Yeah, I was going to say that too, Northern Piper. Plus there’s the knock-on effect; countries that now have barriers to trading with the EU will suffer, and contract, and be less able to make use of local industries for ancillary purposes.
This article isn’t about Brexit, but sentences I’ve highlighted suggest a possible dismal effect of EU withdrawal.
Well, there were apparently local elections in Britain on the 1st, and the two main parties (and the UKIP) which support Brexit got trounced.
So who won? The Lib Democrats may have come back to life (at least a little bit).
So will the Brexit parties get the message, or not? well, according to PM May…
Stay tuned for further follies.
ETA: Reference: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-localelections/britains-two-main-parties-get-brexit-bashing-in-local-election-idUSKCN1S906B
Apparently a number of pro- and anti-Brexit voters used the local elections to throw a little tantrum by scrawling on their voting papers.
I’m unsure as to what message Brexit parties should take from last night as I’m fairly confident the message to Brexit parties at the EU elections in a couple of weeks will be slightly different. I think the direction of travel for the Tories should be fairly clear cut if they wish to remain a relevant electoral force in the coming weeks, months or even years. The direction of travel for the Labour Party is, I think, less clear cut.
On thing I’ve not seen is how many former UKIP councillors were re-elected as Independents. Does anyone have any info?
I’m not sure you can get much of a message about Brexit from the UK’s local council elections. Clearly the Conservative Party losses indicate the government is unpopular, but that’s hardly news. Labour should have gotten an upswing from the Tories’ poor fortunes, but instead lost seats as well. That should have left the Liberal Democrats with the most to gain, but they could only split the votes of dissatisfaction with the Independents and the Greens. Arguably, the Independents did the best, which is like a cricket game where the leading batsman is Others.
It’s hard to find a good analogy for UK politics over the past few days. The Defence Minister was just fired for leaking details of a National Security Council meeting.
Meanwhile the Labour Party Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, attended a May Day rally and made a speech in front of a banner featuring Stalin and Mao, plus Soviet style flag wavers.
Meanwhile, neither party will say what they’re going to do about Brexit.
Best analogy I can come up with? It’s a belly-flop contest at a sewage retention pond.
Pretty much. Everybody’s angry at the political establishment, but not all for the same reason - some because they think the UK should already have left the EU, some because they think Brexit is an utter shambles and should be abandoned, some because Parliament can’t agree on anything after a bazillion votes, and some just want to watch the world burn.
In the upcoming European elections this will likely translate into the pro-Brexit parties doing very well, on the basis that the best way to show the EU that MEPs are a bunch of corrupt, argumentative and useless incompetents who can’t accomplish anything and only turn up to collect their taxpayer-funded salaries is to elect a bunch of corrupt, argumentative and useless incompetents who can’t accomplish anything and only turn up to collect their taxpayer-funded salaries.
That would, admittedly, show us what fer.
What fer what I have no idea, but I would still respect the quintessential whatferitness of it, if you follow my meaning.
For the record, I don’t follow my own meaning.
PM May, is that you?
Any thoughts on the Brexit situation?
Right now it looks like the big front-runner in the British EU Parliament elections will be the Brexit party–with as many or more votes than Labour and the Conservatives put together.
That there will be a fourth vote on May’s withdrawal deal in early June which will lose heavily.
That May will be resigning in early June.
That the Labour-Conservative negotiations on Brexit are dead–the final nail being that May will not be around to implement a deal.
That with a very large number of Conservative MPs throwing their hat in the ring for the leadership contest to succeed May it will take a long time to select the next leader (the final two cadidates will go to a vote by Conservative Party members–unless one of them withdraws).
Naturally Parliament will take a several week long Summer Recess.
The result being that come October the government and Parliament still won’t have made any decisions–and the UK is scheduled to leave the EU October 31.
So what’s going to happen?
45 minutes after you posted that the talks were officially declared dead, and for pretty much the reason you state.
I don’t think a fourth submission of May’s withdrawal bill will pass. I won’t be surprised at all if that vote is cancelled.
What I’m curious about is if May will try the indicative votes again, but using a different format. I’m presuming that Parliament isn’t bound by its rules to only offer yes/no votes. So I’d like to see May list all the proposed future options ranging from an immediate WTO exit to Article 50 revocation. There may be anywhere from 7-15 different options. Have a series of votes where MP’s can vote for as many options as they like, but after each round about a third of the least popular options get dropped. Keep eliminating the least popular options until only one is left. MP’s could then agree that whatever option was decided, while not everybody’s preferred option, was the least unpopular option and should be the consensus will of Parliament.
