Brexit: a beginner’s guide

[MCP]

Americans often ask me ‘what is happening?’ in British politics at the moment. Well, here is my answer...

https://spectator.us/brexit-beginners-guide/

Americans, I know you are confused about Brexit. Who isn’t? Even us Brits struggle to keep up with the spats, splits, tensions and bitching Brexit has unleashed across Europe.

Take last week’s Salzburg showdown, at which the heads of the EU’s 28 member states met to gab about immigration, security and, of course, Brexit in a bizarrely done-up hall that looked like the Death Star conference room from Star Wars. The highlight, or lowlight, was a late-night dinner at which Theresa May had 10 minutes to convince the gathered heads to embrace her Chequers version of Brexit. She failed. The side-eye award went to European Council President Donald Tusk who posted on Instagram a photo of himself offering Theresa May a cake with the caption, ‘No cherries’. French President Emmanuel Macron lost le plot and called Brexit leaders ‘liars’. The PM of Malta got the British Twitterati all a flutter by saying the UK should have a second referendum. And May rounded it all off with a tub-thumping speech outside Downing Street upon her return, in which she told off the EU leaders for being rude to her at dinner.

This is, by anyone’s standards, strange stuff. Mean Girls meets European bureaucracy. Social-media burns elevated to the stuff of international debate. It’s little wonder pretty much everyone I meet in the US asks: ‘What’s happening with Brexit?’ Things aren’t helped by the fact that, depending on who and what you Americans read, Brexit is either the worst calamity to hit the West since Hitler (hello, New York Times), or it’s a British version of Donald Trump and everyone who voted for it is a lovely Limey Trumpite (Fox News, etc).

Let’s try to shine some light into this political fog. Here is almost everything Americans need to know about Brexit.
Brexit is the largest act of democracy in British history. 17.4m people voted for it. If you point this out, Remain voters will say: ‘And our vote was the second largest vote in British history!’ This is true. 16.1m Brits voted to remain in the EU and this is the second-largest vote in British history. All sorts of people voted for Brexit, but the poorer you are, the more likely you are to have voted for it. Middle-class anti-Brexit people hate it when you point this out, which makes it great fun. A majority in the lower social classes (C2, D and E) voted Leave, whereas a majority of the highest social class (AB) voted Remain. Yes, we are still obsessed with class.

Hardly anyone in the establishment wanted us to vote for Brexit. So we are a great disappointment to them, even more so than normal. More than 70 per cent of MPs voted to remain, as did around 70 per cent of business leaders too, compared with just 48 per cent of everyday Britons. Things are even starker in Labour. Just five per cent of Labour MPs voted to leave the EU, in comparison with 52 per cent of the electorate. It’s worth remembering this next time one of your worthy relatives emails you a Jacobin article or a Bernie Sanders statement about how Jeremy Corbyn’s party is for the many, not the few. It isn’t.

This is why the establishment has been so angry with us these past two years, calling us racist and stupid and whatnot. But this isn’t true. Surveys show people voted for Brexit because they believe decisions about Britain’s future should be taken in Britain rather than in Brussels, not because they want to dismantle the Channel Tunnel and create a wholly white UK.

People still want Brexit. They’re not changing their minds in substantial numbers. Many influential politicians and businesspeople don’t want it, however, and so they are calling for a ‘People’s Vote’. By which they mean a second referendum. And then no doubt a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, until we finally give the ‘right’ answer, at which point they will declare: ‘It’s settled! The people have spoken!’ The leaders of the People’s Vote are rich and influential and most Brits don’t like them very much.

Brexit has ripped up party politics. The biggest divides are now within parties rather than between them. Some Tories are Europhobes, others Europhiles. Labour is split between ‘centrists’ who love the EU and radicals who think we should adhere to the people’s vote (the real one) and leave the EU. Although this week’s Labour conference suggests things might be murkier than that. Many supposedly edgy Corbynistas are now calling for a second referendum, suggesting that for all their Blairphobic bluster they share more in common with Tony Blair, Britain’s No1 Remainiac, than they care to admit. The Tories are led by a lifelong Remainer who now campaigns for Brexit (May), while Labour is led by a lifelong Brexiteer who campaigned for Remain (Corbyn). Are you keeping up?

Then there are the negotiations. These are not going well. This is because the EU is like your Hotel California: you can check out but you can never leave. Brussels is roadblocking Brexit. Its favoured roadblock is Northern Ireland. In order to ensure a ‘soft’ trading border between Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, the whole of the UK should probably stay in the Single Market, it says. Theresa May has offered to kind-of stay in the Single Market — but only for goods, not services — which is far too much of a sellout in the eyes of Brexiteers and not enough of one in the eyes of the EU. ‘Will Brexit ever happen?’, people around the country now ask. Our political class have no idea how irritated these people will be if it doesn’t.

Which brings us back to Salzburg and that lavish dinner at which the leaders of Europe argued the toss over whether Brexit, the largest vote in British history, remember, should be fudged a little (May’s preference) or a lot (the EU’s preference). There’s one good thing about that dinner: it doubles up as a metaphor for why Britons revolted against the EU in the first place.

 

[COINTELPRO]

This ties into my thread about Venezuela, the U.S. and China trade war, and me; you are sitting on 600 billion barrels of oil and your industry is privatized, you will need a political referendum by the people, legislative acts, and executive action by the President of the Country to send a message that nationalizing your oil industry is permanent. Imposing sanctions to remove the leadership will not do anything.

I am dealing with the same issues on a micro scale, it is over, I will be living on another continent as a free man. You just need to accept the changes I am imposing and move on. Take what you have stolen and get lost. Nobody wants to hear your deranged ideas, that is why I am leaving.

 

[thoughtone]

GB is finished!

 

[MCP]

GB is finished!

If they go through with a 'No deal' brexit, and go onto WTO rules, things will be looking a lot more dire for the UK

 

[MCP]

Boris Johnson to seek election after rebel Tories deliver Commons defeat
MPs vote to seize control of Commons timetable in attempt to block no-deal Brexit

• Follow the day’s politics news – live
• What have Tory rebels voted for and will an election now happen?

Boris Johnson has announced that he will ask parliament to support plans for a snap October general election after suffering a humiliating defeat in his first House of Commons vote as prime minister.
Former cabinet ministers including Philip Hammond and David Gauke were among 21 Conservative rebels who banded together with opposition MPs to seize control of the parliamentary timetable on a dramatic day in Westminster.
The move was aimed at paving the way for a bill tabled by the Labour backbencher Hilary Benn, which is designed to block a no-deal Brexit by forcing the prime minister to request an extension to article 50 if he cannot strike a reworked deal with the EU27.

Johnson lost the vote by 328 to 301, a convincing majority of 27 for the rebels.
The PM had earlier described the legislation, drawn up by a cross-party coalition including the senior Tories Oliver Letwin and Dominic Grieve, as “Jeremy Corbyn’s surrender bill”.
After his defeat, Johnson said he would never request the delay mandated in the rebels’ bill, which he said would “hand control of the negotiations to the EU”.
If MPs passed the bill on Wednesday, he said, “the people of this country will have to choose” in an election that he would seek to schedule for 15 October.
The prime minister will need a two-thirds majority to secure a general election under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, and Jeremy Corbyn quickly made clear his party would not vote for the motion unless and until the anti no-deal bill had passed.

MPs vote to seize control of the Commons and force vote on Brexit delay – video

“Get the bill through first in order to take no deal off the table,” the Labour leader said.
The rebels hope to push the legislation through all its parliamentary stages by the end of the week – though they face a fierce battle in the Lords, where scores of Conservative peers are lining up to table wrecking amendments.
Johnson held a series of meetings with potential rebels on Tuesday seeking to reassure them he was determined to strike a fresh Brexit deal with the EU27 and that MPs would be given plenty of time to debate and approve it.

But several Tories appear to have been emboldened rather than deterred by the threat of losing the party whip for the remainder of the parliament – and by Johnson’s decision last week to suspend parliament.
They expressed concerns about Johnson’s failure to show any evidence of concrete progress in the negotiations with the EU27.
Hammond, Gauke and the former secretary of state for international development Rory Stewart were among the rebels, as was the veteran MP (and Winston Churchill’s grandson) Nicholas Soames. All were later phoned in turn and told they had lost the Conservative whip.
Rebel Kenneth Clarke told BBC’s Newsnight he no longer recognised the Conservative party, calling it “the Brexit party, rebadged”. He added: “It’s been taken over by a rather knockabout sort of character, who’s got this bizarre crash-it-through philosophy ... a cabinet which is the most rightwing cabinet any Conservative party has ever produced.”

Ed Vaizey, the former culture minister, said he felt liberated by his decision to rebel. “When you hear those speeches in the House of Commons by Antoinette Sandbach and Ken Clarke, you just know you are on the right side,” he said.
A source close to the rebels said last night: “Tonight’s decisive result is the first step in a process to avert an undemocratic and damaging no deal. No 10 has responded by removing the whip from two former chancellors, a former lord chancellor and Winston Churchill’s grandson. What has happened to the Conservative party?”
A number of the party’s leading centrist voices, including Justine Greening, Soames and Alistair Burt, announced on Tuesday they would stand down at the next election.
Hammond, who less than six months ago was delivering his spring statement as chancellor, had said on Tuesday morning he was ready for the “fight of a lifetime” to hold his place in the Conservative party.
“I am going to defend my party against incomers, entryists, who are trying to turn it from a broad church to a narrow faction,” he said.
In a thinly veiled swipe at the prime minister’s chief strategist, Dominic Cummings, who is not a Conservative member, he said: “People who are at the heart of this government, who are probably not even members of the Conservative party, care nothing about the future of the Conservatives and I intend to defend my party against them.”
The Tory MP Phillip Lee took the more radical step of crossing the floor of the Commons to join the Liberal Democrats, removing the PM’s majority just as Johnson prepared to address MPs about last week’s G7 meeting.
Johnson’s G7 statement was just his second appearance at the dispatch box in parliament since he became prime minister in July. Addressing a raucous House of Commons, the PM claimed the motion drawn up by the cross-party coalition was “without precedent in our history” and would “destroy any chance of negotiation”.
He said: “There is only one way to describe the bill: it is Jeremy Corbyn’s surrender bill. That is what it is. It means running up the white flag. The bill is shameful.

