Current Affairs EU In or Out

In or Out

  • In

    Votes: 688 67.9%

  • Out

    Votes: 325 32.1%
  • Total voters
    1,013
Status
Not open for further replies.
Old Blue 2 said:
The point being, seeing as you don't get it, that any region can make out a special case for itself.
Click to expand...

Armaghtoffee said:
Teresa May said it. Leo Varadkar said it. The Eu said it. Our divided Stormont Parliament crossed political lines and said it. I said it.

Are we all wrong that Ireland is a special consideration?

A simple yes or no will do.
Click to expand...

*Cough* @Old Blue 2
 
Old Blue 2 said:
Are you still rattling on about this...???
Click to expand...
Ireland has become of the headline issues surrounding Brexit and on 28th October I asked you this:

Armaghtoffee said:
I am just curious as to whether you have now changed your view regarding special consideration for Ireland? Before you said no to it but in light of May’s recognition of the need for it, just wondering how you see it now?
Click to expand...

You haven’t responded to that point yet and I was just giving you a gentle reminder in case you had been mulling it over but forgot to share.

As before @Old Blue 2, a simple yes or no will do :)
 
Bruce Wayne said:
I've yet to meet a single European, including a number of EU officials, who isn't sad that the UK is leaving the EU, and befuddled as to why they would leave something that is so beneficial for all sides. There isn't animosity at all as far as I can tell. The thing is, there's a situation at the moment whereby people were told the EU's stance on things, and the process by which negotiations would take place well before the vote was cast. Some of that was dismissed as project fear. All that the EU are really doing is following through on what they've always said would be the process for things.

Johnson et al are whining about the unfairness and meanness of the EU because they sold the public the lie that it would all be plain sailing and the EU would bow down before the might of the British Empire. People were told that was nonsense beforehand, but most chose not to listen.
Click to expand...

Absolutely agree.
Additionally, I work with many Europeans who's demeanour has notably changed since the vote. They feel unwanted, sad and have developed a sense of distrust.
But if course, these guys are the enemy. Let's all cling on to archaic notions of sovereignty and nationalism. The human race is buggered
 
No One Knows What Britain Is Anymore


By STEVEN ERLANGER
NOV. 4, 2017



  • Britain — renowned for its pragmatism, its common sense, its political stability and its unabashed devotion to small business (“a nation of shopkeepers”) — has become nearly unrecognizable to its European allies
    “People need to look again at Britain,” said Daniel Brössler, a correspondent for the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. “It’s no longer the country they understood it to be their whole lives.”

    The divorce negotiations with the European Union start another round this week, but they are not going well, to say the least. The most visible fight is over the cost of the divorce. But other difficult and essentially political issues about the authority of the European Court of Justice and a customs border with Ireland must also be clarified before the other 27 member states agree to move on to the next stage, Britain’s future relationship with the bloc. That decision next month once seemed pro forma, but no longer, with some even predicting a breakdown in the talks.

    Mrs. May’s Conservative government is now so split that some Brexit supporters are calling on her to simply quit the bloc with no deal at all — probably the worst alternative for the country, but just the kind of populist, tub-thumping gesture favored by the Brexit elite and the right-wing tabloids.

    Meanwhile, with the Conservative government so riven and rudderless, the old hard lefty Jeremy Corbyn is leading the opposition Labour Party back into an equally fantastical socialist past.

    Britain is undergoing a full-blown identity crisis. It is a “hollowed-out country,” “ill at ease with itself,” “deeply provincial,” engaged in a “controlled suicide,” say puzzled experts. And these are Britain’s friends.

    “The sense in the rest of Europe is bewilderment; how much worse can it get?” said Tomas Valasek, a former Slovak diplomat who lived in Britain for many years and now directs Carnegie Europe, a Brussels-based research institution. “After Brexit, no one is trying to help now. They’ve given up. Nobody on the Continent really cares that much about Britain anymore. Even worse, people feel the country will fall into the hands of Jeremy Corbyn and that will do more damage than Brexit itself.”

    More chilling, perhaps, is the impact on countries less rooted than Britain once appeared to be. “Britain is an example for all of us, as a longstanding democracy, with centuries of the rule of law and traditional institutions,” said Guntram Wolff, a German economist who runs the Bruegel research institution here. “And if such a country has such difficulties, most of us wonder how our own countries would handle such political upheaval — whether we, too, are so vulnerable.”

    Some make the comparison to that other great Anglo-Saxon country, the United States, under President Trump, who saw Brexit as a harbinger of his own election. But however politically divided the United States seems now, Europeans have never considered it a touchstone of stability the way they have Britain.

