Brexit, aka, the UK Becomes a Clown Car of the Highest Order

71/29? Did I miss something here?

Sorry. That was me being obtuse.

The referendum for the Good Friday agreement that was held in Northern Irelan, during 1998, was 71% in favour and 29% against.

I believe that this shows a stronger will of the people than the split in the Brexit referendum.

That galls me as the there seems to be a certain subset of the English that believes the GFA is not something that is precious enough to preserve but will scream ‘will of the people’ in reference to Brexit, I think the DUP are finding out just how much the Tories really value the union.

Bro that will of the people line is pure politicking.

Just after the referendum there was a petition to rerun it based on the majority not being enough of a majority.

The irony was it was started by a brexiteer beforehand who fully believed his team (Brexit) would lose and therefore was already calling for a rematch!

Will of the people my bum!

Indeed. Also lets not forget the Republic changed their constitution to remove a clause claiming NI and still overwhelmingly voted in support of the GFA , if anyone gave up something it was the Republic of Ireland. So its little wonder they are more than a wee bit sensitive over changes to the deal agreed upon in good faith not so long ago.

But again I would underline the Brexit negotiations are not the UK vs the EU or The UK vs the ROI , what is maddening is neither Labour nor the Conservative’s have represented the multifaceted electorate of the UK over Brexit. Both Corbyn and May have decided to live in a cloud cuckoo land where the UK is united over the EU question. We are not. By a very long shot.

May’s (and Corbyn’s to be fair) current strategy of delivering fait accompli and assuming the Brexitteers and Remainers will simply shut up afterwards is ridiculous in my view.,

Very, very good points. They’re literally forgetting about half the population.

Guess someone’s not happy with the current agreement…

Really interesting remarks from Rudd today - first communication from her now she’s back in Cabinet, and it’s underscoring that ‘no deal’ won’t be allowed to happen by Parliament. So much for ‘my deal or no deal’.

If this is the strategy from No. 10, it’s focusing ‘my deal or no brexit’, which might get Tory eurosceptics on board, but has no chance of getting the DUP on side, and maybe even less hope for pragmatic Labour rebels. Will it attract Labour eurosceptics? The vote is going to be close. Really close.

This seems to be their only viable strategy. They’re not going to get the DUP on board with the backstop in the form it is, so they can only win by keeping as many of the ERG types on board as possible and winning over some Labour waverers. The best way to do that is to emphasise “no Brexit” as being the alternative to the deal.

What will be interesting to see is:

a) Will some eurosceptics (perhaps who might only have been riding the wave, rather than a ‘true believer’ type) decide ‘no brexit’ is actually preferable to this deal? Boris Johnson, for instance, seems to be leaning that way.

b) How many Labour members can be peeled away here? The ‘threat to democracy’ line certainly managed to get us this far. But ‘we tried, and what people wanted couldn’t be done’ is a pretty good defense.

c) How coordinated will this be? If the messaging gets split between ‘no brexit’ and ‘no deal’, then rather than voting against what they fear the most, MPs may vote the deal down on what they want the most. I’ll be interested to see how that unfolds.

I think there will inevitably be multiple rounds of votes as parliament thrashes around attempting to find an approach it will actually support.

I’m certainly in the “no brexit is better than this deal” camp. The challenge then is somehow preventing a massive populist surge on the right if no brexit occurs. With the left already fallen to populism, we can’t afford that in any circumstances.

Can “no Brexit” be a threat when there doesn’t seem to be any clear political mechanism for canceling Brexit?

Won’t Brexiters rally around the idea that clearly demonstrating a willingness to exit without a deal (by voting this down) will force the EU to show more flexibility?

If they really believed that, they’d have got their 48 letters.

I’m not understanding why the EU would react this way. Their main purpose has to be making sure the rest of Europe sees that leaving hurts. If the UK tries to play hardball in the negotiations, why wouldn’t the EU just stand firm? I suppose Ireland won’t be happy, but there’s not an alternative to “no deal” that’s better from their perspective unless the UK caves on the customs stuff. As long as the UK is holding the line against staying aligned with EU customs, I don’t see why the EU has any incentive to offer anything but “no deal”.

It’s a bad deal because Brexit is a bad idea. Once you decide Brexit is what you want, this is the kind of exit deal you end up with. Also, too, shooting down a deal is easy; I note that all the people carping about this one are deadly silent when it comes to offering up any tangible alternative, one which the EU could possible accept.

The EU will not give any non-member a better relationship than the EU members get; and they will certainly not give such a better deal to a departing member.

Given that, the UK on exit will either be like Norway (transition period) or it will be like any WTA country, albeit one with very few direct agreements in place with anyone (no transition period or hard Brexit).

Given time, the UK could be like Canada, but that’s about the best you can hope for if Norway is a non-starter. And that agreement will take years. So, if you’re a Brexiter, what do you hope to get from an exit agreement that is better than what May has delivered? That’s the question.

I suspect many Brexiters were hoping for a deal more or less like what Canada has. But Canada doesn’t share a border with Ireland.

Certainly at the start of the process, the Brexiteers were all saying we’d get a much better deal than Canada, that included all sorts of things on services, financial included, because EU companies needed access to our capital markets. As it happens, the deal includes fuck all on financial services.

Sure, but those deals take years to hammer out. This May deal isn’t a trade deal; it’s an exit deal, with a transition period to work on a Canada deal. No one can reasonably have expected to get a Canada deal as their exit deal. So what did they really expect, and are they actually opposed to a transition to get what they want?

For my money, this is the reason I think the deal will be approved. If you’re a Brexiter of any flavor, this is the only reasonable way to get to where you want (never mind that you probably can’t even articulate what you want). So Brexiter parties will be for it, and it seems there really are no non-Brexit parties of any substantial size.

Many of them are, and until maybe 12 months ago, almost all of them were. The transition was hugely controversial among Brexiteers when it was first proposed, because they saw any nod toward sanity — namely that it’s completely impossible to extricate yourself cleanly from an arrangement like the single market in a few months — as being treacherous backsliding. Very few of them would take a longer transition to secure a better (in a Brexiteer sense) long-term deal. They seem spectacularly unable to play the long game, considering how long some of them have been waiting to do this. If they’re right, we’ll be living with the new status quo for decades or more, yet even a couple of extra years transition to get to that end point is intolerable to them.

Here we go…

Not at all surprising to see the Spanish flex wrt Gibraltar - I’m almost surprised that it hasn’t come up before now.

No they’re not and this is really bad faith stuff.

I’m living in Spain and my reaction is to tell the Spanish to go fuck themselves.

edit- actually if Spain blocks any deal then this is good news, even if the motivation is pure greed and hypocrisy.