Thread: Brexit - It's Still On!

Originally Posted by Norton

Time flies. Just over 6 months until the final bell. 75% of the time gone and not much progress.

That's a little unfair...80% of the withdrawal has been agreed. The last 20% will be agreed by November, it just needs selling the deal, to Joe Public, as a win and not a defeat...or at least 'in the national interest'

Originally Posted by Troy

That's a little unfair...80% of the withdrawal has been agreed. The last 20% will be agreed by November, it just needs selling the deal, to Joe Public, as a win and not a defeat...or at least 'in the national interest'

Fair nuff. Hope the last 20% aren't issues that sulley the whole deal.

Originally Posted by Norton

Fair nuff. Hope the last 20% aren't issues that sulley the whole deal.

As an American why would feel concerned? Just asking like Mr Norton.

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

As an American why would feel concerned? Just asking like Mr Norton.

Americans are not allowed to comment on BREXIT? Just askin ...

Originally Posted by Norton

Americans are not allowed to comment on BREXIT? Just askin ...

Obama did. And Brexiteers took no fooking notice.

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

As an American why would feel concerned? Just asking like Mr Norton.

Interested would be a more accurate reason than concerned. BBC and CNN spend a lot of air time on the subject. The whole thing always struck me as throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

Obama did. And Brexiteers took no fooking notice.

Nor will they take notice of my dribblings.

Originally Posted by Norton

Americans are not allowed to comment on BREXIT? Just askin ...

Of course you can. The topic doesn't say anything about seppos being banned.

The scaremongers are working overtime, no such thing as no deal, my mother lode is on a deal and if the odds were right I'd go for deal within a few days of deadline. But good drama.

Interesting read from today's Times:

The Belgian denounced as a heretic for insisting Brexit will be success

Marc Roche, Le Monde’s London correspondent, was a committed opponent of leaving the EU. His volte-face has caused uproar.

They don’t come much more European than Marc Roche. Born in Belgium and nourished on tales of admiration for the EU, he became London correspondent for Le Monde, the most federalist French daily, and was awarded the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest distinction, for his writings. So, when Roche announced the title of his latest book, Le Brexit Va Réussir (Brexit Will Succeed), there was stupefaction in Paris and Brussels.

Colleagues were appalled, acquaintances horrified. How could this most cultivated and articulate of continentals espouse a cause that, seen from France, Belgium or Germany, is an affront to European civilisation? “People just cannot believe that I have written a book saying that Brexit will succeed. When they see that I have, their reaction is to ask: ‘Do you really believe what you have written?’ I tell them I do.”

Roche was chatting this week in a café in Montparnasse in Paris before the publication of his work explaining that Britain has enough cards up its sleeve to survive and even prosper.

He arrived bang on time, an unusual occurrence in Paris and one that he attributed to having lived in Britain for more than three decades. “I can’t stand the French habit of always arriving late,” he said.

Sipping a coffee and dressed in a sky blue jacket, Roche seemed to have adopted a British phlegmatic approach to the storm he was about to cause. “I know that not everyone will agree with me, but I will be happy if I can start a debate,” he said.

That he did, with the book launch turning into a whirlwind of interviews, questions and controversy. If nothing else, Roche’s work had a novelty value that earned him more publicity than even his publisher was expecting. No establishment figure had ever put the case for Brexit in France before, and media outlets were keen to see the eminent writer who was now daring to do so. “My publisher says he has almost never seen anyone get so much attention on the first day of a launch,” Roche said.

Not much of the coverage was positive, though. On France 3, the state channel, the news anchor Francis Letellier hardly bothered to disguise his scepticism at Roche’s claim that Brexit would pacify the argument over immigration in Britain. In the magazine Le Point, which published three pages of extracts, Pascal Lamy, former head of the World Trade Organisation, was categorical. “Brexit won’t be a success,” he said. “The principal victims . . . will be Her Majesty’s subjects. Once out of the EU, their living standards will go down.”

