Brexit, for once some facts.

Fingers

Esteemed Pedelecer
Feb 9, 2016
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We don't get to choose the President of the European Council, the President of the Commission and the President of the ECB.
If we get to choose them, maybe we'd want to stay.

It would have to be a completely new set up. Much like America I suppose for us to vote on the president. This is the way they want it eventually I guess. Although it is quite rare for a prime minister, chancellor to cede power.

The big worry is the apathy in EU voter turnout and the election being hijacked for nefarious means. It’s not good either way.
 

Kudoscycles

Official Trade Member
Apr 15, 2011
5,566
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I, m afraid taking into account the chaos in Westminster, fact we could even end up with Corbyn and Abott actually running things, fact May is probably doomed and her successor will be king without a kingdom (tories completely split and only in power because of Corbyn) your suggestion is probably best... But still dont think it will happen.
May will not back down, she, ll lose vote on 10th...Guess what then...
Train heading for broken rail, nobody on brakes.
Do you really want to be on a train heading to a broken rail without brakes.
If that is your thoughts you surely should be voting for anything that stops Brexit?
KudosDave
 

Zlatan

Esteemed Pedelecer
Nov 26, 2016
8,086
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Do you really want to be on a train heading to a broken rail without brakes.
If that is your thoughts you surely should be voting for anything that stops Brexit?
KudosDave
Like what Dave? Besides, much as no deal wouldnt be my first choice its certainly wont be as problematic as some assume.
 
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Zlatan

Esteemed Pedelecer
Nov 26, 2016
8,086
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You need to get out more. Not to europe. Just down the street to the nearest cafe or polish shop. Perhaps this launches you into another much more shared world. I work a great deal with other europeans. Their lovely. The metaphor about glare and shades is deeply ironic. Its leavers who are blinded by xenophobia, hatred. Life really works a great deal better when one shares it with others.
Dave said nothing about disliking Europeans he said the EU.
I have quite a lot to do with our local Asian community, they are a fantastic group and do fantastic work for our local area, doesnt mean I want to be governed from India.

Why do you make the leap to xenophobia for dislike of EU. The reverse is actually more likely examining ethnicity of leading EU members.
 
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Danidl

Esteemed Pedelecer
Sep 29, 2016
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It would have to be a completely new set up. Much like America I suppose for us to vote on the president. This is the way they want it eventually I guess. Although it is quite rare for a prime minister, chancellor to cede power.

The big worry is the apathy in EU voter turnout and the election being hijacked for nefarious means. It’s not good either way.
There is rarely voter apathy in Ireland. The proportional representation model and multiseat constituencies see to that. While looking over the map linked to the current petition,the undemocratic nature of the UK model is evident. In some places the representation is 1:30,000 and in others 1: 110,000
 
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Kudoscycles

Official Trade Member
Apr 15, 2011
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You still don't get it.
The Eu hate us (just watch them on the TV)
I want out.
Whatever the cost (within reason, No world war 3)
I don’t think the EU hate us,they clearly want us to stay in the club.
But I think they are increasingly frustrated with May,she supposedly spoke for 90 mins and they learnt nothing,she engaged in evasive conversation,never answering a question.....I think she lacks any form of imagination,she just falls back on her repetitive sound bites when cornered....I believe that we see her doing it all the time on our TV.
In actual fact as a businessman I should be supporting the ERG headbangers,if they move us to a Singaporean style tax haven I can see a lot attractive to me,what surprises me is that poor people from mainly northern towns also find their message attractive.....they will destroy the social supporting system that exists in the U.K.,the top 2% will end up mega wealthy but the normal working person will see 90% of their wages going into our equivalent of the Singapore CPF....do your homework and Google ‘Singapore Central Provident Fund’ to see what Rees-Mogg has lined up for the U.K.
KudosDave
 
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Fingers

Esteemed Pedelecer
Feb 9, 2016
3,373
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There is rarely voter apathy in Ireland. The proportional representation model and multiseat constituencies see to that. While looking over the map linked to the current petition,the undemocratic nature of the UK model is evident. In some places the representation is 1:30,000 and in others 1: 110,000

It’s not just us though. EU voter turnout is lower than national elections across the continent. As discussed before some of the Eastern European countries have shocking turnouts and are wide open to corruption.

If Ireland take it more seriously than most then good for them but they are the exception not the rule.
 
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Woosh

Trade Member
May 19, 2012
20,330
16,853
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wooshbikes.co.uk
It’s not just us though. EU voter turnout is lower than national elections across the continent. As discussed before some of the Eastern European countries have shocking turnouts and are wide open to corruption.