    Jan Techau, a German who has traveled extensively in England and ran Carnegie Europe, sees Britain as a tragedy. The European country considered the most outward-looking and globalized is fractured by the backlash against the very model that made Britain strong. “It’s very sad, but Brexit is a controlled suicide,” he said.

    There are many who see Britain as having suffered a sudden nervous breakdown, said Simon Tilford, an economist and deputy director of the Center for European Reform. But he believes that Britain’s political culture and economic stability have been eroding for some time, hidden by the longstanding willingness of others to give it the benefit of the doubt as a pragmatic democracy with a strong civil society and civil service.

    He too blames the Conservatives and the right-wing tabloids that support them for much of the erosion. “The readiness of the political right in particular to lie and peddle obvious untruths, to place their party politics and party unity over and above the national interest, has been going on for a long time,” he said. “The harrumphing nationalism masks a country ill at ease with itself.”

    Rather than a vote for a global Britain and economic liberalism, Mr. Tilford said, Brexit was a vote for protectionism, and its political system now “is deeply provincial and introverted at a time when Britain is supposed to be heading out into the world.”

    The divisions in the society — over Brexit, over politics — are both a function and a result of Britain’s confusion about its identity and global importance. The 19th-century myth of Britain as the “workshop of the world,” a doughty Protestant nation surrounded by Catholics with an empire on which the sun never set, confronted a post-World War II reality, when a lot of these tales stopped being true, suggests Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

    Britain became a service economy, the empire disappeared and people stopped identifying with the Church of England. Then Margaret Thatcher arrived, and with her, Mr. Leonard said, “there was a last gasp of this old identity — an ethnic, exclusively white and backward-looking version of Englishness.”

    However successful, it also excluded an increasingly large number of Britons — black, Asian and Muslim — who felt disenfranchised from “the national story.” Tony Blair and New Labour moved toward more inclusiveness and cosmopolitanism and openness to Europe, too.

    But those validated by the old identity then felt like strangers in their own land, Mr. Leonard said. “Their revenge was Brexit.”

    Confused and divided, Britain no longer has an agreed-upon national narrative, said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform. “In the 2012 Olympics we had one,” he said. “Global Britain, open Britain, generous Britain.” But now there is a competition between that narrative and the nativist one.

    Mr. Grant, like others who have spent their careers watching British and European politics, predicts rough seas for Britain as it casts off nearly 45 years of intimate trade and legal ties with those annoying Europeans.

    “Everywhere I go,” he said, “people are asking me, ‘What’s wrong with your country?’ ”

    Steven Erlanger, the chief diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times, just completed four years as London bureau chief.
 
Armaghtoffee said:
Ireland has become of the headline issues surrounding Brexit and on 28th October I asked you this:



You haven’t responded to that point yet and I was just giving you a gentle reminder in case you had been mulling it over but forgot to share.

As before @Old Blue 2, a simple yes or no will do :)
Click to expand...

I answered your point pages ago. Get off of my back, ffs!
 
Old Blue 2 said:
If you can't be bothered to look, or didn't realise when |I DID answer, then I'm not going to be a crutch for your laziness...

End of. No more replies from me.
Click to expand...
I believe you are dodging the question my friend. I even made it easy for you and said a yes or no would do.

Your opinion is now out of step with your own PM, the Irish PM, the EU and even with cross party political lines at Stormont.

Never mind me challenging you, you are running away from even attempting to justify your own discredited opinion.
 
'Ireland will not be ignored' on border question

'Ireland will not be ignored' on post-Brexit border question
Simon Coveney, the Irish foreign minister, tells party conference Dublin remains ‘firm and stubborn’ in opposition to hard border




Simon Coveney: ‘It seems essential to us that there is no emergence of regulatory divergence from the the rules of the internal market or the customs unions.’ Photograph: Reuters

Lisa O'Carroll Brexit correspondent

@lisaocarroll
Saturday 11 November 2017 16.33 GMTLast modified on Saturday 11 November 2017 17.09 GMT

Britain will not be allowed to dictate the future of the Irish border post-Brexit, Ireland’s foreign minister has warned in a hardening of rhetoric over the UK’s decision to leave the EU.

Simon Coveney told his party’s biannual conference on Saturday that Ireland would remain a steadfast opponent to any proposal that would create a hard border with the republic.

He said Ireland’s position was “consistent, firm and stubborn” and it would not abandon its opposition.

Coveney reiterated demands that Northern Ireland remain in the customs unionand the single market – a position Ireland sees as the only viable way of achieving an invisible border with Northern Ireland .

“Let me be very clear: the Irish government’s position is it seems essential to us that there is no emergence of regulatory divergence from the the rules of the internal market or the customs unions which are necessary from meaningful north-south cooperation, or an all-Ireland economy that is consistent with the Good Friday agreement,” he said.

