Brexit Penny Dropping?

[quilp]

Can't argue with any of that, spot on post. 

[P.K.]

9 hours ago, woolley said:

Debunked all that rubbish last night. Do keep up, PK.

No you haven't.

I also pointed out that energy prices, shortage of labour due to brexit etc also played their part.

But if it's more difficult, more time consuming, less profitable to ship product to brexit Britain then it simply doesn't make sense not to stop and unload in somewhere like Rungis and have your product quickly, easily and cheaply distributed to a market of 440 million.

Which is what is happening in Reality Land...

 

[P.K.]

Love this.

Rishi Sunak has been doing the media round to sell his new NI arrangement.

According to Sunak NI is now the "worlds most exciting economic zone" because it will have access to both the EU and UK markets.

He's also been gushing how it's "very special position" makes it an "incredibly attractive place to invest" etc etc.

What a delicious irony.

Essentially his description of NI's new position is exactly the same status as the entire UK had prior to the totally stupid and completely unnecessary brexit.

MWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.....!

You just couldn't make it up....

[The Voice of Reason]

2 hours ago, manxman1980 said:

 

Great.  Niger Farage said he would not have accepted it though so please don't pretend you speak for everyone who voted Brexit. 

It is the same with the remain camp.  We are where we are as far as I am concerned and we need to get on with life.  There will be some remain supporters who will not want to accept it.

I also don't see myself as a remainer anymore.  I am moving towards being a rejoiner

I look forward to all these Brexit benefits we were promised though.  I just hope that I am still around to see them!

Yes Farage did say that but that’s irrelevant as he would have to get on with life as you are doing. He certainly would not have got a second referendum so what he said in this instance doesn’t matter.

We’ve already got the major benefit of Brexit. Self determination.

Lets all pull together in this brave new world. Ruing what may or may not have been different ( like Barney does) gets us nowhere

 

 

[Non-Believer]

As per an interview on Sky News last night, it will be interesting to see what happens if disadvantaged businesses in England, Scotland and Wales start clamouring for the same sort of Single Market access rights that have just been granted to their N.I. brethren.

It's not the benefits of Brexit that need to be asked for. It's what now were the disadvantages of EU membership to the man or business in the street?

Because under the "sovereignty and control" salesline bollocks, Brexit was never about the welfare of the man or business in the street. It was about retaining the tax advantages of a tiny percentage of British society.

[P.K.]

34 minutes ago, The Voice of Reason said:

We’ve already got the major benefit of Brexit. Self determination.

Ah yes.

Trussonomics really demonstrated just how valuable your alleged "self determination" actually is.

The brexiteers on here more and more seem to be slipping into a fantasy world of reality denial...

[majkul]

16 hours ago, The Voice of Reason said:

And if remain had won by however small a margin I would have accepted it and not be banging on about it seven years later.

To be fair, more people (including some that voted Leave) are now banging on about how third rate Britain is becoming, than about the vote itself. 

[genericUserName]

8 hours ago, Non-Believer said:

it will be interesting to see what happens if disadvantaged businesses in England, Scotland and Wales start clamouring for the same sort of Single Market access rights that have just been granted to their N.I. brethren

The majority of British business and almost the entire finance sector (Britain's leading export industry) opposed Brexit. But too few people wanted to listen to the people who actually pay the bills, create employment etc.

More importantly, even many who supported Brexit were opposed to leaving the Single Market. That was the big mistake. It was a bunch of charlatans and oddballs who made that happen.

The process of rolling back that mistake and rebuilding the relationships has clearly already started as Britain moves again towards an era of grown up centrist politics.

[genericUserName]

Never trust the sort of people who end up on the fringe right (imagining it to be the centre right) having started out on the fringe left. They are always basically contrarians and pedants.

Everything which isn't centre is fringe.

Edited March 1, 2023 by genericUserName

[The Voice of Reason]

55 minutes ago, genericUserName said:

Everything which isn't centre is fringe.

Sounds about right

[The Voice of Reason]

1 hour ago, genericUserName said:

The majority of British business and almost the entire finance sector (Britain's leading export industry) opposed Brexit. But too few people wanted to listen to the people who actually pay the bills, create employment etc.

 

You don’t get it do you?

UK citizens wanted those they voted in UK elections to be the ones that make the laws that govern them, not have people they had never heard of in Brussels or Strasbourg legislating for them.

