are pretty content with the status quo and make little disguise of their disinterest in integrating further. Denmark, Sweden, Poland, much of the rest of Eastern Europe. They know it’s in their power to choose their own future.
The British Eurosceptics always seemed so much more frightened of the power of the central institutions than other countries: the commission in particular. Perhaps that was a vestigial island mentality and resistance to continental empires, but the Danes are pretty independent minded and seem a lot less in awe of Brussels. Yet despite the fear the same people believed we could negotiate the best of both worlds and could bend the EU to our will in the way out.
Again, it’s this odd mixture of under- and overestimating Britain’s agency and power that I don’t get.
You plainly don't understand the basic nature of the EU, so, you know, whatevs
I'm warming to King Charles III, he made Prince Andrew cry, the late Queen comes out this quite badly.
When the dramatic account emerged last week of how the Duke of York had been reduced to tears when he was told by his brother Charles, then the Prince of Wales, that he would never return to public duties, it raised an intriguing question. Why had Prince Andrew not figured that out already?
He was, according to The Mail on Sunday, “blindsided” by the outcome of the meeting and “utterly bereft”. But ever since he had been forced to step down from royal duties there had been repeated reports that there was no way back for Andrew. Was he the only person in the country not to have got the message?
Now the answer has emerged. The duke was too slow to accept his fate because his closest advisers kept telling him they would find a way for him to return to his royal role.
His mother, the late Queen, also failed to make it clear to him that his days as a working member of the royal family were well and truly over as a result of his relationship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of every-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
IIRC, an EU employee's pension can in theory be revoked if they act in an un-european way after their retirement. Doubt it would ever happen, but still creepy as fuck.
Yep. And "creepy as fuck" is an apt description of the inner philosophies of the EU, once you begin to dig. It is "building a superstate by stealth", in essence
Anyway we are now out of this stupid pile of lying wank, and Remoaners like @Scott_xP can spend the rest of their futile lives lamenting it. Perhaps if they'd been honest earlier they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Oh no, Leon's off on Brexit again. I think the only way to stop him will be to rejoin.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Politicians and political movements are liable to human error, and there’s no doubt there was a body of received wisdom that completely missed the opinion outside the world of Witney (or London or Manchester or Scotland etc).
I also think there is a big chunk of received wisdom now which writes pro-Europeans out of history and assumes any anti-Brexit feeling is just an elite metro thing. I don’t think it is. The country doesn’t all think like Mansfield any more than it all thinks like Witney.
Not easy to write a 48% vote out of history. Easier to erase from history that remainers held all sorts of competing convictions, just as Brexit supporters did and do.
Remain voters included: pragmatists who had no theory but liked the practical benefits for them; idealists who knew what the EU actually stood for; people who go with the flow of the political class; people who held utterly deluded views about the EU just being a sort of useful trading association, and so on. Just like Brexit supporters - a mixed bag.
What they all had in common was an acceptance that the EU would develop without us being asked as we went along what we thought, as had happened for decades despite promises. Which was something I could not vote for.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
And yet hundreds of millions of people in apparently pretty sophisticated countries across Europe are pretty content with the status quo and make little disguise of their disinterest in integrating further. Denmark, Sweden, Poland, much of the rest of Eastern Europe. They know it’s in their power to choose their own future.
The British Eurosceptics always seemed so much more frightened of the power of the central institutions than other countries: the commission in particular. Perhaps that was a vestigial island mentality and resistance to continental empires, but the Danes are pretty independent minded and seem a lot less in awe of Brussels. Yet despite the fear the same people believed we could negotiate the best of both worlds and could bend the EU to our will in the way out.
Again, it’s this odd mixture of under- and overestimating Britain’s agency and power that I don’t get.
You plainly don't understand the basic nature of the EU, so, you know, whatevs
Same point again: nation states within the EU have the ability to choose the direction, and they exercise it (including threatened or actual veto) at will. It matters little what the agenda of true believers in Luxembourg or Belgium is. The more confident members understand this. Britain always seemed to see itself in a strangely passive role.
Same as when we have a Tory government we aren’t all automatically heading to the ultimate dream world of the founding fathers of conservatism, nor are we going to become a socialist paradise under a Starmer government.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
And yet hundreds of millions of people in apparently pretty sophisticated countries across Europe are pretty content with the status quo and make little disguise of their disinterest in integrating further. Denmark, Sweden, Poland, much of the rest of Eastern Europe. They know it’s in their power to choose their own future.
The British Eurosceptics always seemed so much more frightened of the power of the central institutions than other countries: the commission in particular. Perhaps that was a vestigial island mentality and resistance to continental empires, but the Danes are pretty independent minded and seem a lot less in awe of Brussels. Yet despite the fear the same people believed we could negotiate the best of both worlds and could bend the EU to our will in the way out.
Again, it’s this odd mixture of under- and overestimating Britain’s agency and power that I don’t get.
You plainly don't understand the basic nature of the EU, so, you know, whatevs
Same point again: nation states within the EU have the ability to choose the direction, and they exercise it (including threatened or actual veto) at will. It matters little what the agenda of true believers in Luxembourg or Belgium is. The more confident members understand this. Britain always seemed to see itself in a strangely passive role.
Same as when we have a Tory government we aren’t all automatically heading to the ultimate dream world of the founding fathers of conservatism, nor are we going to become a socialist paradise under a Starmer government.
Untrue. A derogation for reasons from FoM would have won the referendum for remain, but the EU would not give it to Cameron. Choosing the direction was exactly the point on which we left.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
And yet hundreds of millions of people in apparently pretty sophisticated countries across Europe are pretty content with the status quo and make little disguise of their disinterest in integrating further. Denmark, Sweden, Poland, much of the rest of Eastern Europe. They know it’s in their power to choose their own future.
The British Eurosceptics always seemed so much more frightened of the power of the central institutions than other countries: the commission in particular. Perhaps that was a vestigial island mentality and resistance to continental empires, but the Danes are pretty independent minded and seem a lot less in awe of Brussels. Yet despite the fear the same people believed we could negotiate the best of both worlds and could bend the EU to our will in the way out.
Again, it’s this odd mixture of under- and overestimating Britain’s agency and power that I don’t get.
You plainly don't understand the basic nature of the EU, so, you know, whatevs
The EU that those who voted Remain voted for Britain to stay a member of was an EU in which it had been agreed that Britain had opted out of the drive to "ever closer union". The agreement wasn't hidden. It was trumpeted in the media: "Dave's deal".
So it wasn't Britain being ever more "closely" in a union that informed Brexiteers (if there were any) voted against.
All cried out after HMQ? Got a real time war to focus on this year?
A very poor #rememberancing this year. Not enough #respect for our #fallen who fought for our #freedom. Why don't you all just join ISIS?
There has been a few flashes of truly top notch mawkish nationalism though.
I'd have thought you might have time for charities supporting ex-servicemen many of whom are traumatised by their experiences in war.
Yes, this sneering at poppy-wearers and general Remembrancing gets very old very fast
So it can be a little mawkish, so it can appear overtly patriotic, so fucking what? What do they want?
Perhaps @theuniondivvie and his ilk would prefer a Day of National Disrespect where "rich middle aged anarchists" like @Dura_Ace can publicly wank on top of the Cenotaph while baring his shrivelled buttocks and revving his 50CC moped, and down by Buckingham Palace Sir Rogerdamus de Provence can walk on the faces of seventeen sad prone weeping Tunisians as he officially approaches the King to tell him that Britain is SHIT and probably should have lost to Hitler, all of it applauded by a solitary hologram of Jolyon Maugham wearing an EU waistcoat while lavishly fucking a stoat
Solar energy firm Toucan has fallen into administration after racking up more than half a billion pounds in debt to a local authority in Essex, England https://trib.al/1DDI7RZ
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
And yet hundreds of millions of people in apparently pretty sophisticated countries across Europe are pretty content with the status quo and make little disguise of their disinterest in integrating further. Denmark, Sweden, Poland, much of the rest of Eastern Europe. They know it’s in their power to choose their own future.
The British Eurosceptics always seemed so much more frightened of the power of the central institutions than other countries: the commission in particular. Perhaps that was a vestigial island mentality and resistance to continental empires, but the Danes are pretty independent minded and seem a lot less in awe of Brussels. Yet despite the fear the same people believed we could negotiate the best of both worlds and could bend the EU to our will in the way out.
Again, it’s this odd mixture of under- and overestimating Britain’s agency and power that I don’t get.
