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  1. #51
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    Quote Originally Posted by buriramboy View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by DrB0b View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by buriramboy
    EU position is totally childish and stupid in trying to get agreement on the border while refusing to discuss trade and customs agreements, for the simple reason you can't have a border agreement when you don't know what the customs arrangement is going to be
    It's very simple. Britain has been asked several times how they are going to deal with the EU land border. They have not provided a workable answer.
    You are a native English speaker are you not? The EU is refusing to discuss customs arrangements until the border arrangement is sorted. But as the UK has rightly pointed out to the simple EU negotiaters you can't sort out the border until you sort out the customs arrangements that they are refusing to discuss. I'm really not sure what it is about this that you are struggling to understand. Pretty simple stuff.
    You're not sure what the issue is? The issue is this



    The Irish border is NOT the same as any other EU border.
    The Above Post May Contain Strong Language, Flashing Lights, or Violent Scenes.

  2. #52
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    Quote Originally Posted by buriramboy View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by DrB0b View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by buriramboy
    Please explain how you can sort out the border arrangement when you don't know what sort of customs arrangement you are going to have?
    You can't and that's exactly the point he's making!
    He not making any point, he's just spouting his usual gibberish. So then if you're agreed that you can't sort out the border until you've sorted out the customs arrangements then why are the idiotic EU refusing to discuss trade and customs arrangements until the border is sorted? Is it sinking in yet, as I know the actual reality of the situation is a bit hard to grasp for remoaners.
    Christ are you ESN or what?

    The Maybot has again announced that they are going to leave the single market and scrap the customs agreements on the 31st March 2019. Ok? We know now. Two systems side by fucking side. A border separating two sovereign states, each operating different policies on migration and commerce. Now, the Irish and the EU, and the fucking English, know what the systems are on the Irish side. But the Irish don't know what the British system will be because of two fucking reasons, 1) They don't fucking know and 2) There is no government currently in power capable of developing a policy.

    But in some half-arsed way the British are seeking to use the Irish question as a bargaining chip in getting the EU to agree the British can cherry-pick and enjoy any and all EU membership rights while they arrange other deals elsewhere BUT AT NO EXPENSE TO THE BRITISH AND WITHOUT ANY OVERSIGHT BY THE ECJ AND AT THE SAME TIME THEY RESERVE THE RIGHT TO STOP ANY FREE MOVEMENT THAT OCCURS TO THEM ON 30 March 2019.

    No fucking wonder the Irish PM is hopping mad. He has said that if there is not a detailed negotiation within a reasonable time in which the British disclose their plans fully he is going to veto any fucking plan the Maybot comes up with by 2019 and the sclerotic bitch will have to resign leaving the whole kit and caboodle in chaos.

  3. #53
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    The six Brexit traps that will defeat Theresa May


    Two years ago Yanis Varoufakis led Greece’s failed attempt to negotiate with the EU. He explains how the Brussels establishment will do everything to frustrate and outmanoeuvre the British prime minister, using tactics ranging from truth reversal to ‘the Penelope ruse’

    “It’s yours against mine.” That’s how Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, put it to me during our first encounter in early 2015 – referring to our respective democratic mandates.

    A little more than two years later, Theresa May is trying to arm herself with a clear democratic mandate ostensibly to bolster her negotiating position with European powerbrokers – including Schäuble – and to deliver the optimal Brexit deal.

    Already, the Brussels-based commentariat are drawing parallels: “Brits fallen for Greek fallacy that domestic vote gives you stronger position in Brussels. Other countries have voters too,” tweeted Duncan Robinson, Brussels correspondent of the Financial Times. “Yep,” tweeted back Miguel Roig, the Brussels correspondent of Spanish financial daily Expansión. “Varoufakis’ big miscalculation was to think that he was the only one in the Eurogroup with a democratic mandate.”

    In truth, Brussels is a democracy-free zone.

    From the EU’s inception in 1950, Brussels became the seat of a bureaucracy administering a heavy industry cartel, vested with unprecedented law-making capacities.

