Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Best of British luck
It won't take ten years after a vote.
Commiserations that you voted for a failure.
Commiserations that you still haven't got over being beaten by the side of a bus.
It's been a decade, dude.
And the electorate seems to be coming round to my view.. Dude.
But, as I have shown you, there is fuck all you can practicably do about it. These polls are aspirations, the practical obstacles to Rejoin are immense and will never be overcome (within the realms of the politically plausible)
If we accept free movement and the single market, we will get back the biggest benefits of being in the EU.
The fundamental issue was always with our non contributory welfare system. If we could have free movement without that obligation it would work fine. But the Brussels purists couldn’t see beyond their “perfect model”
Passengers forced to spend thousands of pounds to return to the UK after their EasyJet flight left without them said border control delays caused by the European Union's new entry-exit system had been a "nightmare".
More than 100 people missed their flight to Manchester from Milan's Linate airport on Sunday while stuck in what the airline described as "unacceptable" passport control queues.
Some travellers reported vomiting and passing out as they tried to get through biometric and facial recognition checks rolled out under the new European Entry-Exit System (EES) on Friday.
Carol Boon said the experience was "just horrible", while Max Hume said he had been forced to spend £1,800 to get home.
And you think such a party should be in charge of the country's finances? It can't even run itself properly.
It wants rent controls but has voted to abolish landlords. It voted against nationalising energy companies. It opposes taking steps to deal with racism and anti-Semitism in the NHS and its activists want to pass an anti-Zionism motion using wording identical to that last used by the National Front in the 1970's. Its activists are obsessed by Israel but have no answers to the issue facing local councillors in the U.K.. Its latest MP did not even mention the environment in her maiden speech. Its migration policies - open borders with no restrictions of any kind - with everyone fully eligible for all benefits would destroy the welfare state. But the Scottish Greens did vote for the failed euthanasia bill so maybe that's how they'll make the sums add up.
Honestly, those voting for - let alone joining - this crew are making the same mistake Reform voters and others voting for incoherent populist parties always do: believing what they would like to be true.
Look a bit more closely at what this party is actually saying and doing and at the reality of the behaviour and views of those standing for it. From the leader down, there is a wealth of evidence of highly questionable behaviour and views. The Greens are as ghastly, stupid and as dangerous as Reform. For apparently intelligent people on here to join them claiming they have fresh ideas when they are merely repeating some of the worst ideas we have seen while claiming that, of course, they don't support all their policies only proves that even the apparently intelligent can delude themselves. Though this is not news sadly.
Here's an interesting fact: Anti-Zionism is protected speech. It didn't receive as much coverage as gender-critical speech, but there it is. So consider the following hypothetical
"...There is a Labour candidate for Finchley and Golders Green. He decides to stand under the slogan "Death to Israel" and "From the River to the Sea". The constituency population is over 20% Jewish people. The Labour Party, in horror, attempts to remove him but he claims that anti-Zionism is protected speech and he is not antisemitic because he does not wish harm on Jewish people per se, and sues the Labour Party to keep his position.
What should the Labour Party do? What should the judge decide? Does the Labour Party's right to decide its own policies override the right of their candidate to express themselves legally?..."
Doesn’t work as a question. Labour is not obliged to endorse someone.
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
Wishcasting. You can salami slice all you like, but then another government full of rightwing vigour can come and undo it all with one vote, and this will happen, indeed they can vote us much further away
To get us back in, you need to win a Rejoin referendum. No British government will ever risk it
I feel sorry for the PB Centrist Dads, they lost the biggest vote of their lives and it can never be undone
No reversal required. The CU and SM are huge cliff-edges. You can't salami slice a cliff-edge, with apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Well yes
But I'm trying to school the Centrist Dorks, they're not the smartest
To get us significantly back in, you need to win a referendum. It then becomes the irresistible will of the people, and overrules all else. We saw that in Brexit, when, despite 90% of the British establishment conspiring to scupper the vote and revoke it, nonetheless it prevailed. Because in the end we are a democracy, and the idea of ignoring the expressed will of the people,,the demos, was too appalling (and dangerous) despite several PBers and millions of others (eg Keir Starmer) advocating this insane position. I fully believe we would have seen blood on the streets if the Second Voters had got their way. A narrow escape
Sadiq Khan gets this. He knows you morallly need to win a referendum to Rejoin, and he also knows no government will ever call one (let alone win one),. Hence his advice to Starmer to make Rejoin a manifesto promise that the government can then enact, totally avoiding a plebiscite
It is the measure of the Rejoiners desperation. Not gonna happen
I don't think Rejoin is going to happen. But I think you're wrong.
