Hard Brexit or Hard Brexit

[Scot Dutchy]

If you control your own borders, you can choose to admit, or refuse entry, to anyone you think fit. It's your choice.

At present, it's not the choice of the UK government. You people can act as dumb as you like, you might even impress yourselves.
Well done. I hope it feels good. It's like little children playing with their toys. They imagine what's happening, and enjoy the make-believe.

In the grown-up world, the EU tells it's members what they can and can't do, on their own borders.
I've got no problem with that, they can leave if they want.

We voted to leave, and controlling our own borders was the biggest reason we voted to leave. So pretending that we already do is hugely pathetic. Even the politicians of all the major parties, campaigning for us to stay in the run-up to the referendum didn't claim that.
But you people would rather go with a minor talk-show gobshite who actually not only confused the guy phoning in, who didn't come across as particularly bright, but you as well. That really doesn't say much for your own critical faculties.

The phone-in guy only had seconds to react. You people have sat back, watched it, thought about it, and still got conned. Dumb or what??

You have control over your borders but your government(?) does not enforce them. It said it would cost too much and the legal structures are not in place. So how are you going to afford even what you believe are tighter rules?
It really is just digging a deeper hole.

[rainbow]

If you control your own borders, you can choose to admit, or refuse entry, to anyone you think fit. It's your choice.

At present, it's not the choice of the UK government. You people can act as dumb as you like, you might even impress yourselves.

You can't have actually entered the UK recently then, unless you actually think anyone will believe a bald-faced lie.

I expect though that the majority of Brexit supporters haven't traveled beyond the village confines, so they would've fallen for this lie.

I had expected you to be a bit brighter and better informed.

To my eternal shame, I was completely wrong.

[mistermack]

Huh? YOU are the one who wants total immigration control. I'm not making an argument. I just want to understand your position (primarily whether it is racist, or a rational reason). What do you want that you don't get now (hence the holiday reference), and why do want/need that?

Why not start a thread on immigration then?
As far as immigration goes, I differ from Angela Merkel, in that I don't want a million new muslims coming. The ones that are here are causing enough grief, and so are their kids.
I also don't want more unskilled people coming to work here. It makes life shit for our own unskilled.

But you, living in a place thirty times the size of the UK, with just a third of the population, and a government who CAN control it's borders, can afford to sit back and whine about racism.

[mistermack]

You have control over your borders....

Just keeping saying it doesn't make it true. It just comes across as extremely thick.

None of the remainer politicians claimed that we control our own borders in the campaign. But you know better. Either from the voices in your head, or up your arse.

[rainbow]

You have control over your borders....

None of the remainer politicians claimed that we control our own borders in the campaign.

Why would they need to claim something that was blatantly obvious to anyone crossing a border into the UK?

FFS

Just keeping saying it doesn't make it true. It just comes across as extremely thick.

[pErvinalia]

Huh? YOU are the one who wants total immigration control. I'm not making an argument. I just want to understand your position (primarily whether it is racist, or a rational reason). What do you want that you don't get now (hence the holiday reference), and why do want/need that?

Why not start a thread on immigration then?

Because it's relevant to this thread and you can easily answer it here. That is if you aren't dissembling.

As far as immigration goes, I differ from Angela Merkel, in that I don't want a million new muslims coming. The ones that are here are causing enough grief, and so are their kids.

As has been explained to you, the UK could stop them from coming if they don't have work. So again, what do you want that you don't get now?

But you, living in a place thirty times the size of the UK, with just a third of the population, and a government who CAN control it's borders, can afford to sit back and whine about racism.

The size of the country and population density is irrelevant to racism. Arguments about population density are perfectly pragmatic and have nothing to do with whether you hate people who don't look like you. So your conflation of the two is nonsense. If you are a racist cunt, then just say "I'm a racist cunt". No need to beat around the bush.

[Scot Dutchy]

You have control over your borders....

Just keeping saying it doesn't make it true. It just comes across as extremely thick.

None of the remainer politicians claimed that we control our own borders in the campaign. But you know better. Either from the voices in your head, or up your arse.

Just read European law. The UK politicians cant be bothered to read it. To use the law you had to have in place the legal structures and department but the Brits were to lazy to do it. There is no registration or ID cards in Britain so how do you keep track where people go to and the time they have been in the country? You cant because British society is totally disorganised.

[Scot Dutchy]

Will the child ever learn?

EU says Brexit talks could fail after Johnson's 'go whistle' remarks

Michel Barnier says so-called ‘divorce bill’ is indivisible from other parts of negotiation and payment is a matter of trust

The European Union has said the Brexit talks could be derailed by an escalating fight over money as it fired back at Boris Johnson for telling the EU leaders to “go whistle” if they expected Britain to pay a divorce bill for withdrawing from the bloc.

“I am not hearing any whistling, just a clock ticking,” said the EU negotiator Michel Barnier at a press conference in Brussels to preview the next round of talks, due to begin on Monday.

His London counterpart, the Brexit secretary, David Davis, has not yet presented a formal UK position on the scale of any financial settlement when Britain leaves, which some estimates have suggested could be as a high as €100bn.

