For the Brits: When will BREXIT referendum happen ?

[peejaye]

What did we do post 1973? Were we not capable of flying aeroplanes safely? Beareacrecy running riot!

[Stavros]

Peejaye, some bureaucracy yes, but think of it in EU terms as standardization, and what replaces it when the UK leaves the EU.

What the EU has achieved through standardization in numerous industries and consumer affairs is to do what it can to ensure that if you buy a car in the UK it has the same level of safety as a car does in Germany or Spain, that your right as a consumer to purchase a bar of chocolate in Belgium is the same as it is in Italy. This does mean that a layer of bureaucracy has developed to monitor and develop standards across the board, but that is a good thing as EU standards are often judged to be higher than in other countries. The EU has higher standards of food hygiene and safety than the US which wants to sell the UK its chemically processed muck masquerading as 'food' when they negotiate the trade deal which the current President wants to benefit the US more than the UK.

We have the people to conduct safety checks on aeroplanes, but they are working to EU standards and are subject to the EU's assessment and in extreme cases rulings of the European Court of Justice which Theresa May insists will play no role in the governance of the UK. As yet the government has not announced plans to replace the EU Aviation Safety Agency with one of its own, and although there is no doubt the guys on the ground know their job, if the EU does not see an official safety agency in charge it could deny carriers entry to EU airports on the grounds of safety. You could argue the same with food exports if there is no official body to guarantee the safety and hygiene of food exports to the EU from the UK.

And the irony is that just as the Coalition government from 2010-2015 slashed public sector jobs, a trend continued by the Tory government from 2015-2017, there may be a need to create more public sector jobs to fill the gaps left by our exit from the EU as we replace EU institutions with our own -assuming that we do. A large proportion of the money we were told we would have to spend on our NHS when we leave the EU may be spent on salaries for people in numerous agencies in food, fishing, aviation, chemicals, consumer goods, etc that have to do the work we currently share with the EU. Replacing one layer of bureaucracy in the EU will merely lead to its replication in the UK.

[flabbybody]

Stavros I'll have you know my mother never in her 8 decades served me soup with "chemically processed muck"
It does appear however that the way Yanks clean chickens is not quite up to British standards. This might be one of many hurdles to a UK-US trade deal.
http://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story...1-A6E503041C02

[Stavros]

Stavros I'll have you know my mother never in her 8 decades served me soup with "chemically processed muck"
It does appear however that the way Yanks clean chickens is not quite up to British standards. This might be one of many hurdles to a UK-US trade deal.

A fair riposte to my provocative comment, and I apologise if you were offended.

Of course there is a lot of good food in the US, and I expect where the food is less than good it has its equals in the UK, with chicken appearing to be head of the line. There are multiple fast-food outlets here based on chicken which I would never walk into. If a whole chicken can be purchased for £5 or less I doubt it ever saw the light of day in its short life. Much of this cheap meat is soaked in sauce anyway so the chicken is just one flavour amongst others. For what it's worth we do better than parts of China. I was told by a Shanghai citizen not to eat in any of the small holes in the wall type eating places off the Nanjing Lu because whatever they say the meat is, it might be something else, as in ' you really don't want to know'.

The three key problem areas are hormone-induced beef, GM crops such as wheat products, and chlorine-washed chicken. It is ironic because the US and the EU have high food standards, but the EU sells more meat and food to the US than vice versa.

Food is a sensitive area, and has been difficult to handle. For many years the UK imported beef from Argentina -it amounted to 43% of our meat imports before the second world war, declining to 28% by 1950 (indeed meat production in Argentina has declined and they now export more fish than beef). The problem was that foot and mouth disease was endemic in Argentina and neighbouring Uruguay and the food standards of the time were not as high as they are now, and outbreaks of foot and mouth in the UK were attributed to infections from South America, possibly because the imported meat was chilled rather than frozen. Worse still, outbreaks of typhoid in the UK in the early 1960s -notably in Aberdeen in 1964- were traced to cans of corned beef imported from Argentina that had been processed in a plant with sub-standard hygiene using impure water. This in turn led to a significant decline of imports, sales of Fray Bentos corned beef plummeted, and beef herds in the UK increased in size to compensate for losses from abroad.

If the Argentine beef problem was an example that encouraged a more diligent attitude to food standards worldwide, foot and mouth has continued to be an episodic problem in the UK and the French banned imports of British beef in 1990 following the incidences of 'mad cow' disease. In other words, there have been persistent problems of food hygiene in the UK and elsewhere, even with improved systems of monitoring and control.

I suspect there is a convenient view that the Americans are more likely to export cheap products to us than the good stuff they eat themselves -whether this is true or not-, and I don't know that confidence in these things can be easily overcome if the additional view is that any US-UK trade agreement will be of greater benefit to the US than to the UK.