“I want to make it clear to everybody in this house: there are no circumstances in which I will ever accept anything like it. I will never surrender the control of our negotiations in the way that the leader of the opposition is demanding.”

Corbyn said the measure was “a last chance to stop this government riding roughshod over constitutional and democratic rights in this country, so that a cabal in Downing Street cannot crash us out without a deal, without any democratic mandate and against the majority of public opinion.

“The prime minister is not winning friends in Europe; he is losing friends at home. His is a government with no mandate, no morals and, as of today, no majority,” he said.
Lee’s defection to the Lib Dems came after two moderate Tory former ministers, Justine Greening and Alistair Burt, said they would step down from parliament at the next general election.
Lee, in his resignation letter, said the Brexit process had transformed his “once great party” into “something more akin to a narrow faction”.

While some of those MPs supporting the rebels’ motion on Tuesday want to block Brexit, others would like to leave the EU with a deal.
A group of Labour MPs, including Stephen Kinnock and Gloria De Piero, plan to table two amendments to Wednesday’s bill, calling for the Brexit delay to be used to secure a deal – and a vote to be held on Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement – including the last-ditch concessions she made shortly before she was forced to resign.
Urging MPs to support the rebel motion on Tuesday, Letwin said that due to the imminent suspension of parliament, this was the final opportunity for MPs to legislate and have that legislation “enforced on a reluctant government”.
The West Dorset MP said Johnson’s threat of a no-deal Brexit appeared to mean “if they do not do what he wishes, he will throw himself into the abyss”.

Asked via an intervention whether the plan to delay Brexit until at least 31 January would not simply create confusion, Letwin said it was the best option on offer.

“It’s to provide the government with the time to seek to solve this problem and to enable parliament to help to resolve an issue which has proved very difficult,” he said. “I don’t say it’s easy to do by 31 January, but I’m sure that it will not be done by 31 October. We are between a rock and a hard place, and in this instance the hard place is better than the rock. It is as simple as that. It’s decision time.

“If honourable members across the house want to prevent a no-deal exit on 31 October, they will have the opportunity to do so if, but only if they vote for this motion this evening. I hope they will do so.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...ers-commons-defeat-as-tories-turn-against-him

 

[QueEx]

Americans, I know you are confused about Brexit.

An understatement!

What in Bloody Hell?

.

 

[QueEx]

Law blocking no-deal Brexit passes, Johnson's call for elections rejected


U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson suffered two more major defeats Wednesday.

First, lawmakers voted 327-299 to pass a bill that would block his plan to withdraw from the European Union on Oct. 31 even if no agreement is reached. That legislation now heads to the House of Lords, which must give its assent.

Johnson then tried to call for a snap general election on Oct. 15, but MPs voted overwhelmingly to stifle that plan as well, by a count of 298-56. Under U.K. law, a two-thirds vote is required to hold a general election. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said his party would eventually back an election, but only after the bill preventing a no-deal Brexit becomes law.​

Source: Al Jazeera, The New York Times

​

_________________

If one side losses a vote — the losers get to call for a new general election to see if the people will elect new representatives that will agree with the losers???

.

 

[MCP]

Michel Barnier : “This is the only possible divorce treaty”


https://www.lemonde.fr/internationa...nly-possible-divorce-treaty_5413347_3210.html

For the EU negotiator for Brexit, the British government and Westminster should “move their lines” to avoid a “no deal”.
Par Cécile Ducourtieux Publié le 23 janvier 2019 à 11h43
Temps de Lecture 9 min.

Michel Barnier listens during a debate on Brexit at the European Parliament, Wednesday, January 16, 2019 in Strasbourg, eastern France. Jean-Francois Badias /

Michel Barnier, the Chief European Union negotiator for Brexit received Le Monde and two other European newspapers (Rzeczpospolita and Luxemburger Wort) on Tuesday 22 January in his office on the 5th floor of the Berlaymont building, the headquarters of the European Commission in Brussels.
“Calm” and “lucid” at now 65 days from Brexit, the ex-Internal market Commissioner and former French minister for Foreign Affairs , explains why the treaty which he negotiated for 17 months with London in the name of the 27 “remains the only divorce treaty possible” despite the fact that this massive volume and the declaration on the “future relationship” which accompanies it, was brutally rejected by the British members of parliament on 15 January.
Do you think, given your own red lines and the political chaos in the United Kingdom, that the elements of the November 2018 agreement are still valid?

The British are facing a moment of truth. When you listen to their parliamentary debates, you realise that there are in fact two majorities. One which was clearly expressed on 15th January last against the agreement signed between the 27 members and Mrs May’s government. I think there is also a majority against the ‘no deal’.
Mrs May and the British political leaders must now build a positive majority and bring to fruition the debate which the British parliament is seeking. They need time and we need to respect this democratic time. But I think that an ordered agreement will be globally in keeping with the treaty which is there (he indicates a large volume on his desk, the treaty signed in 2018). It is not simply a speech but 600 pages of elements of legal security. This is the only possible divorce treaty.

The treaty signed at the end of 2018 has nevertheless been rejected by a very large majority in Westminster!

The treaty can still be upheld if it is put in perspective. This is where the “future relationship” with London comes in. If the British government wishes to raise the perspective of the future relationship, and be more ambitious (for the time being, Mrs May maintains that she wants to leave the single market and the customs union) then it would be possible to agree on the global package (treaty and future relationship) and the question of the ‘backstop’ would become relative. If I understand the British debates aright; there is a desire to find a way. But if the government and the MPs don’t move their lines, we are going inevitably into ‘no deal’.
Yesterday, Theresa May, who had promised a Plan B to her parliamentarians, after their rejection of the agreement with the Europeans simply announced “the pursuit of “consultations” and once again demanded concessions on the highly controversial Irish “safety net”. Do you maintain that you are not ready for it?

This safety net (or backstop) is part of the withdrawal treaty, nothing has been left to chance. This is an assurance to maintain peace and stability in the island of Ireland, the assurance that in no circumstances, will a hard frontier be re-built, the Good Friday agreements will be ensured and the “common travel area” (enabling people to travel freely between Ireland and the United Kingdom).
When one meets the different Irish communities, one understands how sensitive this question is. The peace is fragile. I passed through Dungannon (Northern Ireland) in May 2018 and I was very struck by my meeting with some twenty women. Two of them were in tears; they explained how frightened they were that the troubles (between Unionist and Catholic communities) might begin again.
The backstop also concerns the whole of Europe: a product which enters Northern Ireland, coming from the United Kingdom, because of the freedom of movement in the internal European market is treated as if it was entering Poland, France or Luxembourg! We have an obligation to control these products; they must conform to the standards of the internal market.

The British demand that this assurance be for a limited time. They are frightened that it will trap them in a permanent customs union with the European Union. Why not accept their demand? Even the Polish Minister for Foreign Affairs supported it by suggesting a backstop for a period of 5 years.

The backstop which we are discussing today (Northern Ireland will remain in line with the rules of the internal market, and the United Kingdom as a whole will be maintained in a customs union), is imposed on us by Brexit. And it is the one chosen by the United Kingdom.
We proposed a simpler version (in December 2017, only Northern Ireland remained aligned on the internal market), but the British government refused this solution and suggested one of their own in the context of the Chequers White Paper (July 2018) and in other proposals.
I have listened to all the proposals wherever they come from and all the concerns of the Member States have been taken into consideration, those from the Irish in the same way as those from the Polish with their 900,000 citizens resident in the UK. But the question of limiting the backstop in time has already been discussed twice by the European leaders, in November and in December 2018. This backstop is the only one possible because an assurance is no longer operational if it is for a limited time. Imagine if it were to be limited in time and the problem arose after expiry: it is useless!

Anti-Brexit campaigner holds a placard as he demonstrates outside the Houses of Parliament in central London on January 22, 2019. TOLGA AKMEN / AFP
Your arguments have obviously not been understood on the other side of the Channel. Has there not been a problem of communication on the part of the Europeans?

It is not a question of communication or of dogmatism. We have been pragmatic and attentive. But the conditions of the peace in Ireland and the need to keep the single market demand the absence of a hard frontier. From the moment when the United Kingdom said they wished to leave the Customs Union and the internal market we had to seek a pragmatic and operational solution.
I will repeat it: the backstop is not an assurance; it is not there to be used. It will no longer be required when a specific agreement for Ireland, or when the future global relation between the European Union and the United Kingdom has been found which will settle for once and for all the question of the absence of a frontier.
We are not dogmatic, we are protecting the interests of the Union. Our strategy – I mean the 27 members – has always been clear as from the days following the British referendum: we wish, as a priority, to preserve the foundations of the European Union and its principal asset, the single market. The departure of a member State cannot undermine these foundations.
You were saying that they had to be allowed time: are we going straight to a postponement of Brexit?

This decision would have to be taken at the request of the British and be approved by the 27 by consensus. The European Parliament will also have its word to say. I cannot pre-judge their decision. But if this question were to be asked, the Heads of State and the governments would ask three questions. For what reason? For how long? They would also have a third concern: that this possible prolongation might interfere with the democratic working of the European elections. We also have a democratic debate and European elections in the month of May.

The position of the Europeans is nevertheless paradoxical; they firmly defend the principle of an Irish ‘backstop’, but what will happen if there is ‘no deal’: will the physical frontier come back in Ireland?

