Brexit

[Roman Alymov]

I can remember that during the troubles we had Operation Motorman, where we bulldozed roads to ensure that most cards could go down routes, so we could search them. It would be a relatively easy to job to do the same thing again and put in electronic checkpoints. I mean yes, it wouldnt be popular, but if its that or a hard border, I think even the Irish would have to see the advantages.

 

The same (digging the trench all along border with Chechnya) was done between 1st and 2nd Chechen wars, to stop Chechen gangs on SUVs and lorries from looting neighboring regions. Result was failure as in age of mobile communication and modern digging equipment it was quite easy to arrange mobile bulldozer in needed place and needed time to make pass in minutes. But the very situation of considering this option inside UK is telling.

[Stuart Galbraith]

The Government is not considering the position, Im considering the position. Hard though it is to believe, the British Government doesnt listen to me very often.

 

Ireland is very different from Chechnya. Most of the crossing points they took out were bridges (I forget over what river), that were replaced in the past 10-15 years. It didnt stop all movement across the border, nothing could do that. But it seems to have stopped them driving lorries full of armalites across at least. In an era of drone surveillance, it will be even easier to keep tabs on people going over the fields in the Landrovers and Toyota's, at least when they do it semi regularly.

 

Hardly ideal, and politically contentious. But it would create freight flows onto major routes, whcih would make them easier to inspect. Heck, just mandate ALL freight across the border goes via rail. That would make it even easier, if somewhat more difficult logistically.

 

There are plenty of answers to the problem here, but every time the British Government puts it up, from the EU and Eire its 'No no, hell no'. We create a solution, they knock it down and say its up to us to create a solution. How can anyone really negotiate from such an absurd position?

[Mistral]

 

What I dont understand is why the British wish to export their goods to the EU, why dont they export them to the rest of the world? Its a much bigger market. Surely a no deal will save them the cash they have to pay for a deal and they could export to their hearts desire.

 

Maybe if you can anwer that you will realise what will happen come March.

 

Established markets and suppliers. You dont turn those off overnight without expecting absolute chaos. And its not an unreasonable demand for at least a few years grace whilst we restructure. We didnt enter the EEC overnight either.

 

 

One word in your reply describes what will happen. Want to take a guess?

And you don't loose them overnight, you had 2 years to prepare, every party had two years.

[Stuart Galbraith]

 

 

What I dont understand is why the British wish to export their goods to the EU, why dont they export them to the rest of the world? Its a much bigger market. Surely a no deal will save them the cash they have to pay for a deal and they could export to their hearts desire.

 

Maybe if you can anwer that you will realise what will happen come March.

 

Established markets and suppliers. You dont turn those off overnight without expecting absolute chaos. And its not an unreasonable demand for at least a few years grace whilst we restructure. We didnt enter the EEC overnight either.

 

 

One word in your reply describes what will happen. Want to take a guess?

And you don't loose them overnight, you had 2 years to prepare, every party had two years.

 

 

We had 2 years to prepared assuming we would get a deal. Which was not an unreasonable conclusion because only a lunatic would cut all trade ties, and the Government was telling them they would get a deal. So im sorry, this argument is doing nothing for me.

[DB]

One of the reasons that the rank and file British voter voted to leave was the dissonance between the claim that the EU was all about turning Europe into one big equal family, then seeing irresponible national level decisions - Greece on spending, Germany on immigration, Ireland on banking(*), etc, plus widespread evasion of rules on quotas, free movement of farming goods (looking at you, France), the destruction of goods to maintain artificial prices (tomatoes and such in Spain), historical wine lakes, butter mountains, etc.

 

We see nothing but incompetence and waste, which we're perfectly capable of doing ourselves, thanks, no need to feed the Brussels pigs with truffles.

[Stuart Galbraith]

I live next door to an old airfield (RAF Babdown Farm) that was in the 1980s part of the EEC food mountain. It had a hangar completely full of grain, one of the grain mountains we used to hear so much about. Yes, its gone now, they did away with it about 20 years ago. But the memory of such waste, such wholly unsatisfactory management of basic resources, never did much to endear itself to the UK.

