Brexit

It’s nice to see that strong and stable leadership in action from our PM (or maybe not).

What an absolute shambles. Even worse than Dickie 2 at the Almeida.

It's very easy to criticise Theresa May, but she had a poisoned chalice to begin with, and what's the alternative? Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corban. God help us.

I have to agree I've got to the point of not caring anymore. We can't go on like this. A decision has to be made and we move forward and deal with whatever consequences are. No deal, probable chaos at least in the short term. Remain, we stop becoming a democracy and a different type of chaos ensues. Either way it's chaos

What the Lady in the yellow jacket said:

Can I ask a question is the EU going to end?
Has the EU taken more countries than it can chew?
Should there be a more relaxed 'eu policies?

But how is this going to help?

All 27 remaining EU countries would have to agree to extending article 50, and because of the upcoming EU election in May, the longest extension could only be until end of June, as the new EU parliament will constitute itself in early July. And, IIRC, the EU27 have said that they will only consider agreeing to an extension if there is a "proper" reason like a new election or another referendum and not to give the UK a few more weeks for something it didn't achieve in 2+ years.

But isn't a no deal Brexit the only certainty at the moment though? Unless Parliament agree on an alternative deal to go to the EU with, the UK leaves the EU on 29th March 2019 at 11pm whether there is a deal or not, no?

I didn't say it would actually help, I said it would be better than nothing. The alternative is crashing out on 29 March with no deal whatsoever, which is just about the stupidest thing this country could ever do, particularly given that inexplicably no interim arrangements for what would happen in that situation appear to have been put in place.

So any time that the government can buy to try to knock some sense into the MPs who

(a) seem to think this is 1819 not 2019 and the UK still has some sort of sway over the world and the EU should therefore be coming to us on bended knee with a much more favourable deal; and

(b) fail to acknowledge that what the markets hate most of all is uncertainty and therefore the failure to secure any deal, however less favourable than they (wrongly) seem to think we deserve will be disastrous at least in the short term (which frankly is all that any politician cares about as that is what determines whether they keep their job or not)

is frankly better than nothing at all.


Nothing will help until headline Brexiteers get their heads around the very simple concept that we are the ones resiling from international obligations that we agreed to, so the EU owes us nothing and is perfectly capable of managing without any link to us if it has to. But given they've gone 2.5 years without managing to understand that, times are now so desperate that absolutely anything in terms of time that can be bought is better than 29 March rolling around with nothing having changed.

I feel like all the faffing about is being orchestrated by the hardcore Brexiteers and their one goal is to distract everyone for long enough that we simply run out of time and thus end up dropping out with No Deal almost without noticing. Which, at least *someone* has a plan, but also, it's a REALLY terrible plan.

I wouldn't be surprised if that were true. Some of them have been very open about the fact that they aren't concerned about a no deal Brexit and they just want to unilaterally exit.

And playing devil's advocate, isn't that really what many of those who voted 'Leave' actually voted for? We weren't asked about a particular deal, we were simply asked:



One could argue that a no-deal (however ridiculous a result that would be) is *exactly* what the "will of the people" is and that is "Leave the European Union".

See my post above - I think the big EU countries do deserve some blame for putting individual self interest above the idea of a club where pressures are felt and and absorbed equally when several of those countries locked out poorer eastern migrant workers in 2004.

Ahhh, so now it's the EU's fault that the UK was the only country not to impose a transition period for immigration from new countries joining the Union.

Riiiiight...

It's amazing, what failures of domestic policy can be blamed on the rest of the EU. I don't know how the politicians will cope without that scapegoat once we've actually left!