Brexshit
 

So... what's next? May seems to be hanging on, the case for Ref2 isn't full clear. Crash out on 29th looks just as unlikley.

Re: Brexshit
 

We have certainly had lots of evidence that the Machine in Westminster is broken beyond repair.

Re: Brexshit
 

No option is particularly palatable. No-deal will probably get voted down tonight, although will remain the natural fall-back position if nothing else changes. The least damaging outcome for the country would be Parliament agreeing that a "good deal" brexit was infact unobtainable, and article 50 is revoked. I'm guessing it's going to go down to the line though.

Re: Brexshit
 

As a Brexiteer, I am at my lowest point during the whole process. I really cannot see us getting out at all, and now as the laughing stock of Europe, Macron and Merkel will do everything else possible to make our lives totally miserable.

I no longer believe in British democracy or see any point in actually having a government.

Re: Brexshit
 

On the positive side I don't believe that it can be ****ed up any more at this point. You have reached **** up ground zero, the only way is up from here. I'd find it funnier if there wasn't a potential for the Republic to be affected by the sheer incompetence of all involved. Omni-shambles doesn't cover it, I am sure 'to Brexit' something will be coined as a phrase to describe utter incompetence in the future.

Re: Brexshit
 

I still believe that you can always trust our government to do the right thing... once it has exhausted all of the other options.

We are close to having done that second part.

Re: Brexshit
 

Re: Brexshit
 

As a Leaver, I find it all infinitely depressing. After the vote on June 23rd 2016 I was so excited and optimistic for the future of the UK. Never did I think that the machine of government, the BBC and the institutions would continue to fight and frustrate the decision to leave at every turn.

The delays have been so costly. Companies are losing money and people are losing jobs every day because of the delays. Utter incompetence of our government. Please May, just GO!

I'm an optimist and believe that one way or another we will end up leaving eventually, but for now this whole saga has turned us into a laughing stock.

Re: Brexshit
 

The problem is that even if 'brexit' happens, it will never stick.

The brexitters don't say it, but they know that the UK cannot really be "independent". If you're in the WTO, or do any trade deals, you're always subject to legal judgements and rules made outside your country, and enforced by judges (or arbitration etc.) outside of your jurisdiction. Nobody is going to make a deal where you get to be the referee as well as a player. Like a lot of the promises, it overstates the UK's power, and is a deliberate attempt to mislead uninformed, overly patriotic people. The ridiculous idea that the UK can somehow turn the commonwealth into a rival trading block is equally deluded. It's simply not a trading block, and even if it was, the arrogance of the UK expecting that after 40 odd years, it's just going to waltz back in, take the wheel and "lead" India, Nigeria, Australia etc. towards its dream (they'll all just follow, natch, not having any vote or control in things, because it's our commonwealth, not theirs) is just fodder for small minded nationalists. The people pushing this nonsense don't believe it any more than they believed the 350m for the NHS promise.

What they really want is to take the UK away from the progressive European model (welfare state, universal healthcare, high standards, higher taxes) and go full tilt to the US model.

Look at Fox, Farage, etc. they're all on the record in the past advocating abolishing the NHS and basically following the US model.

And that's really the plan.

But it won't stick. The damage to the UK economy will simply be too great.

The thing that amazes me is that Tories who hold up Thatcher as their idol are bent on leaving the single market and customs union, features of the EU that Thatcher spent much of her premiership building and using membership of to encourage Japanese and other investors to come to the UK. Brexitters often say that the UK joined a common market, it didn't intend it to become a "superstate". And yet, when given the choice to leave the EU and remain in the economic 'common market' (single market and customs union) they flat out refuse that too.

The problem for the UK is the damage is already done. For any outside investor coming to Europe, the top factor in selecting a country now is going to be "are these guys likely to leave the EU". And whatever happens in the UK, nobody overseas will trust the UK population for a generation.

Whatever happens, the UK needs to prepare for being poorer and less powerful.

Re: Brexshit
 

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/british...6487dab207.jpg
Now this.

Re: Brexshit
 

My issue has always been that I don't need three layers of Government: Scottish, UK and EU, and all the attendant cost and bureaucracy. Best to get rid of two, then accountability is assured. My own preference would be to become the 53rd state of the USA and throw the other three under a bus. 66% effective taxation rate in the UK just now, equivalent to that in the former USSR.

My own suspicion is that the EU needs the UK to help underwrite the EUR 1 trillion Target2 Eurozone debt owned mainly by Spain and Italy to Germany. This will end badly for Germany, and likely the UK taxpayer.

