BREXIT - Is This Really Still Rumbling On? 😴
Comments
-
-
It's the french that stopped the travel. Anyway, tier 4, no you cant visit them.rick_chasey said:0 -
What a load of hyperbole "imprisoned"? Sure, the Government seem to be doing their best to put their hallmark on the mess but what are they supposed to do if the French won't allow anyone to land?rick_chasey said:1 -
The German embassador would have been better visiting Macron. Can't imagine German truckers would have given him much time. Funny how when UK politicians do this sort of stunt it gets roundly called out but this useless trip had some merit. Who knew.rick_chasey said:1 -
If you think we might rejoin in the foreseeable future then you're being too optimistic IMO.daniel_b said:
I could do, but there is no chance of that ever happening - perhaps it would have happened when I was much younger, and might have had more childish leanings towards nationalism etc, but I have gotten older, grown, and changed considerably since then.Stevo_666 said:
You could look at it like that, but recognising that we are different from our continental friends is not necessarily being insular (although one meaning of insular is 'relating to or from an island'daniel_b said:
To me this article reeks of an insular, inwards looking population here in the uk - and as it appears to regrettably be true, I find that incredibly sad, disheartening and depressing - both for myself, but even more so for the likes of my 7 year old daughter and her generation.rjsterry said:
Um... I guess it illustrates a point of view. One that ignores huge tracts of history but everyone likes a bit of mythology. Feels like someone thumbing through their Reader's Digest Encyclopedia of British History looking for events to back up their starting assumption.Stevo_666 said:Also from a more philiosophical standpoint, this might help a few people understand the current situation:
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/16/great-britain-never-never-will-european-country/
"“Britain is a European nation,” Remainers still often say when calling for the closest possible relationship with the EU after Brexit. I’m never sure what they think this means. And do our Continental neighbours agree? It is hard, perhaps impossible, really to feel the subconscious characteristics that stem from geography, history and culture. Certainly, we lucky islanders have rarely had existential worries about our “identity” or our borders. But France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary – to mention only the biggest – have experienced border disputes or territorial changes even within living memory. You can fight over these things, or you can try to transcend them. So thought Europeanism’s founding fathers, who included men from borderlands wanting to end a nightmare.
Rightly or wrongly, this can never be an instinctive British preoccupation. We could never have been at the heart of this “Europe”, with its quasi-religious mission to replace old nationalisms with an ersatz Europeanism seen as benign. “We have made Europe, now we have to make Europeans”, wrote one leading EU politician a few years back. We might theoretically understand the mistrust of popular sovereignty that has created the EU as a secretive elite power structure. But most of us can never feel this to be the inevitable price for peace. The 20th century taught us a different lesson: that the democratic nation is the bulwark of European civilisation, not its enemy. We instinctively feel that suppressing democratic choice is the truly dangerous course.
Like it or not, we are on the edge, as our eventual relationship with the EU ought to reflect. “Europe” is there, not here. Even the keenest British federalists talk about it as a different place which they wistfully dream of being part of. Semi-detachment runs through our history. We have had shifting relationships with different parts of the continent, so that it is hard even to say with which we have most affinity. Christianity came from Rome. Later we became a southern colony of pagan Scandinavia. Our language is Germanic. We went through a transformative four-century relationship with France. We had a long economic and security relationship with the Netherlands, for a time having the same ruler. For more than a century, after the Hanoverian succession, we were a power in Germany.
Britain has been both the ally and the enemy of every great Continental state, Catholic and Protestant, monarchy, democracy and dictatorship. Its monarch even has a plausible claim to be a sherif of Islam, a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed. It has never been tempted or forced to ally with the hegemonic Continental power to share in the spoils of dominating Europe. If national identity was important, 20 miles of sea were certainly no less; and trans-oceanic connections provided global resources to oppose Continental threats and work to create a “balance of power”. So Britain was the only major European state that never became an ally or a willing satellite of either Napoleon or Hitler, but decided to resist them even when the struggle seemed hopeless. Finally, it never made a serious attempt to join a triumvirate with France and Germany to control the EU. Independence has been our watchword.