You plainly don't understand the basic nature of the EU, so, you know, whatevs
The EU that those who voted Remain voted for Britain to stay a member of was an EU in which it had been agreed that Britain had opted out of the drive to "ever closer union". The agreement wasn't hidden. It was trumpeted in the media: "Dave's deal".
So it wasn't Britain being ever more "closely" in a union that informed Brexiteers voted against.
Except most of us who knew and know something about how the EU works knew it wouldn't have been worth the paper it was written on. Something John Major found out to his cost and complained bitterly about with regard to the Social Chapter in 1996.
All cried out after HMQ? Got a real time war to focus on this year?
A very poor #rememberancing this year. Not enough #respect for our #fallen who fought for our #freedom. Why don't you all just join ISIS?
There has been a few flashes of truly top notch mawkish nationalism though.
Mawkish? Pfff. That idea - with the cake - is well executed.
Clever.
What do you mean, clever? It's possible to think of a cleverly executed poppy-themed dildo. Remembrance stuff is either heart felt reverence for our fallen heroes, or it is outdated wank, but the failed grab at sophistication implied by calling it "clever" is merely embarrassing.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
And yet hundreds of millions of people in apparently pretty sophisticated countries across Europe are pretty content with the status quo and make little disguise of their disinterest in integrating further. Denmark, Sweden, Poland, much of the rest of Eastern Europe. They know it’s in their power to choose their own future.
The British Eurosceptics always seemed so much more frightened of the power of the central institutions than other countries: the commission in particular. Perhaps that was a vestigial island mentality and resistance to continental empires, but the Danes are pretty independent minded and seem a lot less in awe of Brussels. Yet despite the fear the same people believed we could negotiate the best of both worlds and could bend the EU to our will in the way out.
Again, it’s this odd mixture of under- and overestimating Britain’s agency and power that I don’t get.
You plainly don't understand the basic nature of the EU, so, you know, whatevs
The EU that those who voted Remain voted for Britain to stay a member of was an EU in which it had been agreed that Britain had opted out of the drive to "ever closer union". The agreement wasn't hidden. It was trumpeted in the media: "Dave's deal".
So it wasn't Britain being ever more "closely" in a union that informed Brexiteers voted against.
Except most of us who knew and know something about how the EU works knew it wouldn't have been worth the paper it was written on. Something John Major found out to his cost and complained bitterly about with regard to the Social Chapter in 1996.
I didn't hear John Major saying that about Dave's deal in 2014.
I don't blame David Cameron. He did his best. I blame Gordon Brown. Five tests? What a load of c*ck from the "prudent economist". Italy managed to join the f*cking euro, and the lira was a joke. Brown should have said "We're in the euro now. No more changing money when you go to the continent. Got any objection? Then let's have a referendum."
Waiting to call a referendum until after UKIP won the EU elections was idiocy.
Yay I’ve been shopping all day. Have I missed anything?
NV has been called already, by me two guys ago - Laxalt has won by a comfortable enough 2%ish margin here. You know the Democratic governor in Nevada has lost it too, ousted to the strength of the GOP vote in Nevada this election?
Arizona is different in terms of which way it’s leaning this time , dems have won the senate race here, and Lake is very much in trouble now and I’m tipping her to lose.
Meanwhile in UK, Last week I sensed Tories were losing my mums vote to reform, this week she seems back on board because she really likes Jeremy Hunt’s new haircut. Yes. Really. If the whole government go to the same barber the election is in the bag.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
And yet hundreds of millions of people in apparently pretty sophisticated countries across Europe are pretty content with the status quo and make little disguise of their disinterest in integrating further. Denmark, Sweden, Poland, much of the rest of Eastern Europe. They know it’s in their power to choose their own future.
The British Eurosceptics always seemed so much more frightened of the power of the central institutions than other countries: the commission in particular. Perhaps that was a vestigial island mentality and resistance to continental empires, but the Danes are pretty independent minded and seem a lot less in awe of Brussels. Yet despite the fear the same people believed we could negotiate the best of both worlds and could bend the EU to our will in the way out.
Again, it’s this odd mixture of under- and overestimating Britain’s agency and power that I don’t get.
You plainly don't understand the basic nature of the EU, so, you know, whatevs
The EU that those who voted Remain voted for Britain to stay a member of was an EU in which it had been agreed that Britain had opted out of the drive to "ever closer union". The agreement wasn't hidden. It was trumpeted in the media: "Dave's deal".
So it wasn't Britain being ever more "closely" in a union that informed Brexiteers (if there were any) voted against.
Three problems with that promise. Firstly, remainers didn't agree with each other about whether 'Ever Close Union' was anyway real or meaningful (see PB discussions passim). So it's impossible to know what it meant.
Secondly, the EU did not even offer a derogation from FoM which would have won the referendum for remain. So whatever it meant, it didn't mean anything important.
Thirdly, if the UK were in the EU and the rest still committed to 'ever closer..' then at some point a brick wall would be hit where we would either leave or conform. At which point all bets would be off.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate.
Your hidden premise seems to be that federal states (and a fortiori unions) are bad for some reason.
they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history.
We remain on the right side of history (see what I did there?)
Leaving was a bad mistake.
One day even you will figure it out.
There is zero sign of Switzerland, Norway or Iceland trying to join - quite the opposite. Polls show intense allergic reactions to the idea
The EEA countries all seem very happy with their statuses - much more so than most EU members.
There are a couple of differences, though.
First is that the EEA countries are pretty small- they're not giving up that much by withdrawing from the political/democratic discussions.
Second, the EEA states have made fairly clear calculations- accept that they are going to follow the herd in most areas in order to carve out more autonomy in a few things that really matter to them.
Mapping that onto the UK is tricky. Partly because the country is bigger. But also, we haven't really worked out what bits of autonomy we really want and what (if anything) we are prepared to give up to achieve that. Maybe we could, but it's not happened yet.
Put those together, and it kinda makes sense that the UK hasn't neatly settled in EEA. (Me? I'd be chill with it. But I don't see how you get there from "Take Back Control", or think it's a stable answer for the UK.)
On topic, thanks for the timely header, the Tory’s are clearly still moving upward in the polls, a 30 from Techne is only 5 away from hung parliament/Tory re-election for another 5 years territory. And like Mike, I see their poll average continuing to climb from here till the budget at very least.
If the budget goes down well “at last a government on side of workers” “could we ever doubt Sunak looks after the least well off” this upward momentum could get boosterised.
Died laughing, I mean Elon Musk is just the person I want to be my banker, he'll hire Fred Goodwin to head up Twitter Bank, mark my words.
Peter Theil has this to say about Musk and Credit
I was thinking of doing a book on PayPal … and [the chapter on Elon Musk] was going to be titled, “The man who knew nothing about risk.” … We had decided to give a credit card to anybody who wanted them. You got up to $10,000 credit limit. Elon had told the woman who was rolling the service out that he wanted 1 million people to be using the new credit card by the end of the year. Fortunately, it was about two levels down from the front page, and so not that many people were able to discover this. Some people did. They wrote us back and said, “You know this is fantastic! I haven’t had credit in years. I can’t believe you’re offering me credit. I haven’t even had a checking account in 10 years!” … We ended up with something like a 50% charge back rate—the worst subprime companies are like 4%-6%. And then, happily, we sort of rolled that product back very quickly.
On topic, thanks for the timely header, the Tory’s are clearly still moving upward in the polls, a 30 from Techne is only 5 away from hung parliament/Tory re-election for another 5 years territory. And like Mike, I see their poll average continuing to climb from here till the budget at very least.
If the budget goes down well “at last a government on side of workers” “could we ever doubt Sunak looks after the least well off” this upward momentum could get boosterised.
Yay I’ve been shopping all day. Have I missed anything?
Brexit is still a bad idea that's being poorly executed. The pb.com Sonderkommando have liberated Kherson with high precision memes. Mixed views on the Captain Tom cake. Quite a few inmates in an advanced state of intoxication. Trussonomics is dead forever. That's about it.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate.
Your hidden premise seems to be that federal states (and a fortiori unions) are bad for some reason.
1)The UK economy is still smaller than it was pre-covid. 2)The Bank Of England is forecasting a 2 year recession. 3)So when exactly is the UK likely to get back to its pre-covid economic output? 4)This is shocking, no?
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate.
Your hidden premise seems to be that federal states (and a fortiori unions) are bad for some reason.
