[Politics] Brexit

Pretty pink fairy said:

he changed his user name on NSC
regards
DR

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Jim D said:

Very good. So, as you have obviously seen all this coming, would you care to advise those of us that didn't what you have done to protect yourself?

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Two Professors said:

Anybody who is stupid enough not to see that the EU is dying,is very welcome to leave.When is QE finishing?The EU bank can't keep buying worthless debt forever,and once they stop,the bubble will burst big time.Looking forward to getting Lira,Drachma,and Pesetas again.

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Herr Tubthumper said:

I know this wasn't a question for me but I am happy to advice. The horse has already bolted for some of my measures so you will not benefit unfortunately.

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5ways said:

wild untethered deflection. The EU is growing, if slowly.

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5ways said:

wild untethered deflection. The EU is growing, if slowly.

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5ways said:

wild untethered deflection. The EU is growing, if slowly.

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portslade seagull said:

You mean the EU with record youth unemployment and us with the lowest unemployment rate for years and still falling.

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Two Professors said:

If the EU is doing so well,they should be in a rush to get rid of us.You lot keep saying our economy is the worst in Europe so we must be dragging them down.Wonder how much it will grow from March 2019?

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Herr Tubthumper said:

I also see that EasyJet have started moving their UK flights from their Uk company over to their new European one.

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bashlsdir said:

Old news, we have known all along Easyjet was setting up another base in Europe alongside the UK one. Nothing has changed.

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Herr Tubthumper said:

It’s not old news at all. You knew they’d applied for an Austrian license and sett up a separate EU company. What you didn’t know until a few days ago was that they have moved a large chunk of their UK flights to this new company. My flights are now run by an Austrian company and not a British one....and profits etc will now be lost...in short business is being lost as a direct result of Brexit.

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The Clamp said:

And the Leavers still deny deny deny.

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Herr Tubthumper said:

It’s not old news at all. You knew they’d applied for an Austrian license and sett up a separate EU company. What you didn’t know until a few days ago was that they have moved a large chunk of their UK flights to this new company. My flights are now run by an Austrian company and not a British one....and profits etc will now be lost...in short business is being lost as a direct result of Brexit.

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Herr Tubthumper said:

It’s not old news at all. You knew they’d applied for an Austrian license and sett up a separate EU company. What you didn’t know until a few days ago was that they have moved a large chunk of their UK flights to this new company. My flights are now run by an Austrian company and not a British one....and profits etc will now be lost...in short business is being lost as a direct result of Brexit.

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bashlsdir said:

The move will not effect UK jobs.

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bashlsdir said:

The move will not effect UK jobs.

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Politics is stuck in a hall of mirrors, where nothing is quite as it seems and nobody means exactly what they say. Theresa May is presiding over Brexit, a policy that she opposed in last year’s referendum campaign on the grounds that it would make the country poorer and less safe. Even now the prime minister cannot say whether she believes it is right for the UK to leave the EU but she is taking the country out anyway.

Damian Green, the first secretary, goes so far as to say that he would vote Remain again if there were another ballot tomorrow, yet he is de facto deputy of a government committed to breaking with the rest of Europe in a harder than necessary fashion. Philip Hammond faces calls for his sacking from Brexiteers who accuse him of being too pessimistic — but still the chancellor has endorsed a departure from the single market and the customs union that the Treasury fears will do devastating economic damage. The home secretary is sitting in a cabinet that has approved a plan which only a few months ago she was arguing could make the country more vulnerable to terrorist attack. Another cabinet member wishes the transition period would last for “50 years”.

Across Whitehall, ministers are holding their red boxes with one hand, and their noses with the other, as they see the biggest change of their lifetime unfolding on their watch, even though this is a revolution they do not believe in. No wonder the government seems so anxious and uncomfortable. “We are trapped in a box,” admits one minister. “Parliament feels frozen by the referendum but people voted for a fantasy we can’t deliver. They can only have Brexit if they’re prepared to suffer the pain.” It is an extraordinary situation. In the past, ministers have resigned from the government in principle over much less. This is not so much a constitutional mess as an ethical one, with ambiguity on all sides.