It's worth remembering that Cameron only promised a referendum as a tool of party management - he never intended to actually hold the referendum, nor to actually leave the EU.
If public opinion turns against Brexit sufficiently strongly, and backbenchers in a party kick up enough of a fuss, then it's entirely possible that a PM ends up with a commitment to hold a referendum on rejoining that they never particularly wanted.
While I have no confidence in the ability of people currently advocating for EU membership to win such a referendum, there are all sorts of things that might happen in a referendum campaign, and all sorts of other questions that might get wrapped up in it.
You remind me of pro-Europeans in the late-90s who in their arrogance and naiveté could not conceive of the debate going against them. And look where they are now.
I think it will fade. Once we're going through eGates, and other surface concerns. The number of people who care about the non-surface concerns is small. Starmer cosying up to the EU - e.g the phytosanitary deal - makes rejoin less likely not more.
I think the next few decades could be geopolitically interesting, waning and erratic US influence, aggressive authoritarians, severe climate change impacts, China attempting to throw its weight around while it can, etc.
Large events have a habit of creating large changes in public opinion. It's not inevitable that this will see majority story for EU membership, but it is possible.
It doesn't necessarily end with a return to full EU membership but there are undoubtedly factors pushing us back in that direction, in particular the possible collapse of our alliance with the US.
Er - yer wot? Why should us getting fucked over by America make us more inclined to then go get fucked over by the EU?
I've heard some twisted logic about why our Rejoin is inevitable - admittedly from those STILL smarting a decade on that they got beaten by folk much dumber than them. But this?
Nah...
You seem to have put your brain in a jar for some reason. A loosening of ties with America makes stronger ones with Europe more important and more likely.
And I'm not smarting btw. I'm just happy not to have been dumb or sloppy enough to vote Leave. It's a nice feeling. Shame it's unavailable to you.
Yebbut, I've had a decade of being a winner.
It's great. A feeling you'll never know.
Queuing up at passport control is being a winner, of course!
Well, if you WANT to take their punishment beating, go to Europe then.
(It is hardly to the EU's credit that they can't make a simple technological advance work... Does that look promising for a pan-EU army?)
Since the new system is for all non-Schengen countries, our membership of the EU would actually not have given us frictionless travel under the rollout anyway.
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
Wishcasting. You can salami slice all you like, but then another government full of rightwing vigour can come and undo it all with one vote, and this will happen, indeed they can vote us much further away
To get us back in, you need to win a Rejoin referendum. No British government will ever risk it
I feel sorry for the PB Centrist Dads, they lost the biggest vote of their lives and it can never be undone
No reversal required. The CU and SM are huge cliff-edges. You can't salami slice a cliff-edge, with apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Well yes
But I'm trying to school the Centrist Dorks, they're not the smartest
To get us significantly back in, you need to win a referendum. It then becomes the irresistible will of the people, and overrules all else. We saw that in Brexit, when, despite 90% of the British establishment conspiring to scupper the vote and revoke it, nonetheless it prevailed. Because in the end we are a democracy, and the idea of ignoring the expressed will of the people,,the demos, was too appalling (and dangerous) despite several PBers and millions of others (eg Keir Starmer) advocating this insane position. I fully believe we would have seen blood on the streets if the Second Voters had got their way. A narrow escape
Sadiq Khan gets this. He knows you morallly need to win a referendum to Rejoin, and he also knows no government will ever call one (let alone win one),. Hence his advice to Starmer to make Rejoin a manifesto promise that the government can then enact, totally avoiding a plebiscite
It is the measure of the Rejoiners desperation. Not gonna happen
I don't think Rejoin is going to happen. But I think you're wrong.
It's worth remembering that Cameron only promised a referendum as a tool of party management - he never intended to actually hold the referendum, nor to actually leave the EU.
If public opinion turns against Brexit sufficiently strongly, and backbenchers in a party kick up enough of a fuss, then it's entirely possible that a PM ends up with a commitment to hold a referendum on rejoining that they never particularly wanted.