 

There is also the rather insane fisheries policy where they decided a quota on each vessel, and anything over had to be thrown back in the sea. Dead. it made a complete mockery of the stated aim, which was preserving fish stocks. I doubt very much whether our Fishermen are going to be advantaged much by Brexit, but you know what, I get entirely why they feel shafted by EU fisheries policy. They were. You can see the net result of our apparently reformed fisheries policy where the French are trying to reenact Trafalgar on our fishermen off the coast of Normandy whilst the French navy looked on with detachment. What do you think the result would be if we did that to French fishermen off Dover?

 

We have plenty of incompetent politicians and bureaucrats ourselves. Another tier of them always looked something of a luxury to my eyes. Yes, the trade is important. I even agree with free movement, up to a point. And that point should be determined by individual nations, not a supernational body with a hard on for building a superstate.

[Panzermann]

Stuart, your bureaucrats are seem perfectly able to make things worse. Didn't they stack additional requirements on top of EU regulations? and totally going over board in application of regulations?

 

 

---

 

BREXIT PLOT Tony Blair, Nick Clegg and John Major meet with European leaders in secret plot to keep Britain in the EU(the Sun)

 

 

ah yes, these guys are totally going to save it

[TonyE]

[Mistral]

 

 

What I dont understand is why the British wish to export their goods to the EU, why dont they export them to the rest of the world? Its a much bigger market. Surely a no deal will save them the cash they have to pay for a deal and they could export to their hearts desire.

 

Maybe if you can anwer that you will realise what will happen come March.

 

Established markets and suppliers. You dont turn those off overnight without expecting absolute chaos. And its not an unreasonable demand for at least a few years grace whilst we restructure. We didnt enter the EEC overnight either.

 

 

One word in your reply describes what will happen. Want to take a guess?

And you don't loose them overnight, you had 2 years to prepare, every party had two years.

 

If a private company spend the last two years doing nothing, believing the politicians instead of trying to find new suppliers / customers should go bankrupt.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Stuart, your bureaucrats are seem perfectly able to make things worse. Didn't they stack additional requirements on top of EU regulations? and totally going over board in application of regulations?

 

 

---

 

BREXIT PLOT Tony Blair, Nick Clegg and John Major meet with European leaders in secret plot to keep Britain in the EU(the Sun)

 

 

ah yes, these guys are totally going to save it

 

You miss the point. Its not that our politicians are capable, laudable, or even likeable. The point is they are ours, not anyone elses. The word sovereignty figures large here.

 

I think, personally, the world is going to move towards increased grouping because of trade, and globalization is a trend that will not be stopped, no matter how Brexit or MAGA is presented. What I think needs to be born in mind though is that the EU is not a tool of globalization. it is in fact a tool to stop globalization, to keep out foreign competition and free trade. Trump IS right about that if nothing else. At which point, and its just a personal opinion, the EU is the culmination of policies formulated in the 1950s, that today look archaic, out of date and restrictive.

 

The EU is, and im sure people will pick holes in this, an effort to build a European nation state. At just the time when the nation state is becoming all but irrelevant. Yes, I think the politicians here who sold Brexit are for the most part fucking idiots. But when they point to the future being the rest of the world rather than an increasingly irrelevant European corner, they do actually have a point. We may yet end up taking entirely the right step for entirely the wrong reasons, which would be a very British response..

 

No offense meant to anyone, and I truly mean that.

[Stuart Galbraith]

 

 

 

What I dont understand is why the British wish to export their goods to the EU, why dont they export them to the rest of the world? Its a much bigger market. Surely a no deal will save them the cash they have to pay for a deal and they could export to their hearts desire.

 

Maybe if you can anwer that you will realise what will happen come March.

 

Established markets and suppliers. You dont turn those off overnight without expecting absolute chaos. And its not an unreasonable demand for at least a few years grace whilst we restructure. We didnt enter the EEC overnight either.

 

 

One word in your reply describes what will happen. Want to take a guess?

And you don't loose them overnight, you had 2 years to prepare, every party had two years.

 

If a private company spend the last two years doing nothing, believing the politicians instead of trying to find new suppliers / customers should go bankrupt.