We will be obliged to take unilateral emergency measures and in this specific case (Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, automatically leaving the single market) we will be forced to check the products arriving in Northern Ireland. With my team, we have done considerable work to study the dematerialisation of the controls and their decentralisation which will be useful in any event. But even if there is no agreement, we will remain on our positions and we will do everything possible to ensure there is no hard frontier in Ireland.
What will happen to the 3.5 million European citizens resident in the United Kingdom?

The best guarantee for the citizens is the one in the withdrawal agreement: there is an almost total guarantee for all the expatriate citizens (that they will be able to continue to reside in the United Kingdom and to enjoy the rights they have accumulated), for their family and for their lifetime. This question will obviously remain a priority in the event of a no-deal.
There are points which depend on the Union: the directive on the status of long-term residents could apply to expatriate British citizens. And there will be rights which will have to be granted in coherent fashion at national level. There will be means to be ambitious, on condition obviously that the United Kingdom grants reciprocity to European citizens.

Banners are tied to railings on the roadside near parliament in London, Tuesday, January 22, 2019. Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP
Will the British still have to pay?

Concerning the European Union budget, we have always put it very simply: the totality of the commitments of the United Kingdom, as long as the country is a member of the European Union, will be respected. It will be more difficult to have them respected in the case of a ‘no deal’ but we will continue to insist: these commitments are of a legal nature in international law and I do not imagine that the British will not respect their international commitments.
Are the 27 ready for a ‘no-deal’? Will they succeed in the event of this catastrophic scenario to maintain their remarkable unity?

They are all making preparations and they will be ready. The General Secretary of the Commission is in charge of these questions and he has speeded up the work at community level. The Netherlands, for example, have created 700 customs officers, France 1,000, Belgium 400. In the case of ‘no-deal’ action will of course be taken to ensure that planes can land but … But the ‘no-deal’ cannot be a sum of mini deals and be a situation of ‘business as usual’. Even an agreement for an ordered Brexit will cause disruptions and have serious consequences. The ‘no-deal’ even more so.
There are people in Brussels who would like to see you succeeding to Jean-Claude Juncker at the head of the Commission. What do you think?

This is not an issue. I have said from the beginning that I would carry out this mission to its end and, as you see, we are far from having finished. I have decided not to get involved in the process of Spitzenkandidat for the European People’s Party (in the autumn of 2018), even if many people urged me to do so. It is a question of responsibility and of honour.

 

[MCP]

Belfast Shows the Price of Brexit

Withdrawing from the EU might shatter the fragile peace in Northern Ireland.

David Frum
Staff writer at The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...d-reawaken-northern-irelands-troubles/584338/

BELFAST, Northern Ireland—If Monty Python ever produced an updated “What Has the EU Ever Done for Us?” sketch, Belfast would be as good a place as any to situate it.

If any place in the British Isles risks being thrust into an economic and political crisis by the impending Brexit, Belfast is that place.

Three weeks before the United Kingdom’s scheduled exit from the European Union, I took a guided tour of some of the scenes of the Troubles. The tour was led by a former IRA paramilitary, now working with an association of former prisoners partially subsidized by EU funds. A few hundred meters to the north, former Loyalist paramilitaries lead tours on their side of the defensive barrier that still separates predominantly Catholic from predominantly Protestant neighborhoods. The EU helps underwrite those tours, too. All told, about 230 million euros of EU funding will go to support the Northern Ireland peace process during the 2015–2020 budget cycle. The peace that has settled on Northern Ireland since 1998 remains a chilly one in the hearts of the former combatants. But peace it is.

The hard work of peacemaking was done by the British and Irish themselves, assisted by the United States. But it was the existence of the European Union that made the post-1998 settlement possible. The core of that settlement was this postmodern concept: Some in Northern Ireland passionately wish to remain British. Some urgently wish to quit Britain and be recognized as Irish. What if … they can do both?
The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, signed by Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, conferred dual nationality on every resident of Northern Ireland. My former IRA guide now proudly travels the world on an Irish passport, even as the British government pays the costs of his health care and will pay his old-age pension. On the other side of the barrier I walked, the Protestant and Unionist population of Belfast remains as British as ever.

But other barriers have come down. The customs and security border between Northern Ireland and the Republic in the south has vanished. People who live on the island of Ireland cross the border to work, to shop, or to visit a doctor as easily as Americans cross state lines. Vehicles cross the border an estimated 30 million times a year, slowed only by traffic. A retired senior official told me of rural milk routes in which a truck will cross the border 20 times in a day as it transits from farm to farm. The hospital in Londonderry is funded by the EU to serve Irish people across the line in Donegal, on the same basis as National Health Service patients of British nationality.
The currency differs on the two sides of the border. So do the cellphone carriers. VAT rates diverge. Ireland is not united. But Irish people can live as if it were, if they wish—or not, if they don’t wish.

That partnership applies not only on the island of Ireland, but on both sides of the Irish Sea. Ireland-bound mail from beyond the EU is processed in the U.K., sparing Ireland the need to inspect for drugs or explosives. Irish beef, cheese, and mushrooms are sold in British supermarkets within hours of being packaged on the other side of the water.
Would-be criminals and terrorists are policed by services that cooperate as intimately as if they served only one sovereign. Britain and Ireland have found a way to be one marketplace, one travel area, one energy grid, one food emporium, one security partnership—while maintaining two independent political systems, two distinct historical and cultural narratives.

All of this could have been done without the European Union, but the existence of the European Union hugely lowered the inhibitions against doing it, especially on the Irish side.

When Ireland complies with a European arrest warrant, or imports gas via the EU-regulated pipeline between Britain and Ireland, or shares data governed by common privacy laws, or raises and slaughters beef according to the exact same standards prevailing across the Irish Sea—it can do all those things without any sense of domination by a historically oppressive neighbor. It is doing so within a context whereby both the stronger and the smaller country have pooled their sovereignty with two dozen other countries, and within which both the stronger and the smaller partner daily discover that they have much more in common with each other than either does with its fellow EU members across the water.

It was an Irishman, James Joyce, who wrote the phrase “History … is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” Those words could have come as easily to a Pole or a Catalan. From 1968 to 1998, 3,500 British and Irish people died violently, and perhaps 50,000 were wounded. As in Alsace-Lorraine and West Prussia, as in Iberia and Italy, in Ireland, the Anglo-Irish Good Friday Agreement (and the successor agreements built upon it) seemed to show that “Europe” could bring peace by building new identities to encompass and reconcile murderous, ancient quarrels.

After the Brexit vote, British politicians insisted that nothing need change on the island of Ireland. That promise will be extremely difficult to honor. What happens when Afghan refugees in Germany start flying to Dublin, taking the bus to Belfast, and flying from Belfast to work in London? The Irish border is bound to harden. Perhaps at first it will be only cameras. Based on past experience, cameras will be cut down and destroyed by offended nationalists in the border area. So the border will have to be manned. The border guards will become targets. Even today, with both Ireland and the U.K. in the EU, criminal gangs exploit arbitrage opportunities. (Ireland lightly taxes diesel fuel sold to farmers. The fuel is dyed red to identify it. Criminal gangs have learned to bleach the dye and smuggle the cheap fuel into Northern Ireland.) As those arbitrage opportunities multiply, so will the criminal gangs. Many gangsters began as IRA paramilitaries. They have kept their weapons—and even sometimes their ideology.

Sooner or later, a border guard will be shot at.

Then what? Right now, police in the U.K. and Ireland answer to the same ultimate arbiter of law, the European Court of Justice.* Britain and Ireland are both bound by EU law on data privacy. As the two legal systems diverge, though, police cooperation is bound to deteriorate, even with the best of will on both sides. If the U.K. exits the EU warrant system, it will have to stand up its own—and if that new system does not pass muster with EU courts, Irish police might not be allowed to extradite wanted criminals.

The harder border will militarize.

Over the past three days, as I’ve had many conversations with Irish politicians and officials, both with those still serving and even more with those who are retired, the word that recurred most often in discussions of Brexit was betrayal. They imagined that they had at last awoken from Joyce’s nightmare. Now it has returned, scarier than ever.

 

[QueEx]

Can Brexit Be Stopped?
The Liberal Democrats are gambling on the realignment of British politics to do so.

Hannah Mckay / Reuters


The Atlantic
HELEN LEWIS
SEP 17, 2019

BOURNEMOUTH, England—Standing onstage in front of her party faithful, Jo Swinson had a surprise. At the opening rally of the Liberal Democrats’ conference here at the British seaside, the crowd knew what to expect—all week, rumors had been buzzing that they would be joined by a high-profile defector from a rival party—but they didn’t know whom to expect. Even their own members of Parliament were kept in the dark until half an hour before the announcement.

Swinson, the party’s newly elected 39-year-old leader, said the person she was introducing was “someone who has stood up for liberal values,” and moments later, Sam Gyimah bounded up onstage. Gyimah, born in Britain and raised in Ghana, had once been hailed as the future of the Conservatives—the party of Boris Johnson, which is furiously trying to pull Britain out of the European Union. Just three months ago, in fact, Gyimah had stood for the leadership of the Conservative Party.

Now he was a Liberal Democrat.

In her introduction, Swinson stressed Gyimah’s social liberalism—the 43-year-old voted to legalize same-sex marriage in 2013—and his commitment to stopping Brexit. Gyimah ran for the Conservative leadership while calling for a second EU referendum, a position that proved about as popular with its grassroots members as a 100 percent inheritance tax or banning Downton Abbey. It was this experience, he said, that had persuaded him to leave the party. Now his move to the Liberal Democrats sent a clear message: The Conservatives had no place for pro-European social liberals anymore. To underline the point, Swinson was wearing a necklace bearing the word European, while Gyimah took the stage wearing orange trousers—one of the Lib Dems’ signature colors.

