They want a deal, but nobody’s suggested what it could even conceivably look like, so long as Britain insists on restricting EU immigration, which is the brightest of May’s red lines. Either you have a hard border at the NI/RoI border, or you have one at the NI/rUK border.
Nope the little Englander ethno-nationalists want to keep the darkies out. That is the sole goal and sole motivating reason for it all. Everything is around keeping the darkies out. Peace in Northern Ireland is expendable.
There are a lot of Spanish people that work in Gibraltar, so there’s going to be a LOT of internal pressure (in SPain) to keep that border open somehow. I doubt there will be a veto. This is all crazy talk by exiters who want some flag to wave around.
But it’s England who will have to open the border. Spanish citizens going into Gibraltar is much more important for both Gibraltar and Spain’s economy than British people coming into Spain.
Even in a hard Brexit I would see the UK government (maybe the English government by then) allowing free flow of EU citizens into Gibraltar.
A tax haven is no good if nobody can get in.
Gibraltar’s easier in principle because the idea of a hard “internal” border isn’t anathema to half of a formerly heavily paramilitarised population.
It’s not, because the UK is might possibly refuse a deal that treats Gib less favourably than the UK as a point of principal, whereas everyone who matters except maybe some people in Brussels who talk a lot about rules wants some kind of open border in NI.
An Irish deal might look something like this (and I haven’t thought this through deeply, just throwing ideas out)
- There are border crossings with CCTV monitoring and border control presense.
- You don’t have to stop and show papers, but suspicious vehicles might be stopped (as an intelligence lead attempt to detect and deter illegal immigration)
- Lorries and goods trains have to clear customs but a “pre-clearance” regime is in force for regular deliveries (i.e. most of them).
- UK and Ireland bilaterally allow each other’s citizens right to reside and work.
The suspect that the border doesn’t have to functionally prevent unauthorized migration; it just has to appear to have that capability sufficiently to qualify as a “hard” EU border.
The problem is only two points of views get any media play at all:
- There are no problems. The EU will give the UK everything it wants. Everything is fine friend Brexiteer.
- The problems are intractable, the UK is doomed. DOOMED.
So what you don’t see any of are suggestions for non-ideal solutions that both sides might actually go for.
I don’t think there’s any question of the Gibraltar side of that border being closed? Maybe if and only if the Spanish side was closed?
Claiming that this is “exiters who want some flag to wave around” seems odd, given it was the EU27 who decided to make a point of saying that Gibralatar would only be included in any deal with Spain’s permission. Given the history of that border I think you can imagine why a lot of people saw it as a threat. Sane people saw it as a threat to maybe close the border. Less sane people (Michael Howard take a bow) saw it as some other kind of threat).
So, solutions.
The Brexiters have moved on from the EU and now want to lynch black people.
Just in case you had any doubts about what Brexit was really about
What the fuck, man. Where can you and I and the rest of us get off this train?
Not a surprise from Aaron Bank’s Hate Machine but not actually a full representation of the Brexit voters or indeed anything really official.
Now we’ve opened the floodgates however I’m waiting for the future calls for the next referendum on the death penalty. Now that MPs have accepted that abdicated their role as representatives it would be very hard to argue against it. That’s the argument where it’s come up in the past.
A ton of civil rights were granted in Parliament well before popular support existed. Slave ownership being made illegal, perhaps even women’s suffrage?
The whole idea separating a democracy from a tyranny of the majority is this. It’s never clearer than with civil rights, where it is critical and obvious that a representative must look after all their constituents, not just those in the majority.
Which is all just another reason why referendums are insane ways to make critical decisions. Oh well.
The UK is moving ever closer to tyranny of the majority though. The most egregious example being the partial reform of the House of Lords, which made it more democratic (hooray!), but then its powers to block legislation were stripped, because it represented a challenge to the primacy of the Commmons. When the only reason the Commons deserved primacy was its previously unique democratic mandate.
May just called out Corbyn to put up or shut up by calling for another General election on June 8. A smart move imho as this will end badly for Labour no matter what happens.
They also need a new mandate. They got pretty damaged by the last budget when they discovered they were still bound by previous manifesto promises.
This will be really bad for Labour. But the Lib Dems have a lot to gain here.
Corbyn won’t suck up any floating anti-Brexit voters, and there aren’t any charismatic leaders waiting in the wings of the UK Labour Party.
If only David Miliband had won out over his brother 7 years ago.
British electoral law is founded on the principle of a level playing field and controlling campaign spending is the key plank of that. The law states that different campaigns must not work together unless they declare their expenditure jointly. This controls spending limits so that no side can effectively “buy” an election.
But this signed legal document – a document that was never meant to be made public and was leaked by a concerned source – connects both Vote Leave and Leave.EU’s data firms directly to Robert Mercer, the American billionaire who bankrolled Donald Trump.
[…]
Follow the data, however, and another story is revealed, which leads directly to Mercer and his close associate, Steve Bannon, now Donald Trump’s chief strategist in the White House. Mercer was the owner of Cambridge Analytica, a firm which, as the Observer detailed last week, was spun out of a British firm with 30 years experience in working for governments and militaries around the world, specialising in “psychological operations”. At the time of the referendum, the Observer has learned, Bannon was the head of it.
What was not known, until February, was the relationship between all these figures and the Leave campaign. That was when Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s communications director, revealed to this paper that Farage was a close friend of both Bannon and Mercer. He said that the Leave campaign was a “petri dish” for the Trump campaign. “We shared a lot of information because what they were trying to do and what we were trying to do had massive parallels.”
Meanwhile, while talking to a crowd of eurosceptics…
She has had the whip removed, which leaves May’s majority formally now at 11 (including the DUP), though she may well still support the Tories in votes.
That is fucking ridiculous. I mean, maybe a bowl of rice, but a woodpile?
Seriously though, what the fuck? Who says that? Who says that as an elected official? In 2017?
In England!
It’s not like she grew up in the deep south of the USA or anything; she’s an Oxford graduate. Where did she even pick up this phrase?