For the Brits: When will BREXIT referendum happen ?

[peejaye]

God but I do despise fucking keyboard warriors.

No; You just hate losing

[Aticus100]

My point proven.

[Stavros]

Theresa May has delivered her important speech on the terms of Brexit. She gave it in the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella, the same church in which Galileo was twice denounced as a heretic for declaring that the Earth orbits around the Sun. We know what subsequently happened to Galileo, we have yet to find out how Mrs May's speech affects her standing in the party, the forthcoming Tory Conference in Manchester will help.

And to be fair, we do now have a clearer idea of what the UK believes would be a fair and practicable arrangement:

1) There will be no 'clean break' with the EU, but after the formal declaration of an exit through Article 50 in March 2019, there will be a two year transitional period during which various agencies and businesses will have time to adjust to the forthcoming change in sovereignty.

2) During the two year transition, which will include the last year of the existing budget agreement, the UK will continue to pay into the EU budget, though the precise figure has not been agreed. It will also abide by the decisions of the European Court of Justice, and maintain the four fundamental freedoms of the Single Market, with the rider that new entrants into the UK from the EU will have to register as EU citizens. But Mrs May has agreed on the need to write guarantees of rights for EU citizens in the UK into the final agreement.

3) On security and policing, the UK will seek
a bold new strategic agreement that provides a comprehensive framework for future security, law enforcement and criminal justice co-operation: a treaty between the UK and the EU. This would complement the extensive and mature bi-lateral relationships that we already have with European friends to promote our common security.

4) On trade, there is no clear option but two present themselves: one is a “high-access, low-control” arrangement of the kind Norway has, which gives greater access to the Single Market but concedes a degree of sovereignty and requires annual payments into the EU budget. The other is low-access, high-control” which limits the degree of access to the Single Market the UK might have but costs less and gives the UK the sovereignty over legal and other issues such as the movement of people from the EU to the UK and vice versa.
These two models conform to most of the divided opinions in the party, though there are some who favour a more austere 'clean break' where the UK leaves the EU in its entirety and seeks new agreements on an issue by issue basis.

5) The border with Northern Ireland appears to remain a difficult issue to agree on. Mrs May said “We have both stated explicitly we will not accept physical infrastructure on the border.” but that does not offer any clarity on customs issues, and is one of the issues along with the UK's membership of EU agencies that has yet to be discussed, and may take place in the transition period.

The full text of the speech is here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...-a7961596.html

A Guardian summary is here:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...ech-key-points

[filghy2]

so you want the right to re-vote on Brexit subject to final exit agreement? Why in god's name would EU sit down to negotiate in good faith under those terms?
Sorry, you can't buy a pair of new shoes, wear'em for a year and then return them for a refund because you decide they hurt your feet.

Actually, it's normal to negotiate trade agreements on the basis that the final agreement will be subject to parliamentary approval in the countries involved.

The real lesson from the present debacle is the idiocy of holding a referendum on a purely negative question when the implications are so fundamental and depend on the form that Brexit takes (ie what arrangements replace EU membership). The mess the UK has got itself into was entirely predictable.

[Stavros]

And such a mess it is conceivable that the UK will crash out without an agreement. After Mrs May's speech, the leader of the EU Parliament, Guy Verhofstadt rejected the idea of a register for EU citizens, and there is speculation that chief negotiator Michel Barnier is not impressed with the proposal for a two-year transitional period after May 2019.

In addition, it looks like the wagons are circling around Mrs May as the Chancellor, Philip Hammond declined to say if he would support her in any leadership contest, though he is supposed to be one of her most reliable allies (this now appears to be Damian Green). Hard Brexiteers are furious with Mrs May for conceding on financial obligations and a transitional period, and with Boris Johnson renewing his attempt to become leader, the Conference may try to stifle dissent with stage-managed speeches, as is happening at the seaside love-in Labour is presently engaged in, but if May fails to impress conference and no clearer movement in the negotiations is evident, she could be out by December, much as Mrs Thatcher survived the 1990 conference before her comrades stabbed her in the back. May could in theory survive for much longer, but she doesn't seem to have many friends in the right places.

[filghy2]

Never fear Brits, Tony Abbott is on his way to point you in the right direction. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politi...27-gyq2xd.html

I'm not sure what they think he can contribute, given Abbott's sole skill seems to be negative campaigning. That would have been useful in the referendum campaign, but not now.

