Utopia Talk / Politics / Brexit: May requests another extension

murder Member	Fri Apr 05 12:02:45 May has requested a Brexit extension until June 30th. She still has no plan to move forward besides the same deal that has been defeated over and over again.
Rugian Member	Fri Apr 05 12:23:29 To be fair, no one had any plan aside from preventing No Deal. Which incidentally puts the Commons at odds with the population (No Deal if no other option was available commanded a popular plurality). This is a national embarassment.
Pillz Member	Fri Apr 05 12:37:07 This is the UK. National embarrassment is standard.
Seb Member	Fri Apr 05 14:12:38 Rugian: It does not. https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/ojewuniikg/Internal_190401_BrexitTrackers_w.pdf if you had to choose one outcome of Brexit, what would you prefer to see? Britain having a new referendum and voting to remain in the EU after all has the plurality 34% Leaving with no deal has 25%
Rugian Member	Fri Apr 05 14:20:07 Seb, http://d25...might%20help%20on%20Brexit.pdf "If Britain has not agreed a deal by April 12th, what do you think should happen? Britain should leave the European Union without a deal 40%" Granted I got that from The Guardian, so I make no pretense of its reliability.
Seb Member	Fri Apr 05 14:39:53 Rugian: Thats a different question: what people think should happen isn't necessarily what people want to happen. The clear preference is for a second vote. Of course there is a very simple way to find out what the public want.
Rugian Member	Fri Apr 05 14:48:57 Seb, Your poll question actually indicates that a clear majority prefer to leave on SOME kind of terms. Elsewhere in that poll, "referendum & remain" is considered a bad outcome by a plurality. To provide an overall point, it seems clear that a new referendum would almost certainly fail to provide a decisive outcome.
Seb Member	Fri Apr 05 15:03:03 Rugian: Every single option is considered a bad outcome by a plurality. That is why the plurality for a second referendum when all options are presented is the most salient point.
Seb Member	Fri Apr 05 15:14:07 There are only three options on the table: Leave with no deal Leave with Mays deal Remain But the public understanding of no deal is frankly poor. Further, no-deal doesn't resolve anything. The EU simply won't enter negotiations with us on anything else without And I can now say this: our short term plan for NI is simply to not collect customs duties on imports from the Republic, and not conduct any checks on food and goods coming from the Republic. However the common transit convention means goods can enter the Republic without checks as long as their destination is the UK. So while the Republic may put up borders first, at some point someone in the UK is going to get injured by counterfeit goods that will stream in from NI. So we will need to have a bilateral discussion on the Irish border or renege on the GFA. And if we renege on the GFA the US Congress is unlikely to cut an FTA. So that's the world's two largest trading blocks trading with us at maximum tariffs. And we've not even covered the regulation aspect. The commission will roll backn unilateral easements over time (e.g. ownership requirements of airlines) on a timetable that minimises disruption to their economy. Essentially British firms will be forced progressively to relocate rather than lose access to the European market. Like it or not, we are going to have up agree to the backstop, the exit bill, and citizens rights. No deal isn't really an option. The only meaningful referendum is between exit under May's deal or remain. Those are the choices. Anything else is magical thinking.
jergul large member	Fri Apr 05 17:11:19 Seb Context does matter because of general poor awareness. The UK deciding what it wants from the negotiations during May's deal period will change what May's deal feels like. But the EU would accept a May+ deal. For example may's deal with a modified political statement aiming for a customs union. Or may's deal + accepting EU laws on workforce security in the interim.
Seb Member	Fri Apr 05 17:33:40 jergul: EU doesn't give a shit about anything but the WA. The backstop in the WA mitigates against the risk of the UK not wanting a Customs Union: it will cost us N Ireland. They are though, being a bit daft. I think the South has sort of half convinced Europe to look at NI from the lens of a colony, rather than the truth of it being a civil war in NI. The extreme liklihood if the UK does not at this point opt for a Customs Union is that the destination deal is set at Canada, and when the EU refuses to allow more flexible risk based approaches to checks and customs on the NI/RoI border, there will be a border poll. If it is won by the Unionists, the IRA will kick off and the republic will be dragged in (as will the rest of the EU to some extent for failing to be flexible enough). If it is won by the republicans then the Unionists will kick off, but the UK will wash it's hands of the situation completely. "You wanted this, your problem now". Outside of the EU security arrangements, there is very little need or desire for the UK to be the frontline of policing Northern Ireland, and the RoI lacks the capabilities.
Seb Member	Fri Apr 05 17:35:50 Frankly, I'm rather surprised the government hasn't leveraged this more earlier on. The backstop should have been politely declined on the basis that the GFA clearly delegates the power to align to the Republic or the UK to Northern Ireland and as such the UK has no power to make such assurances, only Stormont, and the UK sees no basis for a border poll as the 2017 election saw a strengthening of the Unionists vote share.