The lure of opportunity overseas pulled us away from Continental ambitions. Though the Glorious Revolution of 1688 began the “second hundred years war” with France, ending only at Waterloo, the struggle became increasingly global, fought not only on the plains of Flanders, but in India and America. After Waterloo, Britain refused to be part of the Holy Alliance, a Great Power scheme to run the Continent, becoming instead the patron and protector of independent states, including France, Belgium, Greece, Spain and Portugal.
Britain made little effort to shape the unification of Italy during the 1850s, and watched with limited concern and negligible influence as the separate German states were turned by Otto von Bismarck into a new and powerful Empire by aggressive wars against Denmark, Austria and France. Even had Britain wished to interfere it could scarcely have done so. It was never a superpower, but always a medium-sized state, sometimes having to punch above its weight but not getting into the ring at all if it could avoid it. Bismarck joked that if the British landed their army in Germany, he would have it arrested, and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli declared that Britain “was really more an Asiatic power than a European”.
Was this a great geopolitical mistake? Many who later supported European integration thought so. But Brexit proves that it was too late to alter it. The millions who emigrated over the last two centuries in search of a better life did not cross the Channel or the North Sea to become Europeans, but went to English-speaking countries across the oceans. Today, two and a half times as many British citizens live in the “Anglosphere” as in the EU, and Britain’s main ethnic minorities are from Commonwealth countries. Even when we were striving to be “at the heart of Europe”, we were less economically integrated than any other EU member, and for 20 years our trade has been increasingly moving away from the Continent.
Opinion polling shows that our views of the EU are not very different from those of our Continental neighbours – that is, unenthusiastic or worse. The difference is that they feel that they have no choice but to remain members. Economic calculation weighs. But so do the instinctive feelings that stem from geography and history. The detached or semi-detached countries – Norway, Switzerland, ourselves and the non-Eurozone member-states – are all in different ways outsiders.
Our peculiarity – or so General de Gaulle thought when he vetoed our entry into the European Economic Community – was that we were too global: “an island, sea-going, bound up, by its trade, its markets, its food supplies, with the most varied and often the most distant countries”. It has taken us half a century to realise he was right, and finally to go with the grain."
)
We're not different, we are all human beings with internal organs, who need to breath air, eat food, and drink water to survive.
Working together instead of harking back to some bygone era that some people think can be rekindled and is romantic is such a backwards step, it's beyond belief.
My only hope, seeing as the referendum was carried by the older voter, though I appreciate not exclusively, and that the younger the voter was, the higher percentage wanted to stay in, is that within my daughters working life there is enough common sense to ask to rejoin.
I just have to hope they will accept us back - if I were them, I probably would not, but again, the generation of Europeans who had to deal with this little britain nonsense will have changed by then, so hopefully memories are short enough to not influence that in a negative fashion too much.
We may technically be an Island, but that does not mean we have to have an island mentality - that's a lazy reason imho, in the vein of 'god told me to'
However it goes back to some of the original arguments that what we want to achieve does not require this expensive bureaucratic institution that takes away areas of national decision making, has no reverse gear and which applies rules that are a compromise for its 20-odd members rather than one that are suitable for the UK.
A good grading bloc plus some sensible agreements to cooperate in other areas could do most of that without the downsides. As seen in other parts of the world."I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]1 -
England will never rejoin the EUStevo_666 said:If you think we might rejoin in the foreseeable future then you're being too optimistic IMO.
“New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers, but Belfast has the reason!0 -
“New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers, but Belfast has the reason!0
-
Good luck selling the euro to the UK population. This would be mandatory for any future nation joining.0
-
Thats one reason.john80 said:Good luck selling the euro to the UK population. This would be mandatory for any future nation joining.
There is also the question of what the EU will look like in the medium to long term future. If it achieves the dream of a European Superstate, would we really want to join that?"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
It's unlikely for the provinces as well.tailwindhome said:
England will never rejoin the EUStevo_666 said:If you think we might rejoin in the foreseeable future then you're being too optimistic IMO.