    Even though the EU has evolved a great deal since, and acquired many of the trappings of a confederacy, it remains in the nature of the beast to treat the will of electorates as a nuisance that must be, somehow, negated.

    The whole point of the EU’s inter-governmental organisation was to ensure that only by a rare historical accident would democratic mandates converge and, when they did, never restrain the exercise of power in Brussels.

    In June 2016, Britain voted, for better or for worse, for Brexit.

    May suddenly metamorphosed from a soft remainer to a hard Brexiteer. In so doing she is about to fall prey to an EU that will frustrate and defeat her, pushing her into either a humiliating climb-down or a universally disadvantageous outcome.

    When the Brussels-based group-thinking commentariat accuse Britain’s prime minister, without a shred of evidence, of overestimating the importance of a strong mandate, we need to take notice, for it reveals the determination of the EU establishment to get its way, as it did when I arrived on its doorstep, equipped with my mandate.


    When I first went to Brussels and Berlin, as Greece’s freshly elected finance minister, I brought with me a deep appreciation of the clash of mandates.

    I said as much in a joint press conference with Schäuble in 2015, pledging that my proposals for an agreement between Greece and the EU would be “aimed not at the interest of the average Greek but at the interest of the average European”.

    A few days later, in my maiden speech at the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers, I argued: “We must respect established treaties and processes without crushing the fragile flower of democracy with the sledgehammer that takes the form of statements such as ‘Elections do not change anything’.” May will, I presume, go to Brussels with a similar appreciation.

    When Schäuble welcomed me with his “it is my mandate against yours” doctrine, he was honouring a long EU tradition of neglecting democratic mandates in the name of respecting them.

    Like all dangerous hypotheses, it is founded on an obvious truth: the voters of one country cannot give their representative a mandate to impose upon other governments conditions that the latter have no mandate, from their own electorate, to accept.

    But, while this is a truism, its incessant repetition by Brussels functionaries and political powerbrokers, such as Angela Merkel and Schäuble himself, is intended to convert it surreptitiously into a very different notion: no voters in any country can empower their government to oppose Brussels.

    There is a long EU tradition of neglecting democratic mandates in the name of respecting them
    For all their concerns with rules, treaties, processes, competitiveness, freedom of movement, terrorism etc, only one prospect truly terrifies the EU’s deep establishment: democracy.

    They speak in its name to exorcise it, and suppress it by six innovative tactics, as May is about to discover.


    The EU runaround.

    Henry Kissinger famously quipped that when he wanted to consult Europe, he did not know whom to call. In my case it was worse. Any attempt to enter into a meaningful discussion with Schäuble was blocked by his insistence that I “go to Brussels” instead.

    Once in Brussels, I soon discovered that the commission was so divided as to make discussions futile. In private talks, Commissioner Moscovici would agree readily and with considerable enthusiasm with my proposals. But then his deputy in the so-called Eurogroup Working Group, Declan Costello, would reject all these ideas out of hand.

    The uninitiated may be excused for thinking that this EU runaround is the result of incompetence. While there is an element of truth in this, it would be the wrong diagnosis.

    The runaround is a systemic means of control over uppity governments. A prime minister, or a finance minister, who wants to table proposals that the deep establishment of the EU dislike is simply denied the name of the person to speak to or the definitive telephone number to call. As for its apparatchiks, the EU runaround is essential to their personal status and power.



    Picking opponents.

    From my first Eurogroup, its president, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister, began an intensive campaign to bypass me altogether. He would phone Alexis Tsipras, my prime minister, directly – even visiting him in his hotel room in Brussels. By hinting at a softer stance if Tsipras agreed to spare him from having to deal with me, Dijsselbloem succeeded in weakening my position in the Eurogroup – to the detriment, primarily, of Tsipras.

    The Swedish national anthem routine

    On the assumption that good ideas encourage fruitful dialogue and can be the solvents of impasse, my team and I worked hard to put forward proposals based on serious econometric work and sound economic analysis.