[Stavros]

Over the weekend there were rumours of a split in the British government, with the Chancellor Philip Hammond claiming that in the transitional period that will begin when the UK leaves the EU, the UK will still be 'recognisably European' for at least three years during which free movement will probably continue. Cue howls of rage from the Bangers 'n Mash brigades, not least when Amber Rudd appeared to agree, and Liam Fox disagreed but since then the Prime Minister Theresa May has reinforced her view that 'out' means 'out' and that free movement ends when the UK leaves. This matters to many businesses who have five or ten year contracts with other companies in the EU, but so far, it is all clear....right?

In the meantime, today the EU opened tenders for the new locations for two EU agencies which, because of Brexit, will be re-locating from London: the European Baking Authority and the European Medicines Agency. Both employ around 1,000 people in Canary Whard in East London, but in addition attract thousands of visitors each year who purchase the hotel space in that Docklands area. Those jobs and that demand for hotel space will go over the next 3 years. What the precise impact on the local economy will be is not known, and the UK which currently co-ordinates banking and medicine regulations will have to develop its own when the UK leaves.

You can read about it here-
http://www.politico.eu/article/brexi...use-of-brexit/

[Stavros]

Since the post above, Philip Hammond and Liam Fox, two men on opposite sides of the fence on Brexit published a joint article that conceded a transitional period would be necessary to smooth the UK's path out of the EU. It was the first sign that even the hard nuts, like Fox, may have to tone down their rhetoric to match reality.

In the last 10 days the Government has published two briefing papers to give much-requested clarity on Britain's negotiating positions, the first was on the Customs Union, the second on the border with Ireland, but both made their issues more obscure instead. The UK would leave the single market and the Customs Union, but seek a transitional arrangement providing the UK and the EU with a temporary Customs Union that has all the same rules and regulations as the EU's Custom's Union which raised the obvious question -why? Why not remain in the Customs Union as it is? The answer is that to 'take back control' of the UK Parliament's sovereign right to make its own laws, it cannot be part of a Union whose laws are made by the European Court of Justice [ECJ]. Yet in the last 48 hours another paper has been floated (due out later today, Wednesday 23rd) that implies the UK government will accept rulings of the ECJ, the wording apparently saying th ECJ's direct rulings will end, implying that others may hold. This is either a pragmatic acceptance that the reality of ending 40 years of integration cannot be ended overnight, or a betrayal of the British people, depending on your point of view.

On Ireland, one proposal to ensure there is no return to the border posts patrolled by the military, is to use technology -number plate recognition cameras can monitor vehicles moving to and from from the Republic to Northern Ireland, a proposal that some thought was innovative, others inane. Another proposal to move the border into the Irish Sea suggests the government is all-at-sea so it might work.

The reality is that reality is far more complex than these negotiations can deal with in the time limit set by the parties. The UK wants to begin trade negotiations in October, the EU remains adamant the UK must first agree the financial terms of the exit, the Irish Border questions, and the rights of EU and UK citizens. Such pressure may force the UK government to negotiate terms that are pragmatic from one point of view, concessions amounting to betrayal from another. Vince Cable, who now leads the Liberal Democrat party, remains of the view that the UK when all the negotiating is done, will remain in the EU. A second referendum on the final terms of the deal may swing it -or not. But will the citizens of the UK be given a chance to answer the question, and what will the question be?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...-a7907316.html

[Budweiser]

This sounds pretty good to me.

Britain To Slash 'Migrant' EU Immigration Under Brexit
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017...labour-brexit/

[filghy2]

There's actually very little evidence that immigration has adverse effects on existing residents. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/artic...cans-paychecks

[Stavros]

This sounds pretty good to me.

Britain To Slash 'Migrant' EU Immigration Under Brexit
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017...labour-brexit/

I don't agree with everything in this article by Simon Jenkins, but I do agree with this:

There is a crude chauvinist appeal in “British jobs for British workers”, as there is in the plea to avoid “community swamping”. But the regions voting most strongly for Brexit were those with least immigrants. Britain’s prosperous southern cities seem able to absorb large numbers of new arrivals – domestic and foreign – without soaring unemployment. Have Whitehall economists not noticed that joblessness is far higher in low-immigrant areas, such as the north-east?

The most serious damage to British community identity, other than in small pockets, comes not from immigration but from social deterioration. Brexit was a cry not of xenophobia but of neglect. If May really wanted to respond to the anti-migrant sentiment of the referendum, she would do everything to encourage economic growth away from the south-east and towards the Midlands and the north.
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...neglect-brexit

[peejaye]

That's all correct but I believe the areas voting to leave were the most impoverished areas of the UK?