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
Fvckwits would never understand the argument, just tell them it had the Queen’s head on it and was their favourite colour and they will love it.john80 said:Good luck selling the euro to the UK population. This would be mandatory for any future nation joining.
0 -
“New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers, but Belfast has the reason!1
-
Generous.tailwindhome said:0 -
Yep we would not want anything that reduced national decision making.Stevo_666 said:
If you think we might rejoin in the foreseeable future then you're being too optimistic IMO.daniel_b said:
I could do, but there is no chance of that ever happening - perhaps it would have happened when I was much younger, and might have had more childish leanings towards nationalism etc, but I have gotten older, grown, and changed considerably since then.Stevo_666 said:
You could look at it like that, but recognising that we are different from our continental friends is not necessarily being insular (although one meaning of insular is 'relating to or from an island'daniel_b said:
To me this article reeks of an insular, inwards looking population here in the uk - and as it appears to regrettably be true, I find that incredibly sad, disheartening and depressing - both for myself, but even more so for the likes of my 7 year old daughter and her generation.rjsterry said:
Um... I guess it illustrates a point of view. One that ignores huge tracts of history but everyone likes a bit of mythology. Feels like someone thumbing through their Reader's Digest Encyclopedia of British History looking for events to back up their starting assumption.Stevo_666 said:Also from a more philiosophical standpoint, this might help a few people understand the current situation:
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/16/great-britain-never-never-will-european-country/
"“Britain is a European nation,” Remainers still often say when calling for the closest possible relationship with the EU after Brexit. I’m never sure what they think this means. And do our Continental neighbours agree? It is hard, perhaps impossible, really to feel the subconscious characteristics that stem from geography, history and culture. Certainly, we lucky islanders have rarely had existential worries about our “identity” or our borders. But France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary – to mention only the biggest – have experienced border disputes or territorial changes even within living memory. You can fight over these things, or you can try to transcend them. So thought Europeanism’s founding fathers, who included men from borderlands wanting to end a nightmare.
Rightly or wrongly, this can never be an instinctive British preoccupation. We could never have been at the heart of this “Europe”, with its quasi-religious mission to replace old nationalisms with an ersatz Europeanism seen as benign. “We have made Europe, now we have to make Europeans”, wrote one leading EU politician a few years back. We might theoretically understand the mistrust of popular sovereignty that has created the EU as a secretive elite power structure. But most of us can never feel this to be the inevitable price for peace. The 20th century taught us a different lesson: that the democratic nation is the bulwark of European civilisation, not its enemy. We instinctively feel that suppressing democratic choice is the truly dangerous course.
Like it or not, we are on the edge, as our eventual relationship with the EU ought to reflect. “Europe” is there, not here. Even the keenest British federalists talk about it as a different place which they wistfully dream of being part of. Semi-detachment runs through our history. We have had shifting relationships with different parts of the continent, so that it is hard even to say with which we have most affinity. Christianity came from Rome. Later we became a southern colony of pagan Scandinavia. Our language is Germanic. We went through a transformative four-century relationship with France. We had a long economic and security relationship with the Netherlands, for a time having the same ruler. For more than a century, after the Hanoverian succession, we were a power in Germany.
Britain has been both the ally and the enemy of every great Continental state, Catholic and Protestant, monarchy, democracy and dictatorship. Its monarch even has a plausible claim to be a sherif of Islam, a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed. It has never been tempted or forced to ally with the hegemonic Continental power to share in the spoils of dominating Europe. If national identity was important, 20 miles of sea were certainly no less; and trans-oceanic connections provided global resources to oppose Continental threats and work to create a “balance of power”. So Britain was the only major European state that never became an ally or a willing satellite of either Napoleon or Hitler, but decided to resist them even when the struggle seemed hopeless. Finally, it never made a serious attempt to join a triumvirate with France and Germany to control the EU. Independence has been our watchword.