Re: Brexshit
 

Surely that can't be close to being the case? Quick google search came up with this: https://www.theguardian.com/money/20...e-australia-us
Gross salary of £40k has an effective tax rate of 24.8%; £100k is 34.3%.

Re: Brexshit
 

And the rest...
Employer NI Contributions at 13.8%
VAT at 20%
Fuel duty 58p per litre
Council Tax £££'s
Inurance Tax 12%
Air Passanger Duty
And the rest...

So you work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday to pay the State, Thursday to pay for your commute, and Friday to feed yourself. The Guardian, ffs!

Re: Brexshit
 

The whole Brexit negotiation debacle can be distilled into a simple equation. 52% of the electorate voted to Leave while 75% of MPs voted to Remain. The people gave Parliament an instruction which it did not wish to carry out. It was always going to end in a constitutional crisis.

Re: Brexshit
 

And to add to the trouble, not all leavers meant the same thing by "leave" but because none of the terms or conditions or methods were specified at all there wasn't even any unity in the leave vote.

And on top of that, the main political parties have used this entire process as a tool in their own internal power struggles to the great detriment of the country.

It's not possible to roll the clock back 50 years. We can't get there from here and it isn't advisable to even try because the world is such a diffeent place.

At a guess though, we are going to get a softish brexit, with or without a short article 50 delay, after which none of the social and economic problems in the UK will be addressed any more than they were before and after 10 years when the fuss has died down and the barriers erected by brexit are seen to be just nuisances, it will all quietly go back to where it was. Except that we will have already paid the price with the divisions exacerbated in our country.

Re: Brexshit
 

Agreed there are plenty of places you pick up taxes, but it's not close to a 66% effective rate. Total tax revenue as percentage of GDP = 34.4% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...e_to_GDP_ratio
Here's a link from the right-wing press: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/tax/9654465/Britains-taxes-among-highest-in-world-accountants-say.html "UHY found that people earning over £125,000 keep 60.8 per cent of their income after personal taxes and social security contributions......... The lowest earners – people on £16,000 a year – keep 84 per cent of their income" So that's a 40.2% rate for high earners and 16% for lower earners. Still lots of tax to be fair, but not that high.

Re: Brexshit
 

I think this is the biggest problem with the whole Brexit affair. 17.4 million different varieties of Brexit with so many incompatible with each other. This was exploited by the leave campaigns (I don't blame them - it inflated their support) however it was always going to end up with disagreements when the details of brexit eventually solidified leaving the current mess. Should the terms of brexit have been clearly laid out at the referendum, i suspect the losing remain voters would have joined forces with the brexit supportes to make the best of the brexit situation.

Re: Brexshit
 

Re: Brexshit
 

Re: Brexshit
 

You fink? I reckon 17.4 million people all voted exactly for what was written on the ballot paper. Here is the question once again:

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

It's clear. The MPs who didn't want to leave but where given the task to do so then went about interpreting this in all ways possible to effectively make leave mean remain. There were no options on the ballot, yet MPs have interpreted the word leave to mean an menu of possible outcomes and options all diluting what leave actually meant. This has created futher division and certainly isn't in the spirit of the initial question or vote. A second ref would no doubt have a question that tries to split the leave vote over two options thus meaning remain gets through.

Re: Brexshit
 

posting at the same time :)

Re: Brexshit
 

Quite a few remainers like to claim this. But when you consider polling shows very little, if any, Brexit regrets among Leave voters and a high support for leaving without a deal, I suspect most people were not confused what Brexit meant at the time of the referendum. Leave the EU. How hard is it to figure that out?

As it is, I don't care what happens any more. If Brexit doesn't happen, I'll probably never bother voting again. What's the point? Just accept the EU as your master and that you live in a benevolent dictatorship not that different from the Gulf kingdoms and that your directly elected politicians are meaningless, and just get on with life. At the end of the day I also know it's not bad, the EU offers a high quality of life for the most part and I'm not a working class bloke who has to worry about Bulgarian plumbers undercutting him. And it is also firmly the end of a Britain that once existed. But, you know, nothing one can do about it.

* I do have an American birth certificate due to my father spending that year teaching at a US university. Never bothered to do anything about it in part because wasn't interested, never whatsoever considered myself American by any stretch of the imagination, and also in part because American taxes are terrible for expats. But maybe, just maybe, I'll chase it down and get the citizenship and move to Southern California. That's the back up if NZ doesn't work out.

Re: Brexshit
 

Those rates are for Income Tax and NI only, they don't include the multitude of indirect taxes such as VAT, Fuel, Property, Capital etc., which could easily double them. See Figure 2 here. The Telegraph is too left-wing for my taste, the readers comments excepted :)

Re: Brexshit
 

You may find it was the PM, not the Mp's who interpreted the word leave.