But wait...Britain is a union...
Indeed. Which is why some English Eurosceptics like myself are supportive of Scottish Independence and a united Ireland.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate.
Your hidden premise seems to be that federal states (and a fortiori unions) are bad for some reason.
But wait...Britain is a union...
Leon makes no such assumption.
Quite so. The USA - until recently - has been a supremely successful union. Likewise the UK, yet with a very different backstory
Unions can be long lasting and exemplary geopolitical entities, it is arguable they are the best. But they have to be willing and voluntary. Scotland openly decided to join the UK (you can argue the deets but that is what happened). The 13 original states of the USA overtly opted in to the joint enterprise of the USA
THAT is how you build a union. Voluntarily and openly. You do not do it in secret, behind the voters. That is a recipe for terrible discontent, it has already led to Brexit and ultimately I suspect it will doom other parts of the EU, tho the core may survive
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate.
Your hidden premise seems to be that federal states (and a fortiori unions) are bad for some reason.
But wait...Britain is a union...
Leon makes no such assumption.
Quite so. The USA - until recently - has been a supremely successful union.
1)The UK economy is still smaller than it was pre-covid. 2)The Bank Of England is forecasting a 2 year recession. 3)So when exactly is the UK likely to get back to its pre-covid economic output? 4)This is shocking, no?
What's shocking is that the above is true, and the PM doesn't plan to do anything about it, except make it worse.
they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history.
We remain on the right side of history (see what I did there?)
Leaving was a bad mistake.
One day even you will figure it out.
There is zero sign of Switzerland, Norway or Iceland trying to join - quite the opposite. Polls show intense allergic reactions to the idea
The EEA countries all seem very happy with their statuses - much more so than most EU members.
There are a couple of differences, though.
First is that the EEA countries are pretty small- they're not giving up that much by withdrawing from the political/democratic discussions.
Second, the EEA states have made fairly clear calculations- accept that they are going to follow the herd in most areas in order to carve out more autonomy in a few things that really matter to them.
Mapping that onto the UK is tricky. Partly because the country is bigger. But also, we haven't really worked out what bits of autonomy we really want and what (if anything) we are prepared to give up to achieve that. Maybe we could, but it's not happened yet.
Put those together, and it kinda makes sense that the UK hasn't neatly settled in EEA. (Me? I'd be chill with it. But I don't see how you get there from "Take Back Control", or think it's a stable answer for the UK.)
For the problem you have to go into the past. As of right now the UK as a whole does not accept FoM, ie a migration system not in our power to legislate for.
This only became live as an issue when states at very different stages of development had FoM with us.
To allow this was a UK (New Labour) failure of statecraft.
Once done it can't be undone (theological principle of the EU). Ask Cameron.
We allowed the SM to be linked irrevocably to FoM. Unless that is undone there can be no optimal solution.
We have no power to undo it.
Ergo there is no optimal solution.
This has been the central problem since June 2016, and it still is.
NB Labour has no coherent policy on the matter, for very good reasons.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
It’s rather telling that the referendum winners are still trying to define what happened in the past. If Brexit were a success, why would it matter ?
It matters because there are still too many fanatics on both sides - Remainers who want to reverse the whole thing and Hard Brexiteers who want to ensure we have no relationship whatsoever with the EU - who are still dominating the debate. It needs people in the middle on both sides to say that we have the opportunity for a reasonable relationship with the EU in which neither of those extreme visions wins. There are plenty of us who had a reasonable vision outside the EU which did not involve continual conflict and actually we are starting to see some politicians who are willing to embrace that rather than fighting yesterday's wars.
But doing that needs Europhiles to accept there was and is a political dimension to the EU that was unacceptable to many (even plenty of those who voted Remain) and Brexiteers to accept there was and is a huge amount of benefit to be gained from having a good trading and diplomatic association with the EU and that many people want a close and harmonious relationship. People like Roger (who was the source of this today's bout of Euro-debate with his rant about diseased Tunisians) and Scott (who would blame Brexit for the weather if he got half a chance) do nothing to help the Europhile side. Nor, to be honest, does Bart with his belief we can just rip up treaties like confetti and expect everyone else to smile and indulge us.
There was and is a vision of Brexit that would have been acceptable to the majority of the public once we had actually voted to leave. As I never tire of pointing out, it wasn't my idea but I articulated it on here the day after the referendum. But the fanatics on both sides ensured that we are now 6 years down the line and still fighting yesterday's wars.
To be fair, that confetti remark is a mischaracterisation of my beliefs, but you presumably already knew that; I don't think we should rip up treaties lightly.
I do think we have that prerogative if it is of enough importance - as does every other nation in the planet.
America, Germany, France etc are all willing and able to break treaties when it suits their interests sufficiently to do so. We shouldn't do so lightly, but nor should we never say never either.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate.
Your hidden premise seems to be that federal states (and a fortiori unions) are bad for some reason.
But wait...Britain is a union...
Indeed. Which is why some English Eurosceptics like myself are supportive of Scottish Independence and a united Ireland.
Me too.
Wales can tag along with us if they're too sheepish to go independent.
they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history.
We remain on the right side of history (see what I did there?)
Leaving was a bad mistake.
One day even you will figure it out.
There is zero sign of Switzerland, Norway or Iceland trying to join - quite the opposite. Polls show intense allergic reactions to the idea
The EEA countries all seem very happy with their statuses - much more so than most EU members.
There are a couple of differences, though.
First is that the EEA countries are pretty small- they're not giving up that much by withdrawing from the political/democratic discussions.
Second, the EEA states have made fairly clear calculations- accept that they are going to follow the herd in most areas in order to carve out more autonomy in a few things that really matter to them.
Mapping that onto the UK is tricky. Partly because the country is bigger. But also, we haven't really worked out what bits of autonomy we really want and what (if anything) we are prepared to give up to achieve that. Maybe we could, but it's not happened yet.
Put those together, and it kinda makes sense that the UK hasn't neatly settled in EEA. (Me? I'd be chill with it. But I don't see how you get there from "Take Back Control", or think it's a stable answer for the UK.)
For the problem you have to go into the past. As of right now the UK as a whole does not accept FoM, ie a migration system not in our power to legislate for.
This only became live as an issue when states at very different stages of development had FoM with us.
To allow this was a UK (New Labour) failure of statecraft.
Once done it can't be undone (theological principle of the EU). Ask Cameron.
We allowed the SM to be linked irrevocably to FoM. Unless that is undone there can be no optimal solution.
We have no power to undo it.
Ergo there is no optimal solution.
This has been the central problem since June 2016, and it still is.
NB Labour has no coherent policy on the matter, for very good reasons.
The question is how much poorer are people willing to be to stop Polish people moving here. I guess we're going to find out.
Yay I’ve been shopping all day. Have I missed anything?
Brexit is still a bad idea that's being poorly executed. The pb.com Sonderkommando have liberated Kherson with high precision memes. Mixed views on the Captain Tom cake. Quite a few inmates in an advanced state of intoxication. Trussonomics is dead forever. That's about it.
Thanks for the reply. I have a serious question. As we went into this war the opinion was Russia would have control over the sky’s, and that should make a difference. Should we have though at the start Russia would have control of airspace, and why hasn’t it made much difference? Are the days of manned fighters, bombers, attack helicopters and para troopers going the way of the tank?
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate.
Your hidden premise seems to be that federal states (and a fortiori unions) are bad for some reason.
But wait...Britain is a union...
Leon makes no such assumption.
Quite so. The USA - until recently - has been a supremely successful union. Likewise the UK, yet with a very different backstory
Unions can be long lasting and exemplary geopolitical entities, it is arguable they are the best. But they have to be willing and voluntary. Scotland openly decided to join the UK (you can argue the deets but that is what happened). The 13 original states of the USA overtly opted in to the joint enterprise of the USA
THAT is how you build a union. Voluntarily and openly. You do not do it in secret, behind the voters. That is a recipe for terrible discontent, it has already led to Brexit and ultimately I suspect it will doom other parts of the EU, tho the core may survive
When Scotland joined the Union there were no voters.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate.
Your hidden premise seems to be that federal states (and a fortiori unions) are bad for some reason.
But wait...Britain is a union...
Indeed. Which is why some English Eurosceptics like myself are supportive of Scottish Independence and a united Ireland.
Me too.
Wales can tag along with us if they're too sheepish to go independent.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate.
