Thread: Brexit - It's Still On!

Kemi battered again.

'Oh dear!'

From the day Britain left the EU, this reset was inevitable. What a pointless waste of time, money and effort | Simon Jenkins | The Guardian

Simon Jenkins

Keir Starmer is not blameless when it comes to Brexit, but he is moving in the right direction. Even the Tories attacking him know that.

For the Tories to attack Keir Starmer’s first step towards a Brexit reset is monumental hypocrisy. Their Brexit led to £4.7bn being spent on implementing post-EU border arrangements, according to the National Audit Office, including a vastly expensive “take back control” border post at Sevington in Kent. No other country in the world can have erected such ludicrous barriers against its biggest trading partners. All are now wasted. At least the nonsense can stop. Memorial plaques to Boris Johnson should be pinned to their gates and passersby invited to sign a 50-page customs form in his memory.


Meanwhile, Starmer should hang his own head in shame. He was Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit henchman back in 2019, when Labour voted down Theresa May’s bid to negotiate a soft Brexit deal that would certainly have gone beyond what was signed this week. It was Starmer who helped to scotch at least a possible Commons coalition against hard Brexit and in favour of sanity. It was Corbyn and Starmer who could have stifled five years of the greatest act of self-harm by a British government since the Great Depression.

After the British public voted to leave the EU in 2016, the main reason they gave pollsters was immigration. There was little evidence of opposition to EU trade or membership of Europe’s wider economic community. So-called hard Brexit was adopted entirely by Johnson and those round him as a tool to oust May from Downing Street. Mendacious garbage was issued by his campaigners to claim it would benefit Britain. Public interest was hijacked by power.

The outcome was and is glaring. All serious estimates, official and unofficial, accept that Brexit has made Britain poorer to the tune of tens of billions of pounds. The result can be seen in slowed growth and worse public services. There is not a remote chance of recouping the losses in the foreseeable future. Deals reached with Australia, India and the US cannot begin to redress the harm of hard Brexit.


This week’s political reaction to Starmer’s deal was absurd. The UK’s negotiating strength with the EU was crippled by Brexit. Of course Britain must sign up to EU food standards if it really wants to trade. The EU is the bigger market, as is the US. Of course extended fishing rights for European fleets is a concession, though it reflects a concession already made by Johnson. So too is freer movement for Europe’s young people. Does Nigel Farage really regard this as “abject surrender”? Does he really want to keep open the Sevington border checkpoint and ban e-gate use at airports? Unwilling to put his case to Starmer in the Commons this week, he scurried through an e-gate for a holiday, apparently in France. To him, Brexit has always been a game.

I once opposed EU membership as I thought on balance that a looser free trade area, like the European Free Trade Association, was more in line with Britain’s place in the world. In retrospect, I was wrong. The stability of western Europe over the past half a century has vindicated British membership. Margaret Thatcher was right to negotiate the 1986 single market agreement, but John Major was right at Maastricht to avoid greater union, as was Tony Blair to avoid the euro. Throughout history, Britain’s relations with Europe have always been best when semi-detached.


Since Brexit, two changes should now influence the debate. First, the issue of immigration is consuming all of Europe, desperately requiring international cooperation. The EU’s internal borders have begun to harden and the open door of Schengen has begun to close. Within Britain, the overwhelming majority of annual immigrants are legal, authorised with government visas for work or study. Recruiting immigrants to the labour force was Tory policy. How Brexit was ever expected to reduce this is a mystery.

Meanwhile, and despite public feeling on immigration, polls show a strong majority now regrets Brexit, with 55% of Britons saying it was wrong compared with the 52% of those who voted supporting it nine years ago. Just three in 10 people now approve of Britain having left the EU. People realise they were lied to. British companies can only “take control” of trading by not trading.

That realisation has now been curbing not just farming and food, but manufacturing, services, academic and cultural exchange, and tourism. Even orchestras have had to stop touring. Other European states outside the EU have not so isolated themselves. Hard Brexit was xenophobic, economically illiterate and narrow-minded. I am sure most public figures who supported it, for whatever reason, know this is true but lack the guts to admit it.


From the day Brexit arrived, the laborious reset process that began this week was inevitable. When public opinion is allied to economics and common sense, something has to give. But it will be slow. The EU owes Britain nothing for its behaviour over the past decade.

An apology from the Brexit lobby is too much to hope for. Silence might be a relief. Meanwhile, Starmer should mean what he says: that this is only a first step. We don’t have to “undo Brexit” – at least in this generation – but we must re-establish civil and commercial relations with the continent of which we are a part. An appalling mistake was made. It awaits correction.