The past few months have been chaotic, even by the recent standards of British politics. After Theresa May failed to get her deal drawing Britain out of the EU through Parliament on three occasions, she was forced to resign. Her successor, Boris Johnson, immediately took a more aggressive stance, suspending Parliament and trying to force an early election. Opposition parties have denied him that opportunity, arguing that with Britain legally obliged to leave the EU on October 31, agreeing on an exit deal should take priority. In the brief period in which Parliament sat before its suspension, Johnson suffered a series of defeats—and effectively kicked out 21 MPs from his own party for disagreeing with his Brexit position. Gyimah was one of them.


In contrast to this disorder, the past two weeks have seen a carefully choreographed stream of new faces joining the Liberal Democrats. On September 3, Phillip Lee, a former Conservative, announced his defection in a wordless moment of extremely British drama. He entered the House of Commons—during a speech by Johnson, for extra impact—and went to sit on the Lib Dem benches rather than the Conservative ones. Lee’s change of party deprived Johnson of his working majority in Parliament—and with it any chance of passing legislation.

Two days later, Lee was followed by Luciana Berger, who had earlier left the Labour Party, Britain’s main opposition, because of the anti-Semitism she had experienced from some of its members. Then, on September 7, Jo Swinson tweeted the sheet music for a song from The Sound of Music: “I am 16, going on 17.” Hours later, Angela Smith, another Labour defector, became the party’s 17th member of Parliament. The steady drip-drip-drip was designed to remind onlookers that lawmakers inside both Labour and the Conservatives believe their parties have become too extreme. (Voters, too, have been switching over: In the European Parliament elections in May, the Lib Dems secured a fifth of the national vote and 16 seats—their best-ever result.)

The Lib Dems see the polarization of British politics as their big chance in a country whose first-past-the-post electoral system is notoriously hostile to smaller parties. Aside from national governments at times of crisis, Labour and the Conservatives have alternated ruling Britain since the 1910s. But their traditional bases are fragmenting, with an array of new factors—age, education, city versus country, homeowners versus tenants—crisscrossing the old divides of class and economics. The 2016 referendum on EU membership was won by Leave 52 to 48 percent, with supporters of both main parties on each side of the question.


All that means, with another election potentially looming, attention is turning to the Liberal Democrats. Can they make a breakthrough and become the main opposition—or even a party of government? What do they stand for, apart from opposing Brexit? And by accepting refugees from Labour and the Conservatives, do they look like the sensible middle ground, or just the “None of the Above” party? It is a question with international resonance. Across Europe and the West, old parties are struggling to adapt to new divides. Is the electoral map about to be redrawn—and can the Lib Dems seize the moment?

The Liberal Democrats were born out of the ashes of failure. The first half of their name comes from the Liberals, a party of government that dwindled over the course of the 20th century before eventually merging with the Social Democratic Party—a group that broke away from Labour in the 1980s over fears that the party was becoming too left-wing. The Liberal Democrats’ foundational beliefs were center-left economics plus social liberalism. One member of the SDP breakaway group, Roy Jenkins, had championed causes such as divorce-law reform, decriminalizing homosexuality and abortion, and abolishing theater censorship. The party proposed raising income taxes to fund education and, more recently, health care.

But time and again, this new force was squashed by Britain’s electoral system, which rewards bigger national parties and punishes upstarts. In 1983, as the Liberal-SDP Alliance, the new group won 7.8 million votes—just 650,000 fewer than Labour won—but ended up with only 23 seats to Labour’s 209. In 2005, when they rode a wave of anger against the Iraq War, the Lib Dems still won only 62 seats in Parliament—less than a 10th of the available seats—despite garnering more than a fifth of the vote.


At the next election, in 2010, the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg performed so well in television debates that there were a few weeks of “Cleggmania.” His personal popularity overcame one of the persistent disadvantages faced by any small party: the battle to get any attention at all. When the results came in, the Lib Dems held the balance of power between a tired Labour Party, which had been in power for 13 years, and the Conservatives, with their young, untested leader David Cameron. Clegg chose the Conservatives, entering a full-blown coalition (rather than a looser, vote-by-vote arrangement) and supporting the party’s austerity policies. After five years as the junior partner in government, the Lib Dems’ reward was electoral wipeout. In the 2015 election, the party went from 57 seats to eight.

This history haunts the Liberal Democrats. The party has surged before, only to see the two-party system brutally reassert itself. Its activists fear entering government, because they worry they will end up with all the blame for unpopular policies and none of the credit for successful ones. Raising the threshold at which income tax becomes payable was a Lib Dem idea, as was a 5-pence tax on plastic bags, and yet the party’s time in coalition is most remembered for a broken promise not to raise university tuition fees, which are set by the government in Britain.

Because of its history of centrism, the party has often been accused of vagueness, and the Lib Dems are asked repeatedly during election campaigns what their “red lines” would be—which policies are absolutely essential, and which can be horse-traded away in potential negotiations to form a coalition government. Some argue their identity crisis has been provoked by the success of liberalism itself. “The 20th century is the liberal century; the Labour Party implemented the social liberalism, and Tories a form of economic liberalism,” Stephen Tall, a former Liberal Democrat adviser, told me.

Martin Horwood, among the Liberal Democrats’ members of the European Parliament, speaks to colleagues in Strasbourg, France. (Jean-Francois Badias / AP)
In Brexit, the party hopes it has found a new defining idea. The Liberal Democrats ardently campaigned during the 2016 referendum in favor of remaining in the EU. Now they are going a step further. On the second day of the conference here in Bournemouth, its activists voted decisively to become the party not just of Remain, but also of Revoke. A majority Liberal Democrat government would, they decided, simply cancel Brexit altogether and keep Britain in the EU.

The virtue of the Revoke policy is simplicity. Labour’s position is tortured, implying that a better Brexit deal is out there waiting to be found, but that the party would also offer voters a chance to reject it. And the Conservatives have set out their stall as the party of Brexit, “do or die,” as Johnson has said. The danger is that Revoke is seen as extreme. For a party that already does well in metropolitan areas full of university graduates, the stance risks cementing the perception that they represent the views of the “liberal elite.” During the debate at the conference, Niall Mahon, a councillor from Sunderland, a city in northern England, asked: “Who is this targeting? Do we really need to be piling on more and more Remain votes in London constituencies? What are we offering to the North?”

Some insiders have another worry. They fear that the Lib Dems, custodians of a particular political tradition, are being turned into a single-issue party. At the conference, attacking Brexit was a guaranteed applause line. In his speech, the former leader Vince Cable noted that 70 percent of new members joined to oppose leaving the EU. The common thread of the lawmakers joining the party is a hatred of Brexit. But is that enough to hold a political party together? Or has the liberal tradition been hijacked by—admittedly, extremely polite—entryists?

Conference season is an enduring British political tradition, even though everyone involved claims to hate it. Lawmakers decamp to a series of airless halls outside London, mingle with activists, and wash their party’s dirty linen in public. Labour’s conference is dominated by the trade unions that provide much of its funding; the Conservative one is the best place in Britain to spot men in mustard-colored trousers with strong views on foxhunting. The Liberal Democrat conference is more like a high-school reunion for nerds: Just five minutes after my arrival, a man in a white suit engaged me in an earnest conversation about proportional representation. The party is also intensely democratic. Votes on policy taken here really matter, whereas the bigger parties tend to govern by fiat or clique. That makes it an extremely good place to spot the prevailing opinion among its members.


Activists generally agree that the high/low point of the conference is “Glee Club,” held on the last night—a public sing-along with rewritten pop songs full of in-jokes. Last year’s Glee Clubfeatured a number that could stand as a mission statement for the party. Sung to the tune of Labour’s revolutionary anthem, “The Red Flag,” it instead promised, “The party's flag is pallid pink, and old Madeira is our drink / Though Labour sneers and Tories plot, we will remain a moderate lot / Then raise our banner shoulder height, for to do more is impolite.”

• Why a ‘Brexit Election’ Will Make Things Worse
• Brexit Got a Lot More Complicated for EU Citizens
• Brexit and Britain’s Northern Ireland Déjà Vu
• Boris Johnson, Brexit, and Britain’s Constitutional Quagmire

In an age of populists and strongmen, the Lib Dems are proud to embrace moderation, consensus building, and tolerance. The more battle-weary members, though, have a saying: If you’re in the middle of the road, you might get run over. In the 2015 election, the party suffered heavy losses because it was unable to distinguish itself as having a unique set of principles. Tall, the former adviser, believes that electoral math will guide the Liberal Democrats’ future path: The majority of their target seats are held by the Conservatives. But they need an economic policy that goes beyond splitting the difference between the two main parties—as Tall put it, “a bit Keynesian, but not spendthrift.”

In a packed room at the Marriott Hotel in Bournemouth, Chuka Umunna—like Berger, a defecting MP who joined the Lib Dems from Labour, after a brief attempt at starting a new party—seemed typically unruffled by such questions. He argued that Brexit was not a single issue. Remain and Leave, he told activists, were merely “badges” for new political identities. In the 20th century, the big divide was economics: The Labour Party represented the worker, the Conservatives capital. The new dichotomy, Umunna said, was about values: “liberal, open, outward-looking, internationalist” versus a “socially conservative, nationalistic, authoritarian view of the world.” He saw the party in the same tradition as Emmanuel Macron of France, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, Justin Trudeau of Canada, and Pedro Sánchez of Spain. (That focus on social liberalism brings its own problems. The party’s decision to welcome Lee, who called for immigrants to be tested for HIV, led to a councillor heckling Swinson during a question-and-answer session. Heckling is considered to be very un–Lib Dem, and the audience was palpably shocked.)


Plenty of political scientists support Umunna’s analysis—and his contention that Remain and Leave have become shorthand for these two worldviews, ensuring that the new divide will persist even after Brexit is settled (if it is ever settled). Labour and the Conservatives draw their support from both sides of this new fissure. About 30 percent of Labour’s 2017 voters were Leavers, according to the British Election Study. And about 39 percent of those who voted Conservative in 2015 went on to vote Remain, according to YouGov.

