The now-enacted will of (some of) the people

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

1 hour ago, snowychap said:

German cars mantra.

Can you briefly tell me what this is ?thx

Edited August 7, 2019 by Amsterdam_Neil_D

[ml1dch]

31 minutes ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

Can you briefly tell me what this is ?thx

That the other countries of Europe will want to treat the UK like the special little soldier that they are, because their industries consider us to be such an important marketplace that they will insist that the trade barriers that Brexit automatically creates are removed, so that their exports don't suffer.

It's usually German cars, but French cheese and Italian Prosecco can be handy substitutes.

It wasn't true in 2016 and still isn't true now.

[bickster]

36 minutes ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

Can you briefly tell me what this is ?thx

It's a variation on "They need us more than we need them" with added "The German Car Manufacturers will be knocking down the door of Angela Merkel insisting we get a deal"

They must have opened the cupboard marked 2016 and dusted off  and old one

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

Just now, bickster said:

It's a variation on "They need us more than we need them" with added "The German Car Manufacturers will be knocking down the door of Angela Merkel insisting we get a deal"

They must have opened the cupboard marked 2016 and dusted off  and old one

Thanks,  its down to currency more than anything surely + you can't restrict trade either.  It's like water,  it will find it's own level,  not in the UK's favor (Not great,  not terrible) but it will find a level no doubt and trade will go on,  the alternative,  the streets will be awash with cheap Vauxhall's and no one wants that.

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

9 minutes ago, ml1dch said:

It's usually German cars, but French cheese and Italian Prosecco can be handy substitutes.

Not for towing a caravan there not.

[blandy]

17 hours ago, ml1dch said:

I'd argue though with one possible exception, Caroline Lucas. Given that the hypothetical GONU would be there only long enough to request an extension until after the election and nothing more, she's the one person I can think of who inflames few enough passions on any side to support her as the token figurehead, without anybody feeling usurped, undermined or that they were tacitly supporting a Corbyn Government.

As excellent as she is, my perception is there's absolutely no chance for all kinds of reasons, some of which are already covered/implied in what you and @HanoiVillan have written.

Whether Labour or Tory, MPs would be as reluctant (completely averse) to giving the Green party a boost by having a Green lead parliament and the country. They, for partisan reasons, will never do that. So IMO it's a complete non starter, sadly. I also agree that a GONU is highly unlikely. There are not enough MPs who would put country first, or would even believe that such a thing would put country first.

If we go back to the turn of the year, Jan, Feb etc. it was blatantly obvious that the (then) March default deadline of "we crash out" was going to shift, that we weren't going to crash out and there would be an extension. Many but not all of the reasons that applied then, still apply.

The country and the Government are still not remotely ready for such an event to happen at end October, nor will they be by that time. The necessary legislation is not and won't be in place. Laws for dealing with the changed aspects of our trade and civil operation etc. will still not be in place.

Back in February we had a PM who was saying all kinds of crap about "no deal is better than a bad deal" while obviously not remotely believing it. Parliament also didn't believe it. The "choice" then was between a bad deal and (theoretically at least, but not in reality) no deal. Because broadly, everyone knew no deal was not a genuione option, they could reject the bad deal May had negotiated. So they did, despite all the party loyalty and political games. The EU could decline to negotiate further, because they knew that "no deal" wasn't a genuine option. It was also clear that May was going to be toast.

So what's changed? Not nearly as much as is being sort of told as a story. The laws still aren't ready. The EU and the UK are more aware of how bad no deal would be, the reality is clearer even than it was. The May deal is still comatose/dead. The EU still say they won't change it, the UK say, still, it's not acceptable. The UK government is making much more noise about being "prepared" to go for no deal, but on the other hand it has an even smaller majority, though, and this may drop further to no majority at all by October. The EU has various new MEPs leaders and so on, and the EU national governments, or some of them will be less inclined to indulge the UK.

The chances of the EU therefore effectively washing their hands of it all and being willing to let no deal happen have gone up from basically zero, to a small, but significant chance. The UK Government says they're willing to let no deal happen, but they don't have the maths for that to be the choice of parliament, yet they also know as absolute fact that it would be a disaster (yes there are a few who hold a different view, but they're a small minority).

So what we're seeing now is a re-run of what was happening in Jan/Feb/March, but with the only changes being the willingness of both sides to have another extension being reduced, and the consequences of no deal being more starkly apparent. Leave and remain MPs are making more noise about forcing their will, one way or another, but neither side looks likely to be able to actually achieve their claimed aims.