 

 

There are some manufacturers here whom dont have the economic freedom to just up sticks and move, just on the chance there may end up with no deal. For example, British car manufacturers. Yes, Jaguar Landrover could up sticks and move to Poland. But it would cost an arm and a leg, might prove wholly unnecessary if there is a deal, and would end up killing the home market a the backlash of losing British production. So what do they do? They do what they are doing, move to a 3 day week and hedge their bets by moving some production to Europe, and hope there is a deal. There isnt much else they can do. Short of getting components from Europe cheaply, they will go bust.I know that, we all know it. But what other options are there?

[Adam_S]

 

The delusion is in assuming that the UK has something the EU really needs to negotiate over. Sure, Europe as a whole will be weakened in political and economic power after Brexit, too, and everybody's share to pay of the EU budget will rise by the percentage of the current British share, a little over twelve percent. But I'm flabbergasted that 27 months on, variations of "the Germans will never allow the EU to let us go without a deal, because cars" are still stuck in people's minds. I said that was not gonna happen then, and nothing has changed except the mounting evidence that it isn't. That Theresa May failed in her latest attempt to deal directly with the heads of governments rather than the Commission - which the EU said from the start how it would be done, but was promptly decried as "gangster behavior" by British yellow press - is only the most recent case in point.

 

 

I can't decide whether the idea that the EU would negotiate in good faith was an lie from the Brexit campaign or just outright stupidity on the part of the British government. Either way, it looks like it's going to come back and bite them on the arse.

Edited September 24, 2018 by Adam_S

[Stuart Galbraith]

And the word for today children is 'Schadenfreude'.

[BillB]

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you Chris, needed to find the time to give you a proper response.

 

Bill, this is just a personal perspective on BREXIT.

In 1997 I moved to Belgium to be with my then girlfriend, who was Dutch. We were both unskilled, but could move there easily as her parents had done many years previously with their inland ship. I did a simple cleaning job there until I could find something better, which I soon did. I ended up in charge of the contracts on an account with EDS on what would be about £38.5k a year now even without allowing for inflation. I got that job, and others, because I was willing to do things Belgians were not willing to do. I paid a lot of tax to the Belgian government.

Whilst I was doing this, my wife, who I had enabled to give up cleaning, was building up her own skills in web design whilst continuing to make works of art for rich Americans and to teach art in Holland. She brought money into the EU and into Belgium and also paid her taxes on it.

Five years on, we both moved to a remote part of the UK, where she built up a very successful web design business that essentially dominates the market for web services in the county as well as bringing in money from customers in Belgium, France and Holland.

All of the above was only possible because of the free movement of people enabled by the EU.

That's all very laudable and I'm very glad for you and your significant Other, seriously, not taking the piss. However, not everyone is bright enough or has the get-up-and-go to do what you did, and the country has to be run for the benefit of everyone not just a minority. More importantly, I am pretty sure that if you were an unskilled or semi-skilled worker in say Lincolnshire or Cambridgeshire you would have a rather different take on the benefits of free movement. You are sheltered by being employed in the public sector but for normal Joes in the private sector free movement has artificially depressed wages and although folk will bend themselves into pretzel shapes rather than admit it, it is also largely if not in some instances exclusively responsible for the pressure on housing, schools and the NHS. It's not just the unskilled and semi-skilled either. I was a skilled, time-served tradesman once upon a time, and guys I know still on the tools in the construction industry are still getting paid less than when I last laid a brick at the beginning of the 1990s. Free movement is a wonderful idea unless it's you being undercut or simply edged out of the employment market because employers find it cheaper to import folk from Eastern Europe who are happy to work for less than home-grown folk can afford to.

 

The county in which I live has had a lot of EU money brought in to it for infrastructure and the European Marine Energy Test Centre is based here, but for how long is anyone's guess. We have a thriving fishing industry that sells primarily to the EU and relies on getting their catch into those countries quickly without border impediments. Our tourist and salmon processing industries are largely dependent on EU nationals.

First off, the EU doesn't actually produce any money of its own it is reliant on donations from Member States and as the UK has consistently paid in more than it has got back from the EU then your local projects have actually been receiving largesse from UK taxpayers delivered via a third party. Not sure about the local fishing industry being pro-EU as you appear to be suggesting, everything I've seen shows UK fishermen to be resolutely anti-EU unless you are talking about some small-scale niche area. Ref the last bit, I think it's been pretty well proven that the hospitality industry at least is dependent upon EU nationals because they don't want to pay enough to allow UK nationals to take up those jobs; farming is the same and I suspect the salmon processing employees are in the same box.