If Ireland take it more seriously than most then good for them but they are the exception not the rule.
I think the general perception is the EP's job is to rubber-stamp anything the Commission puts to them.
The EPP, the largest grouping of MEPs, is identified with Germany and whatever they say usually goes. There is no real opposition inside the EP.
 
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Kudoscycles

Official Trade Member
Apr 15, 2011
5,566
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that's the size of the swing if there is another referendum.
the leavers overdid it and started remainers' revolt.
the conservatives lose grip on power.
Let’s be honest us Remainers want a second referendum because we are certain we will win it and Leavers don’t want one because they know they will lose it....the mess of Brexit will get all the BOBs out to vote just to get life back to normal ‘no brexit’ ,the Remainers who didn’t vote last time because they were certain Remain would win,will definitely vote this time,the young will be mobilised,the dead oldies won’t vote!
KudosDave
 

Danidl

Esteemed Pedelecer
Sep 29, 2016
8,611
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Taken from todays Irish Times,by Fintin O'Toole...

"As we take our seats yet again on the great Brexit merry-go-round, I have been thinking of the elegant, high-backed chairs in a dining room 15 miles south of Belfast. They are in Mount Stewart, the big house on Strangford Lough.

But you can see them in paintings of the Congress of Vienna of 1815 – the posteriors of the men who redrew the map of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon graced their seats. One of the men in the pictures is Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary who was one of the dominant figures in deciding Europe’s future. Though he was born in Henry Street in Dublin, Mount Stewart was the family pile. So he took the chairs home from Vienna to Co Down as a memento.

What they bring to mind now is unintended consequences. They remind us that revolutions can leave legacies for the long term that no one imagined. What is the long-term legacy of the Russian Revolution? Not so much contemporary Russia as contemporary China and its strange mixture of Leninism and hyper-capitalism.

What will be the unintended consequences of Brexit? The absence of a clear and realistic set of goals has characterised the project from the beginning
And what is the long-term legacy of the French Revolution? A place called Germany. There was no such place in the 18th century, just hundreds of independent city-states and principalities whose people were Germanic in culture but had no sense of belonging to a single political nation.

The French Revolution created Napoleon who realised that these micro-states were easy pickings and invaded them.

Here we have the most consequential of unintended consequences. France was the dominant power in Europe, and Germany did not exist. Napoleon invaded the Germanic states and accidentally summoned Germany into existence. He reorganised the statelets into confederations. Resistance to him created a pan-German nationalism.


After Napoleon’s defeat, at the Congress of Vienna, the men sitting on those Mount Stewart chairs created the German Confederation, which would eventually lead to German unification in 1871. France’s position as the dominant western European continental power was thus ended by Napoleon.

And Britain, which encouraged the creation of a strong Germany, went to war with it twice in the 20th century.

So what will be the unintended consequences of Brexit? This may be a particularly foolish question when we don’t really know what the intended consequences are, never mind the unintended ones. The absence of a clear and realistic set of goals has characterised the project from the beginning.



Not foreseen?
Since so little has been planned, so much left to chance, is there even a difference in this case between effects that were and were not foreseen? Perhaps not. Perhaps none of Brexit’s consequences will have been fully intended.

But we can guess at some of the ones that run directly counter to the aspirations of those who have created Brexit. One of them will be a strange echo of the French Revolution’s accidental creation of Germany. And this will be doubly ironic.

In the first place, the anti-EU sentiment that would fuel Brexit really began to gather in England in the wake of German reunification in 1990. The fear that the Germany that had so aggressively pursued dominance of Europe in the 20th century was now reborn and would return to its old ways revived the paranoid suspicion that the EU itself was really a German front.

The notion that Germany was in effect reversing by stealth the result of two world wars and achieving by economic means the dominance it had been denied on the battlefield had long been there. But its rise as a potent political myth in England was itself an unintended consequence of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Brexit will unquestionably create a much greater degree of German dominance on the continent
The irony here is that Brexit will help to create the very thing its political proponents feared. When Boris Johnson told voters a month before the referendum in 2016 that the EU was “pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate”, he was manipulating English anxieties about the dark Teutonic truth behind the EU’s tediously consensual deal-making.

Yet, while Brexit will not actually turn this conspiracy theory into a reality, it will unquestionably create a much greater degree of German dominance on the continent.

Disperse power
One of the reasons most small EU countries are especially unhappy about Brexit is that having the British at the European table has helped to disperse power among a larger number of big players. It is easier for smaller countries to use their diplomatic skills to create coalitions on questions of vital interest to themselves when they can play on rivalries and disagreements between the major states, including the UK.