Seb Member	Fri Apr 05 17:40:52 The last thing the Irish govt really wants is a border poll. This is really about the huge damage regulatory and non-regulatory barriers would be to Ireland's trade with the UK, which would be pretty bad. They are (successfully) leveraging English pride against Brexit. Popular opinion is such that we would be happy to let NI go, but not under duress. Any govt would rather do the backstop instead than risk the loss of NI. But the reality is, the "loss" of NI would be a gain. It's tiny, economically irrelevant, fiscally a huge drain, and a source of perennial political and criminal problems. It looms so large in the public's mind outside Ireland that many habitually forget we have a land border with the EU (to whit, Shannon, who believes it isn't even part of Europe). Were it to leave, we would have largely forgotten it as a political moment five years later. For the republic, it would be a hideous albatross.
Rugian Member	Fri Apr 05 17:47:10 "The backstop in the WA mitigates against the risk of the UK not wanting a Customs Union: it will cost us N Ireland." Or...invade and annex Ireland, implement the Firearms Act 1997 and set up your Orwellian mass surveillance island-wide to forestall any future unrest. Problem solved. Go hard Brexit and bask in the gloryof your new-found and unencumbered independence. Think the queen will summon me to form a government?
Rugian Member	Fri Apr 05 18:08:32 "Every single option is considered a bad outcome by a plurality. That is why the plurality for a second referendum when all options are presented is the most salient point." How does that make any sense? The polling suggests that no option commands the confidence of the public, and that a majority would be opposed to any outcome. Referendums are by designed supposed to register whether there is national approbation for a matter, but you won't get that with a second one. Any result would be majorly tainted. And what would a second referendum even look like? The Commons can't agree on anything else, so why should we assume that they can agree on appropriate options and language of it? It would have to be an instrument where a "no" vote automatically solidifies no-deal Brexit as the only remedy, but lawmakers can't be entrusted with even that. You already held one referendum, and the public there decisively chose to leave the United Kingdom. Absent some sort of deal that Parliament can agree to vis-a-vis the EU, the legal default is no-deal. Anything else is a betrayal of the public trust.
Rugian Member	Fri Apr 05 18:10:23 "Chose to leave the United Kingdom" fuck I'm buzzed
jergul large member	Fri Apr 05 18:41:51 Seb Its not about what the EU wants. Its about labour. Part of their reluctance to May's deal is lack of workplace security alignment. I cannot imagine the EU refusing to allow the UK to move closer to EU regulations if doing so gives a deal. It the same thing as with the backstop. It sets the stage for the future permanent relationship. A conservative minority government cannot leverage an imagined loss of NI. Anything other than a customs union involves the imagined loss of NI. Ruggy Your point? Governments break public trust all the time.
Seb Member	Sat Apr 06 04:40:21 Rugian: I find your logic questionable. If all options are considered bad, a referendum between two of the three options to find the one that commands most support seems the only way forward. There are only three outcomes. In fact I'd argue there are only really two. The withdrawal agreement, or remain. No deal doesn't end the process (as even its advocates envisage side deals with the EU, which they have refused absent the UK agreeing the same terms in the WA, and a cold blooded analysis shows this is credible). If you want to break the backstop, a border poll is the way to do it and is best done after signing the WA. So a referendum looks like a binary choice: Do you wish the UK to leave the EU Uber the terms of the withdrawal agreement? Do you wish to remain in the EU under the current terms? This is clearly a different proposition from the previous referendum, where leave held out all sorts of leave options, some of which were fantastical, some of which they now say don't constitute leaving. So if leavers wish now to claim that leaving with a deal like Norway (which was explicitly covered as an option by the leave campaign, and implicitly in the option "leave the EU") that necessarily requires a choice to be made. And obviously if many people world prefer to remain rather than leave on those specific terms, it should be an option. So now we have a true binary: leave under May's deal, or remain.
Seb Member	Sat Apr 06 04:43:35 I think I just said that no? The EU doesn't care too much (it would prefer closer alignment, but can live without it) if the WA is signed. Labours position is more smokescreen - the Labour rights are confected: they are just trying to ensure the Tories get the flack for brexit; though some prefer out as they see it as a policy constraint on radical socialism.