Your hidden premise seems to be that federal states (and a fortiori unions) are bad for some reason.
But wait...Britain is a union...
Indeed. Which is why some English Eurosceptics like myself are supportive of Scottish Independence and a united Ireland.
Scotland wouldn't be independent under Sturgeon, just leaving the UK to join a Federal EU superstate
they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history.
We remain on the right side of history (see what I did there?)
Leaving was a bad mistake.
One day even you will figure it out.
There is zero sign of Switzerland, Norway or Iceland trying to join - quite the opposite. Polls show intense allergic reactions to the idea
The EEA countries all seem very happy with their statuses - much more so than most EU members.
There are a couple of differences, though.
First is that the EEA countries are pretty small- they're not giving up that much by withdrawing from the political/democratic discussions.
Second, the EEA states have made fairly clear calculations- accept that they are going to follow the herd in most areas in order to carve out more autonomy in a few things that really matter to them.
Mapping that onto the UK is tricky. Partly because the country is bigger. But also, we haven't really worked out what bits of autonomy we really want and what (if anything) we are prepared to give up to achieve that. Maybe we could, but it's not happened yet.
Put those together, and it kinda makes sense that the UK hasn't neatly settled in EEA. (Me? I'd be chill with it. But I don't see how you get there from "Take Back Control", or think it's a stable answer for the UK.)
For the problem you have to go into the past. As of right now the UK as a whole does not accept FoM, ie a migration system not in our power to legislate for.
This only became live as an issue when states at very different stages of development had FoM with us.
To allow this was a UK (New Labour) failure of statecraft.
Once done it can't be undone (theological principle of the EU). Ask Cameron.
We allowed the SM to be linked irrevocably to FoM. Unless that is undone there can be no optimal solution.
We have no power to undo it.
Ergo there is no optimal solution.
This has been the central problem since June 2016, and it still is.
NB Labour has no coherent policy on the matter, for very good reasons.
The question is how much poorer are people willing to be to stop Polish people moving here. I guess we're going to find out.
The answer for most families will be "no poorer at all".
The only ones who stand be poorer are those making good money who had gotten addicted to getting everyone else to be minimum wage serfs to look after them. Tarquin might need a more expensive Nanny until he becomes old enough to start climbing on M25 gantries going forwards.
On topic, thanks for the timely header, the Tory’s are clearly still moving upward in the polls, a 30 from Techne is only 5 away from hung parliament/Tory re-election for another 5 years territory. And like Mike, I see their poll average continuing to climb from here till the budget at very least.
If the budget goes down well “at last a government on side of workers” “could we ever doubt Sunak looks after the least well off” this upward momentum could get boosterised.
If.
Absolutely. 2p here or 2p there. That is the question. I’m currently writing a PB header of what policy can make that if a reality in this budget, with great headlines and bedrock for polling recovery, and it’s really not as difficult or complicated as all that.
I’m not sure it will be published as a header though as my other submissions weren’t.
Yay I’ve been shopping all day. Have I missed anything?
Brexit is still a bad idea that's being poorly executed. The pb.com Sonderkommando have liberated Kherson with high precision memes. Mixed views on the Captain Tom cake. Quite a few inmates in an advanced state of intoxication. Trussonomics is dead forever. That's about it.
Thanks for the reply. I have a serious question. As we went into this war the opinion was Russia would have control over the sky’s, and that should make a difference. Should we have though at the start Russia would have control of airspace, and why hasn’t it made much difference? Are the days of manned fighters, bombers, attack helicopters and para troopers going the way of the tank?
The whole area is absolutely saturated with AA systems of every conceivable type and neither side has any meaningful capability to supress them. So there are very limited opportunities to do anything with aviation hence all these videos of hooning round at 100' AGL as if it were a good idea.
Solar energy firm Toucan has fallen into administration after racking up more than half a billion pounds in debt to a local authority in Essex, England https://trib.al/1DDI7RZ
Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot.
Given what's happened in the Electricity market, solar farms ought to be making unprecedented windfall profits, not falling into bankruptcy.
Something very, very dodgy has surely happened there. Hope it gets a criminal investigation.
they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history.
We remain on the right side of history (see what I did there?)
Leaving was a bad mistake.
One day even you will figure it out.
There is zero sign of Switzerland, Norway or Iceland trying to join - quite the opposite. Polls show intense allergic reactions to the idea
The EEA countries all seem very happy with their statuses - much more so than most EU members.
There are a couple of differences, though.
First is that the EEA countries are pretty small- they're not giving up that much by withdrawing from the political/democratic discussions.
Second, the EEA states have made fairly clear calculations- accept that they are going to follow the herd in most areas in order to carve out more autonomy in a few things that really matter to them.
Mapping that onto the UK is tricky. Partly because the country is bigger. But also, we haven't really worked out what bits of autonomy we really want and what (if anything) we are prepared to give up to achieve that. Maybe we could, but it's not happened yet.
Put those together, and it kinda makes sense that the UK hasn't neatly settled in EEA. (Me? I'd be chill with it. But I don't see how you get there from "Take Back Control", or think it's a stable answer for the UK.)
For the problem you have to go into the past. As of right now the UK as a whole does not accept FoM, ie a migration system not in our power to legislate for.
This only became live as an issue when states at very different stages of development had FoM with us.
To allow this was a UK (New Labour) failure of statecraft.
Once done it can't be undone (theological principle of the EU). Ask Cameron.
We allowed the SM to be linked irrevocably to FoM. Unless that is undone there can be no optimal solution.
We have no power to undo it.
Ergo there is no optimal solution.
This has been the central problem since June 2016, and it still is.
NB Labour has no coherent policy on the matter, for very good reasons.
The question is how much poorer are people willing to be to stop Polish people moving here. I guess we're going to find out.
The answer for most families will be "no poorer at all".
The only ones who stand be poorer are those making good money who had gotten addicted to getting everyone else to be minimum wage serfs to look after them. Tarquin might need a more expensive Nanny until he becomes old enough to start climbing on M25 gantries going forwards.
Tempted to give this a like for the sheer volume of clichés and right wing talking points on offer.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate.
Your hidden premise seems to be that federal states (and a fortiori unions) are bad for some reason.
But wait...Britain is a union...
Indeed. Which is why some English Eurosceptics like myself are supportive of Scottish Independence and a united Ireland.
Scotland wouldn't be independent under Sturgeon, just leaving the UK to join a Federal EU superstate
I agree. But that would be their choice to make and I hope they would not go down that route. What matters is that they are free to decide.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate.
Your hidden premise seems to be that federal states (and a fortiori unions) are bad for some reason.
But wait...Britain is a union...
Leon makes no such assumption.
Quite so. The USA - until recently - has been a supremely successful union. Likewise the UK, yet with a very different backstory
Unions can be long lasting and exemplary geopolitical entities, it is arguable they are the best. But they have to be willing and voluntary. Scotland openly decided to join the UK (you can argue the deets but that is what happened). The 13 original states of the USA overtly opted in to the joint enterprise of the USA
THAT is how you build a union. Voluntarily and openly. You do not do it in secret, behind the voters. That is a recipe for terrible discontent, it has already led to Brexit and ultimately I suspect it will doom other parts of the EU, tho the core may survive
When Scotland joined the Union there were no voters.
That was then and this is now - the 21st century, when after full debate the Scots voted clearly in favour of the union. And it will only be a few decades before they can vote again if they wish, which is but a moment in the long amazing history of that wonderful nation.
BTW there were few voters when England was formed out of a heptarchy of warlords. When do we get a vote on bringing back Northumbria (embracing Scotland up to Edinburgh of course)?
1)The UK economy is still smaller than it was pre-covid. 2)The Bank Of England is forecasting a 2 year recession. 3)So when exactly is the UK likely to get back to its pre-covid economic output? 4)This is shocking, no?
The UK economy is almost certainly bigger than it was pre-recession. But, you have to wait for the GDP figures to get revised upwards. That can take several years.
It's a problem for policy makers that they're having to work with figures that are rarely correct.
Speaking of dodgy dealings and criminal activity, glad to see FTX has now officially fallen into bankruptcy and hopefully a few more "Coin exchanges" follow it.
My sympathies for all the victims of the fraudsters and shysters behind the crypto scam. The sooner the entire so-called crypto market is wiped out entirely, the better, stop future victims from falling prey to these predators.
Unfortunately I doubt we'll see many of the people behind this pyramid scam end up behind bars where they deserve.
they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history.
