He wants us to call him Hulk now?
Meanwhile, David Cameron continues to speak out on his book tour:
<Gasp!> :eek: Say it isn’t so!
When the Hulk gets madder, the Hulk gets stronger – but he does not get any smarter.
Assume a no deal Brexit with fairly immediate negative consequences experienced by many. So much so that many Brexit supporters regret the decision.
What would be the possibility and if possible method of a new referendum to rejoin and undo Brexit? Would it be impossible to rewind?
“Madness is Strength”
- *2019 *
There is a pathway to entry for aspirant member states. In principle there is nothing to stop a former member state from following that pathway, though it has never arisen in practice.
However:
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Currently the UK has a number of “grandfathered” rights and privileges - a budget rebate, no obligation to adopt the euro as their currency, opt-outs from various other measures - when end when it leaves the EU, and which aren’t on offer to aspirant new members.
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Of course this is a political matter; the member states could agree to offer favourable re-entry terms to the UK if they wanted to smooth its way back in. But they’d have to agree that unanimously. And before agreeing they’d have to consider the political impolications for existing member states which weren’t offered such favours on their entry and don’t enjoy them now, and of course the political implications for other aspirant member states.
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In short, there are considerations which lean against offering the UK a sweet re-entry deal. The EU would have to really, really want the UK to rejoin before they would do this.
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Which raises the question, would they want to the UK to rejoin? On the one hand for the UK to rejoin would be a triumphant vindication of the benefits of EU membership and an Awful Example of the horrors of leaving.
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On the other hand, for many years now the UK as a member state absorbed an undue amount of political time, attention and capital - the constant whinging, the throwing of toys out of the pram, the table-thumping, the demands for rebates and concessions and exceptions, the gutless leaders who gamble with referenda about EU membership in order to avoid facing party divisions.
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And since the 2016 referndum it has been worse: the UK has looked to the EU like a failing state, one whose institutions cannot resolve or even manage its own internal political divisions, to the extent those divisions are causing serious disruption to the UK’s neighbours. They might prefer the UK to stabilise itself a bit and address some of the issues that have brought it to this pass before they welcome it back into the fold.
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So I think the UK’s readmission would be depdendent on a changed political consensus within the UK - one in which the UK political establishment is actually enthusiastic about the European project, and in which instead of trying to accommodate anti-European sentiment (e.g. by holding idiotic refererenda) they marginalise it (e.g. by slinging europhopes out of the major parties, and leaving them to the likes of Farage). As noted, acceptance of the euro and of the Schengen agreement are already standard conditions of entry. If the UK’s application for re-entry were to be accompanied by demands for immediate concessions and dispensations from the rules which apply to everyone else, well, that could send send signals about the UK’s attitude to the project which would make rejection of the application a racing certainty.
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I think a more likely route to re-entry would be, well, why not enter into an association agreement with the EU as other aspirant member states do, and join the EEA as Norway, Iceland, etc have done. Demonstrate responsible, mature behaviour and a settled commitment to joining the EU for 10 years or so, and then let’s talk.
Doesn’t he also get dumber?
“Ignorance is Strength” - George Orwell in 1984, Brexiteers in 2019.
The UK would need to be on the brink of an Argentina before they’d be allowed to rejoin the EFTA. The Norwegian political establishment had a cross-party panic at the though when it was first advanced. the phrase “national interest” showed up, and it rarely does in consensus-oriented Norway.
They’ve mellowed somewhat since, and one was heard to say off the record “Its not been long enough since the war (WW2) to bar them if the dumb …s are really on the brink”.
So its considered a highly undesirable outcome by Norway.
Now, the EFTA_EU agreement was originally made when the two blocks were more equal in size and economies. So if the UK wanted to rejoin the EEA not as Norway, Iceland etc have by through a separate deal, they would have a lot less bargaining power.
The potential reason for the E.U. to want it is the predicted bad economic outcomes for them too. Assuming hard Brexit and bad predictions true then a let’s pretend this never happened would be a mutual self interest.
But on the U.K. side it would be a referendum instructing Parliament to make it so?
Banksy’s chimp-filled Parliament up for sale amid Brexit chaos: Banksy's chimp-filled Parliament up for sale amid Brexit chaos - CNN Style
Just for those who may not be aware, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) is a parallel trading group to the former European Economic Community (EEC) which transformed into the current European Union (EU). The UK was a founding EFTA member in 1960, but left in 1973 when it joined the EEC. So any rejoining of EFTA would not be the same as rejoining the EU.
While the details aren’t specified, the EU is seeking a free trade agreement with the UK. From the Political Declaration, which is the parallel document to the UK/EU Withdrawal Agreement:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/759021/25_November_Political_Declaration_setting_out_the_framework_for_the_future_relationship_between_the_European_Union_and_the_United_Kingdom__.pdf (PDF) paragraph 17.
So it’s unlikely the EU would seek to forbid the UK from rejoining the EFTA, should the UK choose that path.
As for Norway, a current member of the EFTA, objecting to the UK from rejoining the EFTA, I don’t understand why they would. I could understand Norway objecting if the UK was seeking more favourable terms than Norway has. Likewise, I could see Norway seeking some gains in areas which interest them such as fisheries policy. However, there’s little historical animosity between Norway and the UK, and there are big differences between the two country’s economies. It seems like both countries would mutually benefit by being within a free trade agreement. So why would such an arrangement be “considered a highly undesirable outcome by Norway”?