[Stavros]

Never fear Brits, Tony Abbott is on his way to point you in the right direction.
I'm not sure what they think he can contribute, given Abbott's sole skill seems to be negative campaigning. That would have been useful in the referendum campaign, but not now.

I can't see what the new Institute for Free Trade is going to do that is not already being done by the Institute of Economic Affairs, funded in 1955 to promote free market economics (its zany pamphlets have been a gold-mine for critics of capitalism); the Centre for Policy Studies, founded in 1974 to promote free market economics, and the vehicle Keith Joseph used to relentlessly attack the policies of his own (Conservative) party before converting Margaret Thatcher to monetarism and associated policies, and, curiously enough at the same address on Tufton Street as the Institute for Free Trade. The there is the Resolution Foundation, set up in 2005 which officially aims to promote the well-being of middle-to-lower income families but does so in the framework provided by the benefits of a free market economy.

You will find Conservative MPs associated with all of these bodies, which suggests that the latest vehicle is a vanity project for Daniel Hannan, the Conservative Member of the European Parliament (obviously looking for a new revenue stream when his annual salary of 93,000 Euros dries up). Hannan became one of the most articulate intellectuals on the Leave side, even though most of what he said was lodged somewhere between the irreconcilable positions of being pragmatic or just plain rubbish, such as his claim that outside the EU the UK will be free to trade with 159 countries. As if the value of trade between the UK and Djibouti is going to make up for the loss of trade with the EU, and you can name 100 other poor countries whose value to trade would never match the value we have/had with even one EU country like Ireland, or the Netherlands. The classic moment came after the referendum result when Hannan, asked was asked on tv by Evan Davis about the end of free movement of people and its impact and Hannan blithely replied free movement could carry on because his distinction was between the free movement of labour -good- and the free movement of people -bad. Davis almost banged his head on the table in despair at this sudden, if pragmatic change of definition, yet this is how Hannan operates, offering a sophisticated argument on Monday that is further refined by Saturday, and begins the succeeding week in yet another form.

I think its called 'making it up as you go along'. So all we can expect from the Institute for Free Trade are junkets, and pamphlets and speeches about what might be, rather than the reality of what we are. As for their neighbours on Tufton Street, from the Heritage Foundation to climate-change deniers, it looks rather like Tufton St has replaced Fleet St as London's Street of Shame. At least one can expect quality prosecco at their gigs, even if it is Italian. Italy is in the EU.
https://www.desmog.uk/2017/09/27/int...denier-network

[Stavros]

When it was announced a few days ago that Theresa May would join David Davis in his visit to Brussels for the Brexit negotiations, it was seen by some as a desperate measure to rescue talks bogged down in mind-crunching details neither side can agree on. If reports of her dinner with senior EU officials are anything to go by, her presence merely served to underline the lack of progress. One wonders what would happen if Angela Merkel had got involved. Mrs May looks increasingly like a Prime Minister in office but without power.

As stated before, the three issues on the table are 1) citizens' rights; 2) financial obligations, and 3) the border with Ireland.

1) The rights of EU citizens in the UK and of UK citizens in the EU appeared to be fairly simple to resolve: recognise their rights of residency and permit them to stay, but impose regulations on any new arrivals as would happen with citizens of non-EU countries. The problem that has emerged is the possibility that while the City of London has become the 'passporting' hub for the EU, if the UK when it leaves the EU leaves all the associated economic arrangements, such as the Single Market, the Customs Union and the European Economic Area, passporting rights will no longer apply -at least I think that this is the case. What I am not sure is whether or not banks/financial institutions 'selling' this service must be EU based, or whether anyone can do it, for example, Wall Street. It means that the City of London could offer to maintain passporting even if the UK leaves the EU, or not as the case may be.
What this means, potentially, is that UK citizens living for example, in Spain, would not have an automatic right to have their pensions paid into a bank account in Spain, because the UK firm they used to work for would not have the legal right to transfer their pension outside passporting arrangements that existed when the UK was in the EU. In this instance it appears that passporting is the key to this conundrum, but I don't know how it is likely to be resolved.

