Brexit process

[fuzzy]

You mean totally disenfranchising more than 52% of the electorate, since Cameron spent millions brainwashing the public through employers and the media. It clearly worked. You have no more idea what a clean break from European regulation will mean on the quality of life for the population than I have. I can imagine the squealing of multinational companies, that govs have been biased towards for the last 200 years. If food costs more for example, how about a drop in rental costs, affordable houses for sale, jobs for the uncounted brits instead of endless immigrants?

I don't know the pro's and con's of Mays deal. I have no time to do my own analysis, which is the only one I trust, and I am confident we do not have the facts anyway. Of the people who want it to fail, there are at least 2 groups who are my enemy. They add up to the majority of noisemakers outside of this board. The public majority rarely have a voice and are divided by the usual tactics.

1 group wants to keep high immigration - politicians, finance, rentiers, whitehall, employers.
2 Another wants no borders. Foreigners who are looking after themselves, speculators, media and multinational owners, private school/media brainwashed.

These people all want some version of the current system, or even worse.

[PS_RalphW]

jobs for the uncounted brits instead of endless immigrants?

Whilst I fully sympathise with unaffordable rents and house prices, jobs for Brits instead of foreigners needs a healthy dose of realism from Brits.

I work in IT for a small charity educating children who are otherwise too frightened to go to school. I get paid approximately half the going rate for someone with my skills. We are finding it impossible to employ a sys admin for the price we can afford to pay them. We have an excellent young junior IT guy, (recently given a pay rise) but otherwise the skills we need simply do not exist in the UK population to match demand. This can partly be blamed on 30 years of failure and under investment in UK education, and partly on sexism excluding almost all females from the sector, but also on a culture that has looked down on engineering and more recently on all science and 'experts', as the general populace has followed the US in becoming so de-skilled in critical thinking that it can't tell the difference between honest intelligence, quacks, professional (liars) industrial PR, and the self interested charlatans that now run government and industry.

There will be no surge of jobs for the skilled or unskilled unemployed Brit, because the jobs are either in skills the Brits don't have, or in roles that few Brits are willing to take on for the money that it is economic to pay. Increasingly it will be cheaper to automate unskilled jobs out of existence.

Sorry for the rant. Back to the political bubble that most of the UK is thoroughly sick of.

[Lord Beria3]

Eurointelligence to the rescue lads...

Unilateral Brexit revocation is possible, but only until March 29

Yesterday was a big day in the Brexit process. The ECJ's advocate general gave his legal opinion on the Brexit revocation case, and the government lost a couple of amendment votes in the House of Commons. The former is more important. The latter look scarier from a distance than from close up - an illusory giant. A third important development is a fairly dramatic increase in no-deal preparations. 

In Luxembourg, the ECJ's advocate general yesterday gave an unambiguously clear endorsement of the UK's right to revoke its Art. 50 notification unilaterally but with a bullet: it has to happen inside the two-year negotiation period. But the advocate general did not explicitly say what the position would be if the Art. 50 period were extended: whether revocation would then not be possible at all, or whether it will then need mutual consent. 

His legal reasoning is based on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, on which Art. 50 was based. One argument used by the advocate general is the wording in Article 50(2), which says that the government would notify the EU of its intention to leave, as opposed to its decision to leave. The advocate general also said that the alternative would have meant that a country gets expelled from the EU against its will. There are several other interesting points of EU law in the opinion, but these two arguments appear to us as the strongest. 

The advocate general imposes a few conditions, however.

the notification to revoke has to be officially communicated by the government;it must respect constitutional requirements - in the case of the UK it would require prior parliamentary approval;and finally there are the stipulations of a two-year time limit and the principles of good faith and co-operation.

We were struck by the time-limit clause that revocation is only possible within the two-year period following notification. If this is taken literally, it would mean that the sequence of extension, referendum and revocation is not possible since a referendum cannot be organised before March 29. The additional stipulation that any action by the UK government would have to be done in good faith and in co-operation with the EU also rules out another toxic cycle - revocation followed by a renewed trigger of Art. 50. For example, elections might bring about a Labour government which could in theory decide to reset the clock on Brexit, revoke, re-trigger and gain a further two years of full membership. 