From the entrenched postions, the ways out, without losing face for the two sides are for the EU to change the political statement that goes with the negotiated agreement, and for the UK, which has talked itself into a corner over the deadline it's either to also have changed wording to the Political statement, or to have themselves "forced" by nasty others to break their promise - via an election, or a VONC or whatever. An election would be a massive gamble for all the MPs, apart from the SNP,  a VONC - I just don't see the bottle there for it when it comes to the crunch. Most likely outcome therefore, some fettling of the political statement/agreement around the Irish border and  then a vote and then it (the agreement already made) getting passed and the UK leaves by the end of the year, or thereabouts.

[StefanAVFC]

 

And unrelated to the above:

Blandy, the most frustrating thing for me about this 'EU won't budge' narrative is that the EU forged their terms based on the UK's red lines. Why should the EU budge?

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

The Fisherman above has just convinced me of something,  the UK should look into invoking Article 42 and let the dolphins have a go in office.

[Genie]

20 hours ago, ml1dch said:

Requested by whom, and for what reason?

Requested by us, because we'll have neither a deal we like or a willingness to accept no-deal.

[ml1dch]

7 minutes ago, Genie said:

Requested by us, because we'll have neither a deal we like or a willingness to accept no-deal.

Even though the only person with the constitutional power to make that request has explicitly said that he won't and recently won the leadership of his party because of a promise that he won't?

[Genie]

Just now, ml1dch said:

Even though the only person with the constitutional power to make that request has explicitly said that he won't and recently won the leadership of his party because of a promise that he won't?

He's also a proven liar  

Even with the best will in the world, will he get no deal through parliament? They're keeping fairly quiet about it now (the prospect of blocking no deal) because they have been told to make it look like they're serious about it. When push comes to shove I can't see it going through. Too many (huge) downsides with entire industries likely to go down the pan (or need a lot of gov't bail out money).

[Xann]

Quote

 

The UK’s safety and security would suffer from a no-deal Brexit and no amount of planning and preparation can erase the risk, Britain’s head of counter-terrorism has said.

The Scotland Yard assistant commissioner, Neil Basu, said key crime-fighting tools would be lost and their replacements would not be as good.

Speaking in a wide-ranging interview in which he also warned that boosts to police and security service numbers were no longer enough to combat terrorism, he said: “We can make them [the damaging effects] less, but they would be slower systems. Those systems and tools were developed in the EU for very good reason. They were very good. We had just signed up to biometric sharing.

“In a no deal we’d lose all that. We’d have to renegotiate it.”

The three key measures are fast access to intelligence and data through the Schengen Information System II database, as well as passenger name records, and the ability to use European arrest warrants.

Basu said: “We have done a lot of contingency planning to put things in place. But there are some things you can’t put in place. So there is no contingency planning for not being given passenger name records.

“It would create an immediate risk that people could come to this country who were serious offenders, either wanted or still serial and serious offenders committing crimes in this country, and we would not know about it. It creates that risk.

“With my police leadership hat on there would still be deep concern. There would be some damage to our safety. I can’t put a scale on that.”

Basu suggested that any plausible change would be for the worse. “If I willed it I would want the negotiation to produce the same agreement, so we had access to all the same tools, and the same data-sharing capability … that would be the best position.”

 

Grauniad

He's going for it, this guy.

[chrisp65]

1 hour ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

The Fisherman above has just convinced me of something,  the UK should look into invoking Article 42 and let the dolphins have a go in office.

it would at least give them a sense of porpoise

[Rodders]

this in the grauniad did make me laugh

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/07/northern-ireland-hard-border-brexit-customs

Quote

Hard Brexiters’ stance on the Irish border is nonsense – I can tell you, I grew up there

One consequence of the brain’s incredible ability to make sense of the world is that it sometimes sees things that aren’t there. Most people have experienced pareidolia, that pleasing effect of interpreting a face from a random assortment of objects or shapes, so that a paperclip and two blobs of adhesive putty look like a happy little man, or the watermarks behind Auntie Maureen’s radiator strike her as a dead ringer for the Virgin Mary. Our brain has spent so many millions of years geared toward facial recognition, it takes even the most random nonsense and attempts to construct it into something meaningful.

My brain, it turns out, does a similar thing when I read the tweets of Brexit MEP Ben Habib. “I am on the border between NI and ROI,” he tweeted last week, above a video that depicted him and some colleagues wisely playing in the middle of the road. “Travelling in a straight line, one enters and exits the ROI a number of times. There could never be a hard border here. The UK has declared it would never seek to impose one. The whole thing is a red herring.”

Surely, I thought, this was a pleasing moment of candour from a man who had seen just how unworkable a border would be, who had stood where it once was, and realised that such a self-defeating arrangement must never be put in place again.

