Thread: Brexit - It's Still On!

John Bercow's Brexit stardom
https://www.bbc.com/news/video_and_a...brexit-stardom

got to watch the next video after it for an explanation of the terms used: order, unlock, ayes and noes, honorable gentleman etc...

very interesting stuff,

the damn witch is going to get her extension, by 1 year though

Brexit: Theresa May to make plea for 30 June delay at EU summit
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-47875923

EU leaders are to meet for an emergency summit in Brussels to decide whether to offer the UK another delay to Brexit.

Prime Minister Theresa May wants to postpone the date the UK leaves the EU beyond this Friday, until 30 June.

But the EU is expected to offer a longer delay, after European Council President Donald Tusk urged the other 27 leaders to back a flexible extension of up to a year - and with conditions.

Every EU member state needs to agree before a delay can be granted.

It's all so pointless as the EU say no renegotiation of the withdrawal agreement and it will never pass parliament as it stands so why the extension. All it is achieves is Doris bringing further humiliation on the UK and all because she has lied and lied and lied.

Originally Posted by buriramboy

It's all so pointless as the EU say no renegotiation of the withdrawal agreement and it will never pass parliament as it stands so why the extension. All it is achieves is Doris bringing further humiliation on the UK and all because she has lied and lied and lied.

I think that will lead to REF2 and probably one of the conditions for the extension

or GE

but her little dance with Parliament no longer works, she is doomed, she is a liability. It's a miracle that her entire cabinet is still there. If they had any integrity, they would have all left.

Originally Posted by NigelFarage

They'll offer whatever is most likely to overturn brexit.

stupid Merkel and her German cars manufacturers is putting the pressure on other EU partners

Even Macron has given up his hard position on the extension, what a farce, they are playing in the hand of the stupid Brits and will fall with them in this futile exercise

The cabinet wont dessert her because they are mainly remainers and the Tory membership wont stand for another coronation of a leader and will demand a vote. And how it works is the Tory mps whittle it down to 2 then the membership gets a vote and they all know a Brexiteer probably Boris will win. So to prevent a Brexiteer becoming PM they have to stick with Doris.

Originally Posted by Dragonfly

the damn witch is going to get her extension, by 1 year though .

9 months as previously stated but with review points. I'm glad i timed my hols so i am back to vote in late May.

Wouldn't surprise me if the Tories dont stand candidates in the Euro elections as they have nothing to gain by participating as they will get wiped out and by not standing they can claim some faux Brexit credentials that as we are leaving no point taking part. The local council elections which i believe happen on the same day will be more interesting though as will have a full compliment of candidates out campaigning.

Originally Posted by buriramboy

Wouldn't surprise me if the Tories dont stand candidates in the Euro elections as they have nothing to gain by participating .

Difficult to see how they could canvass based upon how they've handled the debacle. I think the last in a very long line of straws is the cozying up to Corbyn - that could see them lose in elections both national and local and more worryingly hand the reins to Labour, that truly would f uk the country up and make the scaremongering around No Deal look like letting Jimmy Cranky lead the country.

Anyone who thinks that round robin fake news Lisbon Treaty is clearly to dozy and dimwitted to be trusted with democractic freedoms such as voting on important matter. Just chuck them a coloring page of Tommeh "Ten Names" Robinson or Borris

Originally Posted by Dragonfly

the damn witch is going to get her extension, by 1 year though

Originally Posted by NamPikToot

9 months as previously stated but with review points. I'm glad i timed my hols so i am back to vote in late May.

Six months. October with a review in June.

So they didn't manage to kick the can very far. Is that the final extension?

Will May finally resign and let someone competent take over? October isn't really long enough to have a people's vote or even a GE and get policies through.

May is still on Plan A ...

A Game of Drones. Not to be taken seriously as any outcome is now totally superfluous.

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Six months. October with a review in June.

Hopefully things will be made clearer by the end of May.

Brexiteers....it's not too late to come to your senses. You just need to heed the feelings in your breasts.

I was a strong Brexiteer. Now we must swallow our pride and think again.