 

Most of all though the NHS that I work for and our business are both very dependent on economic stability. We have no other significant income. Anything that threatens to throw a spanner in the works could really screw us and now even my wife's entitlement to remain in the UK is in doubt. We (or in this case I) may be getting control back in ways that give a warm fuzzy feeling, but mostly really make no difference to the average person. Being in a job, having money in your pocket, being able to source employees and skills as needed and to export perishable good in a timely fashion - those things mean a lot more to me.

No Chris, the NHS is very dependent on the largesse of the taxpayer, economic stability doesn't really come into it; if it did then large parts if not all the NHS would have been bankrupt years ago. I know several people that work in the NHS in a variety of roles and if only a small fraction of the tales they tell are true then the waste and incompetent management is mind boggling, and then there's the protectionism exercised by the BMA and RCN. Ref your business needing stability, to paraphrase what I said above the country is not supposed to be run purely on the grounds of what's be4st for business and I mean that generally not just with regard to your wife;'s business. Regarding your wife's future status AIUI the Government has undertaken to allow EU nationals to remain in the UK post-Brexit, and it's not as if there were no non-British nationals living and working in the UK before 1992 is it? If you are that bothered then could your wife not take out British citizenship? Ref the bit about Brexit & sovereignty not mattering to the average person, I beg to differ because 17.4 million in the largest voter turn out in UK history IIRC says different. Have a look at the areas that voted most vehemently to Leave, they are overwhelmingly where the average, working-class people live , which suggests what matters to you is not universally the case.

 

In my circle of friends and acquaintances, when I speak to people who voted for BREXIT, I find they tend to be older people living on pensions or otherwise relatively secure incomes. They share a wish to return to a past where we made our decisions independently and where things were better, albeit seen through rose tinted glasses. The ironic thing is most of them won't be around very much longer and the younger people who tended to vote against BREXIT will have to live with their decisions for a good portion of their adult lives, and perhaps forever.

These would be the older people whose work, tax and expertise built the unprecedentedly affluent and stable world in which the snowflake end of the young people assume is simply their birthright just because, yes? I mix with young people for my job and from my equally anecdotal standpoint the idea that the Brexit vote was a simple young v old split is not really the case, it is much more nuanced than that. As for living with the decisions of others, so what? It was ever thus and always will be, that's the problem with living in a representative democracy, you don't always get what you want.

BillB

[BillB]

I have not seen anything that fundamentally alters the view I had when The Brexit vote took place. Brexit will take a real and substantial economic tolk on lots of people in the UK. There is no papering that over. However, and this is significant, it is by no means certain that it would have been better for Britain to Remain, as a whole. This I say because the EU has not done *anything* to fix its basic structural defects. And, as has been said, if something cant go on, it wont.

 

 

Soren

Don't you be coming in here with your reasonable tone and pesky facts, away with you.

 

BillB

[BillB]

HOW would "Brussels" "direct labor"?

Dunno, because the EU has not yet managed to usurp sufficient political and judicial power to be in a position to do so. At the minute the economic pull of richer Member States is doing the job for them, which I assume is why the EU keeps subsuming second-world states. I'd be surprised if it didn't ultimately come to coercion as that's the way European super-states tend to go, the last one within living memory...

 

BillB

[BillB]

Panzermann wrote:

 

Do you really have to ask?

When it was the EWG (EEC in english) back in the day, the joke was "Einer Wird Gewinnen" one will win in english. At the moment GErmany is sucking many of the smaller members dry like a vampire and at the same time wants to push the results of their FUBAR immigration politics on the other members. It is going to implode, because this situation is not long term stable as Sören Ras points out. With the current structure it is going to go boom. Brexit is the first big writing on the wall. Notwithstanding that I have to thank my politics teacher in school, who made us work out all the structural defects and deficiencies of democracy, checks&balances etc. in the EU. And taht was like 25 years ago. Goes to show how much inertia such things have and keep moving.

 

Good points, well made.