Seb Member	Sat Apr 06 04:50:59 Rugian: This idea - that because a unified platform of soft and hard brexit won first time, remain should be ruled out - seems self serving. The goal of any process should be to find which option commands the broadest support. And if some Brexiteers now say that soft brexit counts as remain, that undermines totally the legitimacy of the first vote which was won on < 2% majority overall. Contemporaneous polls of hard Vs soft brexit means that at the time, Brexit, as defined by hard Brexiteers now, did not in fact have a majority at all if the likes of Shannon, JRM and Farrage consider soft brexit to be remain. This means that essentially defending the first referendum as the prime mandate is basically a purely procedural argument, while explicitly acknowledging that the process wasnt fit for purpose.
jergul large member	Sat Apr 06 04:53:37 Seb Any reason that the tories should not get the full flak for brexit? It is after all the child of conservative inner party politics. Leveraging May's brexit chaos to set the template for a future relationship that includes EU standards for workplace protection seems a worthy Labour goal.
Seb Member	Sat Apr 06 05:29:48 Jergul: Imprecise short hand. Labour are trying to make sure they aren't seen as the reason brexit fails to happen, or the reason it does happen. Either will cost them votes, or so their strategists fear. I think it will be much much worse for them if they are seen to have allowed brexit to happen when they could have prevented it. Some of their strategists I sense (some of the hard left out and out Communists) actively want a hard no deal brexit by the Tories and the destruction of the economy and establish approach to politics - it gives them empty ground to rebuild everything along particularly statist lines: political and economic. Equally, Corbyn and some around him would quite like brexit to happen to remove the EU as a constraint on even mild socialist reforms (e.g. state aid rules).
Seb Member	Sat Apr 06 05:44:11 The labourv Rufus rights stuff is just part of their pretend good labour brexit. The one where we leave with the exact same benefits. Cf. 6 criteria, and a customs Union where we get a say on the EUs trade deals witg third party. Labour is nearly as dysfunctional as the Tories. Nearly.
jergul large member	Sat Apr 06 06:02:41 Seb Brexit was flawed from the start. It never had, and still does not have, sufficient parliamentary support. There should never have been an advisory referendum without parliament backing to see it through. So, yah. Labour wants no part of the blame from that at all. Poisoned fruits. Labour can see how a hard brexit can be leveraged, but I see no argument anywhere that this would make hard exit a goal (that idea would fit freakonomic chicago school disaster capitalism models far better than classical marxism, so you may be projecting a bit here). Securing permanent workforce protection by way of baking it in to the interim deal is however quite realistic and in line with consistent labour policy and comments (the lack of such safeguards is the reason May's deal has not passed yet). For truly disfunction parties. See libdems after 2010 and Ukip after 2015.
Seb Member	Sat Apr 06 07:47:36 Jergul: Unfortunately (and I wish this wasn't true), you are projecting here. You need to check out corbynista Twitter. Corbyn is no heir to Atlee. He was a Tankie and many of the people around him were the hard left ejected during the 80s. They are Bennites (so reject the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy as an elitist sham, hence their obsession with mandate). Corbyn himself was always been against the EU, he sees it as a Neoliberal institution that protects the market. If you look, you'll find videos of him from before the ref describing it as a tool of NATO and American imperialism. He's not really interested in keeping the UK in, or aligned. He wants the UK out, but he knows that's unpopular, and so he wants to ensure a no deal or a hard brexit, but for the Tories to take the blame for it.
murder Member	Sat Apr 06 08:05:13 "Labour are trying to make sure they aren't seen as the reason brexit fails to happen, or the reason it does happen. Either will cost them votes, or so their strategists fear. I think it will be much much worse for them if they are seen to have allowed brexit to happen when they could have prevented it." Watching politicians putting the good of their party above the good of the country always gives me the warm fuzzies.
jergul large member	Sat Apr 06 08:11:19 Seb I think we will simply agree to disagree. I have never been a great fan of character assasinations as a means of explaining policy divisions. Murder Labour will opt for May's deal if it is modified to include EUs workforce protection standards. It is on May if that does not come to pass.
Seb Member	Sat Apr 06 08:15:59 Jergul: None of those are character issues. They are policy issues. He supported the Soviet crackdowns. Their Bennite positions, if you go look, are all documented. You can find videos of correctness denouncing the EU. These are policy positions jergul. I get people want a more authentic social democratic party after Blair. Corbyns is a massive overcorrection.
jergul large member	Sat Apr 06 09:18:20 Seb Anything on his wiki page you disagree with? I think you need to dramatically revise your wording if you want to adress politicians on their policy merits. Cobyn is firmly within the social democratic sphere. His view on most - if not all - issues are quite similar to mine. Eusceptism is well-founded. But there that does warrant recklessly abandoning ties, or even abandoning them at all. I for one am quite fond of our EFTA ties to the EU (members in all but name and suffrage). It is a compromise full of problems, but by far better than any alternatives I can imagine.