While I have no confidence in the ability of people currently advocating for EU membership to win such a referendum, there are all sorts of things that might happen in a referendum campaign, and all sorts of other questions that might get wrapped up in it.
You remind me of pro-Europeans in the late-90s who in their arrogance and naiveté could not conceive of the debate going against them. And look where they are now.
I think it will fade. Once we're going through eGates, and other surface concerns. The number of people who care about the non-surface concerns is small. Starmer cosying up to the EU - e.g the phytosanitary deal - makes rejoin less likely not more.
I think the next few decades could be geopolitically interesting, waning and erratic US influence, aggressive authoritarians, severe climate change impacts, China attempting to throw its weight around while it can, etc.
Large events have a habit of creating large changes in public opinion. It's not inevitable that this will see majority story for EU membership, but it is possible.
It doesn't necessarily end with a return to full EU membership but there are undoubtedly factors pushing us back in that direction, in particular the possible collapse of our alliance with the US.
Er - yer wot? Why should us getting fucked over by America make us more inclined to then go get fucked over by the EU?
I've heard some twisted logic about why our Rejoin is inevitable - admittedly from those STILL smarting a decade on that they got beaten by folk much dumber than them. But this?
Nah...
You seem to have put your brain in a jar for some reason. A loosening of ties with America makes stronger ones with Europe more important and more likely.
And I'm not smarting btw. I'm just happy not to have been dumb or sloppy enough to vote Leave. It's a nice feeling. Shame it's unavailable to you.
Yebbut, I've had a decade of being a winner.
It's great. A feeling you'll never know.
Queuing up at passport control is being a winner, of course!
Well, if you WANT to take their punishment beating, go to Europe then.
(It is hardly to the EU's credit that they can't make a simple technological advance work... Does that look promising for a pan-EU army?)
Since the new system is for all non-Schengen countries, our membership of the EU would actually not have given us frictionless travel under the rollout anyway.
It’s a bit confusing because of the Schengen angle but if you’re an EU national you don’t need to use those gates .
The issues with those EasyJet passengers was being on holiday during the changeover . Anyone travelling after April 10th shouidn’t have any drama returning .
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
Wishcasting. You can salami slice all you like, but then another government full of rightwing vigour can come and undo it all with one vote, and this will happen, indeed they can vote us much further away
To get us back in, you need to win a Rejoin referendum. No British government will ever risk it
I feel sorry for the PB Centrist Dads, they lost the biggest vote of their lives and it can never be undone
No reversal required. The CU and SM are huge cliff-edges. You can't salami slice a cliff-edge, with apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Well yes
But I'm trying to school the Centrist Dorks, they're not the smartest
To get us significantly back in, you need to win a referendum. It then becomes the irresistible will of the people, and overrules all else. We saw that in Brexit, when, despite 90% of the British establishment conspiring to scupper the vote and revoke it, nonetheless it prevailed. Because in the end we are a democracy, and the idea of ignoring the expressed will of the people,,the demos, was too appalling (and dangerous) despite several PBers and millions of others (eg Keir Starmer) advocating this insane position. I fully believe we would have seen blood on the streets if the Second Voters had got their way. A narrow escape
Sadiq Khan gets this. He knows you morallly need to win a referendum to Rejoin, and he also knows no government will ever call one (let alone win one),. Hence his advice to Starmer to make Rejoin a manifesto promise that the government can then enact, totally avoiding a plebiscite
It is the measure of the Rejoiners desperation. Not gonna happen
I don't think Rejoin is going to happen. But I think you're wrong.
It's worth remembering that Cameron only promised a referendum as a tool of party management - he never intended to actually hold the referendum, nor to actually leave the EU.
If public opinion turns against Brexit sufficiently strongly, and backbenchers in a party kick up enough of a fuss, then it's entirely possible that a PM ends up with a commitment to hold a referendum on rejoining that they never particularly wanted.
While I have no confidence in the ability of people currently advocating for EU membership to win such a referendum, there are all sorts of things that might happen in a referendum campaign, and all sorts of other questions that might get wrapped up in it.
You remind me of pro-Europeans in the late-90s who in their arrogance and naiveté could not conceive of the debate going against them. And look where they are now.
I think it will fade. Once we're going through eGates, and other surface concerns. The number of people who care about the non-surface concerns is small. Starmer cosying up to the EU - e.g the phytosanitary deal - makes rejoin less likely not more.