We remain on the right side of history (see what I did there?)
Leaving was a bad mistake.
One day even you will figure it out.
There is zero sign of Switzerland, Norway or Iceland trying to join - quite the opposite. Polls show intense allergic reactions to the idea
The EEA countries all seem very happy with their statuses - much more so than most EU members.
There are a couple of differences, though.
First is that the EEA countries are pretty small- they're not giving up that much by withdrawing from the political/democratic discussions.
Second, the EEA states have made fairly clear calculations- accept that they are going to follow the herd in most areas in order to carve out more autonomy in a few things that really matter to them.
Mapping that onto the UK is tricky. Partly because the country is bigger. But also, we haven't really worked out what bits of autonomy we really want and what (if anything) we are prepared to give up to achieve that. Maybe we could, but it's not happened yet.
Put those together, and it kinda makes sense that the UK hasn't neatly settled in EEA. (Me? I'd be chill with it. But I don't see how you get there from "Take Back Control", or think it's a stable answer for the UK.)
For the problem you have to go into the past. As of right now the UK as a whole does not accept FoM, ie a migration system not in our power to legislate for.
This only became live as an issue when states at very different stages of development had FoM with us.
To allow this was a UK (New Labour) failure of statecraft.
Once done it can't be undone (theological principle of the EU). Ask Cameron.
We allowed the SM to be linked irrevocably to FoM. Unless that is undone there can be no optimal solution.
We have no power to undo it.
Ergo there is no optimal solution.
This has been the central problem since June 2016, and it still is.
NB Labour has no coherent policy on the matter, for very good reasons.
The question is how much poorer are people willing to be to stop Polish people moving here. I guess we're going to find out.
The answer for most families will be "no poorer at all".
The only ones who stand be poorer are those making good money who had gotten addicted to getting everyone else to be minimum wage serfs to look after them. Tarquin might need a more expensive Nanny until he becomes old enough to start climbing on M25 gantries going forwards.
Tempted to give this a like for the sheer volume of clichés and right wing talking points on offer.
they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history.
We remain on the right side of history (see what I did there?)
Leaving was a bad mistake.
One day even you will figure it out.
There is zero sign of Switzerland, Norway or Iceland trying to join - quite the opposite. Polls show intense allergic reactions to the idea
The EEA countries all seem very happy with their statuses - much more so than most EU members.
There are a couple of differences, though.
First is that the EEA countries are pretty small- they're not giving up that much by withdrawing from the political/democratic discussions.
Second, the EEA states have made fairly clear calculations- accept that they are going to follow the herd in most areas in order to carve out more autonomy in a few things that really matter to them.
Mapping that onto the UK is tricky. Partly because the country is bigger. But also, we haven't really worked out what bits of autonomy we really want and what (if anything) we are prepared to give up to achieve that. Maybe we could, but it's not happened yet.
Put those together, and it kinda makes sense that the UK hasn't neatly settled in EEA. (Me? I'd be chill with it. But I don't see how you get there from "Take Back Control", or think it's a stable answer for the UK.)
For the problem you have to go into the past. As of right now the UK as a whole does not accept FoM, ie a migration system not in our power to legislate for.
This only became live as an issue when states at very different stages of development had FoM with us.
To allow this was a UK (New Labour) failure of statecraft.
Once done it can't be undone (theological principle of the EU). Ask Cameron.
We allowed the SM to be linked irrevocably to FoM. Unless that is undone there can be no optimal solution.
We have no power to undo it.
Ergo there is no optimal solution.
This has been the central problem since June 2016, and it still is.
NB Labour has no coherent policy on the matter, for very good reasons.
The question is how much poorer are people willing to be to stop Polish people moving here. I guess we're going to find out.
The answer for most families will be "no poorer at all".
The only ones who stand be poorer are those making good money who had gotten addicted to getting everyone else to be minimum wage serfs to look after them. Tarquin might need a more expensive Nanny until he becomes old enough to start climbing on M25 gantries going forwards.
got or become addicted, Bart.
you have just made me a paper gain of £5,400 btw, I thought 3 weeks ago that BDEV looked cheap, and if I bought some I could respond to your whiny accusations of nimbyism that actually, I am putting capital towards housebuilding. Up 15%. Doncha love that feeling of doing well, by doing good?
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
And yet hundreds of millions of people in apparently pretty sophisticated countries across Europe are pretty content with the status quo and make little disguise of their disinterest in integrating further. Denmark, Sweden, Poland, much of the rest of Eastern Europe. They know it’s in their power to choose their own future.
The British Eurosceptics always seemed so much more frightened of the power of the central institutions than other countries: the commission in particular. Perhaps that was a vestigial island mentality and resistance to continental empires, but the Danes are pretty independent minded and seem a lot less in awe of Brussels. Yet despite the fear the same people believed we could negotiate the best of both worlds and could bend the EU to our will in the way out.
Again, it’s this odd mixture of under- and overestimating Britain’s agency and power that I don’t get.
You plainly don't understand the basic nature of the EU, so, you know, whatevs
The EU that those who voted Remain voted for Britain to stay a member of was an EU in which it had been agreed that Britain had opted out of the drive to "ever closer union". The agreement wasn't hidden. It was trumpeted in the media: "Dave's deal".
So it wasn't Britain being ever more "closely" in a union that informed Brexiteers voted against.
Except most of us who knew and know something about how the EU works knew it wouldn't have been worth the paper it was written on. Something John Major found out to his cost and complained bitterly about with regard to the Social Chapter in 1996.
I didn't hear John Major saying that about Dave's deal in 2014.
I don't blame David Cameron. He did his best. I blame Gordon Brown. Five tests? What a load of c*ck from the "prudent economist". Italy managed to join the f*cking euro, and the lira was a joke. Brown should have said "We're in the euro now. No more changing money when you go to the continent. Got any objection? Then let's have a referendum."
Waiting to call a referendum until after UKIP won the EU elections was idiocy.
He didn't call a referendum because he knew he would lose it.
One of the reasons EFTA (or similar) was not entertained was simply that Brexiters were so high on their own supply they could not concede that there was any merit at all in doing so.
After all, there were no downsides to Brexit, only considerable upsides; Minford predicted Brexit would deliver falling prices and economic *growth*; a US trade deal was in the wings, and of course the EU was a sclerotic hellhole anyway.
Once Brexiters return to reality-based thinking, and there are signs that this has started, EFTA (or similar) starts to look viable.
they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history.
We remain on the right side of history (see what I did there?)
Leaving was a bad mistake.
One day even you will figure it out.
There is zero sign of Switzerland, Norway or Iceland trying to join - quite the opposite. Polls show intense allergic reactions to the idea
The EEA countries all seem very happy with their statuses - much more so than most EU members.
By EEA countries, you mean Norway, I think. Switzerland is not in the EEA, nor is it happy with its relationship with the EU. The Norwegian government thinks its deal with the EU is formally bonkers, but it is a compromise that Norwegians have arrived at. Half the country want to be in the EU; half want to be out (sound familiar?) So they have come up with an arrangement everyone can live with.
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate.
Your hidden premise seems to be that federal states (and a fortiori unions) are bad for some reason.
But wait...Britain is a union...
Leon makes no such assumption.
Quite so. The USA - until recently - has been a supremely successful union. Likewise the UK, yet with a very different backstory
Unions can be long lasting and exemplary geopolitical entities, it is arguable they are the best. But they have to be willing and voluntary. Scotland openly decided to join the UK (you can argue the deets but that is what happened). The 13 original states of the USA overtly opted in to the joint enterprise of the USA
THAT is how you build a union. Voluntarily and openly. You do not do it in secret, behind the voters. That is a recipe for terrible discontent, it has already led to Brexit and ultimately I suspect it will doom other parts of the EU, tho the core may survive
When Scotland joined the Union there were no voters.
That was then and this is now - the 21st century, when after full debate the Scots voted clearly in favour of the union. And it will only be a few decades before they can vote again if they wish, which is but a moment in the long amazing history of that wonderful nation.
BTW there were few voters when England was formed out of a heptarchy of warlords. When do we get a vote on bringing back Northumbria (embracing Scotland up to Edinburgh of course)?
Lol, ‘full debate’.
Lovely to hear about how full the debate was from your bit.
they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history.
We remain on the right side of history (see what I did there?)
Leaving was a bad mistake.
One day even you will figure it out.
