Prime Minister Boris Johnson tries to lead the UK but has resigned on July 7, 2022

Great Debates
282

The EU’s approach to negotiation has been pretty poor, refusing to negotiate before Article 50 was triggered, and also refusing to renegotiate after May’s deal was rejected by Parliament, not to mention the refusal to make the last extension as long as was requested.

It’s probably correct to say that the majority of the blame lies on the UK’s side, but not all of it. Not only has the EU done nothing proactive (at least publicly) to keep the UK in the EU, it’s made the negotiations far harder than necessary.

Just to give a couple of examples, Varadkar has said he wouldn’t negotiate Ireland’s position with Johnson while he was there, and the EU has said there will be no negotiation at the upcoming summit. This inflexibility and bureaucracy gets to the heart of the UK’s problems with the EU, and whilst I don’t believe it’s worth leaving over - especially with no deal - it is something that really needs to be fixed.

283

He is attempting to discredit his opponents and get reelected as PM on a platform of fixing the mess that other people forced him to agree to. That’s mostly bollocks, of course, but the opposition refusing an election and the EU refusing to negotiate properly are playing into his hands, and with the right spin, we could see the UK out of Europe without a deal and Johnson reelected with a large majority.

Boris is many things, but he is neither stupid, inexperienced nor lazy. If people underestimate him, he may well get his way - which is pretty terrifying.

Look, Donald Trump is stupid, inexperienced and lazy, but still managed to get elected when the opposition was divided and weak.

284

The EU have not “refused to negotiate properly”. If anything, the EU have bent over backwards to facilitate negotiations with the UK. What the EU has not done - and this has been characterised by the Leave campaign as “bullying” - is catered to every whim of a side that came to the negotiating table without a coherent position or any negotiating leverage, set a timetable it couldn’t keep and signed up to a deal that nobody at home wanted. The EU have agreed to extensions, have been transparent about their own position and have overall acted in good faith, but they are not going to give concessions to the UK just because a bunch of overgrown toddlers keep stamping their feet and complaining about how mean the EU are being to them.

This whole Brexit fiasco has been conducted in the worst possible way, and none of that is the EU’s fault.

ETA: And Boris’ blatant attempt to “divide and conquer” by negotiating directly with Varadkar is not a sign of “inflexibility and bureaucracy”; it’s a sign that Boris once again tried to game the system and got smacked down for it.

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This is a well-understood principle the EU holds regardless - “no negotiations without notification” is well understood by all parties and not somehow a new thing dreamt up for Brexit. And it makes good sense - negotiating with someone within the EU is very different from negotiating with someone outside of it or someone leaving it, and tipping your hand early on that is disadvantageous for the 27 remaining EU members. Is it unreasonable for the EU to not willingly give up an advantage in negotiations with the UK? No - it’d be irresponsible of it towards its own members to do so.

While the previous bit was at least somewhat reasonable, this is a farce. The EU and UK spent two years working out a deal in what was allegedly good faith. Given the incredibly tight time limit and the extenuating circumstances (such as the Good Friday agreement), this was already a very heavy lift. Given that, the expectation was that this was the deal that both countries would accept. Then, with very little time the UK voted it down and expected a new, better deal to spring out of someone’s ass. To say that this is a diplomatic faux pas is putting it mildly. If the UK didn’t want that deal, what did it want?

(This continues to be a sticking point in negotiations, by the way - the UK doesn’t seem to have a damned clue what it wants, and when they mention what they want, what they want is typically less “things they can get” and more “everyone gets their own unicorn” requests like full participation in borderless trade without participation in free movement.)

Under those circumstances, the refusal to renegotiate again is not unreasonable. In fact, demanding another attempt at negotiation with such a small timespan is unreasonable, bordering on absurd.

Let’s be clear here - yet another extension not being quite as long as the UK wants is not “the EU being unreasonable”. It is “the EU bending over backwards but not quite being willing to touch the ground with their nose”. By this point in the negotiations the UK had burned through just about all the goodwill they had had with the EU. They had consistently acted in bad faith. The UK requesting another extension to do… something? It’s just time-wasting. Shit or get off the pot.

The EU has bent over backwards to be fair and reasonable to the UK. It has not, in spite of the accusations of certain bad-faith actors within the UK, been “unreasonable”. The UK wanted to leave, and Europe, as it is obligated to do so, allowed it to. Care to outline what the EU should have done, proactively, to “keep the UK”, that wouldn’t have amounted to privileging a leaving member for leaving, thus allowing for some very unreasonable hostage-esque situations?

The examples you offer are extremely small potatoes. The major procedural hurdles involve things like “demanding a new major trade deal within two years” and “not knowing what the hell they want”.

286

The EU should have campaigned in the referendum for a Remain vote, explained why it was important for both the UK and the EU that we remain together, and explained what, exactly, it is that the EU actually does - as very few people, on either side, seem to know that.

It should also have negotiated properly, specifically before Article 50 was triggered, so each side knew what the actual possibilities for compromise were before the time limit started. Basically, they should act like the most important thing, for both the EU as a whole and for the UK - which, don’t forget is still an EU member, and its citizens are EU citizens - is to keep the UK in the EU. Instead, they are willing to cause significant harm to themselves rather than actually do anything to try to stop Brexit.

That the UK is causing more harm to itself than the EU to itself doesn’t excuse the EU. Its actions will harm all the member states. That’s no more acceptable than the Government of the UK harming the country.

The UK Parliament, at least, knows what it wants - a deal with the EU that does not disadvantage the UK at all. The EU wants to punish the UK for leaving, so as to dissuade other states from doing the same. The first of those is obviously impossible, but the second is hugely unethical - almost as much as Johnson forcing us to leave without a deal would be.