I think the next few decades could be geopolitically interesting, waning and erratic US influence, aggressive authoritarians, severe climate change impacts, China attempting to throw its weight around while it can, etc.
Large events have a habit of creating large changes in public opinion. It's not inevitable that this will see majority story for EU membership, but it is possible.
It doesn't necessarily end with a return to full EU membership but there are undoubtedly factors pushing us back in that direction, in particular the possible collapse of our alliance with the US.
Er - yer wot? Why should us getting fucked over by America make us more inclined to then go get fucked over by the EU?
I've heard some twisted logic about why our Rejoin is inevitable - admittedly from those STILL smarting a decade on that they got beaten by folk much dumber than them. But this?
Nah...
You seem to have put your brain in a jar for some reason. A loosening of ties with America makes stronger ones with Europe more important and more likely.
And I'm not smarting btw. I'm just happy not to have been dumb or sloppy enough to vote Leave. It's a nice feeling. Shame it's unavailable to you.
Yebbut, I've had a decade of being a winner.
It's great. A feeling you'll never know.
Queuing up at passport control is being a winner, of course!
Well, if you WANT to take their punishment beating, go to Europe then.
(It is hardly to the EU's credit that they can't make a simple technological advance work... Does that look promising for a pan-EU army?)
Since the new system is for all non-Schengen countries, our membership of the EU would actually not have given us frictionless travel under the rollout anyway.
It’s a bit confusing because of the Schengen angle but if you’re an EU national you don’t need to use those gates .
Slightly different at different airports depending on the amount of investment by the airport (been in and out 3 times in last 4 months.)
Once they have your data and you have a biometric passport, you can use the same e-gates as EU passport holders. At Madrid for example, the scanners are built into the e-gates. At Seville and A Coruna data capture is separate from the e-gates. Some airports/entry points may not have data capture for a while or have them switched off at busy times. The EU make the rules but the individual countries and airports decide how and when to implement them.
Using Eurostar next month and expecting chaos given the size of the 'holding pen' there.
Queen Elizabeth II ‘dismayed’ by Brexit referendum, book claims
David Cameron should not have called the vote on leaving the EU, the late monarch is said to have told Barack Obama
Queen Elizabeth was “dismayed” about David Cameron’s handling of Brexit and confided in Barack Obama about her concerns over calling a referendum, according to a book.
The late Queen, who as monarch could not take a public stance on the issue, is said to have made her views known to the US president over lunch during his visit to Windsor Castle in April 2016.
The claims are made in a book, The Queen and Her Presidents: The Hidden Hand That Shaped History, by the American journalist Susan Page.
Obama, who was interviewed for the book about the Queen’s relationship with America, said she did not believe that as big a decision as the UK leaving the European Union “should have been decided by plebiscite”.
Page said the lunch, which took place two months after Cameron called the referendum, was a “very rare royal critique of a prime minister, in public or private”.
Describing the conversation, Obama said: “She said, effectively, ‘It’s hard to understand why a prime minister, who presumably understands politics, would put a public referendum forward that he didn’t know what the answer would be of such importance.’”
With all due respect to our former Queen, a plebiscite is the only way to resolve such issues. She was wrong on this.
It isn't. Not even in this case, as the plebiscite did not resolve the issue, we did not Leave the EU the day after the referendum, indeed MPs and peers consistently voted down all terms for leaving the EU and we were still in the EU 3 years after the 2016 referendum result.
Only the Conservative majority at the 2019 general election delivered Brexit, not the referendum
Yes, but that is because the Remainer Parliament from 2015 to 2019 was an utter disgrace that made Trump look like a democrat. Thankfully all of the main offenders lost their seats.
There was an election in 2017, so there were 2 Remsiner Parliaments 2016-17 and 2017 to 2019..
The problem was that in 2017, Labour politicians like Sir Keir pledged to respect the referendum result "as a matter of principle" during the campaign, then blocked every attempt to get it done afterwards
there was a principled as well as an unprincipled problem about 'respecting the referendum'. This could occur via an utterly hard Brexit in which any trade relationship with the EU was entirely severed and we relied on an entirely new set of buccaneering relations, perhaps with a gunboat. Equally respecting the referendum was (as I favoured and favour) a Swiss or Norway deal where outside political EU we were still fully in the economic and trade EU. Which Starmer would do if he dared.