Such reactions were widespread. “There has been great interest in my book, although I could not say that anyone has embraced my case,” Roche said that evening. “The response has been astonishment tinged with hostility. People are very defensive about Europe, and they are bewildered at what I have written. I think I have touched a very raw nerve.”

In the circles he frequents in France and Belgium, the EU is almost universally seen as a force for good — a bulwark against the nationalism that led both countries to be occupied by Germany during the Second World War, offering economic stability in a turbulent world. The idea that anyone would want to quit the bloc seems crackpot.

“In France the only people who want to leave the EU are extremists, which is why the French think that all Brexiteers must be extremists and racists,” said Roche. “They are completely unaware that there might be another point of view.”

Roche was born in Brussels into a Jewish family of textile entrepreneurs on whom the war left an indelible imprint. As the Nazis occupied Belgium his father fled to Switzerland but his mother was captured and sent to Auschwitz. She survived, returned home after Hitler’s defeat and saw in the nascent European community a defence against the sort of horrors she experienced. When Roche was born in 1951, it was in the most pro-European environment imaginable.

“Brussels and the EU are cousins,” he said. “Everyone is totally in favour of Europe, everyone thinks it is marvellous, nobody questions that.”

His career as a journalist did little to alter his view. He specialised in global finance and worked for publications that all supported the EU, notably Le Monde for whom he was City editor until 2014.

He says that his life in London is pleasant. He has written a series of successful books denouncing the failings of Anglo-Saxon banks such Goldman Sachs and HSBC and lives on a street in Notting Hill full of well-heeled people from around the world.

For many years he assumed that all of the UK was as cosmopolitan and contented as his neighbours. “When I arrived Britain in the 1980s, it seemed to me to have got everything right. It was multicultural, economically advanced, ebullient and enjoying the best of both worlds, being in Europe without the drawbacks of having a continental economy,” he said.

He never imagined that the British would one day discard all that by voting in favour of Brexit; the vote was a bombshell. “I absolutely didn’t see it coming,” said Roche. “I am a financial correspondent and although I had been in the UK for years I didn’t know much about it outside the Square Mile. Whenever I left London, it was to go to New York or to South Africa, not to Derby or Newcastle. I didn’t know anyone who was a Brexiteer, or at least anyone who admitted to being a Brexiteer.”

Like all right-thinking continentals, he concluded that only bigotry and blindness could explain the British choice, and repeated what he now calls the “pro-European creed that little England was condemned to become insignificant” after Brexit.

Invited to take part in a BBC News Channel debate on the Brexit talks last year, Roche got into a vitriolic row with a Brexiteer, denounced the UK’s negotiators as useless and earned himself the enmity of the Daily Express. “Europhile Sparks OUTRAGE,” its headline said of him.

Back in Notting Hill, Roche was starting to question his certainties. “Little by little, I realised that Brexit was inevitable and that we had better get on with it. And I started to ask myself: why did I get it so wrong?”

His first surprise was to find out that a “significant number” of people from ethnic minorities had backed the Leave campaign. Noting that “the massive arrival of white Christians [from eastern Europe] has created strong resentment in African and Asian minorities”, he came round to the idea that far from raising racial tensions Brexit could appease them, particularly if Britain adopted modern Canadian-style immigration policies.

He notes that whereas populist politicians are flourishing on the continent the Conservative and Labour parties had 82.4 per cent of the vote in the 2017 general election. “Brexit has killed off populism in Britain,” he concluded.

When he tried to explain this to his French and Belgian friends, he got nowhere. Some thought that the moderate centre-left man they had known had become a far-right supporter, Euroscepticism being the child of the far-right in France. Others took the view that he was cynically exploiting a vacant niche since there was no such thing as a mainstream French commentator promoting a positive view of Brexit.

