It appears that the EU and the UK are now locked into a multi-pronged game of chicken, with a no deal (whether “managed� or “unmanaged�) as the default outcome a lot of people are very keen to avoid. Various parties could blink first, leading to different outcomes.
So who blinks first?
(1) The EU → capitulates on backstop → May's deal passes without the backstop or with an exit/expiry mechanism.
(2) Opposition MPs → bail out May –> May's deal passes unmodified. (followed by DUP brings down government, general election?)
(3) Tory remainers → bring down the government → general election.
(4) The government → splits → Second referendum, general election, revoke A50 or free vote in commons to choose between those options.
(5) Nobody blinks → no deal.
Personally I am coming to believe that no deal is, in the long term, a bigger threat to the EU than it is to the UK. I think that if no deal actually happens, then once the UK has survived the initial chaos and pain, we will become a serious competitor to Germany and that this will pose an existential threat to the the EU. As such, I want a no deal and I am happy to wait for the EU to blink, and take May's deal without the backstop if that happens.
Brexit process
Moderator: Peak Moderation
If I had been in America I'd have voted for Trump. So would that make me anti-empathy, anti-compassion, anti-women, anti-minorities?RevdTess wrote: When I look for hope in the current situation, I have to admit that the big danger of a 2nd referendum 'remain' vote is that it just makes the populist voices stronger, and with that comes Trumpist tendencies that are anti-empathy, anti-compassion for the 'Other' - anyone not like us, and inevitably anti-women, anti-minorities of every kind.
Funny, I always thought Christianity was about tolerance but you seem pretty judgemental and intolerant of any views you don't like.
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kenneal - lagger
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UndercoverElephant
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I am getting a distinct feeling that no deal is getting less scary and more attractive all the time.
We now know that the planes will keep flying and the trucks will keep rolling, and that Ireland is making no plans to build a hard border. May's deal is no closer to getting through parliament and Amber Rudd's move towards a second referendum isn't gaining traction.
My bet is now firmly on no deal. I think the centre of gravity of the tory party is heading that way, and that means the stakes are sky high for people like Soubry and Boles. My gut is telling me that when decision time comes, they will go with the flow. They won't bring down the government to stop no deal when no deal is looking less scary, and that cuts off the last escape route from brexit.
I am really looking forwards to April now, when it turns out a no-deal brexit is about as damaging as the millenium bug.
We now know that the planes will keep flying and the trucks will keep rolling, and that Ireland is making no plans to build a hard border. May's deal is no closer to getting through parliament and Amber Rudd's move towards a second referendum isn't gaining traction.
My bet is now firmly on no deal. I think the centre of gravity of the tory party is heading that way, and that means the stakes are sky high for people like Soubry and Boles. My gut is telling me that when decision time comes, they will go with the flow. They won't bring down the government to stop no deal when no deal is looking less scary, and that cuts off the last escape route from brexit.
I am really looking forwards to April now, when it turns out a no-deal brexit is about as damaging as the millenium bug.
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UndercoverElephant
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Brexit: is the fog lifting?
Until very recently I think it was very hard to call where this was all going. For me, the fog is now clearing. I think we are heading either for a no-deal which will work out quite well, or an EU capitulation on the backstop which will also work out quite well. May deserves no credit for either.
May never intended or even seriously entertained the possibility of no deal as an outcome. Her plan was to get parliament to ratify her deal (regardless of how bad it was) by forcing them to choose between a “cliff edge no deal� and her deal. That's why she tried to block the legal ruling on whether the UK could unilaterally revoke A50, and why she's made no real preparations for no deal. The rather obvious (to everybody but the stupid woman herself) flaw in this strategy was that the EU knew she'd take whatever deal they offered her, so they offered her a dogpile. Although at the end, even they knew that backstop was such a stinker that they had to offer a full customs union in that backstop because otherwise she had no chance of getting the DUP to swallow the dogpile. This is important, because it means that provided there's a unilateral exit mechanism or expiration date, the rest of the deal is actually far better than anything the EU originally wanted to offer. If they capitulate on the backstop now without getting reciprocal concessions, they'll have been mugged.
But the neither the EU nor May bargained for the deal being voted down by 200, as would have happened if May hadn't can-kicked it. As it stands, the deal is completely dead, which means nobody can postpone publication of no-deal contingency plans. This was not supposed to happen before the vote. It was not supposed to happen at all. And that is the game-changer, because we now know that the planes will keep flying, the medicines will keep flowing and the trucks will keep rolling. All that really was project fear, and we weren't supposed to know that, because the vote should already have taken place. Not only that, but there's not going to be any hard border in Ireland. Another way will be found.