 

 

How your political class has handled this. Cameron starting this rubbish bin fire unnecessarily in the first place. How they voted recently happily for the filters showed me that you have the same problem as the rest of Europe. bad politicians making bad decisons. That is, bad decisions for the grand majority of people.

Leaving is not going to change your political establishment. Well at least they cannot hide behind the brussels excuse anymore.

Agree absolutely, the British political class has become utterly divorced from those on whom they rely for legitimacy and it was incompetence in the extreme to allow the hoi-polloi to express an opinion; Cameron only did so because he, in common with the majority of his fellows simply could not comprehend that anyone in their right mind could possibly think that the EU is not an eminently wonderful idea.

Personally I blame the EU for this in the British context at least, dunno enough about the wider European context to comment. Thanks to membership of the EU and arguably earlier we have at least a generation of politicians who have never actually had to do the job they are elected to and paid handsomely for. All they have had to do is posture and go through the motions while rubber stamping EU edicts into British law, that's why the majority in the Commons was pro-Remain including the current PM, and why many are panicking because they can see the gravy train coming to an end meaning they will have to actually do some work and be held properly accountable when they make a hash of it.

BillB

[BillB]

What I dont understand is why the British wish to export their goods to the EU, why dont they export them to the rest of the world? Its a much bigger market. Surely a no deal will save them the cash they have to pay for a deal and they could export to their hearts desire.

 

Maybe if you can anwer that you will realise what will happen come March.

It's a market, which is part of a thing called trade, you may have heard of it. If there's a large market on you doorstep than it would be dumb in the extreme to ignore it, although that's what the EU tends to do because it is really about protectionism, not trade. Over half of the UK's trade is with the rest of the world and more than the figures show due to the Rotterdam effect which counts stuff shipped within the EU as trade when it is really goods in transit. As for what will happen in March, the UK is the world's fourth or fifth largest economies despite the dead weight of the EU's protectionist racketry, so don't concern yourself, I'm sure we'll muddle through somehow.

 

BillB

[BillB]

 

 

 

I have yet to hear an intelligent and practically feasible suggestion from the British side how you want to keep an open border in NI while at the same time no longer being part of the common market. Either you have customs controls to separate from the common market, in which case you can't have a completely open border. Or you don't, in which case at least NI needs to remain part of the common market's tariff regulations.

 

The answer is simple, the UK simply points out that the open border is a special arrangement that predates the EU and the EEC by decades, and that that the EU tacitly accepted that arrangement when it allowed the UK and Eire to join the EEC in 1972. If the EU want a closed border to delineate the edge of the Single Market then go ahead, but the UK will be having nothing to do with it. The Norwegian-Swedish border seems to manage ok and there is no reason why a similar arrangement could not be established in Ireland apart from the fact the EU have deliberately created difficulties as a shit-stirring measure. I think Mr Varadkar will shortly be ruing his attitude when Irish trucks are no longer afforded the privileged access across the UK they currently enjoy, and Brussels leave him holding the bag...

 

 

 

 

Someone should have thought about that question first before calling a referendum. Let's face it, you have been deceived by the Brexit campaigners. By their own admission they heaped lies on top of more lies. There was no plan then, there is no plan now. It's one giant clusterfark.

 

Give your head a wobble and stick to waffling about stuff you actually know something about. There was no planning because Cameron forbade the Civil Service from assisting the Leave campaign in any way, shape or form, and Theresa May has deliberately and consistently undermined the Brexit negotiating team because ashe is a Remainer and her heart isn't in it. And nobody except the gullible and stupid were deceived by anybody. If you want outright lies though have a look at the Project Fear Campaign run by the Remainers; according to them the UK economy was supposed to collapse immediately on a Leave vote, crops were wither in the fields or be consumed by locusts and World War III was supposed to be well underway...

 

BillB

[Yama]

When it was the EWG (EEC in english) back in the day, the joke was "Einer Wird Gewinnen" one will win in english. At the moment GErmany is sucking many of the smaller members dry like a vampire and at the same time wants to push the results of their FUBAR immigration politics on the other members. It is going to implode, because this situation is not long term stable as Sören Ras points out. With the current structure it is going to go boom. Brexit is the first big writing on the wall.