All were convinced that Britain was heading for disaster. “They all think that there is no life outside the EU and that Britain will go down the drain,” Roche said. “They see me as a heretic. I am Luther.”

Their refusal to listen to him spurred him to delve deeper in the case for Brexit, and he came to accept other Leave arguments, too. British universities, for instance, will thrive on the global academic stage, he predicts, as their French counterparts are held back by egalitarianism and bureaucracy. “Europeans consider that British universities are heading for catastrophe,” he writes. “On the contrary, they are making a new planetary future for themselves.”

The City will do all right. “The lifting of the anchors will enable London to multiply its traditional assets that are time zones, the English language, common law and knowhow in financial engineering.”

It would be wrong to say that he has become a fervent Brexiteer; some aspects of the future he forecasts seem distasteful to him. He says there will be more offshore fiscal evasion, greater inequalities, a rise in Chinese investment and the sort of perfidiousness for which Albion is famous. Britain will promise Brussels to regulate its financial sector and then ignore the rules to attract foreign capital, he says. But in so doing it will offset any economic drawbacks of Brexit. “I say Britain will become a different place, although not necessarily a better place. But it will not collapse and I think that whatever the deal with Brussels it will succeed after Brexit.”

He does not have much affinity with Theresa May — “she is too puritan and too much of the shires to be my cup of tea” — but he has dropped his view that she is useless. “I actually think she’s doing quite a good job in an impossible situation.”

Roche also defends Boris Johnson, who is “hated” and misunderstood in Europe, he says, notably in France. “In France, politics is a serious business and politicians must all be serious. The French are fascinated by Boris Johnson but they just don’t understand how he can clown around in the way he does. They don’t get it.”

The sort of British eccentricity that Mr Johnson epitomises appears odd to Roche, too. He is disconcerted by the “strangeness” of Britain, and mystified as to why the British “can never do anything like anyone else”.

But has he come to like the place, so much so that he applied for nationality. His first application was rejected over an error in his credit card number. “I am sure there was no error, they just wrote it down wrong,” he says. “But there’s no one you can call who will try to help and no one will answer emails. You just have to start again.”

His second application suffered no such hiccoughs. On October 2, Belgian-born, French-speaking Roche will officially become British.

Marc Roche

Curriculum vitae
Born April 5, 1951.
Education Saint-Gilles secondary school, Brussels; Brussels University to read economics; Johns Hopkins University in the US to study international relations; Columbia School of Journalism, New York.
Career Reuters in London, 1979 to 1981; Le Soir, Brussels, as EU correspondent, 1981 to 1982; Le Quotidien de Paris, Washington correspondent, 1982 to 1984; Le Point, London correspondent, 1984 to 1997; Le Monde, City editor in London; 1997 to 2014
Family Partner is an osteopath. They have no children

Quick fire
London or Paris? London, it’s more cosmopolitan, more multicultural, more fun
Macron or May? Theresa May, because of the way she deals with Brexit
Fish and chips or mussels and chips? Fish and chips because I’m allergic to mussels
The Three Lions or The Red Devils [Belgium]? The Red Devils. I still support Belgium in football. Anyway, all the Belgian players play in the Premier League
Punctual or late? Punctual, I’m always on time, like the British
A kiss on both cheeks or a handshake? A handshake

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/the-belgian-denounced-as-a-heretic-for-insisting-brexit-will-be-success-vg5dx38df

looks like that Belgian has turned completely gay and become a Brit in spirit,

what a waste of good Belgian spirit

Originally Posted by PAG

He never imagined that the British would one day discard all that by voting in favour of Brexit; the vote was a bombshell. “I absolutely didn’t see it coming,” said Roche. “I am a financial correspondent and although I had been in the UK for years I didn’t know much about it outside the Square Mile. Whenever I left London, it was to go to New York or to South Africa, not to Derby or Newcastle. I didn’t know anyone who was a Brexiteer, or at least anyone who admitted to being a Brexiteer.”