    Once these had been tested on some of the highest authorities in their fields, from Wall Street and the City to top-notch academics, I would take them to Greece’s creditors in Brussels, Berlin and Frankfurt. Then I would sit back and observe a symphony of blank stares. It was as if I had not spoken, as if there was no document in front of them.

    It would be evident from their body language that they denied the very existence of the pieces of paper I had placed before them. Their responses, when they came, would be perfectly independent of anything I had said. I might as well have been singing the Swedish national anthem. It would have made no difference.

    The Penelope ruse

    Delaying tactics are always used by the side that considers the ticking clock its ally. In Homer, Odysseus’ faithful wife, Penelope, fends off aggressive suitors in her husband’s absence by telling them that she will announce whom among them she will marry only after she has completed weaving a burial shroud for Laertes, Odysseus’ father. During the day she would weave incessantly but at night she would undo her work by pulling on a loose string.

    In my negotiations in Brussels, the EU’s Penelope ruse consisted, primarily, of endless requests for data, for fact-finding missions to Athens, for information about every bank account held by every public organisation or company. And when they got the data, like the good Penelope, they would spend all night undoing the spreadsheets that they had put together during the day.

    Truth reversal

    While practising the Swedish national anthem and Penelope ruse tactics, the Brussels establishment utilised tweets, leaks and a campaign of disinformation involving key nodes in the Brussels media network to spread the word that I was the one wasting time, arriving at meetings empty-handed; either with no proposals at all or with proposals that lacked quantification, consisting only of empty ideological rhetoric.

    Sequencing

    The prerequisite for Greece’s recovery was, and remains, meaningful debt relief. No debt relief meant no future for us.

    My mandate was to negotiate, therefore, a sensible debt restructure.

    If the EU was prepared to do this, so as to get as much of their money back as possible, I was also prepared for major compromises. But this would require a comprehensive deal.

    But, no, Brussels and Berlin insisted that, first, I commit to the compromises they wanted and then, much later, we could begin negotiations on debt relief. The point-blank refusal to negotiate on both at once is, I am sure, a colossal frustration awaiting May when she seeks to compromise on the terms of the divorce in exchange for longer-term free trade arrangements.

    So what can Theresa May do?

    The only way May could secure a good deal for the UK would be by diffusing the EU’s spoiling tactics, while still respecting the Burkean Brexiteers’ strongest argument, the imperative of restoring sovereignty to the House of Commons. And the only way of doing this would be to avoid all negotiations by requesting from Brussels a Norway-style, off-the-shelf arrangement for a period of, say, seven years.

    The benefits from such a request would be twofold: first, Eurocrats and Europhiles would have no basis for denying Britain such an arrangement. (Moreover, Schäuble, Merkel and sundry would be relieved that the ball is thrown into their successors’ court seven years down the track.) Second, it would make the House of Commons sovereign again by empowering it to debate and decide upon in the fullness of time, and without the stress of a ticking clock, Britain’s long-tem relationship with Europe.



    The fact that May has opted for a Brexit negotiation that will immediately activate the EU’s worst instincts and tactics, for petty party-political reasons that ultimately have everything to do with her own power and nothing to do with Britain’s optimal agreement with the EU, means only one thing: she does not deserve the mandate that Brussels is keen to neutralise.

    This is an adapted extract from Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment by Yanis Varoufakis published by The Bodley Head.
    i find it hard to disagree with anything in the above article.

    dealing with the eu behemoth is a lost cause, they seek only to obfuscate and annoy.

    a norway agreement would be the most logical plan, and its probably what that despicable cuunt corbyn has got in mind

  4. #54
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    Quote Originally Posted by taxexile View Post


    This is an adapted extract from Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment by Yanis Varoufakis published by The Bodley Head.
    i find it hard to disagree with anything in the above article.

    dealing with the eu behemoth is a lost cause, they seek only to obfuscate and annoy.

    a norway agreement would be the most logical plan, and its probably what that despicable cuunt corbyn has got in mind[/QUOTE]




    That you are now informed by the mytherings of a slimy self-serving, fraudulent, hypocritical, lying Greek dissembling, chicken-eviscerating, snake oil peddler comes as no surprise to me these days, Tax. The spirochetes seem to be eating away at your cerebellum with ever-increasing vigour.