The lure of opportunity overseas pulled us away from Continental ambitions. Though the Glorious Revolution of 1688 began the “second hundred years war” with France, ending only at Waterloo, the struggle became increasingly global, fought not only on the plains of Flanders, but in India and America. After Waterloo, Britain refused to be part of the Holy Alliance, a Great Power scheme to run the Continent, becoming instead the patron and protector of independent states, including France, Belgium, Greece, Spain and Portugal.
Britain made little effort to shape the unification of Italy during the 1850s, and watched with limited concern and negligible influence as the separate German states were turned by Otto von Bismarck into a new and powerful Empire by aggressive wars against Denmark, Austria and France. Even had Britain wished to interfere it could scarcely have done so. It was never a superpower, but always a medium-sized state, sometimes having to punch above its weight but not getting into the ring at all if it could avoid it. Bismarck joked that if the British landed their army in Germany, he would have it arrested, and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli declared that Britain “was really more an Asiatic power than a European”.
Was this a great geopolitical mistake? Many who later supported European integration thought so. But Brexit proves that it was too late to alter it. The millions who emigrated over the last two centuries in search of a better life did not cross the Channel or the North Sea to become Europeans, but went to English-speaking countries across the oceans. Today, two and a half times as many British citizens live in the “Anglosphere” as in the EU, and Britain’s main ethnic minorities are from Commonwealth countries. Even when we were striving to be “at the heart of Europe”, we were less economically integrated than any other EU member, and for 20 years our trade has been increasingly moving away from the Continent.
Opinion polling shows that our views of the EU are not very different from those of our Continental neighbours – that is, unenthusiastic or worse. The difference is that they feel that they have no choice but to remain members. Economic calculation weighs. But so do the instinctive feelings that stem from geography and history. The detached or semi-detached countries – Norway, Switzerland, ourselves and the non-Eurozone member-states – are all in different ways outsiders.
Our peculiarity – or so General de Gaulle thought when he vetoed our entry into the European Economic Community – was that we were too global: “an island, sea-going, bound up, by its trade, its markets, its food supplies, with the most varied and often the most distant countries”. It has taken us half a century to realise he was right, and finally to go with the grain." )
We're not different, we are all human beings with internal organs, who need to breath air, eat food, and drink water to survive.
Working together instead of harking back to some bygone era that some people think can be rekindled and is romantic is such a backwards step, it's beyond belief.
My only hope, seeing as the referendum was carried by the older voter, though I appreciate not exclusively, and that the younger the voter was, the higher percentage wanted to stay in, is that within my daughters working life there is enough common sense to ask to rejoin.
I just have to hope they will accept us back - if I were them, I probably would not, but again, the generation of Europeans who had to deal with this little britain nonsense will have changed by then, so hopefully memories are short enough to not influence that in a negative fashion too much.
We may technically be an Island, but that does not mean we have to have an island mentality - that's a lazy reason imho, in the vein of 'god told me to'
However it goes back to some of the original arguments that what we want to achieve does not require this expensive bureaucratic institution that takes away areas of national decision making, has no reverse gear and which applies rules that are a compromise for its 20-odd members rather than one that are suitable for the UK.
A good grading bloc plus some sensible agreements to cooperate in other areas could do most of that without the downsides. As seen in other parts of the world.
The article read like a parody or a game of trigger word bingo0 -
I don't really understand the sort of nebulous fear of being ruled by the EU.