Originally Posted by PAG

The City will do all right. “The lifting of the anchors will enable London to multiply its traditional assets that are time zones, the English language, common law and knowhow in financial engineering.”

I suspect "The City" will do more than all right. Maybe a clue as to why Roche changed his tune.

Oh dear the Brain dead Amazon worker from Seattle has joined with his conspiracy theory.

Originally Posted by Chico

Oh dear the Brain dead Amazon worker from Seattle has joined with his conspiracy theory.

I work at amazon eh? News to me. If you had more than a double digit IQ you could see that all that graphic does is connect dots. The evidence is fully available to to anyone that has enough intelligence to see it.

6 months to go...

I hope there's no 'deal' and May tells them she ain't paying any monies. Fcuk the EU and all who sail in her.

that's a very positive way to plan for the future

Brexit migration report: 'No preference' for EU workers
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45556246

EU workers coming to the UK should be given "no preference" for visas after Brexit, says a new report.

The Migration Advisory Committee also recommends that it should be easier for higher-skilled workers to migrate to the country.

The report said the fall in the value of the pound after the referendum vote probably raised prices by 1.7 per cent - a larger impact than the effect on wages and employment opportunities from the EU since 2004.

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

I hope there's no 'deal' and May tells them she ain't paying any monies.

From the FT...

If a no-deal Brexit occurred, it would take one of two forms. The first outcome would be where the two sides failed to come to any agreements and the talks ended in acrimony. The UK would spill out of the EU on March 29 2019, guaranteeing chaos on all fronts. It would spell international isolation, as well as a shock to the economy and a political backlash. No competent government could contemplate such an option.

Dominic Raab, eager to make his mark as the new Brexit secretary, says the UK is ready to walk away from negotiations and take off the table its £39bn Brexit divorce payment. He is also ramping up preparations for a no-deal Brexit and will publish more details this week. All this ignores what we have learnt from the negotiations to date. The EU holds the highest cards. On every issue of substance, the UK has folded. Mr Raab might try to mitigate the worst effects of a no-deal exit, by throwing open ports and borders, for example. But Britain would be dependent on the EU’s goodwill to ensure trading continues. Goodwill that, like critical medicine, may be in short supply. Despite Brexiter claims, this is not a rerun of “Project Fear”. Leaving the EU without formal agreements would result in instant, harsh consequences. The UK is not a rogue nation; it respects its financial and legal obligations. This is why it is critical for the UK and EU to strike a sensible deal that serves both sides. A little give and take now is preferable to a calamitous breakdown later.

Yeah, let's just throw a wobbly and basically say 'If you won't lest us win we're not playing, wah wah wah'.

How very sensible.

Originally Posted by cyrille

From the FT...



Yeah, let's just throw a wobbly and basically say 'If you won't lest us win we're not playing, wah wah wah'.

How very sensible.

- We can buy medicines anywhere
- the EU is a net exporter to the UK so Johnny Brussels would be shooting itself in the foot
- It exactly *is* "Project Fear" and just a blatant attempt to get an advantage in negotiations
- It is only prudent to have a fallback "Fuck You" plan ready if the EU tries to deliberately make life difficult out of nothing but spite and resentment

German car manufacturers flexing their muscles now.

The electorate don't givery a fvck about Mini parts,(a once British company).

Sooner we get out the better, No deal all the way!!

Plenty of countries and business already trading and wanting to expand in the UK.

Fvck the EU!

Let's the parasities and beuaracrats sink, the UK has propped up the utopian union of socialist European states for far too long.

These right wing think tanks have reeked havoc in America setting the country back decades all to enrich the few. Do not be foolish enough to let it happen in the UK;

A radical blueprint for a free trade deal between the UK and the US that would see the NHS opened to foreign competition, a bonfire of consumer and environmental regulations and freedom of movement between the two countries for workers, is to be launched by prominent Brexiters.