There is zero sign of Switzerland, Norway or Iceland trying to join - quite the opposite. Polls show intense allergic reactions to the idea
The EEA countries all seem very happy with their statuses - much more so than most EU members.
There are a couple of differences, though.
First is that the EEA countries are pretty small- they're not giving up that much by withdrawing from the political/democratic discussions.
Second, the EEA states have made fairly clear calculations- accept that they are going to follow the herd in most areas in order to carve out more autonomy in a few things that really matter to them.
Mapping that onto the UK is tricky. Partly because the country is bigger. But also, we haven't really worked out what bits of autonomy we really want and what (if anything) we are prepared to give up to achieve that. Maybe we could, but it's not happened yet.
Put those together, and it kinda makes sense that the UK hasn't neatly settled in EEA. (Me? I'd be chill with it. But I don't see how you get there from "Take Back Control", or think it's a stable answer for the UK.)
For the problem you have to go into the past. As of right now the UK as a whole does not accept FoM, ie a migration system not in our power to legislate for.
This only became live as an issue when states at very different stages of development had FoM with us.
To allow this was a UK (New Labour) failure of statecraft.
Once done it can't be undone (theological principle of the EU). Ask Cameron.
We allowed the SM to be linked irrevocably to FoM. Unless that is undone there can be no optimal solution.
We have no power to undo it.
Ergo there is no optimal solution.
This has been the central problem since June 2016, and it still is.
NB Labour has no coherent policy on the matter, for very good reasons.
The question is how much poorer are people willing to be to stop Polish people moving here. I guess we're going to find out.
The answer for most families will be "no poorer at all".
The only ones who stand be poorer are those making good money who had gotten addicted to getting everyone else to be minimum wage serfs to look after them. Tarquin might need a more expensive Nanny until he becomes old enough to start climbing on M25 gantries going forwards.
Tempted to give this a like for the sheer volume of clichés and right wing talking points on offer.
As I posted, there is some sign that Brexiters are waking up to reality, but Barty is pretty much in a permanent coma of bullshit.
they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history.
We remain on the right side of history (see what I did there?)
Leaving was a bad mistake.
One day even you will figure it out.
There is zero sign of Switzerland, Norway or Iceland trying to join - quite the opposite. Polls show intense allergic reactions to the idea
The EEA countries all seem very happy with their statuses - much more so than most EU members.
There are a couple of differences, though.
First is that the EEA countries are pretty small- they're not giving up that much by withdrawing from the political/democratic discussions.
Second, the EEA states have made fairly clear calculations- accept that they are going to follow the herd in most areas in order to carve out more autonomy in a few things that really matter to them.
Mapping that onto the UK is tricky. Partly because the country is bigger. But also, we haven't really worked out what bits of autonomy we really want and what (if anything) we are prepared to give up to achieve that. Maybe we could, but it's not happened yet.
Put those together, and it kinda makes sense that the UK hasn't neatly settled in EEA. (Me? I'd be chill with it. But I don't see how you get there from "Take Back Control", or think it's a stable answer for the UK.)
For the problem you have to go into the past. As of right now the UK as a whole does not accept FoM, ie a migration system not in our power to legislate for.
This only became live as an issue when states at very different stages of development had FoM with us.
To allow this was a UK (New Labour) failure of statecraft.
Once done it can't be undone (theological principle of the EU). Ask Cameron.
We allowed the SM to be linked irrevocably to FoM. Unless that is undone there can be no optimal solution.
We have no power to undo it.
Ergo there is no optimal solution.
This has been the central problem since June 2016, and it still is.
NB Labour has no coherent policy on the matter, for very good reasons.
The question is how much poorer are people willing to be to stop Polish people moving here. I guess we're going to find out.
The answer for most families will be "no poorer at all".
The only ones who stand be poorer are those making good money who had gotten addicted to getting everyone else to be minimum wage serfs to look after them. Tarquin might need a more expensive Nanny until he becomes old enough to start climbing on M25 gantries going forwards.
got or become addicted, Bart.
you have just made me a paper gain of £5,400 btw, I thought 3 weeks ago that BDEV looked cheap, and if I bought some I could respond to your whiny accusations of nimbyism that actually, I am putting capital towards housebuilding. Up 15%. Doncha love that feeling of doing well, by doing good?
Happy for you.
I've had a busy day myself, put a deposit down today for a new build, instructing solicitors on Monday, looking to get back onto the property ladder after a few years of renting.
Probably buying at the top of the market and will happily continue to wish for a house price crash even if that means I bought at the top of the market for many years to come. Renting is dead money anyway, so what difference does it make?
Tonight 3 sources contacted me to claim similar behaviour from Dominic Raab as revealed by @PippaCrerar in foreign office & as Brexit sec. Whitehall source claimed official in Dexeu so concerned they wrote down & shared w cab office. Tho Cab office say no formal complaints. https://twitter.com/itvnewspolitics/status/1591194659862323217
Even had we voted Remain in due course we would have ended up on the outer edge with non Eurozone Sweden, Denmark and Poland and Hungary while the rest moved full steam ahead to federal union.
Yes, exactly (except fuller union of the core won't be anything like at 'full steam ahead', more like a snail's pace with long periods of stasis, if it ever happens at all). We'd have had the best of all possible positions: all the advantages of full EU membership, without the excessive bits. It is such an extraordinary tragedy that we, of our own volition, threw it away. As I predicted at the time, we'll spend at least a decade, perhaps longer, painfully trying to claw back some of the lost ground, but we'll never get back to such a favourable position as we had.
And all of it easily avoided if the arrogant clueless europhiles had only given the British people a vote on earlier moments of integration - as they so often promised, yet failed to do
This constant fraudulence led inexorably to the fatal rupture of total Brexit. Consider this
Yes, the EU as it was circa 2005 almost everybody could have lived with*. A halfway house, fine. Had Cameron tried that little bit harder to achieve such a thing, and to sell it he would have carried the day. Sadly, he thought all he had to was reject the Eurosceptics. Inasmuch as he thought about Euroscepticism, he thought it was confined to a fringe of his own party and an even smaller fringe of the far left. He thought that the country thought like Witney. But given Lisbon we had no way to trust that we wouldn't be dragged in further. Blair wanted to be at the heart of Europe, remember, and wanted to join the Euro. Why would we trust our political classes on Europe? So in a forced choice of wholly in or wholly out, out wins.
*Not me. I was a leaver long before it was unfashionable. But even I was a soft Brexiteer.
Cameron worked very hard and was a good executive chair but was never a deep thinker.
I think he was just a committed europhile. A more neutral PM on the issue could have combined a robust negotiation with some meaningful domestic changes to benefits etc., and come up with a respectable package that would have romped home in the referendum. He didn't want that - he thought the threat of leave would mean that he could force the UK population to swallow the whole hog. Every Euro thing they pushed through after that he'd have reminded anyone who opposed of the 'ringing British endorsement of the EU' etc. Silly and destructive.
Exactly.
The idea that a Remain vote would have seen us a member of an "outer" group is risible - we would have been sucked into the inner core, with the Remain vote used as justification.
The history of British engagement in the EU since the turn of the millennium says otherwise. Staying out of the Euro, exercising the veto, securing carve outs. The history of the EU itself isn’t much different either.
At most we might have had to give up a bit more rebate and agreed to QM voting. The federal superstate thing was always more of a figment of the imagination. Even after the Euro crisis and bailouts the EU is no more integrated now than it was in 2010.
A very rose-tinted view of the situation. Not falsifiable - but also doesn't take into consideration the principle of the ratchet.
But there’s no evidence as far as I can see for any of that before or since. Countries like Denmark for instance are broadly as integrated as they were 15 years ago.
No country ever tried to leave. If you think the raging federalists that run the EU would have risked us having a second try, you're beyond optimistic.
If we’d voted remain we wouldn’t have “tried to leave” any more than Scotland tried to leave in 2015. HYUFD may fantasise about tanks up the A1 but Scotland’s constitutional status is pretty much the same now as before the Indy ref. Likewise Britain’s status in the EU would be the same as before 2016.
The people who “run the EU” - evident to anyone who looks at things like Ukraine or tax policy - are the leaders of the member states.
This is beyond naive. It is astonishing that apparently clever people can still trot out this gibberish
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate.
Your hidden premise seems to be that federal states (and a fortiori unions) are bad for some reason.
But wait...Britain is a union...
Leon makes no such assumption.