This should be, then, a moment of great opportunity for the Liberal Democrats. They hope to pick up support from both disgruntled Labour and Conservative voters by presenting themselves as the unequivocal voice of Remain. If and when Britain leaves the European Union, though, would there be as much backing for a campaign to rejoin? The pure focus of the current anti-Brexit anger would surely dissipate, and everything would depend on whether British politics was truly realigned, or merely snapped back to its old, ill-fitting, comfortable labels.

In recent decades, British politics has become much more presidential, focused on leaders as much as on parties. Both Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader, were chosen by their memberships, rather than their colleagues in Parliament. Both see connecting with their “base” as a purer form of politics than that practiced at Westminster. Johnson draws his energy from the 2016 referendum, promising to enact the “will of the people.” Those in Corbyn’s circle have always felt that it was their job to shift Labour’s center of gravity to the left.

Jo Swinson was elected leader of the Liberal Democrats in July. (Peter Nicholls / Reuters)
To work out whether the Liberal Democrats can break through, then, look at their leader. A great deal now depends on the character and ability of Swinson. Her leadership style is unusually collegiate; she likes to hear a range of opinions before coming to a decision. (This could prove a disadvantage in the pressure cooker of negotiations with other parties.) “She’s probably also one of the less tribal MPs in terms of getting on with people from other parties,” Sean Kemp, a former Lib Dem adviser, told me. “That’s paid dividends with these defections.” Swinson also spent three years as a business minister when the Lib Dems were in coalition with David Cameron’s Conservatives. It is a strange quirk of British politics that, at 39, she therefore has more governmental experience than 70-year-old Corbyn, who was a lifelong backbencher before his elevation to Labour leader.


Her place at Westminster has been hard-won. Swinson lost her seat in 2015 before winning it back in 2017, after a campaign marked by vitriol: She told me that her mother’s car had been attacked with a brick. She has two young children, and her husband, Duncan Hames—himself a former Liberal Democrat lawmaker—became the first person to take a baby through the voting lobbies in the House of Commons. Having the children contributed to her decision not to stand for the leadership at the prior opportunity in 2017, and instead run for deputy.

Those who know her express genuine admiration for her confidence in her first weeks as leader. “As baptisms of fire go, you can’t get much hotter than this,” Tall told me, referring to the series of dramatic votes on Brexit. “She stood up with poise and an instant style. You’d expect a few more nerves.” Kemp agreed: “You don’t lose your seat ... and then win it back without being a bit of a streetfighter.”

Onstage in Bournemouth, Swinson was pleasant, polished—but not yet quite the whole package. She seemed more like a substitute teacher than an unstoppable political force. At the leader’s questions, she had an answer to the naysayers. “I got elected to Parliament as a 25-year-old woman,” she told the hall. “I have some experience of being underestimated. People only ever do it once.”

Even so, the task before her is huge. In realistic terms, beating the previous record of 62 seats would be a good result at the next election. But talk to some activists, and a glimmer creeps into their eyes. Few commentators foresaw the vote to leave the European Union, or the choice of a veteran left-winger such as Corbyn to lead Labour. They dream of a “Liberal Democrat surge” being the next big surprise in British politics. The party has responded by doubling the number of seats it is targeting at the next election to 80, and Umunna has speculated about winning 200.

The political scientists—and the hardened special advisers—I spoke with were skeptical. Canada is sometimes offered as an example of how small parties can break through: In both the 1990s and the 2010s, upstarts unseated traditional rivals at the polls there. But according to Kathryn Harrison, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, the hurdles are still high. “We’ve got the same electoral system—we got it from you,” she told me. “And voters are asking themselves two questions: Who do I prefer? Who do I think is viable?” The electorate, she added, needed to sense a “zeitgeist” that made a small party seem viable, rather than a wasted vote, and so, as a result, third parties tended to cause “tremors rather than earthquakes.”

The Liberal Democrats think that the earthquake has already happened, that Brexit has moved the tectonic plates of British politics. Their ambition is huge—to dominate the outward-looking, liberal side of the new fault line—but so are the risks.


https://www.theatlantic.com/interna...iberal-democrats-brexit-remain-revoke/598162/

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[MCP]

Boris Johnson given two-week EU deadline for Irish backstop plan

Ultimatum comes as sources say PM was ‘surprised’ by levels of checks on the border

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...prised-by-level-of-irish-border-checks-brexit

Boris Johnson has been set a two-week deadline to table a plan for replacing the Irish backstop as further embarrassing details emerged of the prime minister’s chaotic visit to Luxembourg.

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, and Finland’s prime minister, Antti Rinne, told reporters in Paris that they were both “concerned about what is happening in Britain”.

“We need to know what the UK is proposing,” said Rinne, whose country currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency. “Loose talk about proposals for negotiations is irresponsible … The UK should make its possible own proposals very soon if they would like them to be discussed.”

/politics/2016/may/31/eu-referendum-morning-briefing-sign-up

Rinne said: “We both agreed that it is now time for Boris Johnson to produce his own proposals in writing – if they exist. If no proposals are received by the end of September, then it’s over.”

A deadline of 30 September would be highly problematic for the prime minister as it falls on the eve of the Conservative party conference, and it remains to be seen whether the EU will stick to the threat.
Johnson would be wary of showing his hand at such a sensitive point given the potentially negative reaction by his party to any movement towards the EU’s demands on the backstop.
Rinne said that he intended to speak to the European council president, Donald Tusk, and Johnson to discuss the need for swift action from the UK.

EU leaders want a clear run for negotiations before a summit on 17 October so that they need not engage in detailed talks on the issue and can nod through any deal.
Johnson spoke to the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, by phone on Wednesday afternoon. A Downing Street spokesperson said they discussed their continued determination to reach a deal.
They also discussed their lunch meeting in Luxembourg on Monday, which was described as “positive and constructive” during the call.

It emerged earlier in the day that during the lunch meeting Johnson had expressed surprise to his advisers when he was informed about the scale of checks that would still be needed on the island of Ireland under a plan the government has mooted for the Irish border.

The two-hour lunch preceded Johnson’s humiliation at the hands of Luxembourg’s prime minister, Xavier Bettel, when he failed to attend a press conference due to anti-Brexit protests.
EU officials said the advantage for them had been in being able to spell out the problems directly to the prime minister. “It seems to have helped the penny drop,” said one diplomatic source.

During talks with Juncker and the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, the prime minister was shown in detail how allowing Northern Ireland to stick to common EU rules on food and livestock, known as sanitary and phytosanitary measures (SPS), would still fail to avoid checks on the vast majority of goods that cross the Irish border.
Downing Street has described as “nonsense” a report in the Financial Times that Johnson turned to his chief negotiator, David Frost, and the Brexit secretary, Stephen Barclay, and said: “So you’re telling me the SPS plan doesn’t solve the customs problem?”

But senior EU sources confirmed that Johnson had expressed surprise during the lunch at the complexity of the situation, and that it appeared to have been a “bit of a reality check to hear it from EU officials”.
Sources said it was not the case that Johnson had failed to understand the role of the shared customs territory in the Irish backstop but that it was the scale of checks that would still be necessary without such an arrangement that appeared to hit home.

A second EU diplomat confirmed: “When the commission explained the technical challenges and enduring need for customs checks under the UK proposals, Johnson expressed surprise in the direction of his advisers.”
In his address to the European parliament on Wednesday, Juncker hinted at the problems that remained. “I have no emotional attachment to the backstop,” he said of his talks with Johnson. “But I made clear that I do have an intimate commitment to its objectives.”

Given the wide gap between the two sides, Juncker also expressed doubts about the possibility that a mutually agreeable replacement for the Irish backstop would be agreed before 31 October when Johnson has said the UK will leave, “do or die”.

The UK said after the Juncker lunch that it would now move to negotiating daily with the EU rather than twice a week but a spokeswoman for the European commission told reporters on Wednesday that there had been no such request as yet.
She said: “We have said and reconfirm that we are fully available to meet 24/7 seven days a week as soon as the UK would like to meet us. But for the moment I do not have any new announcements or scheduling to pass on to you today.”
Barnier had suggested that there was a lack of seriousness in the UK’s approach during his own statement to the European parliament.

“Almost three years after the British referendum, ladies and gentlemen, it is certainly not a question of pretending to negotiate,” he told MEPs.

Meanwhile, Johnson had his first conversation with the president of the European parliament, David Sassoli, on Wednesday. Sassoli is understood to have told the prime minister that any agreement would need to be agreed by both the Commons and the EU’s parliament, and “robust debate and parliamentary scrutiny is essential”, in a thinly veiled criticism of the decision to prorogue Westminster.

 

[MCP]

Resolution opposing hard Irish Border introduced in US Congress

Growing concern among Irish-Americans on Capitol Hill about the direction of Brexit

Congressman Brendan Boyle (left) has introduced a resolution outlining opposition to a hard border in Ireland.

A resolution opposing the re-imposition of a hard border in Northern Ireland has been introduced in the US Congress amid growing concern among the Irish-American caucus on Capitol Hill about the direction of Brexit.
Congressman Brendan Boyle introduced a resolution on Tuesday, outlining opposition to the establishment of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

“One of the great foreign policy achievements of the twentieth century was the Good Friday Agreement (GFA). Brokered by US Special Envoy George Mitchell, and agreed to by the UK, Republic of Ireland, and leading parties in Northern Ireland, it eliminated the hard border that then existed between Northern Ireland the rest of Ireland. Now Brexit threatens this,” he said.

“A hard border would eliminate the free flow of people between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which has proved fundamental to promoting peace and unity.”

He continued: “We must not go backwards.”
Members of the Irish-American caucus in the US Capital are watching events in London closely, and several have indicated that a return to a hard border in Ireland must be avoided at all costs.

In particular, Richard Neal, the Massachusetts Congressman who was centrally involved in the Good Friday Agreement and is the co-chairman of the Friends of Ireland caucus on Capitol Hill, has recently been appointed as head of the powerful Ways and Means committee. This committee will play a key role in overseeing any future trade agreement between Britain and the United States after Britain leaves the European Union.