The Court is expected to rule shortly, but probably not before next week's Commons vote. It tends to follow the advocate general's advice. In this particular case we would be interested to hear what the court has to say about the two-year limit.

The second most important Brexit news yesterday are indications of a dramatic increase in preparations for a no-deal Brexit. We are hearing from the inside that the civil service is now spinning full-circle, and that ministers have developed an unusual appetite for risk. One of the preparations under way is a plan to contact 145,000 companies that export and import only to or from the EU, to urge them to sort out necessary HMRC registration in the event of a no-deal Brexit. 

We continue to alert readers not to seek comfort in news reports that parliament will stop a no-deal Brexit. It will first need to find an agreed alternative - agreed by the EU. The only alternative under discussion in the UK seems to be the Norway option, whose growing support in the UK government is based on a number of misunderstandings in addition to the usual failure to familiarise oneself with actual treaty texts. What the advocates of the Norway option either fail to understand or fail to mention is that it will still require an Irish backstop. The withdrawal agreement will not change. All that could change is the political declaration, with Norway being specifically mentioned as an alternative. But if the deal is voted down next Tuesday, May and the European Council will almost invariable open up the political declaration to allow for alternative future relationships.

The big Brexit debate that started in the House of Commons yesterday was preceded by a couple of amendment votes which the government lost. We still fail to get excited about the publication of the government's legal advice. Marginally more important was another amendment brought by Dominic Grieve, which passed. It marginally strengthens the parliament role after next Tuesday. This was not another attempt to bring back the original meaningful-vote amendment, which would have put parliament at a much stronger position vis-a-vis the government. In yesterday's amendment, parliament has de facto co-decision rights in the drafting stages of a plan B. But we would add that this would most likely have been allowed in any case. The government will certainly want to make sure than any plan B Brexit deal would pass parliament the second time round. 

The trouble with this entire debate - as with almost every debate on this issue in the UK - is that it takes no account of the position of the EU. There is a no plan B Brexit from the EU's perspective. We don't think the EU is willing to accept material changes to the withdrawal agreement, no matter how many amendments the Commons pass. It was always the logic of Article 50 to get the Commission and the UK government to negotiate a deal, and then get everyone to ratify it.

The debate on the second referendum is unaffected by this. Parliament cannot force it against the will of the government. We are informed that it is, in theory, possible for the parliament to take the legislative agenda into its own hands by taking control of the legislative time-tabling process, and then to maintain that majority in subsequent legislation. As we said before, it is also possible for the parliament to instruct the government to send a letter to the EU asking for an extension of Article 50, but in view of the advocate general's ruling it is no longer clear what such an extension would entail.

If we ever get to this position - failure of withdrawal agreement, government's loss of executive powers in dealings with the EU, and loss of legislative majority - then surely the government will have lost its majority. A hypothetical pro-second referendum majority would need to hold much beyond the legislative process. It would need to displace the current government with, for example, an Italian-style technical government. This is possible in theory, but we should be mindful of the different interests of those who support a second referendum. The Labour leadership prefers elections. And at that point, we think, so would the Tories. Also note that, among the sixteen Tories that supported the Grieve amendment, ten said they would support May's withdrawal agreement. There are quite a few MPs who straddle the various political divides Brexit has opened up. We think there is no majority for a second referendum and, if there is, no majority for the further action needed to make it happen.

[Little John]

...No deal would be both economically and politically catastrophic. It didn't have to be, had preparations been started 2 years ago. But they weren't. It may well turn out to be the "right" outcome in the long run, but the short-term consequences will be severe on a scale beyond anything seen since the end of WW2....

Firstly, this is about more than economics. By that I do not mean I do not care if people are poor since that would require I did not care for myself. But, as has already been mentioned, in the long term you have no more idea than me or anyone else what the consequences will be. In the short term, there would no doubt be some kind of hit. But, again, you are in no better position to know how big a hit than me or anyone else. But, in any event, I consider such a hit as an acceptable short term cost of the return of our democratic sovereignty as a nation and the opportunities that presents over the longer term. I know for a fact that all of the Leavers I know feel the same and I suspect they are indicative of leavers as whole.