It’s nearly three years since I, along with 17. 4 million other Britons, voted for Brexit. Today I have to admit that the Brexit project has gone sour.


Brexit has paralysed the system. It has turned Britain into a laughing stock. And it is certain to make us poorer and to lead to lower incomes and lost jobs.


We Brexiteers would be wise to acknowledge all this. It’s past time we did. We need to acknowledge, too, that that we will never be forgiven if and when Brexit goes wrong. Future generations will look back at what we did and damn us.

So I argue, as a Brexiteer, that we need to take a long deep breath. We need to swallow our pride, and think again. Maybe it means rethinking the Brexit decision altogether.


Certainly it means a delay when we can think about it all in a period of calm. Europe is offering us this opportunity. President Tusk is ready to offer a year’s extension. I say: grab it with both hands.

Ask any psychologist when is the worst time to reach a decision.


They agree that it is when you suffer from exhaustion and emotional collapse. Speaking candidly, that is the state of mind in which most of our MPs and cabinet ministers now find themselves.


And now consider this very sombre thought. We are not talking about a normal decision.

We are talking about arguably the biggest decision with the most momentous long-term consequences made by any British government since the second world war.


It’s a decision which will not just viscerally impact the lives of our children. But also our children’s children.


And their children too.


Indeed, this decision affects each and every one of us. A clumsily executed Brexit will hit us in terms of lower incomes, lost jobs and industries, worse public services and restricted opportunities.



If we are to leave the European Union we want a sensible Brexit. There’s zero chance of that amidst the pandemonium and hysteria at Westminster just now. MPs are at the end of their tether. The cabinet is harrowed and exhausted. I admire the prime minister, think she’s a hero, and have been one of her strong supporters.


But she’s in the last weeks of her premiership.


As the end has come closer she’s turned into a shapeshifter, like the android assassin in the final stages of the second ‘Terminator’ film, moving desperately from one Brexit model to another.


She’s shown immense fortitude and determination which has won her the respect and admiration of decent people.


But there comes a moment in life when determination alone turns to madness. When the wisest and best move is to give up and think again.


I note that matters have been made much worse by Theresa May’s resignation pledge. As night follows day, the cabinet has embarked on a leadership contest, whose result will be decided by 100,000 Conservative Party members. Tory members are good people, and sometimes (writing as a long serving political correspondent who has covered every Conservative conference since 1992) I feel I know every one of them personally.


However, this means that would-be leadership candidates are not thinking of the interests of the nation at large. They are pandering to a tiny electorate, one furthermore which has been infiltrated by UKIP and does not represent the mass of Tory voters, let alone the British people as a whole.

It is practically certain that the next Tory leader will rip up Mrs May’s deal, however sensible and well-intentioned, and then embark on another two-year-long attritional battle with Europe. Does anybody truly want this? And just think what damage will be done to Britain as a nation.

That is why I cannot think of a worse time to make the decision about how to leave Europe. Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, is right. We should grab his kindly offer of a year’s sabbatical.

I’ve heard the argument that people want to get it over with and ‘just leave’. That’s reckless, stupid and could inflict incalculable damage. Matters can get an awful lot worse – more unstable and angrier and far more economically damaging – after we leave the EU. And I write this as someone who voted for Brexit.

If we are honest, we Brexiteers have to admit that the economic arguments for Brexit have been destroyed by a series of shattering blows.


The leading Brexiteers argued during the 2016 campaign that the British economy had been held back by membership of the EU and would survive and flourish on its own. That argument is now unsustainable.


Investment-led growth has collapsed, and we need to stare that undeniable fact squarely in the face. Just look at the events of the early months of this year. They fill me – as they should fill every lover of this country – with anxiety and despair.

Nissan is abandoning its plans to build one of its flagship vehicles at its UK site in Sunderland. In January, the electronics giant Sony announced it was moving its headquarters from London to Amsterdam. Panasonic did the same in August last year.


The Japanese financial firms Nomura, Sumitomo Mitsui and Daiwa have all made clear their intention to move to other European cities. Honda is shutting its plant in Swindon. The news from Airbus (a particularly striking example of a successful pan-European manufacturing operation) is depressing.