The promise of a bilateral trade agreement between Britain and the United States is a central plank of Britain’s post-Brexit economic policy given that British exports to the United States are worth about 100 billion pounds to the British economy.

Though US president Donald Trump supports Brexit he has given mixed messages about the viability of an EU-US trade deal in recent months.

In November, he said that the withdrawal agreement negotiated by Theresa May with the EU meant that the UK may not be able to trade with the United States after it leaves the European Union

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/wor...sh-border-introduced-in-us-congress-1.3775295

 

[MCP]

Can Brexit Be Stopped?
The Liberal Democrats are gambling on the realignment of British politics to do so.

Hannah Mckay / Reuters


The Atlantic
HELEN LEWIS
SEP 17, 2019

BOURNEMOUTH, England—Standing onstage in front of her party faithful, Jo Swinson had a surprise. At the opening rally of the Liberal Democrats’ conference here at the British seaside, the crowd knew what to expect—all week, rumors had been buzzing that they would be joined by a high-profile defector from a rival party—but they didn’t know whom to expect. Even their own members of Parliament were kept in the dark until half an hour before the announcement.

Swinson, the party’s newly elected 39-year-old leader, said the person she was introducing was “someone who has stood up for liberal values,” and moments later, Sam Gyimah bounded up onstage. Gyimah, born in Britain and raised in Ghana, had once been hailed as the future of the Conservatives—the party of Boris Johnson, which is furiously trying to pull Britain out of the European Union. Just three months ago, in fact, Gyimah had stood for the leadership of the Conservative Party.

Now he was a Liberal Democrat.

In her introduction, Swinson stressed Gyimah’s social liberalism—the 43-year-old voted to legalize same-sex marriage in 2013—and his commitment to stopping Brexit. Gyimah ran for the Conservative leadership while calling for a second EU referendum, a position that proved about as popular with its grassroots members as a 100 percent inheritance tax or banning Downton Abbey. It was this experience, he said, that had persuaded him to leave the party. Now his move to the Liberal Democrats sent a clear message: The Conservatives had no place for pro-European social liberals anymore. To underline the point, Swinson was wearing a necklace bearing the word European, while Gyimah took the stage wearing orange trousers—one of the Lib Dems’ signature colors.

The past few months have been chaotic, even by the recent standards of British politics. After Theresa May failed to get her deal drawing Britain out of the EU through Parliament on three occasions, she was forced to resign. Her successor, Boris Johnson, immediately took a more aggressive stance, suspending Parliament and trying to force an early election. Opposition parties have denied him that opportunity, arguing that with Britain legally obliged to leave the EU on October 31, agreeing on an exit deal should take priority. In the brief period in which Parliament sat before its suspension, Johnson suffered a series of defeats—and effectively kicked out 21 MPs from his own party for disagreeing with his Brexit position. Gyimah was one of them.


In contrast to this disorder, the past two weeks have seen a carefully choreographed stream of new faces joining the Liberal Democrats. On September 3, Phillip Lee, a former Conservative, announced his defection in a wordless moment of extremely British drama. He entered the House of Commons—during a speech by Johnson, for extra impact—and went to sit on the Lib Dem benches rather than the Conservative ones. Lee’s change of party deprived Johnson of his working majority in Parliament—and with it any chance of passing legislation.

Two days later, Lee was followed by Luciana Berger, who had earlier left the Labour Party, Britain’s main opposition, because of the anti-Semitism she had experienced from some of its members. Then, on September 7, Jo Swinson tweeted the sheet music for a song from The Sound of Music: “I am 16, going on 17.” Hours later, Angela Smith, another Labour defector, became the party’s 17th member of Parliament. The steady drip-drip-drip was designed to remind onlookers that lawmakers inside both Labour and the Conservatives believe their parties have become too extreme. (Voters, too, have been switching over: In the European Parliament elections in May, the Lib Dems secured a fifth of the national vote and 16 seats—their best-ever result.)

The Lib Dems see the polarization of British politics as their big chance in a country whose first-past-the-post electoral system is notoriously hostile to smaller parties. Aside from national governments at times of crisis, Labour and the Conservatives have alternated ruling Britain since the 1910s. But their traditional bases are fragmenting, with an array of new factors—age, education, city versus country, homeowners versus tenants—crisscrossing the old divides of class and economics. The 2016 referendum on EU membership was won by Leave 52 to 48 percent, with supporters of both main parties on each side of the question.


All that means, with another election potentially looming, attention is turning to the Liberal Democrats. Can they make a breakthrough and become the main opposition—or even a party of government? What do they stand for, apart from opposing Brexit? And by accepting refugees from Labour and the Conservatives, do they look like the sensible middle ground, or just the “None of the Above” party? It is a question with international resonance. Across Europe and the West, old parties are struggling to adapt to new divides. Is the electoral map about to be redrawn—and can the Lib Dems seize the moment?

The Liberal Democrats were born out of the ashes of failure. The first half of their name comes from the Liberals, a party of government that dwindled over the course of the 20th century before eventually merging with the Social Democratic Party—a group that broke away from Labour in the 1980s over fears that the party was becoming too left-wing. The Liberal Democrats’ foundational beliefs were center-left economics plus social liberalism. One member of the SDP breakaway group, Roy Jenkins, had championed causes such as divorce-law reform, decriminalizing homosexuality and abortion, and abolishing theater censorship. The party proposed raising income taxes to fund education and, more recently, health care.

But time and again, this new force was squashed by Britain’s electoral system, which rewards bigger national parties and punishes upstarts. In 1983, as the Liberal-SDP Alliance, the new group won 7.8 million votes—just 650,000 fewer than Labour won—but ended up with only 23 seats to Labour’s 209. In 2005, when they rode a wave of anger against the Iraq War, the Lib Dems still won only 62 seats in Parliament—less than a 10th of the available seats—despite garnering more than a fifth of the vote.


At the next election, in 2010, the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg performed so well in television debates that there were a few weeks of “Cleggmania.” His personal popularity overcame one of the persistent disadvantages faced by any small party: the battle to get any attention at all. When the results came in, the Lib Dems held the balance of power between a tired Labour Party, which had been in power for 13 years, and the Conservatives, with their young, untested leader David Cameron. Clegg chose the Conservatives, entering a full-blown coalition (rather than a looser, vote-by-vote arrangement) and supporting the party’s austerity policies. After five years as the junior partner in government, the Lib Dems’ reward was electoral wipeout. In the 2015 election, the party went from 57 seats to eight.

This history haunts the Liberal Democrats. The party has surged before, only to see the two-party system brutally reassert itself. Its activists fear entering government, because they worry they will end up with all the blame for unpopular policies and none of the credit for successful ones. Raising the threshold at which income tax becomes payable was a Lib Dem idea, as was a 5-pence tax on plastic bags, and yet the party’s time in coalition is most remembered for a broken promise not to raise university tuition fees, which are set by the government in Britain.

Because of its history of centrism, the party has often been accused of vagueness, and the Lib Dems are asked repeatedly during election campaigns what their “red lines” would be—which policies are absolutely essential, and which can be horse-traded away in potential negotiations to form a coalition government. Some argue their identity crisis has been provoked by the success of liberalism itself. “The 20th century is the liberal century; the Labour Party implemented the social liberalism, and Tories a form of economic liberalism,” Stephen Tall, a former Liberal Democrat adviser, told me.

Martin Horwood, among the Liberal Democrats’ members of the European Parliament, speaks to colleagues in Strasbourg, France. (Jean-Francois Badias / AP)
In Brexit, the party hopes it has found a new defining idea. The Liberal Democrats ardently campaigned during the 2016 referendum in favor of remaining in the EU. Now they are going a step further. On the second day of the conference here in Bournemouth, its activists voted decisively to become the party not just of Remain, but also of Revoke. A majority Liberal Democrat government would, they decided, simply cancel Brexit altogether and keep Britain in the EU.

The virtue of the Revoke policy is simplicity. Labour’s position is tortured, implying that a better Brexit deal is out there waiting to be found, but that the party would also offer voters a chance to reject it. And the Conservatives have set out their stall as the party of Brexit, “do or die,” as Johnson has said. The danger is that Revoke is seen as extreme. For a party that already does well in metropolitan areas full of university graduates, the stance risks cementing the perception that they represent the views of the “liberal elite.” During the debate at the conference, Niall Mahon, a councillor from Sunderland, a city in northern England, asked: “Who is this targeting? Do we really need to be piling on more and more Remain votes in London constituencies? What are we offering to the North?”

Some insiders have another worry. They fear that the Lib Dems, custodians of a particular political tradition, are being turned into a single-issue party. At the conference, attacking Brexit was a guaranteed applause line. In his speech, the former leader Vince Cable noted that 70 percent of new members joined to oppose leaving the EU. The common thread of the lawmakers joining the party is a hatred of Brexit. But is that enough to hold a political party together? Or has the liberal tradition been hijacked by—admittedly, extremely polite—entryists?

Conference season is an enduring British political tradition, even though everyone involved claims to hate it. Lawmakers decamp to a series of airless halls outside London, mingle with activists, and wash their party’s dirty linen in public. Labour’s conference is dominated by the trade unions that provide much of its funding; the Conservative one is the best place in Britain to spot men in mustard-colored trousers with strong views on foxhunting. The Liberal Democrat conference is more like a high-school reunion for nerds: Just five minutes after my arrival, a man in a white suit engaged me in an earnest conversation about proportional representation. The party is also intensely democratic. Votes on policy taken here really matter, whereas the bigger parties tend to govern by fiat or clique. That makes it an extremely good place to spot the prevailing opinion among its members.