Alas, this hope was no more real than Auntie Maureen’s blotchy patch of Blessed-Virgin-shaped damp. Habib’s point was, astoundingly, that a no-deal Brexit was somehow incapable of causing a hard border because … it would be inconvenient to erect? Or because there isn’t one there currently? Perhaps Habib thinks the world is just full of things now, and new things can’t be built in spaces where those things don’t currently exist. One wonders what it would be like to watch Grand Designs with him, to feel his innocent thrill at the impossibility of these wondrous structures as they miraculously appear in places where once they weren’t. Of course, it’s hard to know exactly what he meant, or whence came the ebullience with which he meant it since, again, my brain is working overtime to ascribe sense where none exists.

...

 

[wazzap24]

2 hours ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

The Fisherman above has just convinced me of something,  the UK should look into invoking Article 42 and let the dolphins have a go in office.

This is a great idea. ‘Flipper’ has already beaten Farage in an election once. 

[snowychap]

7 hours ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

Not for towing a caravan there not.

You're just not being optimistic enough!

[blandy]

7 hours ago, StefanAVFC said:

Blandy, the most frustrating thing for me about this 'EU won't budge' narrative is that the EU forged their terms based on the UK's red lines. Why should the EU budge?

There’s 2 angles to this. Firstly, you’re right, the UK red lines, set by May’s personal preferences and nothing more, effectively limit the scope of what could be offered for negotiation. There’s no motivation whatsoever for the EU to change that stance.

But the other aspect is that a deal is better than no deal, for both sides. The current (thrice rejected) deal is not acceptable to the UK parliament, even though the then UK PM signed off on it.  So right now there’s no deal. A deal is needed by both sides. The May deal won’t be changed IMO, as per angle 1, above.  So the wording around what comes next, how the two sides arrange things after we have left, which can be changed, will have to satisfy both parties. Trouble is, it’s not legally binding....But it’s the easiest thing by far to alter and allow both sides to settle down. This whole 3 year period is the easy bit. The harder, by far, part is the detail of the future relationship between the EU and UK. There’s another decade of all this to come. We’ll be 4 governments in before it’s remotely sorted.

[Enda]

53 minutes ago, blandy said:

There’s 2 angles to this. Firstly, you’re right, the UK red lines, set by May’s personal preferences and nothing more, effectively limit the scope of what could be offered for negotiation. There’s no motivation whatsoever for the EU to change that stance.

But the other aspect is that a deal is better than no deal, for both sides. The current (thrice rejected) deal is not acceptable to the UK parliament, even though the then UK PM signed off on it.  So right now there’s no deal. A deal is needed by both sides. The May deal won’t be changed IMO, as per angle 1, above.  So the wording around what comes next, how the two sides arrange things after we have left, which can be changed, will have to satisfy both parties. Trouble is, it’s not legally binding....But it’s the easiest thing by far to alter and allow both sides to settle down. This whole 3 year period is the easy bit. The harder, by far, part is the detail of the future relationship between the EU and UK. There’s another decade of all this to come. We’ll be 4 governments in before it’s remotely sorted.

Or the UK’s/HMG’s red lines can change. For example by allowing a border down the Irish Sea and letting Britain (not the UK) leave the customs union.

The EU is waiting on that particular penny to drop, no pun intended.

[StefanAVFC]

2 hours ago, blandy said:

There’s 2 angles to this. Firstly, you’re right, the UK red lines, set by May’s personal preferences and nothing more, effectively limit the scope of what could be offered for negotiation. There’s no motivation whatsoever for the EU to change that stance.

But the other aspect is that a deal is better than no deal, for both sides. The current (thrice rejected) deal is not acceptable to the UK parliament, even though the then UK PM signed off on it.  So right now there’s no deal. A deal is needed by both sides. The May deal won’t be changed IMO, as per angle 1, above.  So the wording around what comes next, how the two sides arrange things after we have left, which can be changed, will have to satisfy both parties. Trouble is, it’s not legally binding....But it’s the easiest thing by far to alter and allow both sides to settle down. This whole 3 year period is the easy bit. The harder, by far, part is the detail of the future relationship between the EU and UK. There’s another decade of all this to come. We’ll be 4 governments in before it’s remotely sorted.

So the EU move? It shows they are weak and we are strong. We changed our minds over and over again, and they buckled.

It won't happen.

[snowychap]

11 hours ago, Genie said:

Even with the best will in the world, will he get no deal through parliament?

'No deal' doesn't have to 'get through Parliament'.

'No deal' is the default.

Parliament has to act to prevent 'no deal'.