    The Norway agreement isn't on the table i don't think not least because it was only ever seen as a half-way measure leading to full membership and a concession to the Norwegians out of pragmatism.

    No, the British have fucked themselves and they must pay for their chosen chaos. The crazies have won the day and they have insisted a hard brexit is the way to go.

    Those body bags will be flying back to Brize Norton in no time and the £ will be 80C Euro and 90cents US.

    but at least that raddled old desiccated sclerotic harridan May will be gone.

    That'll be nice - Johnson or Rees-Mogg in Opposition?

  5. #55
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    it was only ever seen as a half away house leading top full membership and a concession to the the Norwegians out of pragmatism.
    ...and it is eminently suitable as a half way house leading to a complete and pragmatically arranged exit.

    there is a long way to go yet.

  6. #56
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    Quote Originally Posted by taxexile View Post
    it was only ever seen as a half away house leading top full membership and a concession to the the Norwegians out of pragmatism.
    ...and it is eminently suitable as a half way house leading to a complete and pragmatically arranged exit.

    there is a long way to go yet.
    There is only a year and a half to go. It took 32 years for Norway to arrive at its current relationship with the EU. The EEA, which is what the so-called Norway Arrangement refers to, is founded on the "Four Freedoms" of the EU (BTW, Norway's membership has nothing to do with aspiring to full membership - quite the opposite). All EEA states subscribe to those four freedoms. Those four freedoms are specifically what were voted AGAINST in the Brexit referendum.

  7. #57
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    I quite agree Tax, but the crazies have taken over the Tory party and they are in a hurry to seize power and stage their coup - remember the whole point of the Great Repeal Bill is to ensure that they can govern by committee and statutory instrument without recourse to parliamentary debate or vote.

    These are serious matters but it seems that some Tories are beginning to see it as anathema to our form of parliamentary democracy. I prefer to call it the way it is, a bunch of fucking nazis seizing power to enrich themselves and their vested interests for the foreseeable.

  8. #58
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    The issues at hand are that the EU have stated that the priorities to be dealt with before discussing any trade arrangements are the exit costs for the UK, Citizen's Rights, and the Irish Border. The British Government, through David Davis, agreed to this. The British are now trying to welsh on this agreement.

  9. #59
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    Quote Originally Posted by DrB0b View Post
    The issues at hand are that the EU have stated that the priorities to be dealt with before discussing any trade arrangements are the exit costs for the UK, Citizen's Rights, and the Irish Border. The British Government, through David Davis, agreed to this. The British are now trying to welsh on this agreement.
    What you describe as 'welshing' others see as realising how stupid and infantile the EU stance is on the Irish border. Even the dumbest brainwashed Europhile must realise that a customs arrangement needs agreeing on before can sort out the Irish border. On the plus side hopefully this will be a catalyst for Irish reunion, the whole of Ireland can remain in the EU and everyone is happy bar a few draconian unionists.

  10. #60
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    Quote Originally Posted by buriramboy
    everyone is happy bar a few draconian unionists
    Those draconian unionists are currently propping up the British government. Had that slipped your mind?

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    Quote Originally Posted by buriramboy View Post

    On the plus side hopefully this will be a catalyst for Irish reunion, the whole of Ireland can remain in the EU and everyone is happy bar a few draconian unionists.
    And this is as likely as you renewing your vows with your former wife.