Secondly, suggesting that because adequate preparations were not made two years ago means we must all now put up with a shitty deal or no Brexit is not going to wash. Personally speaking, I do not respond well to blackmail and neither, I would suggest, do the British people as a whole.

[kenneal - lagger]

................

There will be no surge of jobs for the skilled or unskilled unemployed Brit, because the jobs are either in skills the Brits don't have, or in roles that few Brits are willing to take on for the money that it is economic to pay. Increasingly it will be cheaper to automate unskilled jobs out of existence.

Sorry for the rant. Back to the political bubble that most of the UK is thoroughly sick of.

I don't think that we have that number of unemployed to fill these jobs any way. I think that we seriously need to set up government funded paid training for the jobs which we do need to be filled and start to lose jobs like railway guards (training most of them as drivers?). We can tax the industries that are receiving the trainees to get the money back or print the money instead.

The world population will start to plateau and then reduce in a few years and it will become unacceptable, or it ought to, to poach the population from other countries to bolster our own economic output at the third world's expense. When the world population plateaus it will also become more expensive to get hold of migrant growth fodder so we will have to start thinking about how we can make our own economy sustainable with a static or shrinking population. So why not start now?

The UK population was 42 million and falling, as was a lot of Europe, in the early 1950s because the population was not replacing itself. To stimulate the economy the government instigated mass migration from the Commonwealth. We now have a population of 64 million plus and still rising and the economy still needs immigrants to prop it up! When will it end? We have had an average nett migration figure of about 340,000 people per year for 65 years and we still haven't solved the problem of balancing jobs with people!!

Rather than helping out the Commonwealth and, more recently, Eastern Europe by sending work to those countries we have been poaching their population to keep ourselves in the manner to which we have become accustomed. It is colonisation by a different means. Rather than working the colonials into the ground in their own countries and taking the profits we bring them here to work them into the ground and we still take the profits. It's still colonialism but the bleeding heart liberal anti colonialists can feel better about it because "we are giving people jobs and a better environment."

Never mind that we are destroying the environment of our planet by giving people who formerly had a less than one tonne of carbon lifestyle a five or ten tonne one and giving that expectation to all the migrants friends at home to boot. We've also built out all the infrastructure, well maybe we are more than a few houses short, for 22 million people at god knows what carbon cost to the environment and loss of habitats in this country for wildlife and the loss of the ability to feed ourselves from our own land.

We are addicted to migration as well as fossil fuels.

[vtsnowedin]

Sorry for the rant. Back to the political bubble that most of the UK is thoroughly sick of.

Don't be. It was well worth the read.

[clv101]

After following the last 36hrs in parliament, frankly, I don't think we'll be leaving the EU (or if we do it'll be in name only) on 29th March. No idea how that would come about though.

[UndercoverElephant]

In the short term, there would no doubt be some kind of hit. But, again, you are in no better position to know how big a hit than me or anyone else. But, in any event, I consider such a hit as an acceptable short term cost...

I know you do, but you aren't following the argument. What matters here in terms of the actual outcome is not what you, or others like you, think about the trade-off between shorter-term pain and longer-term gain. What matters is the numbers game between those (especially in power) who think like you, and those who think the shorter-term pain is likely to be so severe that it is not worth it. And the truth is there just isn't enough people who share your view, so my point stands: rejecting the EEA because you want a hard brexit is a massive gamble.

Secondly, suggesting that because adequate preparations were not made two years ago means we must all now put up with a shitty deal or no Brexit is not going to wash. Personally speaking, I do not respond well to blackmail and neither, I would suggest, do the British people as a whole.

You aren't listening. I am not blackmailing anybody. Personally, I would much prefer a no deal brexit. But if the choice is between accepting the EEA and pushing for an end to FoM in the long run, or rejecting it and ending up cancelling brexit entirely, then I choose the former.

You've got to deal with reality, Steve. I think the gamble you're advocating will backfire. Lots of people right now are making complex calculations like this, in order to avoid their least-wanted outcome.

Four dimensional chess, not ping-pong.