There was, among the principled, no course of action that commanded a real majority. There still isn't.
There is now. It's called rejoin.
Indeed. All you gotta do is put this Rejoin in a manifesto, win on that manifesto, then call the referendum (risking your entire career if you are PM), then win that referendum, THEN hope and pray that the ten years of subsequent turbulent negotiations with the EU (adding constant uncertainty to the economy) do not end with Malta, Ireland, Spain, France or Bulgaria exercising a veto, making it all pointless, as we are rejected
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
Wishcasting. You can salami slice all you like, but then another government full of rightwing vigour can come and undo it all with one vote, and this will happen, indeed they can vote us much further away
To get us back in, you need to win a Rejoin referendum. No British government will ever risk it
I feel sorry for the PB Centrist Dads, they lost the biggest vote of their lives and it can never be undone
No reversal required. The CU and SM are huge cliff-edges. You can't salami slice a cliff-edge, with apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Well yes
But I'm trying to school the Centrist Dorks, they're not the smartest
To get us significantly back in, you need to win a referendum. It then becomes the irresistible will of the people, and overrules all else. We saw that in Brexit, when, despite 90% of the British establishment conspiring to scupper the vote and revoke it, nonetheless it prevailed. Because in the end we are a democracy, and the idea of ignoring the expressed will of the people,,the demos, was too appalling (and dangerous) despite several PBers and millions of others (eg Keir Starmer) advocating this insane position. I fully believe we would have seen blood on the streets if the Second Voters had got their way. A narrow escape
Sadiq Khan gets this. He knows you morallly need to win a referendum to Rejoin, and he also knows no government will ever call one (let alone win one),. Hence his advice to Starmer to make Rejoin a manifesto promise that the government can then enact, totally avoiding a plebiscite
It is the measure of the Rejoiners desperation. Not gonna happen
I don't think Rejoin is going to happen. But I think you're wrong.
It's worth remembering that Cameron only promised a referendum as a tool of party management - he never intended to actually hold the referendum, nor to actually leave the EU.
If public opinion turns against Brexit sufficiently strongly, and backbenchers in a party kick up enough of a fuss, then it's entirely possible that a PM ends up with a commitment to hold a referendum on rejoining that they never particularly wanted.
While I have no confidence in the ability of people currently advocating for EU membership to win such a referendum, there are all sorts of things that might happen in a referendum campaign, and all sorts of other questions that might get wrapped up in it.
You remind me of pro-Europeans in the late-90s who in their arrogance and naiveté could not conceive of the debate going against them. And look where they are now.
I think it will fade. Once we're going through eGates, and other surface concerns. The number of people who care about the non-surface concerns is small. Starmer cosying up to the EU - e.g the phytosanitary deal - makes rejoin less likely not more.
I think the next few decades could be geopolitically interesting, waning and erratic US influence, aggressive authoritarians, severe climate change impacts, China attempting to throw its weight around while it can, etc.
Large events have a habit of creating large changes in public opinion. It's not inevitable that this will see majority story for EU membership, but it is possible.
It doesn't necessarily end with a return to full EU membership but there are undoubtedly factors pushing us back in that direction, in particular the possible collapse of our alliance with the US.
Er - yer wot? Why should us getting fucked over by America make us more inclined to then go get fucked over by the EU?
I've heard some twisted logic about why our Rejoin is inevitable - admittedly from those STILL smarting a decade on that they got beaten by folk much dumber than them. But this?
Nah...
You seem to have put your brain in a jar for some reason. A loosening of ties with America makes stronger ones with Europe more important and more likely.
And I'm not smarting btw. I'm just happy not to have been dumb or sloppy enough to vote Leave. It's a nice feeling. Shame it's unavailable to you.
Yebbut, I've had a decade of being a winner.
It's great. A feeling you'll never know.
Queuing up at passport control is being a winner, of course!
Well, if you WANT to take their punishment beating, go to Europe then.
(It is hardly to the EU's credit that they can't make a simple technological advance work... Does that look promising for a pan-EU army?)
Since the new system is for all non-Schengen countries, our membership of the EU would actually not have given us frictionless travel under the rollout anyway.
It’s a bit confusing because of the Schengen angle but if you’re an EU national you don’t need to use those gates .
Slightly different at different airports depending on the amount of investment by the airport (been in and out 3 times in last 4 months.)