Activists generally agree that the high/low point of the conference is “Glee Club,” held on the last night—a public sing-along with rewritten pop songs full of in-jokes. Last year’s Glee Clubfeatured a number that could stand as a mission statement for the party. Sung to the tune of Labour’s revolutionary anthem, “The Red Flag,” it instead promised, “The party's flag is pallid pink, and old Madeira is our drink / Though Labour sneers and Tories plot, we will remain a moderate lot / Then raise our banner shoulder height, for to do more is impolite.”

• Why a ‘Brexit Election’ Will Make Things Worse
• Brexit Got a Lot More Complicated for EU Citizens
• Brexit and Britain’s Northern Ireland Déjà Vu
• Boris Johnson, Brexit, and Britain’s Constitutional Quagmire

In an age of populists and strongmen, the Lib Dems are proud to embrace moderation, consensus building, and tolerance. The more battle-weary members, though, have a saying: If you’re in the middle of the road, you might get run over. In the 2015 election, the party suffered heavy losses because it was unable to distinguish itself as having a unique set of principles. Tall, the former adviser, believes that electoral math will guide the Liberal Democrats’ future path: The majority of their target seats are held by the Conservatives. But they need an economic policy that goes beyond splitting the difference between the two main parties—as Tall put it, “a bit Keynesian, but not spendthrift.”

In a packed room at the Marriott Hotel in Bournemouth, Chuka Umunna—like Berger, a defecting MP who joined the Lib Dems from Labour, after a brief attempt at starting a new party—seemed typically unruffled by such questions. He argued that Brexit was not a single issue. Remain and Leave, he told activists, were merely “badges” for new political identities. In the 20th century, the big divide was economics: The Labour Party represented the worker, the Conservatives capital. The new dichotomy, Umunna said, was about values: “liberal, open, outward-looking, internationalist” versus a “socially conservative, nationalistic, authoritarian view of the world.” He saw the party in the same tradition as Emmanuel Macron of France, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, Justin Trudeau of Canada, and Pedro Sánchez of Spain. (That focus on social liberalism brings its own problems. The party’s decision to welcome Lee, who called for immigrants to be tested for HIV, led to a councillor heckling Swinson during a question-and-answer session. Heckling is considered to be very un–Lib Dem, and the audience was palpably shocked.)


Plenty of political scientists support Umunna’s analysis—and his contention that Remain and Leave have become shorthand for these two worldviews, ensuring that the new divide will persist even after Brexit is settled (if it is ever settled). Labour and the Conservatives draw their support from both sides of this new fissure. About 30 percent of Labour’s 2017 voters were Leavers, according to the British Election Study. And about 39 percent of those who voted Conservative in 2015 went on to vote Remain, according to YouGov.

This should be, then, a moment of great opportunity for the Liberal Democrats. They hope to pick up support from both disgruntled Labour and Conservative voters by presenting themselves as the unequivocal voice of Remain. If and when Britain leaves the European Union, though, would there be as much backing for a campaign to rejoin? The pure focus of the current anti-Brexit anger would surely dissipate, and everything would depend on whether British politics was truly realigned, or merely snapped back to its old, ill-fitting, comfortable labels.

In recent decades, British politics has become much more presidential, focused on leaders as much as on parties. Both Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader, were chosen by their memberships, rather than their colleagues in Parliament. Both see connecting with their “base” as a purer form of politics than that practiced at Westminster. Johnson draws his energy from the 2016 referendum, promising to enact the “will of the people.” Those in Corbyn’s circle have always felt that it was their job to shift Labour’s center of gravity to the left.

Jo Swinson was elected leader of the Liberal Democrats in July. (Peter Nicholls / Reuters)
To work out whether the Liberal Democrats can break through, then, look at their leader. A great deal now depends on the character and ability of Swinson. Her leadership style is unusually collegiate; she likes to hear a range of opinions before coming to a decision. (This could prove a disadvantage in the pressure cooker of negotiations with other parties.) “She’s probably also one of the less tribal MPs in terms of getting on with people from other parties,” Sean Kemp, a former Lib Dem adviser, told me. “That’s paid dividends with these defections.” Swinson also spent three years as a business minister when the Lib Dems were in coalition with David Cameron’s Conservatives. It is a strange quirk of British politics that, at 39, she therefore has more governmental experience than 70-year-old Corbyn, who was a lifelong backbencher before his elevation to Labour leader.


Her place at Westminster has been hard-won. Swinson lost her seat in 2015 before winning it back in 2017, after a campaign marked by vitriol: She told me that her mother’s car had been attacked with a brick. She has two young children, and her husband, Duncan Hames—himself a former Liberal Democrat lawmaker—became the first person to take a baby through the voting lobbies in the House of Commons. Having the children contributed to her decision not to stand for the leadership at the prior opportunity in 2017, and instead run for deputy.

Those who know her express genuine admiration for her confidence in her first weeks as leader. “As baptisms of fire go, you can’t get much hotter than this,” Tall told me, referring to the series of dramatic votes on Brexit. “She stood up with poise and an instant style. You’d expect a few more nerves.” Kemp agreed: “You don’t lose your seat ... and then win it back without being a bit of a streetfighter.”

Onstage in Bournemouth, Swinson was pleasant, polished—but not yet quite the whole package. She seemed more like a substitute teacher than an unstoppable political force. At the leader’s questions, she had an answer to the naysayers. “I got elected to Parliament as a 25-year-old woman,” she told the hall. “I have some experience of being underestimated. People only ever do it once.”

Even so, the task before her is huge. In realistic terms, beating the previous record of 62 seats would be a good result at the next election. But talk to some activists, and a glimmer creeps into their eyes. Few commentators foresaw the vote to leave the European Union, or the choice of a veteran left-winger such as Corbyn to lead Labour. They dream of a “Liberal Democrat surge” being the next big surprise in British politics. The party has responded by doubling the number of seats it is targeting at the next election to 80, and Umunna has speculated about winning 200.

The political scientists—and the hardened special advisers—I spoke with were skeptical. Canada is sometimes offered as an example of how small parties can break through: In both the 1990s and the 2010s, upstarts unseated traditional rivals at the polls there. But according to Kathryn Harrison, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, the hurdles are still high. “We’ve got the same electoral system—we got it from you,” she told me. “And voters are asking themselves two questions: Who do I prefer? Who do I think is viable?” The electorate, she added, needed to sense a “zeitgeist” that made a small party seem viable, rather than a wasted vote, and so, as a result, third parties tended to cause “tremors rather than earthquakes.”

The Liberal Democrats think that the earthquake has already happened, that Brexit has moved the tectonic plates of British politics. Their ambition is huge—to dominate the outward-looking, liberal side of the new fault line—but so are the risks.


https://www.theatlantic.com/interna...iberal-democrats-brexit-remain-revoke/598162/

.

The only problem for the Liberal Democrats trying to achieve a revoking of Article 50, is that they would need to get into government. They are still a distant third behind both Labour and the Conservative parties as the latest polls are showing.

A lot of people still don't trust the Liberal Democrats after they formed a government with the Conservatives under David Cameron and also voted in severe austerity cuts to services here in the UK. This was quite evident during the last election where the Lib Dems lost so many seats in parliament.

There is a growing momentum for a second referendum here in the UK. With Boris Johnson so adamant that a No deal Brexit is the solution for Britain, the problems with Northern Ireland and the backstop. Britain does face a uncertain future.

 

[MCP]

Macron gives Johnson until end of week to overhaul Brexit plan
French president’s insistence that UK should give way raises chances of talks imploding

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...s-boris-johnson-end-week-overhaul-brexit-plan

The French president has given Boris Johnson until the end of the week to fundamentally revise his Brexit plan, in a move that increases the chances of the negotiations imploding within days.
The UK proposals tabled last week are not regarded in Brussels as being a basis for a deal and Emmanuel Macron emphasised it was up to the UK to think again before an upcoming EU summit.
After declining to meet with the prime minister in person, Macron further insisted during a phone call on Sunday that the talks would only be advanced through Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator.
“Boris Johnson presented his latest proposals,” an official at the Élysée Palace said of the conversation. “The president told him that the negotiations should continue swiftly with Michel Barnier’s team in coming days, in order to evaluate at the end of the week whether a deal is possible that respects European Union principles.”

Barnier has already said he does not have a mandate from the EU27 to agree a deal on the terms so far presented by Downing Street.

The prime minister’s chief negotiator, David Frost, has also been repeatedly told there will no last-minute negotiations with leaders at the summit on 17 October.
The British proposals involve the return of a customs border on the island of Ireland and a Democratic Unionist party veto on Northern Ireland staying in the EU’s single market for goods, an arrangement designed to avoid checks on the border.

Macron’s message to Johnson echoed the words of the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, who reportedly told the prime minister in a call on Saturday that the EU27 would not accept an agreement that created a customs border in Ireland. “Important questions remain about the British proposals,” Rutte later tweeted.
Opposition MPs are expected on Monday to push for a vote demanding publication of the full 40-page legal text of the alternative backstop plan presented to the EU by the UK. So far only a seven-page explanatory note has been published.

The shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, said it was important to see the legal detail “because we suspect it will confirm that the government’s proposals unavoidably mean the introduction of infrastructure in Northern Ireland, and that this will contradict the assurances that Johnson gave in the house on Thursday [that no new infrastructure would be required]”. Starmer also said the legal text would clarify whether or not workers’ rights were being protected.

Opposition MPs have been able in the past to use the Commons standing order 24 to trigger an emergency debate on a binding “humble address” motion demanding the release of government papers, but such a debate would only go ahead with the approval of the Speaker.
With just a few days remaining for the UK to backtrack on key aspects of its proposals, officials in Brussels described the talks as a “farce”.

The two sides appear locked in an impasse. Frost told European commission officials on Friday the UK would not move on its negotiating position until Brussels accepted its main proposals as a basis for the talks.
Johnson’s most senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, has told Conservative aides that the government will not fundamentally change its proposals.