The trickle of companies announcing plans to leave Britain has turned into a flood. It is becoming unbearably painful to read the financial news. For political reasons many are careful to blame factors other than Brexit. Do we believe them? Or is too much of a coincidence?


The most wounding insult for Brexiteers came with the announcement that Dyson is to shift its headquarters to Singapore. James Dyson is without a doubt an industrial genius. His insistence that Britain could flourish outside the European Union was held up again and again by Brexiteers. James Dyson was our trump card.

He insists that Brexit is nothing to do with his decision. Nevertheless, he joins a long list of rich men who made the case for Brexit but have no intention of living with the consequences of the 2016 referendum result.


Another case in point concerns Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire industrialist and Brexit apologist, who recently announced that he would be shifting his HQ out of Britain to save tax.


Investment banks in the City are compelling their employees to sign contracts committing them to move to European centres if required. Perhaps we commend them for putting the interests of their clients first, but what does this say about the difficulties financial services in Britain may face? Our economy would be lost without them. The City of London has been one of the motors of British post-war prosperity.

There have been decisions to continue to invest in Britain, and they are welcome. But they are easily outweighed by moves in the opposite direction. The reason for this mass exodus from Britain is easy to understand.


Easy access to Europe was the most important reason why so many important foreign companies chose to invest in this country over the past three or four decades. Investment has come in the shape of both manufacturing and services. The Brexit debate about the customs union vs the single market has revealed how blurred and narrow the distinction between the two has become. They are both massive sources of inward investment and job creation.

I vividly recall the wave of national elation when Margaret Thatcher brought Japanese car manufacturers to the declining north-east of England in the 1980s. This was a turning point in British industrial history. The car industry – in seemingly terminal collapse since the second world war – switched course, beginning a long, sustained revival. It is now undeniable that Britain’s departure from the EU will be another punctuation mark in the history of British manufacturing, only this time a sombre one.

It has become clear to me, though I’ve been a strong Tory Brexiteer, that Britain’s departure from the EU will be as great a disaster for our country as the over-mighty unions were in the 1960s and 1970s.


Indirectly we will all be disadvantaged. The biggest and immediate losers, however, will be working-class people from England’s north-east, who are widely said to support Brexit. Some of them currently enjoy relatively well-paid and secure jobs thanks to foreign investment. A lot of those jobs will slowly vanish.

I can’t help noticing that those most vocal in advocating Brexit are two opposing camps. On the one hand traders in financial assets – in particular hedge-fund managers – relish the speculative opportunities created by Brexit volatility. The city state of Singapore is held up as one economic model. The United States is another. I cannot see that there is any popular desire for us to follow the business and employment cultures of such countries.


On the other side we have the far Left, which wants out of the European Union for the exact opposite reason. The Left sees the EU as a capitalist conspiracy because of the protections it offers for private property and the restraints against centralised economic power, in particular state aid. A very substantial faction around Jeremy Corbyn, including former members of the Communist Party, is looking forward to British departure from the EU because they rightly see that the EU prevents the imposition of socialism.

When hedge-fund managers and the Communist Party see eye-to-eye on any question, it’s time to be concerned.


If Brexiteers are clear-eyed about the economic consequences of Brexit, a further question arises. Do they really think that the economic disruption that lies ahead – along with the serious threat to our own union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – is worth it.

I should explain at this point why I voted for Britain to come out of the European Union. Like millions of others I voted for what I thought were honourable principled reasons.


It’s an exaggeration to say the European Union is anti-democratic, but it is not democratic. This leads to a problem. The politicians operating at a national level are accountable for decisions made in Brussels or Berlin for which they have no responsibility. We have seen a great deal of this over the last ten years. In Italy, Greece and other countries politicians have been obliged to enforce brutal programmes of economic austerity whether they like it or not.

It was never as bad as this in Britain, but some of the same contradictions applied. Politicians and ministers were unable to respond to popular concerns about immigration because membership of the European Union meant they were unable to back words with action. When she was home secretary, Theresa May kept promising to combat the relatively high levels of immigration. The reality was she was powerless to do anything about it.