jergul large member	Sat Apr 06 09:19:17 that does not warrant*
Seb Member	Sat Apr 06 13:45:35 Jergul: "Corbyn is firmly within the social democratic sphere. His view on most - if not all - issues are quite similar to mine." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-ukx8HrnpE So here he is arguing that the EU is a military Frankenstein, and urging the Irish to reject the Lisbon treaty. His politics throughout the 70's and 80's aren't really in question - and when asked about those he tends to be very evasive. You can find his voting record too, if you want, and trace that back some way. Corbyn does have an amazing tendency to get people thinking he's just a big soft social democrat. But he's not at all a moderate looking for a kinder version of the free market system. He wants a radical reform of our entire system of government and economy. He was one of Tony Benn's lot back in the day - and they always maintained that the Parliamentary system was an obstacle to socialism. You still see Corbyn blathering on about Citizen Assemblies and the importance of extra-parliamentary political action. It's pretty clear Corbyn sees the EU as a big obstacle to his manifesto: see his vote in the first referendum in the 70's, his active opposition and campaigning against all the European treaties since, and his distinctly unenthusiastic campaign in 2016. It's not that he wants a looser relationship, he sees it as actively a bad thing: an international club of capitalists. As I said, you don't really need to look very far to find political strategists and activists floating around Labour that are long associates with Corbyn who are pretty explicit about the potential benefits of the Tories being left to destroy the "capitalist, neo-liberal" economy. Very Marx - seeds of own destruction etc. But hey, knock yourself out.
jergul large member	Sat Apr 06 15:41:37 Seb I did not mistake him for a soft social democrat. He is merely a social democrat. Politics evolve, as do politicians (invading Iraq? Anyone think that was not misguided today?). Anyone thinking the EU is a tool of rampant capitalism clearly missed the Panama papers. We need super-national organizations to reign in the worst excesses. Everyone in Labour knows this. Everyone knows by now that superimposing direct action assemblies on Parliament is misguided madness. See the advisory referendum for direct action and brexit as the misguided madness. Labour will leverage a hard brexit as best it can. It does not make it a desired outcome. If May wants her deal, then she will have to allow for alignment to EU workforce protection in it. A hard brexit is otherwise on her (and would be on her party in any event for calling the referendum in the first place. Gambling with the future of a nation is not the way to resolve internal party power struggles).
Seb Member	Sun Apr 07 05:22:07 Jergul: "Everyone knows by now that superimposing direct action assemblies on Parliament is misguided madness." Not Corbyns labour. https://www.google.com/amp/s/labourlist.org/2015/09/labour-to-organises-citizens-assemblies-to-reinvent-politics/%3famp They recently floated it as a so lution to brexit. The depressing thing about Corbyn of as far as I can see, he's not changed his mind on anything and is incapable of doing so. Cf. Antisematism crisis where he can't even bring himself to acknowledge that somec of his friends have some fairly unacceptable views.
jergul large member	Sun Apr 07 06:28:16 Seb That link was a year before the learning experience and is also a purely consultive experiment (how to rebuild your region). Anti-semitism? Really? You are going there?
CrownRoyal Member	Thu Apr 11 13:21:51 A swiss lesson on what to do with referenda when voters were fed BS, perhaps ========== Swiss court orders historic referendum re-run "The result of a nationwide referendum has been overturned for the first time in modern Switzerland's history. The poll, held in February 2016, asked the country's voters whether married couples and co-habiting partners should pay the same tax. Voters rejected the proposal, with 50.8% against and 49.2% in favour. But the supreme court has now voided the result on the grounds that voters were not given full information, and the vote must be re-run... ..The information provided to the electorate was "incomplete" and therefore "violated the freedom of the vote", the court ruled. Switzerland's direct democracy system frequently allows citizens to take part in decision-making. During the referendum campaign, the Swiss government told voters just 80,000 of married couples were paying more tax than couples living together. The true figure was almost half a million, the government later said." http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47879777
Rugian Member	Thu Apr 11 15:04:15 CR, Judicial activism should hardly be something to be encouraged.
jergul large member	Thu Apr 11 15:21:09 Ruggy How is a re-run activism? For activism, see cancelling recounts to ensure near relatives win presidencies.
Rugian Member	Thu Apr 11 15:24:11 Jergul, GWB was 20 years ago. Get over it already.
CrownRoyal Member	Thu Apr 11 15:40:37 I couldn't agree more. I am against any encouragement of judicial activism
jergul large member	Thu Apr 11 16:03:43 Ruggy I sure will. Shall we say after the last USSC justice GWB appointed relinquishes his post. Only 2 more to go now.
jergul large member	Thu Apr 11 16:09:13 But on topic. Why did you find the case to be judicial activism? Or why would you think CR wanted the UK courts to intervene. They already said that the referendum would have been overturned if it had any legal standing, but it does not, so there is nothing to overturn. CR was simply pointing out that irregularities in the referendum process undermine its moral standing. And its moral standing is really the only thing it has going for it.
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