Quite so. The USA - until recently - has been a supremely successful union. Likewise the UK, yet with a very different backstory
Unions can be long lasting and exemplary geopolitical entities, it is arguable they are the best. But they have to be willing and voluntary. Scotland openly decided to join the UK (you can argue the deets but that is what happened). The 13 original states of the USA overtly opted in to the joint enterprise of the USA
THAT is how you build a union. Voluntarily and openly. You do not do it in secret, behind the voters. That is a recipe for terrible discontent, it has already led to Brexit and ultimately I suspect it will doom other parts of the EU, tho the core may survive
When Scotland joined the Union there were no voters.
That was then and this is now - the 21st century, when after full debate the Scots voted clearly in favour of the union. And it will only be a few decades before they can vote again if they wish, which is but a moment in the long amazing history of that wonderful nation.
BTW there were few voters when England was formed out of a heptarchy of warlords. When do we get a vote on bringing back Northumbria (embracing Scotland up to Edinburgh of course)?
Lol, ‘full debate’.
Lovely to hear about how full the debate was from your bit.
Did you notice the whining? "We didn't get to vote when our glorious barbarian murdering kings decided for us, so of course we revere them to this day and believe fervently in their central role in the UK polity [edit] and won't let anyone else vote."
Speaking of dodgy dealings and criminal activity, glad to see FTX has now officially fallen into bankruptcy and hopefully a few more "Coin exchanges" follow it.
My sympathies for all the victims of the fraudsters and shysters behind the crypto scam. The sooner the entire so-called crypto market is wiped out entirely, the better, stop future victims from falling prey to these predators.
Unfortunately I doubt we'll see many of the people behind this pyramid scam end up behind bars where they deserve.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” My response to everything you post, Barty. It would never remotely occur to me to invest in bitcoin (as opposed to holding retail sized bits of it to buy acid on Tor), but it is a bit more complicated than you think it is. FTX going bust says nothing about bitcoin being a scam.
Tonight 3 sources contacted me to claim similar behaviour from Dominic Raab as revealed by @PippaCrerar in foreign office & as Brexit sec. Whitehall source claimed official in Dexeu so concerned they wrote down & shared w cab office. Tho Cab office say no formal complaints. https://twitter.com/itvnewspolitics/status/1591194659862323217
Didn’t Raab get an injunction or even superinjunction for some quite sinister behaviour?
Rishi sure knows how to pick ‘em. Nobody, literally nobody, was calling for Raab to return.
they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history.
We remain on the right side of history (see what I did there?)
Leaving was a bad mistake.
One day even you will figure it out.
There is zero sign of Switzerland, Norway or Iceland trying to join - quite the opposite. Polls show intense allergic reactions to the idea
The EEA countries all seem very happy with their statuses - much more so than most EU members.
There are a couple of differences, though.
First is that the EEA countries are pretty small- they're not giving up that much by withdrawing from the political/democratic discussions.
Second, the EEA states have made fairly clear calculations- accept that they are going to follow the herd in most areas in order to carve out more autonomy in a few things that really matter to them.
Mapping that onto the UK is tricky. Partly because the country is bigger. But also, we haven't really worked out what bits of autonomy we really want and what (if anything) we are prepared to give up to achieve that. Maybe we could, but it's not happened yet.
Put those together, and it kinda makes sense that the UK hasn't neatly settled in EEA. (Me? I'd be chill with it. But I don't see how you get there from "Take Back Control", or think it's a stable answer for the UK.)
For the problem you have to go into the past. As of right now the UK as a whole does not accept FoM, ie a migration system not in our power to legislate for.
This only became live as an issue when states at very different stages of development had FoM with us.
To allow this was a UK (New Labour) failure of statecraft.
Once done it can't be undone (theological principle of the EU). Ask Cameron.
We allowed the SM to be linked irrevocably to FoM. Unless that is undone there can be no optimal solution.
We have no power to undo it.
Ergo there is no optimal solution.
This has been the central problem since June 2016, and it still is.
NB Labour has no coherent policy on the matter, for very good reasons.
The question is how much poorer are people willing to be to stop Polish people moving here. I guess we're going to find out.
The answer for most families will be "no poorer at all".
The only ones who stand be poorer are those making good money who had gotten addicted to getting everyone else to be minimum wage serfs to look after them. Tarquin might need a more expensive Nanny until he becomes old enough to start climbing on M25 gantries going forwards.
got or become addicted, Bart.
you have just made me a paper gain of £5,400 btw, I thought 3 weeks ago that BDEV looked cheap, and if I bought some I could respond to your whiny accusations of nimbyism that actually, I am putting capital towards housebuilding. Up 15%. Doncha love that feeling of doing well, by doing good?
Happy for you.
I've had a busy day myself, put a deposit down today for a new build, instructing solicitors on Monday, looking to get back onto the property ladder after a few years of renting.
Probably buying at the top of the market and will happily continue to wish for a house price crash even if that means I bought at the top of the market for many years to come. Renting is dead money anyway, so what difference does it make?
Comments
The EU is intent on Ever Closer Union. That has been its explicit aim since its inception, denied less on the continent than in the UK
As a small part of this it has created a super elite of very-well-paid and undertaxed eurocrats and politicians who are, notwithstanding their general mediocrity, completely dedicated to the EU Federal ideal - not least because it provides them with a career and a creed
It's like being a Catholic cleric - which also explains why the reactions to Brexit were so emotionally hostile. Brexit isn't just an error, it is a heresy, to these people. It can never be right, no more than a blasphemer can be "right"
This commitment to the EU is, by the way, written into the Lisbon Treaty. All the Commissioners have to display a "European vocation" - ie be totally convinced of the Ever Closer Union and emotionally invested in the EU as the future. Meaning no eurosceptic can ever be a senior member of the EU's "government" - just one reason we had to leave, in the end
The EU is a nascent Federal superstate. The honest ones do not deny it, and I respect them more than the snivelling liars or the pootling idiots
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11418155/Owners-emission-free-vehicles-pay-tax-time-bid-plug-7-billion-shortfall.html
Instead Theresa May decided to not even involve her own MPs in a discussion of what to do. That's the key failure that led to the others.
Any form of Brexit was going to lead to large compromises of one sort or another. People have to be walked through the logical necessity of that over time. It's common for many on here to say that "Norway for now" was the obvious solution, and it's what I assumed would happen immediately after the vote, but even that solution involves masses of compromise and leaves lots of problems outstanding.
Instead of parroting empty slogans like "Brexit means Brexit" or "We're going to have a red, white and blue Brexit", we really needed a Prime Minister who was going to lead the country through a national debate on all the pros and cons of the different options.
Anyway we are now out of this stupid pile of lying wank, and Remoaners like @Scott_xP can spend the rest of their futile lives lamenting it. Perhaps if they'd been honest earlier they might not have ended up on the wrong side of history. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Leaving was a bad mistake.
One day even you will figure it out.
But doing that needs Europhiles to accept there was and is a political dimension to the EU that was unacceptable to many (even plenty of those who voted Remain) and Brexiteers to accept there was and is a huge amount of benefit to be gained from having a good trading and diplomatic association with the EU and that many people want a close and harmonious relationship. People like Roger (who was the source of this today's bout of Euro-debate with his rant about diseased Tunisians) and Scott (who would blame Brexit for the weather if he got half a chance) do nothing to help the Europhile side. Nor, to be honest, does Bart with his belief we can just rip up treaties like confetti and expect everyone else to smile and indulge us.
There was and is a vision of Brexit that would have been acceptable to the majority of the public once we had actually voted to leave. As I never tire of pointing out, it wasn't my idea but I articulated it on here the day after the referendum. But the fanatics on both sides ensured that we are now 6 years down the line and still fighting yesterday's wars.
Was after I read this story.
Elon Musk wants Twitter to offer debit cards and loans
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/elon-musk-wants-twitter-to-offer-debit-cards-and-loans-hgfrx5pdk
Died laughing, I mean Elon Musk is just the person I want to be my banker, he'll hire Fred Goodwin to head up Twitter Bank, mark my words.
The British Eurosceptics always seemed so much more frightened of the power of the central institutions than other countries: the commission in particular. Perhaps that was a vestigial island mentality and resistance to continental empires, but the Danes are pretty independent minded and seem a lot less in awe of Brussels. Yet despite the fear the same people believed we could negotiate the best of both worlds and could bend the EU to our will in the way out.
Again, it’s this odd mixture of under- and overestimating Britain’s agency and power that I don’t get.
