The situation in the Canary Islands re: Health insurance is not a special carved out status, but EU rules applied as they are meant to. The UK chose to not have fiscal residence requirements for access to the NHS and other benefits.
Edit: Ninja’ed
Edit: It’s typical Brexit rethoric, blaming the EU for an UK decision.
The EU might be a bit of a mess, but how could it be anything else? It’s all fine to say it should be less complex, but how do you do that while still maintaining independent countries?
The Canary Islands does have a special carved out status in other respects though, so I’m not sure why you are picking up on this point.
As I’m sure I’ve mentioned upthread it’s not so much a matter of choice as the FoM systems around welfare and healthcare being designed for continental systems and being a poor fit for the way the UK systems are administered. Institutional resistance to change, especially within the NHS, have meant that attempts to address this have only begun since it became a major public issue and have tended to be incremental.
Because it is the point that was brought out in example just a handful of posts above?
For myself, it’s not so much that it is a mess, but that the mess has allowed the bureaucracy to gain the whip hand over the states, to the point that the EU (in terms of the EU institutions - the democratic states still hold much more power over the day to day lives of citizens) is effectively a technocracy rather than a democracy. Even pro-Europeans like Macron and Verhofstadt have seen this as a problem (though they probably wouldn’t put it in those terms, it’s clear they would like to move to a more pan-European democracy).
I tend to think that point is overstated, often because it suits member states to pretend their hands are tied. There are very few areas where the Commission, or for that matter other EU institutions like the ECB or the ESAs, have direct power. Certainly when it comes to new legislation, the bureaucracy can only propose measures — nothing actually gets passed without not one but two main democratic interventions (in practice many more). In terms of ongoing governance, competition is the big one, and it’s hard to see how it couldn’t be — arguably the whole point of the EU and its bureaucracy is to prevent member states from unfairly putting their fingers on the scales. The ECB has all the power and admittedly not enough accountability when it comes to monetary policy, but I think by now we’ve learned that central banks need independence from government, albeit not without oversight. For most other things, though, the power the bureaucracies wield is mediated through national regulators and is really not all that great - witness Italy effectively overruling the ECB/SSM when it came to bailing out the Venetian banks.
None of which is to say that governance couldn’t be improved or made more democratic. I’m certainly in favour of giving the European Parliament more power and giving the ESAs and other bodies more independence from the Commission. But the reason that doesn’t happen is because member state executives see that as a threat to their supremacy - any increased power and legitimacy of other institutions challenges their own. It’s the same reason the Commons has stopped reforming the Lords. It’s much harder to justify things like Parliament Act overrides if the thing you’re overriding has an equal claim to democratic legitimacy (or maybe better, if the Lords was elected on PR).
May finally makes it explicit that part of the point of Chequers over Canada Plus was to get around the Irish border issue. ( https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/sep/25/no-deal-brexit-better-than-canada-style-deal-theresa-may )
The irony is, having won an apparently ideal result (frictionless trade with a major export market under an essentially EU regulatory regime, with no concessions to the City of London on services) by using NI as leverage the EU have then doubled down either because they want to blow up the deal entirely or because they think they can win more concessions (which probably depends on the individual concerned, with the former at least in part responsible for the belief of the latter).
They can’t win more major concessions of course - it’s dubious enough that May can deliver Chequers and noone else can deliver a deal of any form.
Err 1, 2 and 3? 😁😂😛
OK so states can choose to apply it.
That was my overall point.
Britain could have applied many more restrictions to address certain “problems” without blaming and then leaving the whole EU.
But yeah, Brexiteers would probably manufacture some other problem.
Yeah this is my distinct impression.
Don’t like x law = the EU made us do it. 😯
But that’s not really an ideal result. An ideal result reaffirms that a single market is inseparable from freedom of movement.
An ideal result is one your partner will accept. I can think up an ideal result where my employee gives me my salary every month and I stay home playing games, but somehow, I don’t think it’ll be accepted.
And from what I’ve read, Chequers would very much not be ideal for the EU and would result in x billion Euros of loss in y years. So…
I think you genuinely need to consider the possibility that the EU regards Chequers as worse than e.g. a boring free-trade agreement, even if Chequers solve the NI border (I’m not sure it does).
And really: are we in a position to argue about it? The government has placed us in a terrible negotiating position, while telling us ‘we hold all the cards’. I think I’d rather just cut my losses and try to renegotiate later, rather than plunge into a chaotic exit of the EU at the end of March out of the principle of not accepting how weak a hand we have to play.