The question of the Irish border has the potential to further derail Britain’s hopes of moving on to the second phase of Brexit talks in December.

On Friday the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, warned that the UK has two weeks to come up with clarifications on the three round one issues: the divorce bill, EU citizens’ rights and Ireland.
Coveney told delegates at the conference on Friday night that the government would “never sell out” of the commitment to stop a hard border emerging on the island.

He warned that Britain would have to do more to show it would honour the pledges set out in the Good Friday agreement, which had eradicated border controls almost 20 years ago: “Ireland will not be ignored.”

On Friday, the taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, said the only way an invisible border could be achieved would be through a “bespoke” solution seeing Northern Ireland staying in the customs union and the single market even if the rest of the United Kingdom did not.

Speaking in Jersey, he said there was a precedent for a tailored solution in the Isle of Man, which is a member of the customs union and has free movement of goods and products without being in the EU.


FacebookTwitterPinterest
Leo Varadkar said an invisible border could only be achieved if Northern Ireland remains in the customs union and the single market. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
Ireland’s position chimes with that of the EU, which this week said the only way to avoid a hard border was to ensure there was no “regulatory divergence” north and south of the border. That would mean staying in both the customs union and the single market.

Illustrating a possible deepening divide on the issue, the Brexit secretary, David Davis, in turn said he would not accept a proposal that threatened the UK’s “constitutional and economic integrity”.

Sources in Brussels say European commission is very sensitive to the Irish question and Varadkar has the support of its president, Jean-Claude Juncker.

Coveney told RTE’s Morning Ireland programme on Friday that “there was a way to go between the two negotiating teams to be able to provide credible answers and sufficient progress in the context of the Irish border before we can move on to phase two”.

“While we welcome the language we get from the British government in the context of north-south challenges ... there has always been a scepticism on how we are going to get there in the context of the British approach to Brexit as a whole,” he said.
 
Clint Planet said:
No One Knows What Britain Is Anymore


By STEVEN ERLANGER
NOV. 4, 2017



  • Britain — renowned for its pragmatism, its common sense, its political stability and its unabashed devotion to small business (“a nation of shopkeepers”) — has become nearly unrecognizable to its European allies
    “People need to look again at Britain,” said Daniel Brössler, a correspondent for the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. “It’s no longer the country they understood it to be their whole lives.”

    The divorce negotiations with the European Union start another round this week, but they are not going well, to say the least. The most visible fight is over the cost of the divorce. But other difficult and essentially political issues about the authority of the European Court of Justice and a customs border with Ireland must also be clarified before the other 27 member states agree to move on to the next stage, Britain’s future relationship with the bloc. That decision next month once seemed pro forma, but no longer, with some even predicting a breakdown in the talks.

    Mrs. May’s Conservative government is now so split that some Brexit supporters are calling on her to simply quit the bloc with no deal at all — probably the worst alternative for the country, but just the kind of populist, tub-thumping gesture favored by the Brexit elite and the right-wing tabloids.

    Meanwhile, with the Conservative government so riven and rudderless, the old hard lefty Jeremy Corbyn is leading the opposition Labour Party back into an equally fantastical socialist past.

    Britain is undergoing a full-blown identity crisis. It is a “hollowed-out country,” “ill at ease with itself,” “deeply provincial,” engaged in a “controlled suicide,” say puzzled experts. And these are Britain’s friends.

    “The sense in the rest of Europe is bewilderment; how much worse can it get?” said Tomas Valasek, a former Slovak diplomat who lived in Britain for many years and now directs Carnegie Europe, a Brussels-based research institution. “After Brexit, no one is trying to help now. They’ve given up. Nobody on the Continent really cares that much about Britain anymore. Even worse, people feel the country will fall into the hands of Jeremy Corbyn and that will do more damage than Brexit itself.”

    More chilling, perhaps, is the impact on countries less rooted than Britain once appeared to be. “Britain is an example for all of us, as a longstanding democracy, with centuries of the rule of law and traditional institutions,” said Guntram Wolff, a German economist who runs the Bruegel research institution here. “And if such a country has such difficulties, most of us wonder how our own countries would handle such political upheaval — whether we, too, are so vulnerable.”

    Some make the comparison to that other great Anglo-Saxon country, the United States, under President Trump, who saw Brexit as a harbinger of his own election. But however politically divided the United States seems now, Europeans have never considered it a touchstone of stability the way they have Britain.

    Jan Techau, a German who has traveled extensively in England and ran Carnegie Europe, sees Britain as a tragedy. The European country considered the most outward-looking and globalized is fractured by the backlash against the very model that made Britain strong. “It’s very sad, but Brexit is a controlled suicide,” he said.