What a pointless waste.

President Donald Trump plans to hit the European Union with a massive 50pc tariff on all goods it sends to the US, starting on June 1.

Mr Trump berated the EU as “very difficult to deal with”, and said US negotiations with Brussels to avoid a transatlantic trade war were “going nowhere”.

The president’s unexpected escalation would appear to cover the entire $600bn (£447bn) flow of goods exports from the EU to America. It would likely provoke more than €95bn (£80bn) of EU retaliatory measures.

Mr Trump seems to have lost patience with Brussels, after reports in recent days suggesting Washington was unhappy with the offer that European negotiators had tabled. The two sides have been negotiating a climbdown from Mr Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariff salvo of April 2. This added a 20pc EU-specific tariff to his “baseline” 10pc tariff, but was later paused for 90 days.

Mr Trump made his announcement in a post on his online platform Truth Social, in which he resurfaced his full list of grievances with Brussels: the EU’s large trade surplus with the US, its trade barriers, value-added tax, legal and regulatory action against US companies, “ridiculous corporate penalties” and “monetary manipulations”.

“The European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States on TRADE, has been very difficult to deal with,” he wrote.

“Our discussions with them are going nowhere! Therefore, I am recommending a straight 50pc tariff on the European Union, starting on June 1, 2025. There is no Tariff if the product is built or manufactured in the United States.”

A European Commission spokesman said Brussels would not be commenting until after senior trade officials from both sides had spoken to each other.

another one to add to starmer’s list of ‘triumphs’ this week.



1/ betrayed the brexit referendum

2/ betrayed fishermen

3/ betrayed chagossians

4/ betrayed britains strategic military position

5/ betrayed jews

6/ emboldened antisemites

7/ given WHO jurisdiction over our future lockdowns

8/ betrayed justice (Lucy Connely)

9/ reopened EU free movement

10/ shackling us to the EU freeloaders five days before trump announces 50% tariffs on them.

^ Starmer is undoing some of the damage caused by Brexit. Damage that both the Tories and Labour shamefully failed to prevent in the first place.
Johnson, Gove and Farage should have been locked up for fraud. They cheated UK citizens with their lies and deceit.

I fail to understand why people like you, tax, fail to see the obvious.

Dumbest thing the UK ever did..

in these times of dwindling resources, overpopulation, cheap goods from the east and financial problems, every nation is trying to achieve what is best for itself.

in an ideal world, co-operation between countries, eg. the eu, would and should be the answer. but that does not take into account human nature, where patriotism, nationalism, survival, self interest, and seeking an advantage are the rules. its politics.

every country wants a bigger slice of an ever decreasing cake.

i believe that the uk is better off out of europe, making it own way in the world without being subjected to the ever increasing bureaucracy and political in fighting imposed on its members by brussels in its attempts to level the playing fields and impose "fairness" on 27 countries with different cultures, economies, needs and personalities.

the different flavours of diversity, be it racial, religious or sexual and even the diversity of the cultures, economic needs and aspirations of european countries mean that one size can never fit all, the result being disharmony, dissatisfaction and politicisation especially in times of conflict, need and uncertainty.

the brexit vote was won by a narrow margin, which left the country terribly divided, and the advantages offered by independence were not seized upon, thanks to poor governance, objection, confusion ,the appearance of covid, and the intractability of both sides when trying to negotiate the rules of leaving.

starmer, is a weak leader, who spends more time doing his hair than running the country, has always believed in the eu, and now seeks to take us back in. the deal he has arranged will just make us even more subservient to brussels than we were before. it will turn out to be a very expensive mistake with few benefits. i believe we should be in control of our own destiny, and not a bit player in a failing union, increasingly arguing amongst itself, in a continent with a war on its doorstep instigated by a psychopathic madman that could very easily spread westwards.

for so many reasons, this is no time for the uk to get cosy with the eu. trade with it by all means. sell to it and buy from it, exchange knowledge
and make travel easier, of course, but we dont need to sign up to agreements and laws that could hamstring us for years to come.

Originally Posted by Troy

Starmer is undoing some of the damage caused by Brexit. Damage that both the Tories and Labour shamefully failed to prevent in the first place.
Johnson, Gove and Farage should have been locked up for fraud. They cheated UK citizens with their lies and deceit.

I fail to understand why people like you, tax, fail to see the obvious.

Dumbest thing the UK ever did..

"Even though Boris was somewhat involved"

"Well, we look like a stupid country anyway"

I don't know why it's taken Labour 18 months to call out BoJo's 'oven ready' deal for the horrendous turkey that it is.