Obviously, we weren't. But if that were the case in the future, so what?- Genesis Croix de Fer
- Dolan Tuono0 -
Mm, then the german delegate drifted over somme gas and it went down hill.tailwindhome said:0 -
Makes me think the deal isn't as bad as it could be. I generally take the view that Farage being annoyed is good.tailwindhome said:0 -
It still helps to explain why we are where we are. If it wasn't right, the referendum probably would have gone the other way.surrey_commuter said:
Yep we would not want anything that reduced national decision making.Stevo_666 said:
If you think we might rejoin in the foreseeable future then you're being too optimistic IMO.daniel_b said:
I could do, but there is no chance of that ever happening - perhaps it would have happened when I was much younger, and might have had more childish leanings towards nationalism etc, but I have gotten older, grown, and changed considerably since then.Stevo_666 said:
You could look at it like that, but recognising that we are different from our continental friends is not necessarily being insular (although one meaning of insular is 'relating to or from an island'daniel_b said:
To me this article reeks of an insular, inwards looking population here in the uk - and as it appears to regrettably be true, I find that incredibly sad, disheartening and depressing - both for myself, but even more so for the likes of my 7 year old daughter and her generation.rjsterry said:
Um... I guess it illustrates a point of view. One that ignores huge tracts of history but everyone likes a bit of mythology. Feels like someone thumbing through their Reader's Digest Encyclopedia of British History looking for events to back up their starting assumption.Stevo_666 said:Also from a more philiosophical standpoint, this might help a few people understand the current situation:
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/16/great-britain-never-never-will-european-country/
"“Britain is a European nation,” Remainers still often say when calling for the closest possible relationship with the EU after Brexit. I’m never sure what they think this means. And do our Continental neighbours agree? It is hard, perhaps impossible, really to feel the subconscious characteristics that stem from geography, history and culture. Certainly, we lucky islanders have rarely had existential worries about our “identity” or our borders. But France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary – to mention only the biggest – have experienced border disputes or territorial changes even within living memory. You can fight over these things, or you can try to transcend them. So thought Europeanism’s founding fathers, who included men from borderlands wanting to end a nightmare.
Rightly or wrongly, this can never be an instinctive British preoccupation. We could never have been at the heart of this “Europe”, with its quasi-religious mission to replace old nationalisms with an ersatz Europeanism seen as benign. “We have made Europe, now we have to make Europeans”, wrote one leading EU politician a few years back. We might theoretically understand the mistrust of popular sovereignty that has created the EU as a secretive elite power structure. But most of us can never feel this to be the inevitable price for peace. The 20th century taught us a different lesson: that the democratic nation is the bulwark of European civilisation, not its enemy. We instinctively feel that suppressing democratic choice is the truly dangerous course.
Like it or not, we are on the edge, as our eventual relationship with the EU ought to reflect. “Europe” is there, not here. Even the keenest British federalists talk about it as a different place which they wistfully dream of being part of. Semi-detachment runs through our history. We have had shifting relationships with different parts of the continent, so that it is hard even to say with which we have most affinity. Christianity came from Rome. Later we became a southern colony of pagan Scandinavia. Our language is Germanic. We went through a transformative four-century relationship with France. We had a long economic and security relationship with the Netherlands, for a time having the same ruler. For more than a century, after the Hanoverian succession, we were a power in Germany.
Britain has been both the ally and the enemy of every great Continental state, Catholic and Protestant, monarchy, democracy and dictatorship. Its monarch even has a plausible claim to be a sherif of Islam, a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed. It has never been tempted or forced to ally with the hegemonic Continental power to share in the spoils of dominating Europe. If national identity was important, 20 miles of sea were certainly no less; and trans-oceanic connections provided global resources to oppose Continental threats and work to create a “balance of power”. So Britain was the only major European state that never became an ally or a willing satellite of either Napoleon or Hitler, but decided to resist them even when the struggle seemed hopeless. Finally, it never made a serious attempt to join a triumvirate with France and Germany to control the EU. Independence has been our watchword.
The lure of opportunity overseas pulled us away from Continental ambitions. Though the Glorious Revolution of 1688 began the “second hundred years war” with France, ending only at Waterloo, the struggle became increasingly global, fought not only on the plains of Flanders, but in India and America. After Waterloo, Britain refused to be part of the Holy Alliance, a Great Power scheme to run the Continent, becoming instead the patron and protector of independent states, including France, Belgium, Greece, Spain and Portugal.
Britain made little effort to shape the unification of Italy during the 1850s, and watched with limited concern and negligible influence as the separate German states were turned by Otto von Bismarck into a new and powerful Empire by aggressive wars against Denmark, Austria and France. Even had Britain wished to interfere it could scarcely have done so. It was never a superpower, but always a medium-sized state, sometimes having to punch above its weight but not getting into the ring at all if it could avoid it. Bismarck joked that if the British landed their army in Germany, he would have it arrested, and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli declared that Britain “was really more an Asiatic power than a European”.