    There are many who see Britain as having suffered a sudden nervous breakdown, said Simon Tilford, an economist and deputy director of the Center for European Reform. But he believes that Britain’s political culture and economic stability have been eroding for some time, hidden by the longstanding willingness of others to give it the benefit of the doubt as a pragmatic democracy with a strong civil society and civil service.

    He too blames the Conservatives and the right-wing tabloids that support them for much of the erosion. “The readiness of the political right in particular to lie and peddle obvious untruths, to place their party politics and party unity over and above the national interest, has been going on for a long time,” he said. “The harrumphing nationalism masks a country ill at ease with itself.”

    Rather than a vote for a global Britain and economic liberalism, Mr. Tilford said, Brexit was a vote for protectionism, and its political system now “is deeply provincial and introverted at a time when Britain is supposed to be heading out into the world.”

    The divisions in the society — over Brexit, over politics — are both a function and a result of Britain’s confusion about its identity and global importance. The 19th-century myth of Britain as the “workshop of the world,” a doughty Protestant nation surrounded by Catholics with an empire on which the sun never set, confronted a post-World War II reality, when a lot of these tales stopped being true, suggests Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

    Britain became a service economy, the empire disappeared and people stopped identifying with the Church of England. Then Margaret Thatcher arrived, and with her, Mr. Leonard said, “there was a last gasp of this old identity — an ethnic, exclusively white and backward-looking version of Englishness.”

    However successful, it also excluded an increasingly large number of Britons — black, Asian and Muslim — who felt disenfranchised from “the national story.” Tony Blair and New Labour moved toward more inclusiveness and cosmopolitanism and openness to Europe, too.

    But those validated by the old identity then felt like strangers in their own land, Mr. Leonard said. “Their revenge was Brexit.”

    Confused and divided, Britain no longer has an agreed-upon national narrative, said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform. “In the 2012 Olympics we had one,” he said. “Global Britain, open Britain, generous Britain.” But now there is a competition between that narrative and the nativist one.

    Mr. Grant, like others who have spent their careers watching British and European politics, predicts rough seas for Britain as it casts off nearly 45 years of intimate trade and legal ties with those annoying Europeans.

    “Everywhere I go,” he said, “people are asking me, ‘What’s wrong with your country?’ ”

    Steven Erlanger, the chief diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times, just completed four years as London bureau chief.
Click to expand...

Fantastic article that nails the situation, and almost exactly how I think.

I find myself despairing at every 'realistic' option - the bold bit is frighteningly spot on; Britain has decided to kill itself for no reason whatsoever.
 
Tubey said:
Fantastic article that nails the situation, and almost exactly how I think.

I find myself despairing at every 'realistic' option - the bold bit is frighteningly spot on; Britain has decided to kill itself for no reason whatsoever.
Click to expand...
No reason whatsoever eh?
Please, for once, accept that not all of those wanting out, did so due to immigration and by association, are outright racists.
My reason, however simplistic it seems, was that I wanted the UK to be able to govern itself without interference from Europe.
 
tommytowne said:
No reason whatsoever eh?
Please, for once, accept that not all of those wanting out, did so due to immigration and by association, are outright racists.
My reason, however simplistic it seems, was that I wanted the UK to be able to govern itself without interference from Europe.
Click to expand...

Exactly mate, no reason whatsoever.
 
Cornwall appeals to government as crops ‘rot in fields’ due to shortage in migrant labour after Brexit

The local council authority in the region, which vthe EU, says it is concerned by 'a sharp fall in the number of EU workers
Essential staffing levels for farms have dropped by two-thirds since the Brexit vote


Crops in Cornwall are said to be "rotting in the fields" due to a lack of migrant workers to harvest them in the wake of Britain's decision to leave the European Union.

The county council has approached the Government to request it implement area-specific migration laws after Brexit, will help to deliver skills to the area.

Cornwall voted to leave the European Union in last year's referendum by more than 56 per cent, considerably above the national average. The area is home to 17,000 EU nationals, making up 3 per cent of the county's population. But research commissioned by the council found that, since the Brexit vote, staffing levels for farms had dropped to 65 per cent of what would normally be required.


Gordon Brown on Brexit: Britain will hit a 'crisis point' next Summer
The study found that changes to migration laws following Britain’s exit from the EU could lead to multimillion pound losses if the horticultural industry cannot find the skilled work force it needs.

“If we put strict limits on Eastern European migrant labour or devise alternative immigration policies that limit so-called ‘low-skilled’ labour, the Cornish horticultural industry is finished," said David Simmons of Riviera Produce, one of Cornwall's biggest producers
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Welcome

Join the Everton conversation today.
Fewer ads, full access, completely free.

→ Log in 🔑 Register
🛒 Visit Shop

Support Grand Old Team by checking out our latest Everton gear!
Back
Top