We can see this most clearly from a negative example: without the UK in the euro zone, Ireland was much more vulnerable in the banking crisis to bullying by the ECB.

If and when Britain leaves, Germany will, merely by default, become much more dominant. The balance of power that Castlereagh did so much to create at the Congress of Vienna will have tilted towards Berlin.

But there is another irony too: the Germans don’t really want this dominance. Scarred by the experience of defeat, they don’t trust themselves with it. This unintended consequence is also, even for its apparent beneficiary, an unwanted one.

It is weirdly apt that British influence on the continent was largely the creation of two Irishmen: the Duke of Wellington and Castlereagh. For the collapse of that influence as a result of Brexit will also have unintended consequences for Ireland.


However Brexit now turns out, Britain's prestige has melted before our eyes
Those chairs in Mount Stewart represent in tangible form an immensely important intangible: the prestige of Britishness. That prestige once came from hard power – military prowess and industrial strength. In our time, it has been maintained by soft power – the notion that Britain still cuts a great figure in the world, maintained through popular culture, an image of vibrancy and openness and a reputation for competence and reliability.

British prestige
We have to keep in mind that for us in Ireland this soft British power is a domestic matter. The allegiance of a very substantial minority on our island has been shaped by history, culture and economic interests. But it has been maintained, even as Britain ceased to be a world power, by a sense of British prestige.

However Brexit now turns out, this prestige has melted before our eyes. Britain will no longer be a player on the continent, and the fantasy that it will therefore emerge again as a global power will be cruelly exposed.

What glamour will attach to Britain then, and what will the British identity of so many people on the island of Ireland then mean?

When Britain is no longer taken seriously at the table, are they just left with the old chairs? "
 

flecc

Member
Oct 25, 2006
53,154
30,572
The Eu hate us (just watch them on the TV)
You are very mixed up. If they hated us they wouldn't have given us all the concessions they have previously and they'd have kicked us out after all our many refusals to co-operate.

The truth is they are trying to keep us in while we are trying to leave, so it's the other way round. We (collectively) hate them.
.
 

Zlatan

Esteemed Pedelecer
Nov 26, 2016
8,086
4,290
Taken from todays Irish Times,by Fintin O'Toole...

"As we take our seats yet again on the great Brexit merry-go-round, I have been thinking of the elegant, high-backed chairs in a dining room 15 miles south of Belfast. They are in Mount Stewart, the big house on Strangford Lough.

But you can see them in paintings of the Congress of Vienna of 1815 – the posteriors of the men who redrew the map of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon graced their seats. One of the men in the pictures is Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary who was one of the dominant figures in deciding Europe’s future. Though he was born in Henry Street in Dublin, Mount Stewart was the family pile. So he took the chairs home from Vienna to Co Down as a memento.

What they bring to mind now is unintended consequences. They remind us that revolutions can leave legacies for the long term that no one imagined. What is the long-term legacy of the Russian Revolution? Not so much contemporary Russia as contemporary China and its strange mixture of Leninism and hyper-capitalism.

What will be the unintended consequences of Brexit? The absence of a clear and realistic set of goals has characterised the project from the beginning
And what is the long-term legacy of the French Revolution? A place called Germany. There was no such place in the 18th century, just hundreds of independent city-states and principalities whose people were Germanic in culture but had no sense of belonging to a single political nation.

The French Revolution created Napoleon who realised that these micro-states were easy pickings and invaded them.

Here we have the most consequential of unintended consequences. France was the dominant power in Europe, and Germany did not exist. Napoleon invaded the Germanic states and accidentally summoned Germany into existence. He reorganised the statelets into confederations. Resistance to him created a pan-German nationalism.


After Napoleon’s defeat, at the Congress of Vienna, the men sitting on those Mount Stewart chairs created the German Confederation, which would eventually lead to German unification in 1871. France’s position as the dominant western European continental power was thus ended by Napoleon.

And Britain, which encouraged the creation of a strong Germany, went to war with it twice in the 20th century.

So what will be the unintended consequences of Brexit? This may be a particularly foolish question when we don’t really know what the intended consequences are, never mind the unintended ones. The absence of a clear and realistic set of goals has characterised the project from the beginning.



Not foreseen?
Since so little has been planned, so much left to chance, is there even a difference in this case between effects that were and were not foreseen? Perhaps not. Perhaps none of Brexit’s consequences will have been fully intended.

But we can guess at some of the ones that run directly counter to the aspirations of those who have created Brexit. One of them will be a strange echo of the French Revolution’s accidental creation of Germany. And this will be doubly ironic.