Nothing else has worked – so Starmer and Reeves are finally telling the truth about Brexit | Rafael Behr | The Guardian


The UK government is trying out a new Brexit stance, not to be mistaken for a change in policy. The shift is tonal.

Previously, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves talked about Britain’s detachment from the rest of Europe as a feature of the natural landscape, awkward to navigate perhaps, but nobody’s fault. Now they are prepared to say it is an affliction.

Speaking at a regional investment conference on Tuesday, the chancellor listed Brexit alongside the pandemic and austerity as causes of persistent economic lethargy. She made the same point at a meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington last weekend, observing that the country’s “productivity challenge has been compounded by the way in which the UK left the European Union”.

It was a careful formula, diagnosing harm not in Brexit itself, but in the manner of its implementation; blaming the politicians who did it, not the ordinary people who willed it. Reeves needs that distinction to be clear when she delivers her budget next month. She wants to attribute some of her grim fiscal predicament to a bad deal that Boris Johnson negotiated, without appearing to denigrate the aspirations of leave voters.

The economic argument is settled in the eyes of people who care about evidence. The Office for Budget Responsibility calculates that Britain’s long-term productivity is 4% lower than it would have been if the country had retained EU membership.

Alongside the cost of new trade friction, there was a sustained hit to business investment caused by political tumult and regulatory uncertainty. There was also the opportunity cost incurred by all the government’s energy being spent on a task for which no one was prepared because none of the people who thought it was a good idea had seriously considered what might be involved in making it happen.

When the facts are incontrovertible, officials struggle to affect political neutrality. Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, told last week’s IMF gathering that he took “no position per se” on Brexit before giving his judgment that its impact on growth will be negative “for the foreseeable future”.

He anticipated a mild corrective rebalancing in the longer term, which isn’t much use to a chancellor who needs to plug a huge revenue shortfall before Christmas. Taxes are going up, and Reeves wants everyone to know that Brexit is one of the reasons.

The point is worth making because it is true. That doesn’t mean there will be much political benefit for saying it. The same truth was available when Reeves delivered last autumn’s tax-raising budget and in last summer’s general election campaign, which Labour fought in wilful denial of the certainty that taxes would go up.

At this stage, when the government is neither new nor popular, exposition of the causes of economic pain sounds to most voters like making excuses for failure. There might be more mileage in blaming the Tories for everything if the Conservatives were the only alternative to the government and a halfway credible threat. “We’re clearing up the other lot’s mess, don’t let them back in” is the classic incumbent campaign in a two-party contest. The rise of Reform UK complicates the picture.

There isn’t much difference between the policy agendas of the two parties, but voters don’t notice ideological affinity as much as personal rivalry. People who are drawn to Nigel Farage because they have lost faith in the system, especially when it comes to immigration control, don’t recognise Reform and the Tories as sibling parties. One has a proven record of letting millions of foreigners into the country, and the other doesn’t – a difference Farage will not tire of pointing out.

He is less eager to talk about Brexit, partly because it is a legacy he has to share with Conservatives and partly because there is nothing positive to show for his role in it. If pressed, the Reform leader will argue that the heroic liberation dream was traduced by cowardice in the implementation, but even that defence puts him in complicity with disappointment. Simpler to change the subject.

This is why Labour feels more confident raising it. Starmer’s party conference speech last month was a turning point. The prime minister had previously talked about Britain and Europe only in the driest, technocratic terms. He had a project to “reset” the relationship, but its focus was uncontroversial barriers to trade – customs checks on food imports, for example – steering well clear of the fissile cultural matter at the radioactive core of Britain’s post-referendum meltdown.

Starmer didn’t exactly replay old remainer anthems to his activist audience in Liverpool, but he hinted that he remembers the words. He referred to “Brexit lies on the side of that bus” – a reference to leave campaign claims about reallocating Brussels budget payments to the NHS – in the context of “snake oil” peddled by politicians whose simplistic solutions exacerbate the nation’s problems.

Departure from the EU was ranked alongside Covid as traumas ordinary folk have had to endure in recent years. Comparing Brexit to a horrible disease indicates a stiffening of rhetorical posture, even if the economic remedies currently being negotiated in Brussels haven’t changed.

The goal is to connect Farage to a famous case of political mis-selling, from which it follows that he cannot be trusted; that he exploits discontent and sows division, but hasn’t a clue how to govern effectively.

This week’s suspension of four Kent county councillors from Reform’s local government flagship reinforces that message. Leaked footage of a video conference showcased all the squabbling and recrimination that might be expected from a bunch of amateurs learning the hard way that delivering public services on wafer-thin budgets is harder than posting leaflets about slashing waste and clamping down on foreigners.