This changes the whole dynamic, because suddenly no deal ceases to be so scary. The EU has a massive trade surplus with the UK and has no intention of forcing Ireland to build a border. For all the sabre-rattling, the last thing the EU needs as it teeters on the brink of recession is to make a no deal brexit any harder than it needs to be. And that in turn means any lingering hope May had of convincing people to back her deal has died, and in fact some people might shift in the other direction. It also makes it less likely that opposition MPs will bail her out.
So the deal will be voted down in January, and the last barrier to no deal will be Soubry, Boles and any other tories who so far have committed to fight no deal to the death. Will they vote to put Corbyn in Downing Street in order to stop no deal, when the tide has turned against them? Of course they won't. And that kills off any chance of a second referendum or general election, and guarantees us no deal.
This leaves the EU with a choice between a no deal and capitulating on the backstop. A no deal which isn't so bad for the UK after all, and also means no £39bn for the EU, no fishing rights, and no backstop to trap us in a customs union we can't control until we give them everything they want in a trade deal. Is giving us an exit clause from the backstop to make sure the deal is ratified so terrible? The bully will have to put his baseball bat down, but at the end of the day the UK will want to negotiate a mutually beneficial deal. We won't exit the backstop until it makes sense to do so. The EU would be giving away its unfair advantage in the trade negotiations, but the situation would still probably be better for them than a no deal brexit they have far less control over.
So possibly the EU will back down and May's deal will be ratified without the backstop, or with an exit/expiry mechanism, but if it doesn't happen then the world is not going to end. We will just leave the EU on March 29th without a deal, and then go through a period of instability and re-adjustment. But it's going to be OK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FscIgtDJFXg
Until very recently I think it was very hard to call where this was all going. For me, the fog is now clearing. I think we are heading either for a no-deal which will work out quite well, or an EU capitulation on the backstop which will also work out quite well. May deserves no credit for either.
May never intended or even seriously entertained the possibility of no deal as an outcome. Her plan was to get parliament to ratify her deal (regardless of how bad it was) by forcing them to choose between a “cliff edge no deal� and her deal. That's why she tried to block the legal ruling on whether the UK could unilaterally revoke A50, and why she's made no real preparations for no deal. The rather obvious (to everybody but the stupid woman herself) flaw in this strategy was that the EU knew she'd take whatever deal they offered her, so they offered her a dogpile. Although at the end, even they knew that backstop was such a stinker that they had to offer a full customs union in that backstop because otherwise she had no chance of getting the DUP to swallow the dogpile. This is important, because it means that provided there's a unilateral exit mechanism or expiration date, the rest of the deal is actually far better than anything the EU originally wanted to offer. If they capitulate on the backstop now without getting reciprocal concessions, they'll have been mugged.
But the neither the EU nor May bargained for the deal being voted down by 200, as would have happened if May hadn't can-kicked it. As it stands, the deal is completely dead, which means nobody can postpone publication of no-deal contingency plans. This was not supposed to happen before the vote. It was not supposed to happen at all. And that is the game-changer, because we now know that the planes will keep flying, the medicines will keep flowing and the trucks will keep rolling. All that really was project fear, and we weren't supposed to know that, because the vote should already have taken place. Not only that, but there's not going to be any hard border in Ireland. Another way will be found.
This changes the whole dynamic, because suddenly no deal ceases to be so scary. The EU has a massive trade surplus with the UK and has no intention of forcing Ireland to build a border. For all the sabre-rattling, the last thing the EU needs as it teeters on the brink of recession is to make a no deal brexit any harder than it needs to be. And that in turn means any lingering hope May had of convincing people to back her deal has died, and in fact some people might shift in the other direction. It also makes it less likely that opposition MPs will bail her out.
So the deal will be voted down in January, and the last barrier to no deal will be Soubry, Boles and any other tories who so far have committed to fight no deal to the death. Will they vote to put Corbyn in Downing Street in order to stop no deal, when the tide has turned against them? Of course they won't. And that kills off any chance of a second referendum or general election, and guarantees us no deal.
This leaves the EU with a choice between a no deal and capitulating on the backstop. A no deal which isn't so bad for the UK after all, and also means no £39bn for the EU, no fishing rights, and no backstop to trap us in a customs union we can't control until we give them everything they want in a trade deal. Is giving us an exit clause from the backstop to make sure the deal is ratified so terrible? The bully will have to put his baseball bat down, but at the end of the day the UK will want to negotiate a mutually beneficial deal. We won't exit the backstop until it makes sense to do so. The EU would be giving away its unfair advantage in the trade negotiations, but the situation would still probably be better for them than a no deal brexit they have far less control over.