In the first place, the anti-EU sentiment that would fuel Brexit really began to gather in England in the wake of German reunification in 1990. The fear that the Germany that had so aggressively pursued dominance of Europe in the 20th century was now reborn and would return to its old ways revived the paranoid suspicion that the EU itself was really a German front.

The notion that Germany was in effect reversing by stealth the result of two world wars and achieving by economic means the dominance it had been denied on the battlefield had long been there. But its rise as a potent political myth in England was itself an unintended consequence of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Brexit will unquestionably create a much greater degree of German dominance on the continent
The irony here is that Brexit will help to create the very thing its political proponents feared. When Boris Johnson told voters a month before the referendum in 2016 that the EU was “pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate”, he was manipulating English anxieties about the dark Teutonic truth behind the EU’s tediously consensual deal-making.

Yet, while Brexit will not actually turn this conspiracy theory into a reality, it will unquestionably create a much greater degree of German dominance on the continent.

Disperse power
One of the reasons most small EU countries are especially unhappy about Brexit is that having the British at the European table has helped to disperse power among a larger number of big players. It is easier for smaller countries to use their diplomatic skills to create coalitions on questions of vital interest to themselves when they can play on rivalries and disagreements between the major states, including the UK.

We can see this most clearly from a negative example: without the UK in the euro zone, Ireland was much more vulnerable in the banking crisis to bullying by the ECB.

If and when Britain leaves, Germany will, merely by default, become much more dominant. The balance of power that Castlereagh did so much to create at the Congress of Vienna will have tilted towards Berlin.

But there is another irony too: the Germans don’t really want this dominance. Scarred by the experience of defeat, they don’t trust themselves with it. This unintended consequence is also, even for its apparent beneficiary, an unwanted one.

It is weirdly apt that British influence on the continent was largely the creation of two Irishmen: the Duke of Wellington and Castlereagh. For the collapse of that influence as a result of Brexit will also have unintended consequences for Ireland.


However Brexit now turns out, Britain's prestige has melted before our eyes
Those chairs in Mount Stewart represent in tangible form an immensely important intangible: the prestige of Britishness. That prestige once came from hard power – military prowess and industrial strength. In our time, it has been maintained by soft power – the notion that Britain still cuts a great figure in the world, maintained through popular culture, an image of vibrancy and openness and a reputation for competence and reliability.

British prestige
We have to keep in mind that for us in Ireland this soft British power is a domestic matter. The allegiance of a very substantial minority on our island has been shaped by history, culture and economic interests. But it has been maintained, even as Britain ceased to be a world power, by a sense of British prestige.

However Brexit now turns out, this prestige has melted before our eyes. Britain will no longer be a player on the continent, and the fantasy that it will therefore emerge again as a global power will be cruelly exposed.

What glamour will attach to Britain then, and what will the British identity of so many people on the island of Ireland then mean?

When Britain is no longer taken seriously at the table, are they just left with the old chairs? "
Well written post. Makes sense but dont write UK off just yet..
In ten years Brexit will be a distant memory... Will it be consequential? Perhaps... Perhaps not.
 

gray198

Esteemed Pedelecer
Apr 4, 2012
1,592
1,069
Why didn’t I realise this before? I’m putting him on ignore. I won’t be missing anything. I barely read his nonsense and insults anyway.

Clicky on ignore.

Good advice.
I did that sometime ago along with uncle tom. Big improvement
 
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Kudoscycles

Official Trade Member
Apr 15, 2011
5,566
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Like what Dave? Besides, much as no deal wouldnt be my first choice its certainly wont be as problematic as some assume.
How do you know that ‘no deal’ won’t be ‘as problematic as some assume’....if no deal is actioned properly it will be a disaster....just imagine going into your supermarket and be told they had scrapped the checkout scanners.....the girls had been given a list of prices and a calculator.....how long are you prepared to wait before you dump your shopping and give up.
Well if we immediately fall onto WTO tariffs that’s exactly what ‘no deal’ will look like. Most small/ medium businesses use Sage in the U.K.,the Sage system allows the addition of HS codes alongside every line of an invoice but it doesn’t specify the tariff percentage,the customs officer would need to look up the percentage tariff,manually calculate the amount,then manually add up the total,then ask how the tariff is to be paid.
Ok you sell a truck load of envelopes to Austria that’s probably doable but a TNT truncker with hundreds of individual consignments in the back could have to wait for a week to calculate the tariffs.
Rees-Mogg would say that this has to be already done for 70% of our trade but containers coming in from China have to submit manifests weeks before and this is digitally calculated and duty taken as the ship docks,it’s a seamless system,a world away from a multi consignment truck arriving at Calais.
Of course,it should all be done at source and HMRC /French customs all be digitally linked but the Sage system has no means of calculating tariffs,they say it could be 2 years minimum to get such a system up and running.
It only needs one jobsworth French (or U.K.) customs officer to bring Dover and Calais to gridlock....I can see them doing that,they had a trial recently and 17 miles queues built up in a morning.....the EU would probably let it happen just to prove a point.
Then May and Grayling would be running round like headless chickens with BMW and drug companies pointing the finger with a big ‘we told you so’.
I sell to over 500 businesses in Europe so I do know what I am talking about,’no deal’ will be a disaster,not just a few bumps in the road as the ERG would have you believe.
KudosDave
 
