Re: Barnier Spits his Dummy Out

That's folks for you.

Re: Barnier Spits his Dummy Out

It seems there is a need for a brexit museum after all.

Re: Barnier Spits his Dummy Out

I should'nt take my english as a guide to your own english education
Triple seven9311 as l was brought up as a cockney!
In your reply to my post you say that it does not matter if EU was
important to the UKs wealth or not? How can that be?? The whole
reason for forming the EU must surely have been to make ALL its
members better off should'nt it?? Can you honestly (a german trait
you say) tell me that is the case at the moment??
In the case of the UK it not only cost us a large membership fee each
year, but cost us 80 to 90 billion a year in balance of trade deficit PA!
Not exactly enriching l think you will agree??
On the subject of being happy l will only be happy when we have finally
agreed to disagree and parted company !!
As you say it would have been better if we could have reached this
stage 3yrs ago, but Barniers strategy involved delaying as long as
possible and relying on a British cave in which has not happened yet?
Who knows? Perhaps he knows us better than we know ourselves?
But, from my point of view things are going well right now!!!

Donkeyman! 👍😁👍

Re: Barnier Spits his Dummy Out

Good morning,

thank you for asking for details. Sometimes I am not sure if I can make myself understood properly enough between all those more-or-less native English speakers in this forum.

Concerning the EU I meant that from now on, the EU will have no significant effect on the UKs wealth. Here I simply cut off the past because negotiaions are for the future.

I take the pro Brexit arguments and those people who use them seriously. Allthough I have my doubts I try to believe those arguments like

- brexit means brexit,
- we are sovereign again,
- we are unleashing UKs future,
- 350Mln per week for the NHS,
- they need us more than we need them and
- no deal is better than a bad deal.

They have been used so often by brexiters that simply nothing can go wrong. In this sense the EU is completely irrelevant.

Of course what I say seems like a very naive approach but as I said, I take you all seriously. In case all that goes wrong I will not laugh and point fingers. You took a sovereign decision and all I want is to see the outcome because it could be a good way for other countries to go.

I really hope UKs future outside the EU will be great and I feel sorry for your citizens that it took so many years to make an exit possible.

Have a good day, regards from Germany

Re: Barnier Spits his Dummy Out

Since when has the EU ever had an influence on the UK's wealth ? We have been a net contributor since we joined, so in reality, the only influence the EU has had on the UK wealth is a negative one. The single market has benefitted the UK least in terms of goods and there is no single market for services.

If you mean that when we joined we were the "sick man of Europe" and joining the common market magically turned our mis fortunes around, think again. The UK was destroyed by socialist UK governments and the unions and it was Thatcher that got our country on its feet not the EU (which didn't even exist back then). Joining the common market destroyed our fishing industry and through EU state aid rules, the EU has forced us to sacrifice struggling industries.

The EU has done nothing for the UK - absolutely nothing.

The customs union also meant the UK abandoning the commonwealth which is a fear greater trading partner than the EU.

Re: Barnier Spits his Dummy Out

I don't know if the EU ever had influence on the UKs wealth. As I stated earlier in those days I was too young to know about that. However I stated that in the future the EU will play no significant role in that sense for the UK.

Frustrating that it sometimes takes so long to react on an obviously bad situation (like the EU having negative financial effect on the UK), isn't it? Well but now the referendum is years ago and IMO it is time to focus on the future.

Given that rumors of an EU breakdown in the near future arise more and more, EU and negotiations become even more irrelevant for the UK, isn't it?

As far as I know it was the word on the street, that the UK was "sick man..." when it joined the EU. It was not me to invent that phrase or even claim that it is/was true.

For which reasons didn't the UK leave the EU much earlier? When you were forced to sacrifice industries by the EU and other industries were distroyed by the EU, I would like to know why that did not lead to an earlier exit movement. Thank you in advance for some insight.

Re: Barnier Spits his Dummy Out

The reason we never left sooner is because we were denied a referendum on EU membership until 2016. Cameron only allowed it because of the enormous pressure and rising popularity of UKIP. As soon as we had a referendum, we voted to leave, the rest is history.

The other part of this is that article 50 (the method to leave) wasn't introduced until the Lisbon Treaty came into effect (2009 I think was the date).

Re: Barnier Spits his Dummy Out

Oh I did not know about the degree of UKIPs popularity. However it explains the situation.

Also I did not know about article 50 being introduced so late. Probably the EU architects did not expect a member to be willing to leave one day.

Well then: thankx Mr. Cameron

Why then was the result only 52/48% when the problems were so obvious and overwhelming?

Re: Barnier Spits his Dummy Out

Depends which way you look at it - that 4% was over 1.2 million votes for a start.

London was massively remain, because London is generally a lefty / socialist / federalism place in the first place. It also has around 9 million people living in it, so that contributes a lot to the 48%.

But if you look at the vote by region, all of them voted leave except London, Scotland and Northern Ireland, of which around 40% also voted leave.

At the time of the referendum, project fear was at is height, we had threats of doom and gloom from :

1. Press - Daily Mail, Guardian, Mirror, Independent etc etc
2. Media - BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Channel 5, Sky
3. Obama - telling us we would go to the back of the queue etc
4. Organisations such as Gina Millers "Best for Britain" funded by George Soros (which is illegal because like Obama he is not British and should not be interfering with other countries democracies).
5. The UK judicial system
6. Universities, education and the rest of the civil service peddling fake news
7. The EU themselves threatening the UK with no food or water, energy
8. The Chancellor of the Exchequer (George Osborne) saying 800,000 people would lose their job if we voted leave and an emergency Brexit Shock budget of 2 billion was set up
9. Threats from the EU that the banks would leave
10. Weaponising the Irish Border and using the GFA to try and frustrate the Brexit vote

... etc etc

and yet, even after all that, the UK still voted overwhelmingly to leave.

Re: Barnier Spits his Dummy Out

That's easy to construct from the parliamentarian handling of the withdrawal terms in HoC. British are good at telling what they don't want, but are unable to form a common opinion on what they DO want.