Meanwhile Latvia’s prime minister, Krišjānis Kariņš, told the BBC the onus was on Johnson to make a move. He said: “If the offer from the UK turns out to be a take-it-or-leave-it, it’s going to be very difficult I see in agreeing. It’s fully dependent on the will of Mr Johnson because from the European side, we’re always open and looking towards a deal.”
Given the gap in positions, senior EU sources said Brussels had all but written off the chance of a deal being struck and that the onus was now on avoiding blame.

“Increasingly capitals have the impression the legal text was tabled to be rejected and never meant to a basis for discussion,” said one EU diplomat.
Under the Benn act, Johnson will have to request an extension to the UK’s EU membership by 19 October if a deal has not been agreed.

In response to claims in the Sunday Telegraph that Johnson would seek to provoke the EU to veto an extension by threatening to be an obstructive member state, one EU official described the government as “beyond pathetic”.
Claims that the government could veto the EU’s budget or impose Nigel Farage as the British commissioner were said to be “nonsense”.

The budget is unlikely to be finalised and put to a vote until June next year. The commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, or the European parliament can reject a member state’s nomination for a commissioner portfolio.

 

[Helico-pterFunk]

DM poll: Britain wants MPs to stop the delay and back Boris Johnson

The survey found a surge in support for the Tories following the UK Prime Minister's breakthrough at this week's EU summit. They are now on 32 per cent, five points up on their tally three weeks ago.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[QueEx]

DM poll: Britain wants MPs to stop the delay and back Boris Johnson

The survey found a surge in support for the Tories following the UK Prime Minister's breakthrough at this week's EU summit. They are now on 32 per cent, five points up on their tally three weeks ago.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Thanks HF !

 

[Wobble Wobble]

They just voted on the Letwin amendment, which as I understand it, delays the final vote. It is now the fourth bill in a row that Boris Johnson has put forth and has been defeated. It opens the possibility for EU to block/hamper further deals, the Scots to push for independence, and the Northern Irish to. throw a wrench in so much more. It might also be a good time for a vote of confidence on Boris...

New vote on Monday.

 

[Helico-pterFunk]

Thanks HF !

I like when sites add those informative visuals to their articles. Definitely helps it all make a bit more sense to all of us at large.

 

[MCP]

Brexit and Northern Ireland, especially the Good Friday Agreement will be the stumbling block with any agreement with the EU.

I voted to remain, yes the EU does have its issues, but the pros of remaining in the EU IMO certainly outweighs leaving.

The UK to leave on Oct 31 with a 'No deal' mandate, is nothing but a disaster.

 

[Helico-pterFunk]

Labour will back second referendum when deal legislation is brought in

Labour will support efforts to hijack Boris Johnson's Brexit deal this week in a bid to make the Prime Minister's divorce agreement subject to a second referendum.

www.dailymail.co.uk

UK Home | Daily Mail Online

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[Helico-pterFunk]

 

[Helico-pterFunk]

Boris lost Saturday's Brexit battle but he'll win the general election war

“AND all the time Boris becomes more and more popular,” murmurs a Cabinet minister surveying the wreckage left by Saturday’s joke Parliament. An array of opinion polls give heart to battered Tories…

www.thesun.co.uk

 

[MCP]

Boris lost Saturday's Brexit battle but he'll win the general election war

“AND all the time Boris becomes more and more popular,” murmurs a Cabinet minister surveying the wreckage left by Saturday’s joke Parliament. An array of opinion polls give heart to battered Tories…

www.thesun.co.uk

That I believe is not a full gone conclusion there.

 

[Helico-pterFunk]

Vote Farage… get Corbyn? Tories could miss out in nearly 90 seats

An audit by the Daily Mail found Boris Johnson could miss out in almost 90 battleground constituencies if the pro-Brexit vote is split between the Tories and the Brexit Party.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[Helico-pterFunk]

 

[Helico-pterFunk]

What is Nigel Farage's election plan and how would it would work?

The Brexit Party leader said his party would stand in 500 British seats at the December vote unless the Prime Minister abandoned his hard-won Brexit deal and pursued a much harder Brexit.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[MCP]

Farage is a one trick pony. After Brexit, what does this man has to offer?

 

[Helico-pterFunk]

Bonfires are lit across the country for Guy Fawkes' celebrations

The streets of Lewes, East Sussex, where controversial effigies are regularly displayed, are alight with fire and celebration. While in Ottery St Mary burning barrels are carried.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[Helico-pterFunk]

 

[Helico-pterFunk]

Nigel Farage faces mounting pressure to stand down

The Brexit Party leader (pictured) was warned Britain could end up with a 'shabby coalition of socialists, Lib Dems, Scottish and Welsh nationalists' if he contests seats the Tories want.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Labour collapses across UK in fresh poll blow for Jeremy Corbyn

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is at risk of losing dozens of seats in traditional working class areas in the Midlands and the North according to new opinion polls.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[MCP]

Donald Tusk's message to UK voters: don't give up on stopping Brexit
Outgoing EU council chief gives implicit backing to Boris Johnson’s opponents

Donald Tusk's message to UK voters: don't give up on stopping Brexit

Outgoing EU council chief gives implicit backing to Boris Johnson’s opponents

www.theguardian.com

Donald Tusk has given his implicit backing to Boris Johnson’s opponents in the general election with a call for anti-Brexit campaigners to keep fighting in the month before Britain goes to the polls.

In what he openly conceded was an unconventional move, the outgoing president of the European council made a pointed intervention in the UK’s general election debate with a thinly veiled message of solidarity for those seeking to unseat Johnson’s Conservatives.
Reflecting on his five years in his role as a top EU official as it comes to an end this month, and following a speech on the life of the journalist and philosopher Hannah Arendt, Tusk said he felt empowered to be honest about his feelings.

/politics/2016/may/31/eu-referendum-morning-briefing-sign-up

He added that he had been jealous of the renewed freedom of expression of John Bercow since standing down as Commons Speaker.
“I want to tell you something I wouldn’t have dared to say a few months ago, as I could be fired for being too frank,” Tusk said. “The UK election takes place in one month. Can things still be turned around? Hannah Arendt taught that things become irreversible only when people start to think so. So the only words that come to my mind today are simply: don’t give up. In this match, we have already had added time, now we are in extra time, perhaps it will even go to penalties?”

Tusk’s comments mark a break from the policy of EU chiefs steering clear of getting drawn into domestic political debates in member states during election periods.

But the former Polish prime minister, who also cited Margaret Thatcher as among his heroines during his speech, has long been an outspoken critic of those who he claims misled the British public into backing Brexit and turning their backs on the EU.
Speaking at the College of Europe, a training ground for a string of European leaders and senior officials, Tusk said he heard all around the world, and specifically in those countries that were once part of the British empire, that Brexit would leave the UK as an “outsider, a second-rate player”.

“I have heard repeatedly from Brexiters that they wanted to leave the European Union to make the United Kingdom great again, believing that only alone, it can truly be great,” Tusk said. “You could hear in these voices a longing for the empire. But the reality is exactly the opposite.”
He went on: “Only as part of a united Europe can the UK play a global role, only together can we confront, without any complexes, the greatest powers of this world.

“In fact, I can say the same about Germany or France. And the world knows it. I have heard the same in India, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa; that after its departure, the UK will become an outsider, a second-rate player, while the main battlefield will be occupied by China, the US and the EU.

“‘Why are they doing this?”’ – I was asked this regretful question everywhere I went. One of my English friends is probably right when he says with melancholy that Brexit is the real end of the British empire.”

Tusk also defended his hardline approach to Vladimir Putin during his tenure in Brussels as convenor of EU summits, and organiser of the bloc’s positions on key affairs.

The Russian leader’s strategic goal, Tusk said, was “not only to regain control of the former Soviet Union territories, but also to systematically weaken the EU by provoking internal divisions”.

“I had to publicly remind others, almost every week, that Russia is not our ‘strategic partner’, but our ‘strategic problem’,” Tusk said. “I was even labelled a ‘monomaniac’, for being so focused on this subject. But eventually it paid off.”
Tusk, a one-time member of Solidarity, was briefly imprisoned by the Communist government in Poland in the 1980s. Russia invaded Ukraine around the time Tusk took office in Brussels. Among those who have offered a softer line on how to deal with the Kremlin has been Jean-Claude Juncker, the outgoing president of the European commission.

Tusk was scathing about the recent comments of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who had suggested a rethink of the relationship with Russia.

“When I hear Macron’s words, that ‘we must reconsider our position with Russia, to rethink the strategic relationship’, I can only express hope that it will not happen at the cost of our common dreams about Europe’s sovereignty,” Tusk said.

“In the same interview for the Economist, President Macron says that he shares the same views on this subject as Viktor Orbán, and that he hopes that Mr Orbán will help convince Poles to change their position on Russia. But not me, Emmanuel.”

 

[Helico-pterFunk]

Ex-EU Council head Tusk tweets image of him holding 'gun' to Trump

Former EU Council chief Donald Tusk fired a shot at Donald Trump today by tweeting a photo of himself taken last year pretending to point a gun into the back of the US President during a G7 summit.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[QueEx]

Americans often ask me ‘what is happening?’ in British politics at the moment. Well, here is my answer...

Well . . .


Looks up . . . sky not falling over here . . .

No sign of sky falling, over there

Her Majesty still with us . . .

Lennon is still gone . . .

Harry & Meghan still doing their own thing . . .

William & Kate still William & Kate . . .

and . . .

MCP, you still here ? ? ?

.

 

[MCP]

Well . . .


Looks up . . . sky not falling over here . . .

No sign of sky falling, over there

Her Majesty still with us . . .

Lennon is still gone . . .

Harry & Meghan still doing their own thing . . .

William & Kate still William & Kate . . .

and . . .

MCP, you still here ? ? ?

.

Yes I'm here.

As for Brexit. My rights as a European citizen has been curtailed. I am not allowed to move freely, travel and live anywhere in the European union without restrictions. This is a act of stupidity and over the next few months people will soon realise what they have done. Turkeys voting for christmas