Once they have your data and you have a biometric passport, you can use the same e-gates as EU passport holders. At Madrid for example, the scanners are built into the e-gates. At Seville and A Coruna data capture is separate from the e-gates. Some airports/entry points may not have data capture for a while or have them switched off at busy times. The EU make the rules but the individual countries and airports decide how and when to implement them.
Using Eurostar next month and expecting chaos given the size of the 'holding pen' there.
I’m going to France via ferry in May. What do I need to do?
Of course May’s biggest error was post the referendum she had a total ability to decide what Brexit meant.
If she’d decided it meant single market to match the closeness of the result nobody would have argued. Instead she went for hard Brexit even though she herself said she didn’t want one.
That 12 months in they hadn't agreed what the approach would be, leading to futher arguments and resignations, was when I started turning against it - it was clear at that point that the pessimists had been right about how it would be handled.
I think we will probably end up with basically that at some point. Out but single market type arrangement. May could have easily delivered that.
But she couldn't. Not as leader of the Conservative Party.
May's plan was several steps further away from the EU than that and she was defenestrated for that, on the grounds that it was insufficiently Eurosceptic. There is no way that Conservative MPs would have backed her signing up for anything like the single market. Had she tried, she would have been out on her ear faster than Jacob Rees-Mogg can say "vassal state". Had she tried to get it through Parliament with opposition votes, even more so.
There were at least two explosive devices locked deep in the Brexit mechanism, which would foil politicians with more cunning than we really want politicians to have.
First was that any Brexit deal had to be acceptable to a majority of MPs overall, and a majority of Conservative MPs- who by that point had been driven a bit loco by the process. Majority overall ruled out a hard Brexit, majority of Conservatives ruled out anything other than a hard Brexit.
Second was that Leave covered a range of ambitions- deregulating business, global trade deals, control of borders, spending money on other things. The only way to give everyone in the 52% what they wanted was to take control of all of those things, which meant a massive distancing.
Given those constraints, a few things follow.
First, painful as it is to say, the only way out of the maze was to give Boris and his fellow travellers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. The 2019 election result was the only mechanism that unlocked the Paliament and Party locks simultaneously. Shame it gave so much power to people so unsuited to exercise it.
Second, we had to end up where we ended up, for now. Nothing else was stable. That it has consequences that a lot of people don't like is neither here nor there.
Third, the resulting Brexit is very vulnerable to salami-slicing. Pretty much any bit of unpicking Brexit is likely to be net popular. We've seen some examples already, there are more in the pipeline. It's like I say to kids when they are stuck on a maths problem- if you can't see all the way to the answer, look for the thing you can do which might be helpful, do that and repeat. (It's quite good as life advice in general.)
Wishcasting. You can salami slice all you like, but then another government full of rightwing vigour can come and undo it all with one vote, and this will happen, indeed they can vote us much further away
To get us back in, you need to win a Rejoin referendum. No British government will ever risk it
I feel sorry for the PB Centrist Dads, they lost the biggest vote of their lives and it can never be undone
No reversal required. The CU and SM are huge cliff-edges. You can't salami slice a cliff-edge, with apologies for the mixed metaphor.
Well yes
But I'm trying to school the Centrist Dorks, they're not the smartest
To get us significantly back in, you need to win a referendum. It then becomes the irresistible will of the people, and overrules all else. We saw that in Brexit, when, despite 90% of the British establishment conspiring to scupper the vote and revoke it, nonetheless it prevailed. Because in the end we are a democracy, and the idea of ignoring the expressed will of the people,,the demos, was too appalling (and dangerous) despite several PBers and millions of others (eg Keir Starmer) advocating this insane position. I fully believe we would have seen blood on the streets if the Second Voters had got their way. A narrow escape
Sadiq Khan gets this. He knows you morallly need to win a referendum to Rejoin, and he also knows no government will ever call one (let alone win one),. Hence his advice to Starmer to make Rejoin a manifesto promise that the government can then enact, totally avoiding a plebiscite
It is the measure of the Rejoiners desperation. Not gonna happen
I don't think Rejoin is going to happen. But I think you're wrong.
It's worth remembering that Cameron only promised a referendum as a tool of party management - he never intended to actually hold the referendum, nor to actually leave the EU.