This is a fruitful line of attack for Labour, but it requires the government’s own service delivery to be good enough that the prospect of giving Reform a go feels like a dangerous gamble. Also, it is a message for deployment in a campaign that probably won’t happen before 2029. If Starmer and Reeves want to reach that point looking like antidotes to Faragism, they need to show it in the meantime with an agenda of their own that is positively defined.

There are limits to what can be achieved with a change in tone, and it is later than they think. How much easier would they find it to argue now that Brexit is an affliction and Farage a fraud if they had said so all along? How many more options might they have? Do they deserve credit for saying it now, when other excuses are spent? Sure. But the problem with arriving at the obvious place by the most circuitous route is that people wonder what took you so long. Starting from the truth is quicker.

They spent the run up to their first budget talking the economy down and then proceeded to ramp employers NI just as there were signs of improvement, now they are finding that taxing business during a weak recovery and the messages they have given business going forwards causal effect is for business to shelve investment, reduce staff and hiring and for companies to take their investments to other countries- you of course Sympl will ignore the last 18 months of their mismanagement in all this. As usual.

There seems to be a growing realisation among the less half-witted Brexiteers that their Brexit has failed miserably and who acknowledge that losing unfettered access to a socio-economic association a mere 22 miles distant accounting for 16% of UK's GDP was a calamity amounting to a 5% loss in growth annually.

Remember when Tax said back in the day it would all be better in a few years time?

Sterling is still in the gutter, GBP 90 billions lost annually in trade, higher food costs, you name it.

The sooner we rejoin, and declare economic war against the US and the Russian pig the better.

Fuck Israel! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

Originally Posted by Seekingasylum

There seems to be a growing realisation among the less half-witted Brexiteers that their Brexit has failed miserably and who acknowledge that losing unfettered access to a socio-economic association a mere 22 miles distant accounting for 16% of UK's GDP was a calamity amounting to a 5% loss in growth annually.

Sterling is still in the gutter, GBP 90 billions lost annually in trade, higher food costs, you name it.

And still, numpt just wants to talk about Starmer!

I wonder why that would be...

Regardless, it's for another thread, numpt.

Like the poor, the stupid are always with us.

Originally Posted by cyrille

And still, numpt just wants to talk about Starmer!

he's never here Keir

mind you look at the fukin mess they are making of it with Rachel from accounts

Originally Posted by Seekingasylum

Like the poor, the stupid are always with us.

and as if by magic, here you are again!

Poor old Tax, nailed his colours to the Brexit mast of imbecility for all to see and no doubt he still flies the banner of his hero, Farage, depicted against the background of an upside down union jack sucking Putin’s cock while masturbating Trump.

There’s no fool like an old fool unless of course he is a Yorkshire tyke counting his shekels.


Har, har.

Originally Posted by Seekingasylum

while masturbating Trump.

you must have seen your mate Starmer fawning over Trump and crawling around on the floor, he's a national embarrassment

^ Oh my, Farage, who foocked up Britain with his stoopid Brexit, is having a moan.

Farage doesn't believe in the "National Interest", he only believes in himself, and getting loads o' money doing so.

The only way forward for Britain, and I mean the ONLY WAY FORWARD, is to align closely with the EU.

So fook off you stoopid moronic bunch of loons and to hell with Farage!!

Only an idiot would be persuaded by the utter drivel spouted by Farage, a pitiful Poundland Trump regurgitating propaganda tailored for his demographic of the credulous, the halfwitted and the lumpen.
Farage is a racist bigot who is a thief, a fraud and a tax evading grifter.
Nevertheless, I shall vote for his party at the next election because then we shall be assured of England’s deserved descent into chaos and penury, a fitting punishment for those 17.4 million who fucked the country in 2016.
Fuck Israel, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free and fuck the English.

Har, har.

Originally Posted by Seekingasylum

Fuck Israel, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free and fuck the English.

what a little child you are

Let's just take the first point made by Farage.

The Erasmus scheme is way more beneficial to students that the Turing scheme, longer term, more comprehensive, reciprocal and was a great loss due to Brexit.

Fook off Farage!

Originally Posted by cyrille

Kemi battered again.

'Oh dear!'

Cyrille wake up, ffs - she's obviously pretty bad, but no worse than Starmer... It's a pair of kids.

what is amazing is that he's still getting a speech coach paid for by the taxpayer, surely someone should tell him that you cannot change a dull person by altering their diction. I just cannot listen to him.

Originally Posted by cyrille

Kemi battered again.

She does have something of the cod about her.