Regarding the UK needing to be “on the brink of an Argentina”, presuming that you’re referring to currency devaluation and economic hardship, that would make the UK rejoining either the EFTA or the EU less likely, not more. Trade depends on stability and mutual beneficence. Nations aren’t likely to enter into agreements with other countries when those countries are going to be unlikely to meet their obligations.
ETA: Sorry if this is a hijack from the Boris Johnson discussion. I lost track of which thread In was in.
This was just posted on the AP, so I’m going to include the times each bit was posted. The current headline is “The Latest: Johnson says he can see ‘shape’ of a Brexit deal”.
I continue to think that Boris Johnson has no plans to negotiate anything and that he will defy the law requiring him to ask for another extension. I think he’s prevaricating like a motherfucker and should not be trusted in any way shape or form. YMMV.
“I am confident we can learn to fly like birds but whether we do or not, we will be throwing ourselves off a cliff on 31 October.”
Yup. His billionaire buddies demand it of him.
Yup. That’s been pretty much his whole shtick.
I am not at all sure the EU have the right to veto new EFTA members. I do believe they could block entry into the EEA though, one does not automatically follow the other. Switzerland is not in the EEA, and it is unlikely that the UK would want to be, as it would have to accept free movement of people. That would move the EFTA center of gravity firmly outside the EEA, another problem.
It is not a matter of enmity, but a matter of pretty much everyone form the far left to the far right believing it will damage us. Potentially a lot. There is in fact some willingness to take damage if the UK is really on the brink of the abyss but it would have to be exceedingly severe situation for the UK.
For starters the UK has an economy tuned completely differently to ours and is 13 times as large. In fact it is five times the size of the total EFTA population. The UK operates what from the EFTA perspective is a comparatively low median wage, low skills economy, where the “Nordic model” is based on much higher wages for the basic jobs. The economic interests are highly divergent, and we are much more dependent on trade than the UK. Not to mention the issues of the size of the UK agricultural market. It would be much like Russia entering into an economic union with the Nordic nations, or Canada.
The UK could ruin us, and the rest without noticing much just based on its size. A UK in the EFTA would have to be exceptionally careful about its policies and sensitive to the vulnerabilities of the economies of other members. I don’t see this generation of the UKs political establishment as remotely capable of that. Also, integrating an economy so much larger and so different would probably take a lot of time and be far more complicated than leaving the EU has been.
There is also the fact that when the original deal between the EFTA and what became the EU was made, the EFTA block included Sweden, Denmark, the UK, Finland (ass.) Austria and Portugal in addition to the current members. It was far more of a negotiation between equals. Being one of the two largest inheritors of that deal has been very good to Norway and is not a position we are eager to yield.
According to the off the record remarks of Norwegian politicians it would need to be quite a bit worse than that.
Generally, only Iceland sees benefits to having the UK join. The others are negative, with Switzerland moderatly so and Norway the most. (But still hoping someone else will veto it) Well, Carl Baudenbacher wanted the UK in, its what got him fired from his job as president of the EFTA supreme court.
Its very rare to see the entire political spectrum in Norway have such a lockstep reaction. Almost unprecedented. Now there is enough of a sense of historical close relations and debts that the establishment has moved to the understanding that UK could be admitted if it was that or the abyss (also, we don’t want our biggest trading partner to collapse), but it would be an exceedingly complex negotiation.
Hacker: Europe is a community of nations, dedicated towards one goal. […]
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[/moderating]
Ther’s a couple of issues with the UK joining EFTA:
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UK dwarfs all the existing EFTA members put together. In a five-member EFTA, UK would represent 70% of combined GDP; the other four 30% between them. There are fears that this would lead to EFTA’s positions and interests being rebalanced in a way not to the advantage of the other four members, and that EFTA could become UK-centric in much the way that the UK is England-centric.
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UK as an EU member state has not in recent years displayed much team spirit or compehension of the nature of consensus buildiing or collaboration in the exercise of poooled sovereignty. This wouldn’t exactly fill EFTA mebmers with a sense of confidence about how the UK might behave as an EFTA member state.
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EFTA members would resent then notion that EFTA membership was seen as a kind of nursery school for states not mature enough to be trusted with grown-up EU membership.
In short, I think for existing EFTA member states to welcome the prospect of the UK joining, a necessary (thought not sufficient) condition would be a change in the UK political climate such that EFTA membership was seen as desirable in its own right, and something to which the UK would make a mature commitment, rather than a panicked response to the realities of no-deal Brexit, when experienced.
In principle, this isnt’ an unattainable goal. Norway’s enduring semi-detached relationship with the EU, expressed through EFTA membership, is precisely the outcome of (a) a near-even division of opinion within the country over whether to be EU members (as in the UK) coupled with (b) a recognition that this calls for the construction of a consensus in favour of a relationship with the EU which takes seriously, and addresses, the concerns of those on both sides of that split (very much as not in the UK). Until UK political culture changes to the point where building a consensus solution is seen as a positive strength and not as a weakness or, at best, a reluctant compromise with necessity, EFTA membership is going to be problematic.
Sorry, I assumed anything C&P’d from WikiQuote would be fair use. And what Doper requires attribution to know what show Hacker and Applebee are from?
Appleby. As all Dopers should know.