Those who have seen Mrs May privately in recent weeks describe her as stricken and stunned. On one occasion she sat in silence for almost ten minutes while the visitor she had invited to see her waited for her to lead the conversation. He left the meeting deciding she no longer wanted to be prime minister. The internal contradiction of her position must be taking an emotional as well as a political toll. According to reports in the German press, she appeared “tormented” at her dinner with Jean-Claude Juncker last week.

There is an institutional as well as a personal incongruity in Whitehall, with most senior civil servants opposed to Brexit. Even in the Department for Exiting the EU many officials believe they are masterminding a policy against the national interest. In the Commons, MPs voted for Article 50 which started a process towards an outcome a majority of them want to prevent.
Anna Soubry, the pro-European MP who resigned from the government last year, admits she is relieved at no longer being a minister. “I don’t believe the majority of people in the government want the hard Brexit they’re now pursuing,” she says.

The Brexiteers will claim this is the dreaded “elites” closing ranks against “the people” but there is of course a clash between the representative democracy of parliament and the direct democracy of a referendum. In any case, it’s not only the former Remainers who are internally torn between political expediency and economic reality. Michael Gove and Boris Johnson both campaigned for Brexit but now seem uncertain about what it should mean. They wanted to shake things up but never expected to win. Like the robbers in The Italian Job, they were “only supposed to blow the bloody doors off”.

Although friends say the foreign secretary now has the “zeal of the convert” about leaving the EU, he has always been in favour of immigration. He is also nervous about the short-term impact of Brexit. He once told me that the economy would follow the path of a Nike tick if we voted to leave, going down before soaring up. He knows that those in the poorest parts of the country who voted for Brexit to improve their lives can ill afford even this short-term dip and there is no sign of the £350 million a week he promised for the NHS. Mr Johnson’s effervescent optimism has the feel of Peter Pan telling the children to clap to keep Tinker Bell alive.

David Davis and Liam Fox may be true believers but even their dreams are slowly adjusting to the reality of Brussels negotiations. The Tory party is so dysfunctional that the Conservative voice on Radio 4’s The World At One yesterday was Suella Fernandes, who happily laid into the Confederation of British Industry as leader of the European Research Group of Tory Brexit-supporting MPs, although she is also parliamentary private secretary to Mr Hammond, who presumably takes a rather different view about Britain’s leading businesses. In the hall of mirrors, images ricochet around and identities become confused.

Labour is in its own gallery of glass. Jeremy Corbyn, an instinctive radical who has for years seen the EU as part of a capitalist conspiracy, now looks in the mirror to see himself attempting to preserve the status quo for a transitional period at least. John McDonnell has floated the idea of staying in a reformed single market, even though the left has always resisted the controls on state aid that belonging can bring. Meanwhile the Labour moderates sit meekly by while their leader takes the party in a direction with which they totally disagree. One MP told me that Mr Corbyn’s leadership was a “moral” question for him. He was so opposed to his policies on defence, national security and public spending that he did not want him to become prime minister. Yet he and many others remain on the Labour benches because they hope one day to reclaim their party.

None of this is black and white. It would be easy to accuse the Remain-supporting cabinet ministers, or the Labour moderates, of hypocrisy, but that would be a cheap hit. In both cases, decent people believe they must respect a democratic mandate, whether that is the Brexit referendum or the Labour leadership election. They are staying in their positions because they hope to make what they see as a bad situation better. Yet the profound lack of trust in politics will only be exacerbated by the perception that so many politicians are doing the opposite of what they believe.

The voters demand honesty and authenticity, yet the reality at Westminster is dissembling and ambiguity. There will be more than seven years’ bad luck when this hall of mirrors comes crashing down.

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ManOfSussex said:

Which Government do you think will benefit in new tax receipts from EasyJet moving functions and operating out of their new Austrian Company and who will lose out in tax receipts - Vienna or London?

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