So possibly the EU will back down and May's deal will be ratified without the backstop, or with an exit/expiry mechanism, but if it doesn't happen then the world is not going to end. We will just leave the EU on March 29th without a deal, and then go through a period of instability and re-adjustment. But it's going to be OK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FscIgtDJFXg
Shared values require cultural winners and losers
Tess, I agree that there is less cohesion, and that this is a problem. Unfortunately it is hard to examine fragmentation objectively in today's society, because so much is now taboo. For example, if I raise the subject of English incomers diluting local Welsh culture in West Wales - who are these people who so cheerfully change a house name like "Penrallt" to "Dunroamin'"? - I usually find your typical well-educated, urban, middle-class English person to be sympathetic to the Welsh predicament. (I don't see any easy solutions to this problem, incidentally.)RevdTess wrote:there is no way this is going to unite the nation, because either way it's locking us into a direction of travel that for some people is going to be fundamentally opposed to their deepest values.
On the other hand, if I were to ask the same well-educated, urban, middle-class English person whether they feel that the tremendous inflow of Eastern Europeans is diluting English culture, there's an excellent chance, in my rather depressing experience, that I would be instantly labelled a bigot - my arguments would not even be considered. Obvious inconsistencies of this type are emblematic of our failure, as a society, to hold an honest discussion about migration, immigration and sensible population levels for the UK.
With regard to your "fundamentally opposed to their deepest values", this seems to me the Remain camp's problem. They have couched their argument in terms of the purported economic impact of Brexit, which is not a "shared story" argument - it does not address culture or identity. A certain level of economic well-being may be desirable for nearly everybody, but for most people it is not a "deepest value" of the kind you mention. My children are a substantial economic burden, yet like most fathers I would give my life for them.
Worse, when supporters of Remain do address the identity issue, it is to appeal to a layer of community (some vague concept of a kind of European family) far above or far removed from that with which people come into contact with on a day-to-day basis. How do you get people excited about something as nebulous as a common European identity? With difficulty. With great difficulty. That Leave won the referendum despite the substantial deterrent of Project Fear suggests that, if it had not been for the economic scare stories, the margin of Leave's win could have been even larger, which in turn implies that the attraction of the EU, and of "European-ness" is limited.
The underlying problem is that if a society glorifies diversity and heterogeneity instead of functioning as a somewhat coercive melting pot in which shared values (based overwhelmingly on the "indigenous" culture) are encouraged to dominate, then broad-based communities will not cohere. Instead we will have tribes living side by side in a state of eternal wariness.
The proponents of the contact theory hypothesis might well be correct in thinking that a certain level exposure to different cultures reduces the short-term risk of conflict, but a society of different, loosely affiliated cultures is a different thing to a society in which the vast majority of the population share core beliefs and are confident that those beliefs are largely correct.
We are more or less the same at a biological level, but the cultural overlays are what makes us distinctive, and what cause the conflict. I know that will be anathema to those who believe that humans are basically identical (as I did when I was a naive teenager), but after five decades of life, including a couple spent living in an alien culture, this seems to me to be an inescapable truth.
Suss
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Little John
I'd go along with that more or less UE.UndercoverElephant wrote:Brexit: is the fog lifting?....
......So possibly the EU will back down and May's deal will be ratified without the backstop, or with an exit/expiry mechanism, but if it doesn't happen then the world is not going to end. We will just leave the EU on March 29th without a deal, and then go through a period of instability and re-adjustment. But it's going to be OK....
For me it has always rested, fundamentally, on the issue of sovereignty and democracy.
Any deal that does not tie the hands of any future government is neither here nor there for me. Or, at least, more or less that is the case.
The red line for me, always, has been either Brino or some bullshit like the backstop with ties us up even tighter but without any future say in anything.
So, if a deal can be arrived at that a future government can fully undo as part of the program of government, then I can probably live with it. Though, I would still need to see the details.
Failing the above, WTO Brexit if you please.
Finally, I think the elephant in the room here, which nobody here, and certainly not the MSM, are acknowledging is the general public. I would argue it is only BECAUSE many millions of intransigent, cantankerous buggers like me putting our foot down and steadfastly, absolutely refusing to budge an inch in the wake of Project Fear Mk 2, that has meant that one way or another, our own political class looks like it might be blinking first and dare not defy us for fear of the unmitigated shit-storm that would erupt in this country if they did. Or, at least, I hope to God this is the case, for all of our sake.
Last edited by Little John on 20 Dec 2018, 22:58, edited 1 time in total.
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Little John
Thank you for that post Susukino.
I guess I would just add this. For a large portion of remainers, it is partly about economics, since being in the EU has been a benefit to them economically and also in terms of making their lives more interesting - eg travel and cultural exchange.
Forr a large portion of the leavers, however, there has been no economic gain to being in the EU and, with mass immigration of low skilled workers, quite the opposite.
Thus, firstly, on the economic front, one should be little surprised at the limited utility of telling people who feel they have lost nearly everything that if we leave the EU they are going to lose it all. Secondly, when people lose everything economically, their identity and sense of cultural belonging is all they have left to hold onto. So, again, unsurprisingly, whilst this might be something that that many remainers love to sneer at, it has also been a factor in driving the leave vote.