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    Manufacturers: UK growth to suffer without EU workers
    Uncertainty about the ability of British firms to recruit skilled workers from the EU after Brexit threatens to damage the UK economy and curb growth, according to EEF, a group that represents manufacturers. Since the UK voted to pull out of the EU, job applications from EU workers have fallen and more European workers are leaving their jobs in the UK, the group said.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business...-manufacturers

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    Labour backs keeping UK in European single market for transition
    In a sharp reversal of its previous position, Britain's opposition Labour Party said it wants the UK to remain in the European single market and customs union during a transitional period that would last "as long as necessary." The shift puts Labour in direct conflict with Prime Minister Theresa May's Conservative Party-led coalition government.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...nsitional-deal

  14. #64
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    Here's a revolutionary idea maybe firms could start investing and training their own workers instead of employing cheap foreign Labour. Can't believe no one has thought of this before..........

  15. #65
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dragonfly
    Manufacturers: UK growth to suffer without EU workers
    The EU workers are being replaced by many UKraine workers. And there will be much more coming and welcome... (beside the ones who decided to work for dangerous Mr. Putin)

  16. #66
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    It would appear the Tories are in a bit of a pickle with this Brexit means Brexit tomfoolery. For all intents and purposes they want to stay within the EU whilst being able to tell Joe Public that they have left.

    Perhaps it would be better if every EU country left the EU and they all joined a new club with the same trading benefits ruled by the same courts and with the same freedom of movement. Let's call it the UE, or maybe the USE....and then Brexit will be Brexit and Boris will have got his cake and eaten it.

    May still needs to be dealt with, using a very big stick and preferably very hot at one end.

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    today I went to visit the ECB in Frankfurt during my business/whoring trip

    I see a lot of potential in Frankfurt for Brexit

  18. #68
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    Some bad news for the doom and gloom types.


    Aston Martin announces £500m UK-Japan deal


    Aston Martin announces £500m UK-Japan deal - BBC News

  19. #69
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dragonfly View Post
    today I went to visit the ECB in Frankfurt during my business/whoring trip

    I see a lot of potential in Frankfurt for Brexit
    What does that say about Paris though if companies are choosing Frankfurt over it?

  20. #70
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    Quote Originally Posted by buriramboy View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Dragonfly View Post
    today I went to visit the ECB in Frankfurt during my business/whoring trip

    I see a lot of potential in Frankfurt for Brexit
    What does that say about Paris though if companies are choosing Frankfurt over it?
    what does have to do with the price of coffee

  21. #71
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    Quote Originally Posted by taxexile
    This is an adapted extract from Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment by Yanis Varoufakis published by The Bodley Head.
    Well worth a read/listen to.

  22. #72
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dragonfly View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by buriramboy View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Dragonfly View Post
    today I went to visit the ECB in Frankfurt during my business/whoring trip

    I see a lot of potential in Frankfurt for Brexit
    What does that say about Paris though if companies are choosing Frankfurt over it?
    what does have to do with the price of coffee
    Probably cheaper in Frankfurt hence Paris isn't going to get all the financial institutions relocating there it thought it would. Bit of a sad indictment of Paris if multi nationals choosing Frankfurt over it.

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    Looks like another week of negotiations have gone by without any concrete achievements. UK civil servants getting their expenses while they still can is about all that happened.

    The EU will not allow the UK to take the piss and the UK hasn't quite realised their position papers are taking the piss.

    Boris and friends need to supply some cake....

  24. #74
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    Quote Originally Posted by Troy View Post
    Looks like another week of negotiations have gone by without any concrete achievements. UK civil servants getting their expenses while they still can is about all that happened.

    The EU will not allow the UK to take the piss and the UK hasn't quite realised their position papers are taking the piss.

    Boris and friends need to supply some cake....
    Errrm it's the other way around, the UK is not going to let the EU take the piss as in we won't be paying their extortionate divorce fee which those silly continentals seem quite surprised and shocked at. Maybe it's just starting to slowly sink in that we are quite prepared to walk away with no deal if the EU continue to be fuktards.

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    as usual, Brits are not paying their financial committement

    how can anyone take them seriously?

    of course nobody, except filthy Indians and greedy Chinese

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