Anyway, three weeks to go until the October deadline that Salzburg reaffirmed. Tick-tock!
I noticed something the other day…I still feel a bit annoyed about Brexit but I find myself increasingly not caring very much.
I live in Spain and now I’m just waiting to find out how this all affects me.
Will I have to get a visa or A new type of resident’s permit or is the existing paoerwork sufficient?
Will I be able to travel freely within Spain and the EU or not?
Simple essential stuff.
I feel like giving up on understanding the politics or really caring about Mrs Bean/May and the others.
To the extent I probably won’t vote again, at least not in the near future, except possibly in a new referendum.
I tend to think that point is overstated, often because it suits member states to pretend their hands are tied.
This. I’d say it’s goes one degree further, even. IMO - pretty much every European politician - right, left, and center - have spent the past several decades telling their local populace how every unpopular regulation or legislation is somehow the fault of the EU. It’s terribly convenient, after all to pass on the blame to some distant bureaucrats in Brussels. At the same time, they are more than happy to take as much credit for positive EU initiatives and regulations as they can - and where they can’t, to simply ignore them (not worth talking about stuff that doesn’t win you votes).
These same politicians are then shocked - positively shocked - when they ask people to vote in favor of the Union in referendums and find that their constituencies have a rather skewed view of the EU…
[quote=“Fifth_Fret, post:1788, topic:78214, full:true”]
I think you genuinely need to consider the possibility that the EU regards Chequers as worse than e.g. a boring free-trade agreement, even if Chequers solve the NI border (I’m not sure it does).[/quote]
That’s very possible! I regard Chequers as much worse than a boring free trading agreement for the UK and heavily favouring the EU, but you might be right.
The problem is there is no way that May can accept the EU’s proposals on NI, as the unionist community would view that as a breach of the Good Friday agreement, inasmuch as they claim it comprises a change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. While this argument is somewhat tortured it seems clear that a hard border down the Irish Sea is at least as significant a breach of the agreement as a hard border on the island of Ireland, as it touches on the primary constitutional agreement on the status of NI.
There’s a reason the backstop was worded in the tortuous way it was, rather than “NI will remain part of the single market and customs union”. The exact meaning of the backstop specified in the agreement is clear as mud, but as an international agreement I read it as a clear commitment to something less than NI remaining part of the customs union being an acceptable backstop. So from the UK side of the table (which clearly had this intent with the wording) the EU made a clear agreement to a backstop to be agreed in future that was less than full CU + SM membership for NI. Clearly that’s not what the EU thought was going on.
I’m sure that May would happily accept a “boring free trading agreement” in the current situation (it would be politically easier for her within her own party for a start), even though she might have a preference for a softer Brexit. However there is no boring free trading agreement on the table because of the requirements on the NI border.
We’re not in a position to argue about it. We’re in the position to either take what the EU offers or no deal. But the EU has only made offers it knows May cannot accept, possibly in the mistaken belief that its offers cannot be refused.
EDIT: This goes back to the whole “No deal” preparedness thing the brexiteers were going on aboiut a year or so ago. They thought it would be a good source of leverage in the negotiations, which I’m sure we can all agree as an idea would go down with the EU27 about as badly as you might imagine. The actual reason to be prepared for no deal is that the people with the most influence and passion on the EU27 side appear to be interested in either a punitive deal or no deal at all, whereas the majority who just want the issue to go away without compromising the EU structure don’t care enough to spend the political capital to work around the key individuals in the commission, and are sure that Britain will fold anyway.
Or cancel Brexit. Which is what I and I daresay a slim majority/minority of voters want.
There’s certainly no proposals I can imagine that will be appealing to either side. In which case we are crashing out in March, or cancelling this daft process.
Obviously the ECJ might make a “political” decision, if they even hear the case, but my reading of A50 is that it can only be cancelled with the agreement of the other 27 states.
In any case I don’t see that there is a single possible PM who would cancel Brexit. No Tory PM could do it, and everyone close to Corbyn who has spoken on the issue has made clear that the only Peoples Vote they would offer will not include the remain option. Do not underestimate the ideological opposition of Corbyn and his circle to the EU. Keir Starmer can talk about what he wants at conference and get nice headlines in the Guardian, but he’s not in control of what happens.
In any case we’ve had three votes covering this issue in some way already, one directly and unambiguously. We had zero votes about Lisbon. If we end up remaining it would confirm every eurosceptic’s worst fears about the ratchet-like nature of EU membership and the erosion of soverignity.