I guess I would just add this. For a large portion of remainers, it is partly about economics, since being in the EU has been a benefit to them economically and also in terms of making their lives more interesting - eg travel and cultural exchange.
Forr a large portion of the leavers, however, there has been no economic gain to being in the EU and, with mass immigration of low skilled workers, quite the opposite.
Thus, firstly, on the economic front, one should be little surprised at the limited utility of telling people who feel they have lost nearly everything that if we leave the EU they are going to lose it all. Secondly, when people lose everything economically, their identity and sense of cultural belonging is all they have left to hold onto. So, again, unsurprisingly, whilst this might be something that that many remainers love to sneer at, it has also been a factor in driving the leave vote.
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UndercoverElephant
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Little John
The bullshit people's vote campaign has been taking their buses around the country.
They called up North.
Bad idea. They ended up having to F--k off back where they came from with a police escort.
This is only the merest taste of what will follow if these anti-democratic traitors get their way in parliament
https://www.facebook.com/houghtonboxing ... 945601029/
They called up North.
Bad idea. They ended up having to F--k off back where they came from with a police escort.
This is only the merest taste of what will follow if these anti-democratic traitors get their way in parliament
https://www.facebook.com/houghtonboxing ... 945601029/
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careful_eugene
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It goes both ways. https://twitter.com/HopeFestFilm/status ... 8341580800Little John wrote:The bullshit people's vote campaign has been taking their buses around the country.
They called up North.
Bad idea. They ended up having to F--k off back where they came from with a police escort.
This is only the merest taste of what will follow if these anti-democratic traitors get their way in parliament
https://www.facebook.com/houghtonboxing ... 945601029/
Paid up member of the Petite bourgeoisie
In the comments under that clip, you write "absolutely f***ing love this".Little John wrote:The bullshit people's vote campaign has been taking their buses around the country.
They called up North.
Bad idea. They ended up having to F--k off back where they came from with a police escort.
This is only the merest taste of what will follow if these anti-democratic traitors get their way in parliament
https://www.facebook.com/houghtonboxing ... 945601029/
Why? There's nothing to love about intimidation and labelling people with a contrary opinion as 'nazi scum'. I'm someone who voted leave, favours a hard Brexit and doesn't agree with the idea of a second referendum. But the tactics used in this clip aren't the way to behave.
We'll soon see whether being outside the EU improves our economic lot or not. If, as nearly all businesses are predicting, a hard Brexit does bring hard economic times, the impacts will be felt hardest by those at the bottom of the pile.Little John wrote:I guess I would just add this. For a large portion of remainers, it is partly about economics, since being in the EU has been a benefit to them economically and also in terms of making their lives more interesting - eg travel and cultural exchange.
For a large portion of the leavers, however, there has been no economic gain to being in the EU and, with mass immigration of low skilled workers, quite the opposite.
Plus, the double whammy is that we move away from the EU's stance on social protection, worker protection, environmental protection etc. If the economy turns bad, do we trust a UK government to protect these areas ?
The 'mass immigration', that you talk about mostly comes from outside the EU anyway. HMG has always had control of that (supposedly) - but to what effect ? I read that one of India's conditions for negotiating one of these mythical Trade Deals was easier access to Visas for their citizens.... So are we just going to swap EU low skilled workers for non-EU slightly higher skilled workers....?
I just don't think that Brexit will do 'what it says on the tin' for the UK's low skilled workers....
We'll see, but I think they've been sold a pup.
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Little John
People who are actively, willingly, knowingly attempting to usurp a democratic mandate really are fascists. It is of complete irrelevance that their fascism is hidden behind an oh-so-polite, middle-class, passive aggressiveness. And I don't mean fascism in a metaphorical sense or in the meaningless twaddle-like way that it is thrown about as a casual insult to any one who does not agree with them by the imbecilic liberal faux-left.oobers wrote:In the comments under that clip, you write "absolutely f***ing love this".Little John wrote:The bullshit people's vote campaign has been taking their buses around the country.
They called up North.
Bad idea. They ended up having to F--k off back where they came from with a police escort.
This is only the merest taste of what will follow if these anti-democratic traitors get their way in parliament
https://www.facebook.com/houghtonboxing ... 945601029/
Why? There's nothing to love about intimidation and labelling people with a contrary opinion as 'nazi scum'. I'm someone who voted leave, favours a hard Brexit and doesn't agree with the idea of a second referendum. But the tactics used in this clip aren't the way to behave.
I mean the real f***ing thing.
They are fascists.
And I absolutely do love seeing them get their arses kicked. I despise them more than just about any other type of person in this society. I mean really, honestly, utterly f***ing despise them.
I am not alone I can assure you.
Last edited by Little John on 22 Dec 2018, 20:49, edited 1 time in total.