If public opinion turns against Brexit sufficiently strongly, and backbenchers in a party kick up enough of a fuss, then it's entirely possible that a PM ends up with a commitment to hold a referendum on rejoining that they never particularly wanted.
While I have no confidence in the ability of people currently advocating for EU membership to win such a referendum, there are all sorts of things that might happen in a referendum campaign, and all sorts of other questions that might get wrapped up in it.
You remind me of pro-Europeans in the late-90s who in their arrogance and naiveté could not conceive of the debate going against them. And look where they are now.
I think it will fade. Once we're going through eGates, and other surface concerns. The number of people who care about the non-surface concerns is small. Starmer cosying up to the EU - e.g the phytosanitary deal - makes rejoin less likely not more.
I think the next few decades could be geopolitically interesting, waning and erratic US influence, aggressive authoritarians, severe climate change impacts, China attempting to throw its weight around while it can, etc.
Large events have a habit of creating large changes in public opinion. It's not inevitable that this will see majority story for EU membership, but it is possible.
It doesn't necessarily end with a return to full EU membership but there are undoubtedly factors pushing us back in that direction, in particular the possible collapse of our alliance with the US.
Er - yer wot? Why should us getting fucked over by America make us more inclined to then go get fucked over by the EU?
I've heard some twisted logic about why our Rejoin is inevitable - admittedly from those STILL smarting a decade on that they got beaten by folk much dumber than them. But this?
Nah...
You seem to have put your brain in a jar for some reason. A loosening of ties with America makes stronger ones with Europe more important and more likely.
And I'm not smarting btw. I'm just happy not to have been dumb or sloppy enough to vote Leave. It's a nice feeling. Shame it's unavailable to you.
Yebbut, I've had a decade of being a winner.
It's great. A feeling you'll never know.
Queuing up at passport control is being a winner, of course!
Well, if you WANT to take their punishment beating, go to Europe then.
(It is hardly to the EU's credit that they can't make a simple technological advance work... Does that look promising for a pan-EU army?)
Since the new system is for all non-Schengen countries, our membership of the EU would actually not have given us frictionless travel under the rollout anyway.
It’s a bit confusing because of the Schengen angle but if you’re an EU national you don’t need to use those gates .
Slightly different at different airports depending on the amount of investment by the airport (been in and out 3 times in last 4 months.)
Once they have your data and you have a biometric passport, you can use the same e-gates as EU passport holders. At Madrid for example, the scanners are built into the e-gates. At Seville and A Coruna data capture is separate from the e-gates. Some airports/entry points may not have data capture for a while or have them switched off at busy times. The EU make the rules but the individual countries and airports decide how and when to implement them.
Using Eurostar next month and expecting chaos given the size of the 'holding pen' there.
I’m going to France via ferry in May. What do I need to do?
Just follow the staff instructions.
Have seen 3 set-ups. Straight to e-gates with equipment built-in to capture your data. Or you might have to go to the normal border police window where the equipment will be there so they can capture those not already captured. The third version is banks of equipment to the side where you go there first and then to the e-gates.
Its the same versions around the world. Last year Kyoto had banks of equipment to the side. Abu Dhabi had equipment at the border police window. I think Singapore had it all built in.
Comments
https://travel-europe.europa.eu/ees/what-is-the-ees
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6k55WQ5GAk
And once registered that lasts 3 years .
Once they have your data and you have a biometric passport, you can use the same e-gates as EU passport holders. At Madrid for example, the scanners are built into the e-gates. At Seville and A Coruna data capture is separate from the e-gates. Some airports/entry points may not have data capture for a while or have them switched off at busy times. The EU make the rules but the individual countries and airports decide how and when to implement them.
Using Eurostar next month and expecting chaos given the size of the 'holding pen' there.
"Well, as the president of the United States showed, two can play at that game," he says.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cp9vm5ezxz4t?app-referrer=deep-link
Have seen 3 set-ups. Straight to e-gates with equipment built-in to capture your data. Or you might have to go to the normal border police window where the equipment will be there so they can capture those not already captured. The third version is banks of equipment to the side where you go there first and then to the e-gates.
Its the same versions around the world. Last year Kyoto had banks of equipment to the side. Abu Dhabi had equipment at the border police window. I think Singapore had it all built in.
At least he's being honest for once.
Listening to the speech, I'm again struck by just how petulant Vance sounds.
If that doesn't work the next step is for the US to start bombing Israel...
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