EU and Brexit

Factual Questions
1

So why does the EU care about the timeline for Brexit? It seems to me that if they want to keep the EU together, it would make sense to just tell the UK to negotiate within themselves for as long as they need to, then when they have passed a deal, bring it to the EU for consideration. In the meantime, the EU would just treat them as a full regular member. The UK could then debate the issue for years if they felt like it, before they finally rescinded article 50.

If the EU doesn’t want to break up, then why are they pushing so hard for it?

2

The EU is trying to force the issue to get May’s ‘deal’ through, which includes among other things a clause that says they will never get to Brexit again.

The EU is simply playing authoritarian hardball. Which to me is a good enough reason to get out of it.

3

This is a confusing OP. Do you mean “invoked” rather than “rescinded” here?

I’ll assume you do. The UK was perfectly free to spend as much time as needed to figure things out before invocation, but rather disastrously chose not to do so. And so the clock started ticking, and here we are with only a few days to go and chaos reigns.

4

What clause in the proposed withdrawal agreement says that? Are you getting mixed-up with the ECJ ruling that the UK could unilaterally revoke A50? I mean, not even that ruling says that the UK will never get to Brexit again, but only that a revocation followed by an immediate re-invocation was not going to be viewed kindly.

5

The UK government could ask for a long Article 50 extension (the ‚for years’ mentioned by the OP); they chose not to.

Absent a long extension (which would involve the UK participating in the European Parliament elections), the UK must be out before the elections (the stance that the European Council has adopted) or at the latest before the newly elected EP first convenes (the extension that May asked for).

The EU treaties have no provision for a country (still) being a member but not being represented in the European Parliament, and there is no time to amend them (requiring ratification in all 28 countries, which requires a referendum in a number of them - always had been a long and fraught process). So the UK being a member but not sending MEPs would make the Damocles‘ sword of legal invalidity hang over all EU legal acts, pending some party‘s making an issue of it.

6

Brexit has been enormously distracting for the EU, which has a lot of other matters that it needs to be dealing with. If it is certain that the UK will leave, there is no benefit to the EU in further prolonging the departure. There is also an unwillingness on both sides to have the UK elect representatives to the European Parliament in May, which would be a requirement if the UK is still a member at the start of the next session in June.

7

Because of all possible outcomes, never-ending uncertainty is the worst.

Also, the UK has had two years to decide what it is going to do, and did nothing until the last minute. All evidence is that if given another two years, they would just diddle around for 23.5 months and be in the same position again.

8

They care, because the uncertainty itself is causing real problems, and the longer it goes on for, the worse it gets.

Take a business in France that sells widgets, a big chunk of which are currently sold in the UK. If a big UK company puts in an order for 10,000 custom widgets in 2 months, will they be able to actually supply them? Will their normal delivery company still be able to deliver? Will they need to do a mass of extra paperwork, which they won’t be compensated for? Will Sterling crash, so they get paid for with 20 Euros the owner had left from his last skiing trip, five stamps and an IOU?

In all seriousness, orders are being cancelled and money is being lost on both sides of the channel, just due to businesses not knowing how this is going to fall out. I suspect many businesses are currently just trying to delay agreeing to anything until they know which way things are going, but there’s a limit to how long they can do that. Plus, politically, with a significant proportion of UK MPs basically threatening to not pay up for agreements the country has made (framing it as the EU making unfair demands, rather than the UK trying to walk away from debts), letting the UK hang round, taking advantage of schemes that they may not actually pay their share for just isn’t viable.

Yes, the EU would prefer the UK called the whole thing off and started acting like a proper member again, but at the moment, my country is a liability, and it looks depressingly like the UK will shoot ourselves in the foot in a few weeks. The only other option the EU can give us is allowing us to dither about spreading chaos for a few months or even years, being neither truly in nor truly out, then shoot ourselves in the foot.

We’re acting like that mate who’s got way too far into the party drugs, who might just start a fight, or run out the restaurant without paying if you try to include him. Even if the rest of the group have been friends for years and they really miss who he used to be, no-one can really help, and they might make things worse trying. We need to sort ourselves out first.

9

:confused: The effect of May’s deal (or any deal, or no deal) would be that the UK leaves the EU. Obviously it cannot Brexit again in such a situation, because Brexit will have occurred.

10

Because it’s draining, destracting and destablising.

Nope. We don’t want the UK involved in framing long-term strategy that they may not stick around to implement. It’s hard to plan our budgets and programmes on a 7-year cycle if one of our major contributors (and one of our major recipients) is not likely to be around for that 7 years, but we have no idea when they’ll bail out.

The Lisbon Treaty provides for a two-year (but flexible) period for a reason; prolonged uncertainty is damaging.

The irony is that the UK did debate the issue for years, and had they chosen to they could have debated it for more years, before invoking Art 50. It’s just it was a really poor debate, and didn’t produce any clear position on the objectives, strategy or even the the point of Brexit, and was largely conducted in a reality-free environment in which wishful and magical thinking went unchallenged. And, frankly, there’s no reason to think that had they debated for longer than they did, they would have debated any differently. It seems to be only the pressure of a deadline that has introduced any realism into the UK’s debate.

We don’t want to break up, but we accept that the UK does. We;re not going to be the clingy ex; we have other stuff to do. And by now we’re getting a bit impatient to move on and do it. Our objective at this point, and for quite some time past, has not been to avoid the breakup but to complete it with minimal harm to ourselves.

11

If your spouse said “I want out, this is final”, would you tie them down to a chair and then try to live life normally around their tied-up form, all while spoon-feeding them and giving them sponge baths?

They want out because they think we didn’t pamper them enough (yes I realize #notallBrits), when the rest of us think that in fact we pampered them from here to the edge of the galaxy. The sooner they decide how exactly do they want out, the sooner the new balance can be established and the sooner we all can find our new normal.

The uncertainty affects anybody doing international business in the EU. We don’t know what the legal frame is going to be next year, or in two years. We don’t know whether we should refuse to wign up contracts with UK-based companies, accepting them only from their sister companies in other countries. EU citizens living in the UK do not know whether they will be able to stay or not; short-term UK expats are in a similar bind. Uncertainty is much worse than whatever the final arrangement ends up being.

12

Cite please

13

While I totally get your perspective, I think it’s not ‘The EU didn’t pamper us enough’ and much more ‘The EU interferes with our business too much (which is ‘at all’).’ Brexiteers tend to be just generally unhappy with ANY kind of political union, and always have been.

#notthisBrit