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Fingers

Esteemed Pedelecer
Feb 9, 2016
3,373
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Let’s be honest us Remainers want a second referendum because we are certain we will win it and Leavers don’t want one because they know they will lose it....the mess of Brexit will get all the BOBs out to vote just to get life back to normal ‘no brexit’ ,the Remainers who didn’t vote last time because they were certain Remain would win,will definitely vote this time,the young will be mobilised,the dead oldies won’t vote!
KudosDave

Quite frankly I couldn’t care less if we remained or left especially with Mays idiotic deal on the table. But a second ref would be way more catastrophic to this country. The sense of betrayal to the democratic process and ineptitude shown around the world would be far more damaging than any type of Brexit.
 
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Kudoscycles

Official Trade Member
Apr 15, 2011
5,566
5,048
www.kudoscycles.com
Let’s be honest us Remainers want a second referendum because we are certain we will win it and Leavers don’t want one because they know they will lose it....the mess of Brexit will get all the BOBs out to vote just to get life back to normal ‘no brexit’ ,the Remainers who didn’t vote last time because they were certain Remain would win,will definitely vote this time,the young will be mobilised,the dead oldies won’t vote!
KudosDave
Gray198......you may be unhappy with my posting ,it’s probably not what you want but it’s hard to argue with reality.
KudosDave
 

jonathan.agnew

Esteemed Pedelecer
Dec 27, 2018
2,400
3,381
Why didn’t I realise this before? I’m putting him on ignore. I won’t be missing anything. I barely read his nonsense and insults anyway.

Clicky on ignore.

Good advice.
The palpable desperation of leave voters on the thread (putting your hands over your ears and shouting i cant hear you i cant hear you is a good example) as we inexorably move towards a softer brexit is deeply gratifying.
 

Zlatan

Esteemed Pedelecer
Nov 26, 2016
8,086
4,290
How do you know that ‘no deal’ won’t be ‘as problematic as some assume’....if no deal is actioned properly it will be a disaster....just imagine going into your supermarket and be told they had scrapped the checkout scanners.....the girls had been given a list of prices and a calculator.....how long are you prepared to wait before you dump your shopping and give up.
Well if we immediately fall onto WTO tariffs that’s exactly what ‘no deal’ will look like. Most small/ medium businesses use Sage in the U.K.,the Sage system allows the addition of HS codes alongside every line of an invoice but it doesn’t specify the tariff percentage,the customs officer would need to look up the percentage tariff,manually calculate the amount,then manually add up the total,then ask how the tariff is to be paid.
Ok you sell a truck load of envelopes to Austria that’s probably doable but a TNT truncker with hundreds of individual consignments in the back could have to wait for a week to calculate the tariffs.
Rees-Mogg would say that this has to be already done for 70% of our trade but containers coming in from China have to submit manifests weeks before and this is digitally calculated and duty taken as the ship docks,it’s a seamless system,a world away from a multi consignment truck arriving at Calais.
Of course,it should all be done at source and HMRC /French customs all be digitally linked but the Sage system has no means of calculating tariffs,they say it could be 2 years minimum to get such a system up and running.
It only needs one jobsworth French (or U.K.) customs officer to bring Dover and Calais to gridlock....I can see them doing that,they had a trial recently and 17 miles queues built up in a morning.....the EU would probably let it happen just to prove a point.
Then May and Grayling would be running round like headless chickens with BMW and drug companies pointing the finger with a big ‘we told you so’.
I sell to over 500 businesses in Europe so I do know what I am talking about,’no deal’ will be a disaster,not just a few bumps in the road as the ERG would have you believe.
KudosDave
Quite s bit of hyperbole there Dave... and panic, and scaremongering...
But we, ll see.
BTW you forgot scurvy and workhouses.
 
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