As for a trade deal, there could have already been 3 years of negotiation for one had the EU allowed it. They didn’t, because they refused to change their bureaucratic procedures to do so.

Yes, this whole thing could have been avoided if the UK had been less stupid. But the EU is refusing to try to minimise the harm done to all parties involved.

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Nonsense. They refused to negotiate before Article 50 was triggered, and so are completely to blame for the timing issues. Had they done so, either a workable deal would have been found before it was triggered, leaving 2 years to implement it or - more likely - it would have become clear that there is not workable deal possible, and it would never have been triggered in the first place.

If the rules prevented such negotiation, change the rules.

Ultimately, the EU should be acting to protect itself and its member states - and that includes the UK, a current member state. Instead, it has shown it is willing to harm both sides.

None of this excuses the stupidity and inaction of the UK - but our stupidity and inaction doesn’t excuse the EU, either.

288

Honestly at this point I’ll just consider it a win that you recognize that this is an absurd demand.

289

Do they also want a pony?

290

Is the EU allowed to campaign in a British referendum? I wouldn’t think so.

Eta: Looking at the electoral commission’s guidelines, only UK and Gibraltar based organizations could register as Campaigners.

291

No, this is nonsense. Before triggering Article 50, the UK should have had :1) a clear and agreed negotiating position for what it wanted to achieve (an actual negotiating position, not the vague “everyone gets a unicorn” one you mention); 2) an understanding of what was required to go from the status quo to that position; 3) an understanding of the actual timeframe required to achieve it; and 4) an experienced, competent and prepared team to carry out the negotiations on the UK’s behalf. Had those things been in place, a reasonable agreement could have been achieved within the Article 50 timeframe.

Instead, the UK had no coherent position, negotiation plan, understanding of the requirements, or team who actually knew what they were doing. Theresa May triggered Article 50 purely for domestic political reasons based on unrealistic expectations of what could be achieved, an overinflated sense of the UK’s negotiating position, no real preparation for the talks and an absolute shambles of a negotiation team. None of that is the EU’s fault, and your insistence that the EU should save the UK from itself - including the bizarre insistence that they should have actively interfered in a domestic referendum - does not change any of that.

Again, it is not the EU’s responsibility to save the UK from its own incompetence. While the Leave campaign has insisted that the EU is a tyrannical overlord overriding national sovereignty, this is not actually true and the EU cannot - and should not - be able to prevent a member state from leaving if it so chooses by its legitimate political mechanisms. Without rehashing the whole debate about the referendum itself, the UK has said it wants to go, it has used the appropriate mechanisms to do so, and the EU - while it has made all reasonable efforts to convince the UK not to leave - cannot stop it. And if the UK want to leave in the most half-assed way possible, that’s its sovereign [sic] right.

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No, that would be absurd! What the UK has always demanded is a unicorn. :unicorn:

The EU is being utterly unreasonable by refusing even to negotiate about providing one.

293

A new twist:

John Bercow to step down as Speaker by 31 October

294

The real reason why there should be a second referendum is that the first one was won by breaking the law. Illegal funding was used to influence the vote, provided by shady hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who also funded Donald Trump.

The real reason we should fear the work of Dominic Cummings

If you have a chance, watch the Channel 4 docudrama, Brexit - The Uncivil War. It tells the whole story brilliantly, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings.

295

All evidence? Note that the UN had announced that after Desert Storm , a lot of WMD were missing*, that Saddam used nerve gas on his own people, and that he announced he was rebuilding him WMD program.

Now, it’s true that after the US threatened invasion, so SH let the UN back in and the UN went in and couldnt find anything- then there was grave doubts and no reason to invade, but certainly up until then the smart money would have been that SH had WMD.

*most were found , after SH was taken down, rusting and lost in the desert.

296

I feel that some people could do to read the recent piece in the New Statesman*, “Why liberals now believe in conspiracies: How could the most rational ruling elite in history have fallen for the most dangerous toxin in politics?”

“…Detecting the fingerprints of conspirators in the disarray of their societies, they are possessed by the pathology they rage against. Unwilling to admit why progress has foundered, liberals have embraced the worst kind of magical thinking.”

  • for those not familiar, a respectable left-leaning British magazine
297

Yes, it’s very good.

Speaking of Cummings: Stephen Collins on Dominic Cummings – cartoon | Life and style | The Guardian

298

A couple of pieces of news:

So now we get to see if BoJo is a lawful PM, a criminal or dead in a ditch.

Also:

Ah, but see, that’s where it get sticky again and makes me think BoJo isn’t really on the up-and-up:

That doesn’t impart a lot of confidence in transparency or truth, IMO.

299

Cruel but defensible paragraph of that article:

“Back in the day, the USSR under Stalin organised a successful disinformation campaign to persuade people in the West of something that wasn’t true. Let me tell you about it in excruciating detail. Right now, people don’t seem to trust politicians to act in their interests. These things are connected Because Reasons. Also, I can put a random paragraph in there about how Putin organised a successful disinformation campaign to persuade people in the West of something that isn’t true, therefore Liberal Elites Suck”

It may well be true that there is some cohesive group that you can define as a “Liberal Elite” (though nobody who writes newspapers ever seems to actually define it) and that in fact they have some policies that suck, but what is in that article is not actually a coherent argument

300

First Dog on the Moon has something to say about Remainaggedon and the UK bravely leaving the EU

301

No, “all evidence” is correct. Prior to the the inspection teams going back into Iraq, (after the removal of the U.S. spies–Hussein never kicked the UN out, the UN withdrew its teams when it was seen that they were compromised), there was a suspicion that Iraq still had WMD, but in the six months prior to the invasion, NO evidence was discovered and a lot of administration lies were outed. Even the rusted, rotting weapons found in the desert had clearly been lost or abandoned long before HWB tried to drum up his war.