Oh, and while I’m dreaming, also declare that the Summer recess is cancelled and Parliament will be in session every single day until a decision is made and some bill is passed.
I don’t get how everyone’s so horrified about the Brexit Party doing so ‘well’ when it’s not really pushing the barrier that UKIP achieved in 2014. The real interesting matter will be turnout, I think. Labour are also freefalling because they continue to sit on the fence, and there’s a chance they could become third behind the Lib Dems.
In my neck of the woods it is very clear that the more that people are learning about the EU the more that escaping it’s clutches is replacing previous indifference or believing that to remain imprisoned is a good idea.
The EU is profoundly undemocratic. The relationship between the EU commission and the European parliament makes this very obvious once it’s looked into. The role that Germany and France have created for themselves is that which would previously have taken war to achieve, the loss of control of our borders, sovereignty, and law making machinery beyond little more than who collects the garbage is shocking but had not been realised by the general public. Well a bit more than that but get the idea?
Add to that the absolutely and literally shocking behaviour by May, her cabal, and the 1922 Committee et al has turned the Conservative party into toast. Now the probability is that the BREXIT party will rapidly morph into New Conservative in a similar way that Blair-the-war-criminal created New Labour.
If nothing else the future will be interesting!
You mean the EU whose Parliament we’re literally about to elect representatives to?
Yes. The idea is apparently that you don’t understand how the EU works. It is at least as democratic as the UK’s own Parliament is (possibly moreso, given how the House of Lords works), and if we withdraw the UK will almost certainly continue to be directly or indirectly affected by EU rules while losing all say in them, which sounds distinctly less democratic than staying in. Depending on the final arrangement, we may even have to keep paying the EU while receiving little in return, unlike now where there are substantial benefits to membership.
Also, despite the sly insinuations about Germany and France, Britain has been a driving force in EU legislation. Far from “loss of control of our borders, sovereignty and law-making machinery” we not only have substantial “control” over all those things but have even carved out special rights - for example, one of the reasons that all those immigrants pile up at Calais is because of an existing EU agreement to keep them from getting to the UK. Leave the UK and France has no incentive to hold them. So much for control of our borders. Plus, of course, any hard Brexit is going to wreak havoc with customs and border controls for years to come because it will take us that long to get the appropriate infrastructure in place.
As for laws, more than 95% of EU laws map directly onto existing UK laws, in large part because the UK has been instrumental in writing the EU laws (particularly in the financial sector). The main areas of contention are over offshoring and tax havens and - surprise, surprise - “once it’s looked into” one finds that the wealthy backers and proponents of Brexit such as Jacob Rees-Mogg are the ones who don’t like having to give up their tax shelters (JRM’s business is domiciled in the Caymans) and who will profit mightily from Brexit while the rest of us suffer.
So in short, if you want less democracy, less influence over regulations that will affect the UK, and to hand your “sovereignty” to the wealthiest members of society who will tank the economy for their own personal profit while systemically dismantling the workers’ rights the EU currently grant us, then by all means vote Brexit.
The Conservatives have been falling apart for a long time - it’s one of the reasons Cameron agreed to the referendum in the first place. May chose to grab the poisoned chalice in return for power, but no leader of any party was or will be able to deliver a Brexit as promised by the Leave campaign.
Any party involving Farage and Galloway will never be able to grow beyond a certain level - they’re fine as a protest group but as the history of the UKIP and Respect parties shows they immediately crumble whenever they start to gain momentum. That said, God only knows what the Tories will become - if it weren’t for the fact that Labour was also an utter shambles the Conservatives would have been out of office long ago.
It looks possible - perhaps even likely - that the Conservatives are going to force the Prime Minister to resign on the literal eve of the EU Parliament elections, because why the fuck not?
That’s the situation at 17:00 BST on the 22nd May 2019 anyway.
Just when one thinks that the Brexit situation can’t get any more messed up, the UK says, “Hold my ale, and watch this.”
Looking at the polling, it looks like the Tories could come 5th in the election, that must be unprecedented for a ruling party here.
Am I being too cynical here, or are they trying to get rid of her so they have to waste so long with a leadership election that time runs out on the extension, forcing no-deal leaving?