When the dramatic account emerged last week of how the Duke of York had been reduced to tears when he was told by his brother Charles, then the Prince of Wales, that he would never return to public duties, it raised an intriguing question. Why had Prince Andrew not figured that out already?
He was, according to The Mail on Sunday, “blindsided” by the outcome of the meeting and “utterly bereft”. But ever since he had been forced to step down from royal duties there had been repeated reports that there was no way back for Andrew. Was he the only person in the country not to have got the message?
Now the answer has emerged. The duke was too slow to accept his fate because his closest advisers kept telling him they would find a way for him to return to his royal role.
His mother, the late Queen, also failed to make it clear to him that his days as a working member of the royal family were well and truly over as a result of his relationship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/prince-andrew-aides-role-return-royal-family-5377fwprk
Remain voters included: pragmatists who had no theory but liked the practical benefits for them; idealists who knew what the EU actually stood for; people who go with the flow of the political class; people who held utterly deluded views about the EU just being a sort of useful trading association, and so on. Just like Brexit supporters - a mixed bag.
What they all had in common was an acceptance that the EU would develop without us being asked as we went along what we thought, as had happened for decades despite promises. Which was something I could not vote for.
Same as when we have a Tory government we aren’t all automatically heading to the ultimate dream world of the founding fathers of conservatism, nor are we going to become a socialist paradise under a Starmer government.
Was it just coincidence that I got fatter, balder, and greyer after we left?
So it wasn't Britain being ever more "closely" in a union that informed Brexiteers (if there were any) voted against.
So it can be a little mawkish, so it can appear overtly patriotic, so fucking what? What do they want?
Perhaps @theuniondivvie and his ilk would prefer a Day of National Disrespect where "rich middle aged anarchists" like @Dura_Ace can publicly wank on top of the Cenotaph while baring his shrivelled buttocks and revving his 50CC moped, and down by Buckingham Palace Sir Rogerdamus de Provence can walk on the faces of seventeen sad prone weeping Tunisians as he officially approaches the King to tell him that Britain is SHIT and probably should have lost to Hitler, all of it applauded by a solitary hologram of Jolyon Maugham wearing an EU waistcoat while lavishly fucking a stoat
Or can even you now admit that your brattya are going to lose. And die, enormously
I don't blame David Cameron. He did his best. I blame Gordon Brown. Five tests? What a load of c*ck from the "prudent economist". Italy managed to join the f*cking euro, and the lira was a joke. Brown should have said "We're in the euro now. No more changing money when you go to the continent. Got any objection? Then let's have a referendum."
Waiting to call a referendum until after UKIP won the EU elections was idiocy.
Looking at it again, I think it's an allusion to that embarrassing old fuck of a driving instructor. Even worse than it initially appears.
NV has been called already, by me two guys ago - Laxalt has won by a comfortable enough 2%ish margin here. You know the Democratic governor in Nevada has lost it too, ousted to the strength of the GOP vote in Nevada this election?
Arizona is different in terms of which way it’s leaning this time , dems have won the senate race here, and Lake is very much in trouble now and I’m tipping her to lose.
Meanwhile in UK, Last week I sensed Tories were losing my mums vote to reform, this week she seems back on board because she really likes Jeremy Hunt’s new haircut. Yes. Really. If the whole government go to the same barber the election is in the bag.
Secondly, the EU did not even offer a derogation from FoM which would have won the referendum for remain. So whatever it meant, it didn't mean anything important.
Thirdly, if the UK were in the EU and the rest still committed to 'ever closer..' then at some point a brick wall would be hit where we would either leave or conform. At which point all bets would be off.
Timeo Daneos et dona ferentes
But wait...Britain is a union...
First is that the EEA countries are pretty small- they're not giving up that much by withdrawing from the political/democratic discussions.
Second, the EEA states have made fairly clear calculations- accept that they are going to follow the herd in most areas in order to carve out more autonomy in a few things that really matter to them.
Mapping that onto the UK is tricky. Partly because the country is bigger. But also, we haven't really worked out what bits of autonomy we really want and what (if anything) we are prepared to give up to achieve that. Maybe we could, but it's not happened yet.
Put those together, and it kinda makes sense that the UK hasn't neatly settled in EEA. (Me? I'd be chill with it. But I don't see how you get there from "Take Back Control", or think it's a stable answer for the UK.)
If the budget goes down well “at last a government on side of workers” “could we ever doubt Sunak looks after the least well off” this upward momentum could get boosterised.
I thank you.
My high-vis jacket? Why thank you.
2)The Bank Of England is forecasting a 2 year recession.
3)So when exactly is the UK likely to get back to its pre-covid economic output?
4)This is shocking, no?
Unions can be long lasting and exemplary geopolitical entities, it is arguable they are the best. But they have to be willing and voluntary. Scotland openly decided to join the UK (you can argue the deets but that is what happened). The 13 original states of the USA overtly opted in to the joint enterprise of the USA
THAT is how you build a union. Voluntarily and openly. You do not do it in secret, behind the voters. That is a recipe for terrible discontent, it has already led to Brexit and ultimately I suspect it will doom other parts of the EU, tho the core may survive
This only became live as an issue when states at very different stages of development had FoM with us.
To allow this was a UK (New Labour) failure of statecraft.
Once done it can't be undone (theological principle of the EU). Ask Cameron.
We allowed the SM to be linked irrevocably to FoM. Unless that is undone there can be no optimal solution.
We have no power to undo it.
Ergo there is no optimal solution.
This has been the central problem since June 2016, and it still is.
NB Labour has no coherent policy on the matter, for very good reasons.
I do think we have that prerogative if it is of enough importance - as does every other nation in the planet.
America, Germany, France etc are all willing and able to break treaties when it suits their interests sufficiently to do so. We shouldn't do so lightly, but nor should we never say never either.
Wales can tag along with us if they're too sheepish to go independent.
The only ones who stand be poorer are those making good money who had gotten addicted to getting everyone else to be minimum wage serfs to look after them. Tarquin might need a more expensive Nanny until he becomes old enough to start climbing on M25 gantries going forwards.
I’m not sure it will be published as a header though as my other submissions weren’t.
Given what's happened in the Electricity market, solar farms ought to be making unprecedented windfall profits, not falling into bankruptcy.
Something very, very dodgy has surely happened there. Hope it gets a criminal investigation.
BTW there were few voters when England was formed out of a heptarchy of warlords. When do we get a vote on bringing back Northumbria (embracing Scotland up to Edinburgh of course)?
It's a problem for policy makers that they're having to work with figures that are rarely correct.
My sympathies for all the victims of the fraudsters and shysters behind the crypto scam. The sooner the entire so-called crypto market is wiped out entirely, the better, stop future victims from falling prey to these predators.
Unfortunately I doubt we'll see many of the people behind this pyramid scam end up behind bars where they deserve.
you have just made me a paper gain of £5,400 btw, I thought 3 weeks ago that BDEV looked cheap, and if I bought some I could respond to your whiny accusations of nimbyism that actually, I am putting capital towards housebuilding. Up 15%. Doncha love that feeling of doing well, by doing good?
After all, there were no downsides to Brexit, only considerable upsides; Minford predicted Brexit would deliver falling prices and economic *growth*; a US trade deal was in the wings, and of course the EU was a sclerotic hellhole anyway.
Once Brexiters return to reality-based thinking, and there are signs that this has started, EFTA (or similar) starts to look viable.
However, we seem to have returned to certain posters analysing hypothetical midterm polls at some undefined point in the future.
"Forgiveness for what, Matt? What are you sorry for? Are you sorry for being caught? Sorry for having an affair? Sorry for making bad decisions? Sorry for lying? What?" https://twitter.com/GraemeDemianyk/status/1591193883731709952/video/1
Lovely to hear about how full the debate was from your bit.
I've had a busy day myself, put a deposit down today for a new build, instructing solicitors on Monday, looking to get back onto the property ladder after a few years of renting.
Probably buying at the top of the market and will happily continue to wish for a house price crash even if that means I bought at the top of the market for many years to come. Renting is dead money anyway, so what difference does it make?
Eat Bum Coco.
The perky truth is admitted. Somethings fake on the Labour Front bench!
Migrant invasion problem solved, merely by bunging France £60M
Terror chiefs “hot flush” vest.
And that’s just 4 papers.
Rishi sure knows how to pick ‘em. Nobody, literally nobody, was calling for Raab to return.
Congrats btw.