Yes let’s have pan European cooperation in the field of science ( technology, disease eradication etc), catching criminals, animal welfare,etc without giving up our right to govern ourselves.
 

Like Boris Johnson ( love him or hate him))said “ love Europe, hate the EU”

Its like Stockholm syndrome. Having been held hostage by the EU for forty odd years some can’t contemplate a life outside of that.

The UK will survive outside of the EU. And prosper.

 

Edited March 1, 2023 by The Voice of Reason

[Non-Believer]

49 minutes ago, The Voice of Reason said:

The UK will survive outside of the EU. And prosper.

And prosper at the same rate as the EU and the rest of the developed world?

What is going to become painfully apparent from the application of the Windsor Framework EU Single Market access conditions to Northern Ireland is the fact that the remainder of both UK businesses and consumers have and will continue to be disadvantaged and inconvenienced to the tune of BILLIONS in the name of this fatuous and fallacious pursuit of alleged "return of sovereignty".

But it's ok, the UK can "prosper", it can retreat to its islands and suffer shortages of food and goods it still needs to import because the markets give priority to larger concerns, it can struggle for the unskilled/skilled and professional/medical numbers it needs to maintain its society because it's seen as an isolationist, xenophobic and backward outlier.

But it's still got its "sovereignty", it can dwell on its glorious days of empire and slave trade, kids up chimneys and cobbling things together out of cast iron. Of such things are "UK prospering" made.

[Albert Tatlock]

Catastrophically stupid decision to call it the 'Windsor Framework' IMO sucking in royalty by inference. If it fails to be implemented in terms of Stormont being back up and running...there's no better catalyst to kick off terrorism over there again.

 

[P.K.]

1 hour ago, The Voice of Reason said:

You don’t get it do you?

The UK will survive outside of the EU. And prosper.

Our fellow G7 countries have now economically recovered beyond the position they were in prior to the pandemic.

The UK has not. In fact at best it's standing still.

That's nothing like prospering...

@The Voice of Reason

Well misnomer, what's your reason for the inescapable fact above...?

[The Voice of Reason]

The EU has discovered that it needs Britain more than it supposed

By Ambrose Evans-Prichard ,  WORLD ECONOMY EDITOR

Mr Sunak’s deal on the Protocol is a spectacular success CREDIT: CHRIS J RATCLIFFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Vladimir Putin is the Godfather of the Windsor Framework. Full-scale war in Europe for the first time since 1945 is what has made it possible to detoxify the Northern Ireland Protocol.  Few people are aware that the UK extended its world-class cyberwarfare deterrent to the whole of Eastern and Central Europe at the outset of the conflict, raising the stakes for the Kremlin if it tried to take down their critical infrastructure with cyber attacks.  Nor are they aware that the UK extended a solidarity guarantee to Sweden and Finland very early and at a critical juncture, offering de facto Article 5 protection even though they were not in NATO. But the significance of this was not lost on the governments of these countries, and they have a voice in EU affairs through multiple channels. Commission pettifogging over the trade of seed potatoes and sausages from one part of the UK to another had become surreal. “Only Putin will be happy,” said Polish premier Mateusz Morawiecki last year, calling for an end to the distraction. Events vindicated the British view that Putin could be checked and that Ukraine should be backed to the hilt. That put us in tight alignment with front line states, the Nordics, and Holland. The divide was not between the UK and the EU: the line of cleavage is and was within the EU.

Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish prime minister, says the Russian leader’s ‘monstrous ideology’ poses a deadly threat to Europe CREDIT: UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS/AFP

Much wishful thinking in Paris, Brussels, and the Monnet nexus of integrationist think-tanks has been ruthlessly exposed. The war has dashed hopes of a European defence and foreign policy “superpower” emerging now that the EU is no longer held back by Britain, acting in eternal character as de Gaulle’s Trojan Horse for the Americans.  Little has come of Emmanuel Macron’s “European sovereignty” or his defence condominium with the Germans. As soon as matters became serious, Berlin turned to Washington. Olaf Scholz is buying new F-18 fighter jets from the US, undermining the Franco-German FCAS joint fighter project. The Italians are working on a new combat aircraft with the UK and Japan.  “Of the momentum that Brexit was expected to give EU security and defence policy, not a peep can be heard,” said Le Monde Diplomatique. Mr Macron has drawn the inevitable conclusion and buried the hatchet over Brexit, something easier for him to do with the calm and amenable Rishi Sunak. The Entente is back. The French and the British are destined to be comrades, as they have since the 1850s in the great questions of diplomacy. Personally, I am stunned by Mr Sunak’s deal on the Protocol. As Lord Mandelson said, it is “as good as it gets”. David Davis on the other side of the Brexit bench called it a “spectacular negotiating success”. Indeed it is. It settles a bone of contention with the Biden White House. It should unlock pent-up business investment by foreign firms, although the Government could unlock a great deal more if it abandoned the coming rise in corporation tax to 25pc and acceded to the CBI’s plea for full expensing. Yes, the European Court remains in the shadows, but governing a reduced sliver of the Acquis, with no “reach-back” into British economic policy through state aid rules. The larger political point is that Brussels no longer wishes to use the Protocol to demonstrate hegemonic power. That episode is over.

Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, said she hoped the deal would maintain a ‘stronger EU-UK relationship’ CREDIT: DAN KITWOOD/AP

The deal clears the way for Britain to rejoin Horizon Europe for science and research, and the nuclear Euratom programme.  Or, put differently, it allows the EU to extricate itself from a destructive policy that was doing serious harm to European science and was leading to a generalised revolt by research institutions and universities against the Commission itself. Brussels discovered that in sanctioning the UK, it was sanctioning Europe.  Let us be clear what happened. Horizon is a genuinely pan-European scheme. British participation is written into the original Brexit text. Until yesterday, the EU was refusing to fulfil its legal commitment. It has been holding science hostage, using it as a political pressure tool. It has done the same to Switzerland, kicking the Swiss out of EU science in order to punish them for other sins – a move described as “absurd” and “almost spiteful” by one leading figure in European research. Was it Moscow-educated Maroš Šefčovič, the Commission’s Brexit enforcer, who chose to weaponise science? Whoever it was, he or she did not understand the nature of cross-border cooperation in research, or the pivotal role of British and Swiss institutions in Europe’s scientific ecosystem.  “It’s a punishment for all of us, a punishment for Europe, a sadomasochistic decision,” said Professor Antoine Petit, head of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the Stick to Science campaign that includes ten Nobel laureates from across Europe. He says CNRS alone was involved in over 1,000 projects with UK or Swiss researchers under the last round of the Horizon scheme. “Every domain will be impacted by this decision,” he said. Grants have been blocked. Projects are in limbo. Suddenly, scientists on the Continent find themselves on the wrong side of a political barrier when dealing with the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge or the Torus fusion labs in Culham.  The European University Association said EU research policy had become "arbitrary and obscure: the Commission can no longer claim to be the adult in the room”. The universal cry from European science has been to stop this folly immediately. Britain is not a poor relation in this domain. It has the highest ranking universities in Europe by far. It has big beasts of funding research such as the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK. Without British (and Swiss) participation, Europe risks being relegated to a second-tier backwater in global science. Michelle Donelan, the UK’s Science and Technology Secretary, upped the ante earlier this month, letting it be known that this country was preparing (reluctantly) to activate its “Plan B” and switch to new scientific alliances. “We are more than ready to go it alone, working with science powerhouses like the US, Switzerland and Japan. I will not sit idly by while our researchers are sidelined,” she wrote.

Michelle Donelan, the UK’s Science and Technology Secretary, believes the UK can lead the world in science and technology CREDIT: SIMON DAWSON/NO 10 DOWNING STREET

Horizon is an excellent programme – the sort of Europe that the British always wanted – but it is excellent for a reason. European scientists were so disenchanted with the Commission’s research directorate – top-down, bureaucratic, glacially slow, and run by ideologues who micromanaged the use of funds – that they drifted away in the early 2000s and formed their own cross-border network. It became the European Research Council.  The Commission learned a hard lesson. It changed its fundamental approach to science and brought the dissidents back into the EU family. The ERC and Horizon have together evolved into a European success story precisely they are sui generis.  It is entirely desirable that Britain should retake its place in this structure. This is not because it needs hand-outs from Brussels. The Government has pledged to match the pre-Brexit levels of research grants whatever happens. Horizon is valuable because it is the glue that holds everything together in European science collaboration. The moral of the Horizon saga is that the EU needs the UK more than Brussels supposed in the first flush of post-Brexit triumphalism, just as it needs the UK more than it ever imagined to prevent Putin reconstituting the Russian tsarist empire.

Edited March 5, 2023 by The Voice of Reason