[RevdTess]

Firstly, this is about more than economics. By that I do not mean I do not care if people are poor since that would require I did not care for myself. But, as has already been mentioned, in the long term you have no more idea than me or anyone else what the consequences will be. In the short term, there would no doubt be some kind of hit. But, again, you are in no better position to know how big a hit than me or anyone else. But, in any event, I consider such a hit as an acceptable short term cost of the return of our democratic sovereignty as a nation and the opportunities that presents over the longer term. I know for a fact that all of the Leavers I know feel the same and I suspect they are indicative of leavers as whole.

I can totally understand this point of view. If we see the EU as a terrible organisation that is trying to force the UK towards a political, economic and environmental consensus that we're totally opposed to then I too would be arguing that short term economic damage is worth the hit to regain our sovereignty. (After all, many thought leaving the ERM would be a disaster but that freedom to set our own interest rates and stay away from the Euro proved to be a great blessing during the credit crunch and euro crisis.)

E.g. if the EU institutions were made up mostly of right-wing demagogues imposing xenophobic, homophobic and anti-environment policies on the whole EU then I'd totally be voting to taking any economic hit necessary to get our sovereignty back.

So I get the anger. It's just I don't see the EU as the enemy but largely as the good guys, trying to do what's morally right in the face of the xenophobic nationalist forces rising up in individual countries.

Even so, there's no doubt a large number of people who voted purely on financial grounds either for themselves or the country as a whole. They felt the EU was stealing our money, our food, our jobs. For them, the consensus economic hit of no-deal might really change their minds.

I do have sympathy though for those who want sovereignty back at any cost. It's a principled stance that I could see myself taking if my politics were different or the EU was taken over by the far right.

[Little John]

Firstly, this is about more than economics. By that I do not mean I do not care if people are poor since that would require I did not care for myself. But, as has already been mentioned, in the long term you have no more idea than me or anyone else what the consequences will be. In the short term, there would no doubt be some kind of hit. But, again, you are in no better position to know how big a hit than me or anyone else. But, in any event, I consider such a hit as an acceptable short term cost of the return of our democratic sovereignty as a nation and the opportunities that presents over the longer term. I know for a fact that all of the Leavers I know feel the same and I suspect they are indicative of leavers as whole.

I can totally understand this point of view. If we see the EU as a terrible organisation that is trying to force the UK towards a political, economic and environmental consensus that we're totally opposed to then I too would be arguing that short term economic damage is worth the hit to regain our sovereignty. (After all, many thought leaving the ERM would be a disaster but that freedom to set our own interest rates and stay away from the Euro proved to be a great blessing during the credit crunch and euro crisis.)

E.g. if the EU institutions were made up mostly of right-wing demagogues imposing xenophobic, homophobic and anti-environment policies on the whole EU then I'd totally be voting to taking any economic hit necessary to get our sovereignty back.

So I get the anger. It's just I don't see the EU as the enemy but largely as the good guys, trying to do what's morally right in the face of the xenophobic nationalist forces rising up in individual countries.

Even so, there's no doubt a large number of people who voted purely on financial grounds either for themselves or the country as a whole. They felt the EU was stealing our money, our food, our jobs. For them, the consensus economic hit of no-deal might really change their minds.

I do have sympathy though for those who want sovereignty back at any cost. It's a principled stance that I could see myself taking if my politics were different or the EU was taken over by the far right.

So, you see the EU as the "good guys" do you.

1) Greece sacrificed in order to save the German banking system

2) The setting of the value of the Euro and other fiscal policies in a way that suits the German manufacturing economy at the cost of half of Europe

3) Anti democratic, neo-liberal EU regulations that make Keynesian policies more or less illegal to be implemented in the EU area. In other words, making it more or less impossible for any socialist government to enact actual socialist policies. This is HARD-WIRED into EU regulations.

4) The attempt, covertly, by the EU to sign up to TTIP such that international corporations could secretly sue national governments if they felt their profits were being affected by national policies. The claim for reparations would be made in secret. The arbitration process itself would be held in secret, the arbitrators would be undemocratically and secretly selected and their identity would remain secret. The judgement of such arbitrations would also be secret such that national governments could be forced to change polices on the back of such judgements. Policies that its citizens had previously voted for. But, said governments would not be in a position to tell their own electorate why they had done so. THE EU WERE ACTUALLY TRYING TO SIGN US UP TO THIS SHIT.