Re: Brexshit
 

It was everyone.

Re: Brexshit
 

The £350m/wk part.

Re: Brexshit
 

That was never in the ballot.

Great show of balls from the speaker yesterday.

Re: Brexshit
 

I think that when the history of NOTBrexit is finally written, The Speaker of the house will be lauded for NOT changing the course of our once great nation and forcing us to join the second phase of the Lisbon accord. :(

Re: Brexshit
 

They have 10 days to repeal the law and get Art.50 extended or revoked. None of that is easy. Speaker's pro-remain move might well prove to be pro-Brexit.

Either way, it was a ballsy move and I respect people who do stuff like that.

Re: Brexshit
 

I do hope you're right !!

Re: Brexshit
 

As the old saying goes, it ain't over till the fat lady sings. The last year has very much been lurching from one extreme outcome to the other extreme outcome and back and forth and back and forth. One practically gets sea-sickness from trying to follow Parliament.

As for Bercow and his bugger Brexit stickers on his, ahem, his wife's car, I'd have more respect for his decision if he hadn't ignored Parliamentary convention and precedence, against the full advice of his advisers, last year.

Re: Brexshit
 

You're holding a grudge from a year ago?

Anyway - as he said at the time - someone has to set a new precedent or nothing will ever change.

Re: Brexshit
 

Sadly not. A simple statutory instrument is all that is required after Brussels gives the nod. It can be done in an afternoon. After driving a horse and cart through the constitution when it suits him, Bercow has now decided to announce, before the government has even brought forward the meaningful vote, that he won’t allow it to proceed due to his newly discovered respect for precedent. His naked political agenda is just that.

Re: Brexshit
 

It was November/December, I believe. Something to do with declaring the government in contempt despite the government following the same precedent as previous governments. Something like that.

It is quite hard to take this little man seriously. He's no Betty Boothroyd for sure.

Re: Brexshit
 

Well this little man is being taken quite seriously by the markets right now as well as the international media since yesterday.

Re: Brexshit
 

I hope the EU doesn't grant an extension. There is no point. There was never a point in even trying to negotiate in the first place so more time isn't going to be used to obtain anything meaningful.

Re: Brexshit
 

The referendum question was very clear.

It was simply a vote to leave the EU, nothing more. It said nothing about (a) why people might want to leave (b) what the new relationship should be.

It's brexitters who have filled in the blanks and insist on *their own personal brexit*, and then insist that anything else is a betrayal of what the brexit vote really meant, rather than what it actually said.

If brexit never happens, it's the fault of brexitters. If they'd come up with a decent plan and spent some of the last 40 years actually thinking about the northern ireland border problem, and perhaps putting some of their hedge fund billions into developing the magic technology required to have chlorine washed chicken and sh1t standards on one side, and high quality standards on the other, while ensuring no smuggling, then their hard brexit might have stuck. Failing that, even accepting that remaining in the single market and customs union, but leaving the EU, does fulfill the referendum result, would have maybe got widespread support in parliament and the country as being a reasonable compromise.

Instead they tried to use a narrow 52/48 margin in a vote that was purely about leaving the EU to drive through a right-wing coup, the end game of which is basically to rip up the progressive European economic structure of postwar Britain, and instead subscribe totally to the US model. It's no accident that Farage, Fox and other brexitters have been championing abolishing the NHS at the political fringes for as long as they've been banging on about leaving the EU.

No deal will simply never stick. The UK is part of Europe, and industry, farming and commerce all require a close relationship with frictionless trade. If the UK left with no deal, the new government that will inevitably follow an economic collapse would quickly do whatever the EU wanted to get a single market and customs union deal.

Re: Brexshit
 

You know that almost everywhere in the world chlorine washes chicken, right? All that cheap chicken from Thailand or Brazil that ends up in ready meals is most likely chlorine washed. Even the EU chlorine washes chicken for export.

The ban on US imported chicken is more likely less about animal welfare or hygiene than it is about protectionist policies for local producers. Chicken is one of the most highly protected industries globally - almost all countries have some form of trade rules to protect local protection.

Re: Brexshit
 

Out of all that, chicken washing was the most important point ? :)

Re: Brexshit
 

Correct. Though if I was in the EU's shoes I would push for an extension, as they will definitely get more out of it watching May et al tie themselves in further knots. A no deal Brexit is akin to a mercy shooting.
If this was a boxing match, the canvas would be covered in thrown towels by now :D