But EU officials are adamant that failure to at least acknowledge the principle of ongoing budget obligations would prevent talks from proceeding at all and not allow any discussion of future relationship issues such as a free trade deal.

“The three priorities for the first phase are indivisible,” said Barnier, referring to the financial settlement, citizens’ rights and other separation issues such as the Northern Irish border. “Progress on one or two would not be sufficient in order for us to move on to the discussion of our future relationship.”

More...

The tory negotiators just dont get it. The quickest way out is to keep on making these childish jibes.

[Brian Peacock]

Clearly they are not immigrants, but naturalised Brits.

Why else would they be patiently standing in line?

[Brian Peacock]

If you control your own borders, you can choose to admit, or refuse entry, to anyone you think fit. It's your choice.

Then the question becomes 'who do you want to exclude, and why?'

At present, it's not the choice of the UK government. You people can act as dumb as you like, you might even impress yourselves.

So I guess the answer to the first part of that question is: 'EU citizens + plus others'. So what about the 'why' part? Really, why?

Well done. I hope it feels good. It's like little children playing with their toys. They imagine what's happening, and enjoy the make-believe.

In the grown-up world, the EU tells it's members what they can and can't do, on their own borders.
I've got no problem with that, they can leave if they want.

Well here's the thing. The 'EU' is its member nations. As an institution it only implements that which its member nations negotiate collectively. Unfortunately a succession of (particular Tory) governments have never really grasped this idea. Sure, they've always liked the economic benefits membership of the union has brought, but they always kind of resented having to form agreements with their EU partners. 'The Lady is not for turning' and all that. Thus we've been treated to story after story about how the EU 'control', 'impose', 'ignore' or 'punish' the UK and, more importantly, how we are powerless to stop it.

Of course, the way to address any imbalances would be to engage with the EU politically. You know, to form political alliances with other European parties and work towards reforming processes and remedying systematic deficits. However by not engaging in the union in that way the UK, particular under the guidance of the Conservative party, has effectively placed itself on the political fringes of the union - and then belly-ached ad nauseum about how 'we' are being ignored and sidelined in Europe.

My personal feeling about why the Tories in particular have taken this route in Europe is that Torism expresses a basic, inherent and naive assumption about itself - that the members and officers of The Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain are born to rule, that it's their natural role in the political order to lead, and concommitantly the role of every other participant is simply to acknowledge their innate superiority and follow. And the reason for this? The Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain has always been the party to represent the interests of wealth and power, and in that regard the wealthy and powerful always hate having limits imposed on their influence and activity: "Don't you know who I am?". In short, Tories consider themselves our natural betters, and sadly a great many of us continue to agree with them.

Us regular folks have benefited greatly from EU law, regulations and rules. We like that our employment rights are secured, that the stuff we buy is safe and covered by consumer regulations, that building standards are (on the whole) firmly implemented, that safety is given a high priority in the workplace or in schools or hospitals, that the welfare system catches everyone and is pegged to a fixed minimum relative to poverty, that the government has to adhere to its own law and that we can seek legal remedies against those who wrong us, including the government itself. We like the fact that we can just hop on a plane and go to Paris for the weekend, or drive through the Chunnel to stock up on cheap booze, or go on holiday to Spain, or be employed abroad, all with the minimum of official fuss or interference. What we don't seem to like is having to reciprocate.

What you have to ask yourself now that we are about to 'Take Back Control' is not so much what the UK will be able to discretely control which it couldn't control as a member of the EU (immigration being a case in point), but whose vision of Britain are we going to adopt and who is going to be doing the controlling from now on, and why? And I tell you, it's not going to be us regular folks who'll be influencing and determining all the replacement laws, regulations, and rights we're about to drop - you can be assured of that.

We voted to leave, and controlling our own borders was the biggest reason we voted to leave. So pretending that we already do is hugely pathetic. Even the politicians of all the major parties, campaigning for us to stay in the run-up to the referendum didn't claim that.

Pointing out the facts of the matter isn't pathetic, it's just pointing out the facts of the matter. The UK could, if it chose to, deport EU citizens in the UK after three months if they had no visible means of support. This is a fact. What is pathetic, and more, is maintaining a falsehood in order to justify a remedy that never had to be implemented to solve a problem which fell entirely within the responsibility of the UK government.

We do control our borders. It's just that successive UK governments have done a pretty poor job of implementing that, and then blamed the EU for their own ongoing failures.

But you people would rather go with a minor talk-show gobshite who actually not only confused the guy phoning in, who didn't come across as particularly bright, but you as well. That really doesn't say much for your own critical faculties.

'You people' eh? You mean the 48% of the population that voted to remain don't you? This is just more guff of the kind we've been exposed to through the right-leaning press - that almost half of the population are now a major part of 'The Problem With Britain', that they're 'saboteurs' and 'enemies of freedom' etc etc, that basically they have no real reason to disagree or dissent. You see, I don't think the caller to O'Brien's show is the only one who's confused about this. A great many people have swallowed the 'it's not me it's them others' excuses the Tories in particular have consistently offered for their own failings, and which Farage and his coterie of rampant nationalists have latched onto in order to promote their silly ideas about preserving some non-existent fairyland notion of pure Britishness. Now the gullible and overly credulous are being told to swallow the story that 'them others' doesn't just include the EU, immigrants, EU citizens in the UK, asylum seekers, and the like, it also now includes the half of the population which doesn't agree with them.