The blueprint will be seen as significant because of the close links between the organisations behind it and the UK secretary for international trade, Liam Fox, and the US president, Donald Trump.

Its publication follows a week of policy launches by the European Research Group of Conservative MPs designed to pressurise the prime minister into “chucking Chequers”, her softer Brexit proposal, in favour of a harder, clean break from the European Union.

The text of the new trade deal has been prepared by the Initiative for Free Trade (IFT) – a thinktank founded by the longtime Eurosceptic MEP Daniel Hannan, one of the leaders of Vote Leave – and the Cato Institute, a rightwing libertarian thinktank in the US founded and funded by the fossil fuel magnates and major political donors the Koch family.

The “ideal UK-US free trade deal” was due to be launched later on Tuesday in both London and Washington but the Cato Institute appears to have accidentally posted it online early.

The policy initiative was shaped in consultation with a group of other conservative libertarian thinktanks on both sides of the Atlantic, the blueprint explains. These include UK organisations whose funding is opaque, such as the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) and the Adam Smith Institute among others in the UK, and others in the US including the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The authors argue for a free trade agreement that would loosen government controls on capital and data flows and be “more liberalising than any other free trade agreement in the world”. They say that it could become a model for future deals post-Brexit. It would remove tariffs and throw out the precautionary principle that has guided much EU regulation on GM foods, chlorine-washed chicken, hormones in meat, pesticides and chemicals in cosmetics.

The same US thinktanks have been behind developing off-the-shelf policies favoured by big business that were adopted by the Trump administration when it took office. Several policies and staff from the Heritage Foundation were taken into the Trump transition team.

In the UK, the researchers behind the blueprint have had exceptional access to ministers in both the Department for International Trade and the Department for Exiting the European Union, with IEA staff and its head of trade policy, Shanker Singham, meeting Liam Fox, David Davis, Steve Baker and other ministers and special advisers on numerous occasions since the referendum result, government transparency data shows. Fox has given speeches at both the Heritage Foundation and the AEI before and after the referendum.

The IFT itself had a controversial birth last summer. It was initially launched as the Institute for Free Trade but was forced to change its name to the Initiative for Free Trade Ltd following a Companies House investigation that enforced the rule that “institute” may only be used by bodies conducting significant independent research and not by lobby groups. It also came under fire when the then foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, allowed it to use the Foreign Office map room for its launch free of its usual charge for outside bodies. As well as Johnson, prominent hardline cabinet Brexiters Fox and Michael Gove were guests at the launch.

The Foreign Office said that the decision was in line with its usual policy for events supporting the government’s interests but has since changed the policy.

The IEA meanwhile is facing two official investigations after undercover filming by Greenpeace appeared to show that the thinktank was offering potential US donors access to UK government ministers. The Charity Commission announced in July that it had opened an investigation into the IEA over concerns over its independence, and whether it should be registered as a lobbyist rather than a charity. It has previously labelled so-called cash-for-access allegations “spurious” and denied that it breaches charity law, saying: “We do not act in donors’ interests.”

The IFT/Cato Institute free trade deal recognises that its proposals are likely to be unpopular. “Health services would benefit from foreign competition, although we recognise any change to existing regulations would be extremely controversial,” it says.

It recommends testing the waters with foreign competition in education and legal services first.

The proposals are likely to meet fierce opposition from trade experts on the left. Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said: “The measures supported in this paper represent a free trade utopia, entirely divorced from economic reality. The authors view good government as ‘getting out of the way’ of business, and letting profit drive every aspect of our society. If carried out, these policies would destroy huge swathes of our economy, including farming, and they would lay waste to public services.”

A DIT spokesperson said: “We are committed to forging new trading relationships that create jobs, boost our vital industries and benefit people across the whole of the UK. We are currently seeking a wide range of views about four potential free trade agreements, including with the USA, and we encourage all interested organisations and members of the public to make their voices heard through our online consultations.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics...trade-deal-nhs