This has had a noxious effect on our politics in a number of ways. Sometimes politicians make promises that they know they are powerless to deliver. At other times they use Brussels as a whipping-boy for unpopular decisions they would have made in any case. This has created a real problem for democracy across Europe. Not just in Britain.


It has also fanned a resentful belief that decisions are actually made by remote and unaccountable elites. This brings politics itself into disrepute and helps explain the rise of anti-establishment, racist and even neo-fascist political parties right across the European Union.

European leaders have not faced up to the tension between a dogmatic political centre, and unruly and indignant dissent from the periphery. They must. The invisible ropes that bind nations to those who rule them have grown ever more taut. Our politicians should wake up and accept they are in danger of snapping.


Part of me, therefore, still feels proud of Brexit. Well done Britain for challenging remote oligarchs based in Brussels.

For me, however, and I am sure for many people, the last 30 months of very bitter and angry debate has cut me in two. I have come to see that this is not just a simple problem of whether or not we are patriots.


Both Remainers and Brexiteers love Britain with equal strength and sincerity. Remainers are not citizens of nowhere, as the Brexiteer insult goes. Nor are Brexiteers ignorant, closet racists, as, disgracefully, some Remainers like to sneer.


Many who voted Leave have a deep – perhaps the deepest – understanding of the communities where they live; and in some of these, everyday life has been spoiled for many by policies imposed on them by a pro-European Westminster elite: policies they never voted for.

The truth is these apparently warring parties, Remain and Leave, represent different elements of the same country and opposite sides of the same coin. Sometimes the war is within our own breasts. I feel it within mine.

Full piece here:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ope...d-think-again/

So that's 17.4 million minus 1.

Awesome.

If it had been a general election then the winning side's credibility would be shredded, and they would be heading for certain defeat in the next election.

That's a strong point imo.

Certainly much stronger than his claims that he knows some intelligent Brexiteers, but he'd never considered the effect of Brexit on the union.

We've become so used to prevarication and outright lies from Brexiteer politicians that it's worth remembering the claims from the likes of Lying Liam.

Originally Posted by Neverna

So that's 17.4 million minus 1.

Awesome.

Tell us again how many days are left before Brexit..

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Six months. October with a review in June.

what a total farce, the EU gave up without even hearing May new justification (she didn't have any)

the unity is a front, a posture, this whole Brexit affair is also dividing the EU27 with Merkel worried about her campaign sponsors, that is the car manufacturers

Originally Posted by lom

Tell us again how many days are left before Brexit..

With all the useless cnuts and traitors in the UK parliament, your guess is as good as mine.

Originally Posted by Troy

So they didn't manage to kick the can very far. Is that the final extension?

Will May finally resign and let someone competent take over? October isn't really long enough to have a people's vote or even a GE and get policies through.

May is still on Plan A ...

indeed, why not give her enough time to organize a REF2 or GE? Incidentally, this is is the same date Juncker is out of a job

6 more months of torturing, maybe that's the point, another 6 months of torture for invoking A50

You guys are never going to leave !!!

Brexit: UK and EU agree delay to 31 October
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-47889404

Analysis
Laura Kuenssberg
Political editor

You couldn't quite make it up. The new Brexit deadline is, you guessed it, Halloween.

So to get all the terrible metaphors about horror shows, ghosts and ghouls out of the way right now, let's consider straight away some of the reasons why this decision is a treat in one sense, but could be a trick too.

A treat? First and most importantly, the EU has agreed to put the brakes on. We will not leave tomorrow without a deal.

The prime minister's acceptance that leaving the EU without a formal arrangement in place could be a disaster won out.

And there are quite a few potential tricks. This new October deadline might not solve very much at all.

This could, although I hate to say it, just make way for months of extra gridlock before the UK and the EU find themselves back here in a similar situation in the autumn.

Read Laura's blog here

Apparently Macron won the day by getting a shorter extension, right

full of shit, that's what they are, claiming one thing, and doing the opposite

Maybot won again,

Originally Posted by Dragonfly

Apparently Macron won the day by getting a shorter extension, right

Madam decided it was the best for France, Macron himself wouldn't know.