5) Oh, I nearly forgot..... Aiding and abetting the CIA in orchestrating a Neo-Fascist coup in an Eastern European country in the second decade of the 21st century.

I could go on...

I haven't even begun to mention the inherently undemocratic nature of the EU institutions themselves.

Whatever you may think of the UK political class, if you are seriously trying to suggest the EU are the "good guys", you are either deluded as a consequence of being ideologically possessed, unaccountably ignorant of the actual facts or lying.

[Lord Beria3]

Well said Little John.

The EU is authoritarian, neoliberal and undemocratic empire. How anybody could think of them as the 'good guy's beggers belief!

[careful_eugene]

4) The attempt, covertly, by the EU to sign up to TTIP such that international corporations could secretly sue national governments if they felt their profits were being affected by national policies. The claim for reparations would be made in secret. The arbitration process itself would be held in secret, the arbitrators would be undemocratically and secretly selected and their identity would remain secret. The judgement of such arbitrations would also be secret such that national governments could be forced to change polices on the back of such judgements. Policies that its citizens had previously voted for. But, said governments would not be in a position to tell their own electorate why they had done so. THE EU WERE ACTUALLY TRYING TO SIGN US UP TO THIS SHIT.

I have to take issue with this, I nearly voted to leave precisely because of TTIP & investor state dispute settlement. Then I learned that the biggest cheerleaders for this part and all the other crap parts of TTIP were the UK government! I have no idea if brexit is going to happen but if it does, you can be certain that when we do a trade deal with the US it will be viewed as a massive opportunity for the corporate takeover of the UK.

[Little John]

Of course the UK government were the biggest cheerleaders. So what? What did you expect? They are Tories. Most of them are globalist neo-liberals.

The point being, however flawed UK parliamentary democracy may be, there is still, at least in principle, the capacity to throw a given party and its policies out and replace them with a democratic alternative. The fact is, If the Tories had tried to get TTIP through parliament in a sovereign UK, it would not have got past first reading precisely because such a change to the law would have to be debated in parliament.

The reason the neo-liberals in the Tories were cheering the EU on is because the EU was (undemocratically) able to do that which the Tories would have wanted to but could not. And the only reason the EU backed off was due to successive leaks about the negotiations leading the peoples of the Eu to get wind of what was going down and there being the very real risk of Europe wide unrest over it. But, they did not back off due to being threatened with being democratically removed.

[UndercoverElephant]

Eurointelligence to the rescue lads...

[snip]

The second most important Brexit news yesterday are indications of a dramatic increase in preparations for a no-deal Brexit. We are hearing from the inside that the civil service is now spinning full-circle, and that ministers have developed an unusual appetite for risk. One of the preparations under way is a plan to contact 145,000 companies that export and import only to or from the EU, to urge them to sort out necessary HMRC registration in the event of a no-deal Brexit. 

We continue to alert readers not to seek comfort in news reports that parliament will stop a no-deal Brexit. It will first need to find an agreed alternative - agreed by the EU. The only alternative under discussion in the UK seems to be the Norway option, whose growing support in the UK government is based on a number of misunderstandings in addition to the usual failure to familiarise oneself with actual treaty texts. What the advocates of the Norway option either fail to understand or fail to mention is that it will still require an Irish backstop. The withdrawal agreement will not change. All that could change is the political declaration, with Norway being specifically mentioned as an alternative. But if the deal is voted down next Tuesday, May and the European Council will almost invariable open up the political declaration to allow for alternative future relationships.

Hmmm. Maybe no deal is still a big possibility. For me, this now comes down to either No deal or a general election (probably followed by Lab win, 2nd ref, no brexit).

If so, then the key decision is going to be taken by tory MPs who will be faced with the choice of accepting a Corbyn government as the price of stopping a no deal brexit.

[vtsnowedin]

Regardless of what they do in March, or whenever the deadline is, will there not be an election at sometime after that where the UK voters get to punish or reward MPs based on how they voted on the issue?
That election is the one all the clever politicians are focused on.