There we have it. Finnish export industry was devastated by triple blow of Lehman Crisis + Nokia collapse + Russian sanctions. Now we have lost a decade of growth as we can't devaluate because of the fucking Euro. Within the Euro we can't compete with German economies of the scale, and non-Euro neighbours are happily devaluating their currency against Euro to ensure we can't get a shoe in.

[Panzermann]

 

When it was the EWG (EEC in english) back in the day, the joke was "Einer Wird Gewinnen" one will win in english. At the moment GErmany is sucking many of the smaller members dry like a vampire and at the same time wants to push the results of their FUBAR immigration politics on the other members. It is going to implode, because this situation is not long term stable as Sören Ras points out. With the current structure it is going to go boom. Brexit is the first big writing on the wall.

There we have it. Finnish export industry was devastated by triple blow of Lehman Crisis + Nokia collapse + Russian sanctions. Now we have lost a decade of growth as we can't devaluate because of the fucking Euro. Within the Euro we can't compete with German economies of the scale, and non-Euro neighbours are happily devaluating their currency against Euro to ensure we can't get a shoe in.

 

 

Yup. and all those customers across the EU buy with loans, because there have not enough cheques imploded in the last decade...

 

Also this politic is bad for domestic consumption, because wages in Germany have effectively shrunk in the last decades to support the export effort and in direct competititon with the cheaper labour elswhere in the EU.

 

It is going to crash sooner or later and then the howling and teeth gnashing will be big and nobody dindu nuffin. How could this happen?

Edited September 25, 2018 by Panzermann

[Briganza]

 

Its the irish, what they gonna smugle? If its booze they'll drink it, if its not they aren't interested.

 

Well Tommy Guns maybe. But as the American point out, we are oppressed and degunned, so no problem there.

 

I can remember that during the troubles we had Operation Motorman, where we bulldozed roads to ensure that most cards could go down routes, so we could search them. It would be a relatively easy to job to do the same thing again and put in electronic checkpoints. I mean yes, it wouldnt be popular, but if its that or a hard border, I think even the Irish would have to see the advantages.

 

Op Motorman was the clearing of streets in Derry not closing crossings on the border.

 

The border is an interesting point. Small roads were blocked with concrete bollards and girders and in some places old water tanks (EWTs) filled with concrete. Other roads across the border were open but funneled into check points. We also had the Monaghan concession road but as there was no link to the UK from that road there was no checkpoint. HGVs had to cross the border at designated point (and for the most part getting an HGV down some of those roads would be taxing with multiple 90 degree bends) which had the facilities to search them. Customs points did exist but were hardly ever manned. The army was not interested in you moving an extra ten boxes of fags and at christmas I stopped many a car full to the top with tins of quality street going north or south depending on who was selling them cheapest that year. Petrol stations would open or close dependant on the price at the time in each country. People would drive 30 miles to fill up. My brother in law had a dental practise in Enniskillen till the crash and his southern paying customers dried up.

 

The real smuggling was done in the open so to speak, you just couldn't catch them. Farmer Fionn would have a barn built on both sides of the border. Depending on price and subsidies cattle would go in the south door and out the north door so that they could collect the money. Next week the same cattle would walk back and he would claim again. The same would be true for diesel which would be filtered of the dye.

 

If they needed to reinstate the check points it is already mapped but they are not going to build a fence as a lot of farmers have fields on both sides of the border. The real border will be at the ferry ports.

[Briganza]

Stuart, your bureaucrats are seem perfectly able to make things worse. Didn't they stack additional requirements on top of EU regulations? and totally going over board in application of regulations?

 

 

---

 

BREXIT PLOT Tony Blair, Nick Clegg and John Major meet with European leaders in secret plot to keep Britain in the EU(the Sun)

 

 

ah yes, these guys are totally going to save it

It's ingrained into our civilservice at all levels just to make sure. Not only that they also follow the rules even if they are stupid and all can see that they are.

 

If you really want I can give a number of examples off the top of my head.

 

What can I say, we're British.

[rmgill]

I still believe in free trade. I still believe a common European trade area is a good idea. The rest of it is a lot of ideological crap that wants throwing on a bonfire.

Why do you need to cede your national sovereignty to Brussels (and Strasbourg) in order to have free trade?

Edited September 25, 2018 by rmgill

[Simon Tan]

Becuase Bruxxels sez so.