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The Tory Government Is Living In Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, Believing Brexit To Be Beneficial To The Uk
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The government publication by Badenoch (Department for Business & Trade) is quite unbelievable.
We are doomed if government ministers really believe this nonsense.
There is a link to the government publication (Brexit 4th Anniversary) in the youtube video.
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Hymie - You are using an awful lot of space on the AB server to tell us the same thing day after day after day after day.....
You (and others) think Brexit was a bad idea - we get it.
Can we do anything about it? No.
Are you achieving anything at all with these endless threads and videoes - other than hacking off lots of other ABers?
Even those agreeing with your POV can do nothing about Brexit other than huff and bang their gums.
Get yourself a hobby........a different hobby.
I can tell you if the CEO was to announce that some strategy the company had engaged in (Brexit?), resulting in a 4% drop in revenue was a fantastic success for the company – he’d be gone within a week.
And you'd be quite right.
The difference (which you perpetually and stubbornly refuse to acceept or even discuss) is that the UK is not a FTSE 100 company and there is far more to consider than simply "revenue".
Politcians who are not announcing Brexit to be a "disaster" understand this. They accept that people who voted to leave did so for a wide variety of reasons and the question of the nation's "revenue" did not trump everything else for them, unlike, it seems it does for you.
When you can take a broader view of EU membership and what it means to member states then we might get round to a sensible debate. However, I'll not hold my breath. Until then we'll have to put up with you continually droning on about "revenue", "GDP", "queues at ports and airports" and "people being turned away from their flights because they hadn't read the passport requirements."
It probably hasn't occurred to you that one of the main reasons many people voted to leave is because of the very things you drone on about. Over the last fifty years the EU and its predecessors have acquired more and greater political control over its members. This increase in control has been secured by the threat of the very problems you describe. In short "You can't possibly leave now because it will be too difficult and cause you too much trouble." The writing was finally written on the wall in 1992: the "European Union" was born out of the "European Community" and all pretence of a trading association (as little as then existed) was lost. The EU was formed in order to oversee its members economic and political integration.
Nobody in this country was aksed if they wanted economic and political integration with eleven other nations and they certainly were not asked if they minded that integration being extended to encompass sixteen more, many of which had absolutely nothing in common with the UK, either economically, politically or anyhow else. But there it was, and we were stuck with it because "it would be too difficult to leave." This gave the Euromaniacs carte blanche to press ahead with their intergationist plans, secure in the knowledge that their members were stuffed.
So the more you harp on about how difficult it has all become for the UK, the more I will believe (as if I needed any convincing) that our decision was the right one. No country should be in a position where its daily affairs are determined by unelected foreign bureaucrats and I'm forever grateful to the 17,410,741 people who voted alongside me to leave. I'm also grateful to you for continually pointing out what a hold the EU had over the UK's affairs and what a pernicious influence it continues to extend across the continent.
The longer it goes on, the more that influence will increase and the more difficult it will be for any other nations who see through this scheme for what it is to get out. Despite your assertions, I can see no possibility of the UK re-applying for membership. The EU is a declining influence both economically and politically and there are far better ways for the UK to secure its future than to be part of it.
What will Brexiteers say when Labour forms the next government and announces that there is a black-hole of over £40 billion in tax revenues, and well over a £100 billion loss to the UK economy as a direct result of Brexit?
After all, they have no interest in giving out false information in relation to Brexit, as the Tory government is doing.
What will Brexiteers say when Labour forms the next government and announces that there is a black-hole of over £40 billion in tax revenues, and well over a £100 billion loss to the UK economy as a direct result of Brexit?
They already know because you and Phil have told us often enough. I know because we have debated that very topic (and those figures). Even if they are accurate (and you will note from our debates that I'm not entirely convinced of their accuracy) it doesn't matter a jot. You will understand why when you take a wider view of the issue as I've continually encouraged you to do (but failed miserably, it seems).
The vast majority of the population (who have not been reading my posts on AB), would be shocked at the losses to the UK caused by Brexit (if a Labour government were to make such an announcement) – and if they also point out that the Brexit benefits claimed by the Tories were absolute nonsense, who would be left supporting Brexit?
And that’s without anyone pointing out the benefits of being in the EU.
"Yes - there should have been a referendum before Major signed us up to Maastricht. Things could have been very different."
I think they might have been, dave, but not perhaps in the way you think.
In 1992 I don't think too many people really realised what the "European Project" was all about. Maastricht was sold to the UK electorate (as most EU treaties have been throughout time) as nothing too radical: simply a "tidying up" exercise to make the administration of the EU simpler and its expansion easier. In fact it was nothing of the sort. It was a fundamental “land grab” of individual nations’ sovereignty. It laid the foundations for the single currency; proposed a European Central Bank; it introduced the concept of “European Citizenship”; and determined an ambition for "a common foreign and security policy including the eventual framing of a common defence". Anybody reading just those few words should have been in no doubt whatsoever in which directions the ambitions of what was a “trading bloc” when the UK joined, were pointed.
So with that in mind, I don’t think a referendum in the UK would have rejected Maastricht. I don’t think there would have been much to use as leverage in order to remain with concessions even if it had. In any case, Large scale uncontrolled immigration from the EU had not up to then been evident (principally because that only came about following the later expansions in the east).
But if anybody was in any doubt about the EU’s ambitions, they had only to wait until 2001 when along came proposals for a “European Constitution” which was to repeal all previous EU treaties. This was rejected by referendums in both France and Denmark. Not to be disappointed - or perhaps disobeyed may be the right word - the Euromaniacs simply crossed out the heading and replaced it with an amending treaty, the treaty of Lisbon. This made much the same provisions as the rejected Constitution (including the abandonment of nation vetoes in 43 areas). The French and the Danes were asked to vote again and the treaty was ratified.
If the UK had held a referendum on Maastricht and it voted in favour, I think it would have been very much more difficult to secure a referendum, let alone win a vote to leave in 2016. It took sceptics in the Tory Party, strengthened by a concerted campaign by UKIP to secure a referendum. Previously, Mr Cameron had gone cap in hand to Brussels to ask for next to nothing in the form of a few “concessions” (i.e that the UK be able to regain control of a few things which should never have been signed away) and returned with slightly less than that. The rest, as they say is history.
I'm afarid all this is lost on some people. They see the problems that Brexit has created, but don't linger to think why they have arisen. They arose because successive UK governments signed away competences that they should have retained. That resulted in the EU being permitted to impose conditions upon how the UK conducted its business which necessarily became very entangled. It is the extraction from that entanglement - in which we should never hve become trapped - which has caused the problems which the UK is encountering whilst trying to regain the status as a "normal" country.
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