2)The financial obligations that are under scrutiny not only include the budget that the UK has agreed to pay into, but after the UK's exit the country's commitment to the EU's pension obligations. Because the UK has been paying into the EU pension fund for more than 40 years, and because of its size, the UK has become an important source of funds for all those staff of the EU from admin staff to Members of the European Parliament. I assume the UK position is that the UK would take full responsibility to pay the pensions of UK citizens who are entitled to an EU pension, but I don't know what rights the UK outside the EU would have if there are any amendments to EU pensions, and as the UK insists it will not incorporate decisions of the European Court of Justice into English law (and by inference the law in Scotland and Northern Ireland), it appears that the EU could increase the value of the pensions it pays, or change some aspect of their entitlement, and the UK government would have to pay it and accept the changes, or explain to its citizens why it is not doing so. In the case of both the EU budget and Pensions, the EU is thus asking the UK to make precisely the kind of financial commitment into the future that the hard men, like Boris Johnson and Liam Fox are opposed to.

3) Ireland and the border question raises perhaps the most fascinating conundrum of all. At the moment, because Ireland and Northern Ireland are both full members of the EU in a single market, the 'border' exists as a geographical set of co-ordinates but in most other ways is invisible. Theresa May wants a 'frictionless' border to be maintained in order to prevent a return to the days when there were border posts and armed border patrols -mostly for security reasons during the Troubles- with the potential addition of customs arrangements in the form of customs officials checking vehicles, and so on.
The problem for Mrs May is that if the UK leaves the EU, so does Northern Ireland, but if an agreement is reached which does not re-impose an identifiable border and trade flows freely, this, in effect, means that the island of Ireland is a single market and is thus a form of 'United Ireland', the one issue on which the largest party in the province, the DUP is opposed to. And, as Theresa May cannot survive on key items of legislation without the DUP's support, she must find a way to resolve the border issue that does not create a 'United Ireland' but which also does not prejudice trade that is vital to both Ireland and the UK.
As I don't believe the UK can remain in the single market in any meaningful sense of the word, I can't see any alternative but a return to the hard border with cumbersome checks on vehicles by immigration and customs officials. Well, at least that means more jobs in Northern Ireland, and another extra £100 million a year for the government to find. And the leavers told us the UK will be saving money by leaving the EU!

[peejaye]

More speculation, scaremongering & guess work as usual when on this topic!
Personally; I wouldn't give them a fucking penny, they've already had something like £358bn from the UK! Outrageous!

[Stavros]

More speculation, scaremongering & guess work as usual when on this topic!
Personally; I wouldn't give them a fucking penny, they've already had something like £358bn from the UK! Outrageous!

Peejaye, I understand how frustrating it is not to know what the exit process is going to look like, but your comments are plain stupid. It is not scaremongering to ask what happens to pension rights or the passporting system, these are real issues that affect UK citizens living abroad -are you suggesting the UK government just leave British citizens to rot in Spain with no attempt to secure a fair deal for them?

The money paid into the EU by the UK since 1973 can not be judged on its own because it became part of a pool of money that was then re-distributed across the EU because we are a collective of nations. It means a proportion of the money used by the EU to subsidize fishing and agriculture originated in the UK but not all of it did, so while you complain about the money 'we' gave 'them' what about the money 'they' gave to 'us'? How do you break down the funding from various EU universities in research in neural networks that took place in the UK and European institutions, and are you suggesting 'we' give back 'their' share and vice versa? More than 50% of the fishing fleet was purchased with money from the EU, are those fishermen going to give it back?
This is nonsense.

And here is the real killer: the UK does not just have a moral obligation to abide by signed agreements, they are legally biding too -so if the UK walks away from the EU in 2019 without a comprehensive set of exit agreements, the next day the negotiations will start all over again and consume even more time and money than they have already, bearing in mind the projected cost of the government's Department for Exiting the European Union is already £100 million a year. And who knows if the EU decides to prosecute the UK for breaking international law? We are not Americans who sign a deal one year and walk away from it the next without caring what others think, and why after Brexit should the Germans want to sign a trade deal with a UK that has become untrustworthy?

There are 37 EU institutions ranging from European Medicines Agency, the European Environment Agency to safety agencies in food, maritime affairs, aviation; agencies related to security and intelligence, banking and so on. Do you not realise that the UK must either simply walk away from these agencies or re-negotiate a relationship with them? In some cases, such as the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control the UK will leave it only to re-negotiate a relationship with it, which is a good example of the rank stupidity that has engulfed this country in the cause of some fantastic independence that even liars like Boris Johnson don't believe is either possible or desirable.

Yes it is frustrating and looks like a mess, but we have no choice, we have to negotiate our way out of the EU, if not before 2019, then after it. And I can't believe you don't appreciate the practical and symbolic issues around the border with Ireland.