The phone-in guy only had seconds to react. You people have sat back, watched it, thought about it, and still got conned. Dumb or what??

The phone guy's reaction simply highlighted the fact that he not only hadn't thought about the issues beyond the most baseline level of 'I don't like them' bigotry, but that he hadn't even been exposed to factual information concerning the powers the UK government had and why it had chosen not to use them. So who's responsibility is it to inform him of the facts of the matter - is it the government's, the media's, or his own, and accordingly is his ignorance on this particular matter a failure of government, of the media, or just a personal failure?

[Brian Peacock]

Huh? YOU are the one who wants total immigration control. I'm not making an argument. I just want to understand your position (primarily whether it is racist, or a rational reason). What do you want that you don't get now (hence the holiday reference), and why do want/need that?

Why not start a thread on immigration then?
As far as immigration goes, I differ from Angela Merkel, in that I don't want a million new muslims coming. The ones that are here are causing enough grief, and so are their kids.
I also don't want more unskilled people coming to work here. It makes life shit for our own unskilled.

But you, living in a place thirty times the size of the UK, with just a third of the population, and a government who CAN control it's borders, can afford to sit back and whine about racism.

Here you're confusing immigrants with refugees and asylum seekers. The facts of the matter are that 80% of people looking to enter Europe are fleeing a warzone. If you want to stem that flow then a seeking and/or enforcing a political solution to the ongoing conflicts at Europe's borders is the only way to do it.

[pErvinalia]

If you control your own borders, you can choose to admit, or refuse entry, to anyone you think fit. It's your choice.

Then the question becomes 'who do you want to exclude, and why?'

He's already answered that..

Who? - Muzzies.

Why? - I'm scared.

[Scot Dutchy]

Great post Brian.

Thatcher was heard to have said forty years ago: "Lets get in and take over. They need British leadership". Pure arrogance.

The tories have a massive inflated view of the UK which is the main reason they want to leave.

Well Barnier is setting time limits. The EU has had enough.

Brexit: EU demands answers from UK on fate of its citizens within five days - and says 'the clock is ticking'

Britain is told to provide "clarification" even before the exit talks resume in Brussels next Monday

The EU has piled further pressure on Britain to settle its “divorce bill” and the fate of EU citizens after Brexit – demanding answers within five days.

Michel Barnier, the EU's chief Brexit negotiator, also ridiculed Boris Johnson’s claim that the EU could “go whistle” over the multi-billion pound exit settlement.

“I'm not hearing any whistling, just the clock ticking,” Mr Barnier told a Brussels conference - underlining where the power lies, in his view.

[Brian Peacock]

Brexit plans could fall apart 'like a chocolate orange', says auditor general

Unprecedented intervention from Amyas Morse laments government’s vague approach to date and calls for unified strategy for EU talks

A lack of energy and leadership in Theresa May’s government has left hopes of a successful Brexit at risk of falling apart “like a chocolate orange”, a leading government watchdog has warned.

In an extraordinary intervention that will raise the pressure on the prime minister to reassess her approach to Brexit, the comptroller and auditor general of the National Audit Office said the government had failed to take a unified approach to talks with the EU. He also revealed that a request to see a ministerial plan for the changes needed to leave the EU had been met with only “vague” assurances.

Amyas Morse said that the result could be failures across Whitehall as the negotiations unfold. “Can government actually step up in these very difficult circumstances and deliver a unified response?” he asked. “I’m not seeing it yet.”

Morse, whose role as chief auditor gives him a statutory responsibility to scrutinise all public spending, has spoken out in a rare interview with reporters – a reflection of his growing concern. He suggested that the Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU), the Treasury and the cabinet office had so far failed to take an “energetic” lead, leaving other departments to set their own priorities.

“These options could have been activated by now. The combined forces of DExEU leadership, Treasury and Cabinet Office should be speaking on one voice on these matters,” he said.

He said he has asked to see, but not been shown, a ministerial plan to guide government departments through structural and legal changes for the UK to leave the EU. He had only received “vague” assurances that the government would support struggling departments trying to enact complex and expensive changes made necessary by Brexit, he said. ...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... or-general

First off, Britain has an Auditor General!

Second, the financial implications for the administration of executive power which follow from Brexit, not to mention the spending implications, should, one would have thought, been top of the list of ministerial concerns. OK, so we don't know exactly what form the divorce will take or how exactly it will be implemented, but is nobody thinking ahead, setting goals, determining contingencies (the answer appears to be 'No' btw), or are they all just hoping that someone else will sort it out later? I'm beginning to suspect there's a significant amount of 'Fourth Wheel' thinking going on here - and that ain't healthy.

[pErvinalia]

What happens if the UK keeps playing games and won't be reasonable about an agreement? Is there a default exit that happens regardless of whether the UK signs up to it or not?