Was this a great geopolitical mistake? Many who later supported European integration thought so. But Brexit proves that it was too late to alter it. The millions who emigrated over the last two centuries in search of a better life did not cross the Channel or the North Sea to become Europeans, but went to English-speaking countries across the oceans. Today, two and a half times as many British citizens live in the “Anglosphere” as in the EU, and Britain’s main ethnic minorities are from Commonwealth countries. Even when we were striving to be “at the heart of Europe”, we were less economically integrated than any other EU member, and for 20 years our trade has been increasingly moving away from the Continent.
Opinion polling shows that our views of the EU are not very different from those of our Continental neighbours – that is, unenthusiastic or worse. The difference is that they feel that they have no choice but to remain members. Economic calculation weighs. But so do the instinctive feelings that stem from geography and history. The detached or semi-detached countries – Norway, Switzerland, ourselves and the non-Eurozone member-states – are all in different ways outsiders.
Our peculiarity – or so General de Gaulle thought when he vetoed our entry into the European Economic Community – was that we were too global: “an island, sea-going, bound up, by its trade, its markets, its food supplies, with the most varied and often the most distant countries”. It has taken us half a century to realise he was right, and finally to go with the grain." )
We're not different, we are all human beings with internal organs, who need to breath air, eat food, and drink water to survive.
Working together instead of harking back to some bygone era that some people think can be rekindled and is romantic is such a backwards step, it's beyond belief.
My only hope, seeing as the referendum was carried by the older voter, though I appreciate not exclusively, and that the younger the voter was, the higher percentage wanted to stay in, is that within my daughters working life there is enough common sense to ask to rejoin.
I just have to hope they will accept us back - if I were them, I probably would not, but again, the generation of Europeans who had to deal with this little britain nonsense will have changed by then, so hopefully memories are short enough to not influence that in a negative fashion too much.
We may technically be an Island, but that does not mean we have to have an island mentality - that's a lazy reason imho, in the vein of 'god told me to'
However it goes back to some of the original arguments that what we want to achieve does not require this expensive bureaucratic institution that takes away areas of national decision making, has no reverse gear and which applies rules that are a compromise for its 20-odd members rather than one that are suitable for the UK.
A good grading bloc plus some sensible agreements to cooperate in other areas could do most of that without the downsides. As seen in other parts of the world.
The article read like a parody or a game of trigger word bingo"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
As above, part of it is about rules that are suitable for the UK vs a compromise for 20-odd members with competing priorities and interests. Like the single currency, one size doesn't fit all.pangolin said:I don't really understand the sort of nebulous fear of being ruled by the EU.
Obviously, we weren't. But if that were the case in the future, so what?
Then there is the question of the democratic deficit in the EU institutions. Well debated on here already.
I guess if you can overcome these issues then we might have a better chance of rejoining in future."I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
TBH, I am fairly relaxed about it but, to understand the different perspectives, I think in work terms.pangolin said:I don't really understand the sort of nebulous fear of being ruled by the EU.
Obviously, we weren't. But if that were the case in the future, so what?
If England, Scotland, Wales and NI are small/medium businesses, UK is a corporation and Eu is a mega corporation.
Personally, I have generally carved a career through the medium sized business sector enjoying the opportunity to have influence without being totally distanced from the coal face.
Others want totally hands on small business dynamism and small scale whilst others prefer the risk free but stale world of corporate bland.
As soon as I conceptualised the whole Eu thing this way, people’s opinions regarding the Eu made far more sense to me.
I have no wish to work in a mega corp and can see why the working class tradesmen who stand on their own two feet could think of the Eu in the same way with regard to governance.
Think of the ERG as asset strippers who want to avoid corporate oversight.
Same with US and guns. You can’t put a UK perspective on it. Think in terms of a country that formed rapidly against a violent backdrop.0 -
I forget which political journo pre-emptively tweeted that Farage would claim the deal was a betrayal. I suppose what with his anti-mask wheeze looking a bit thin, and there really not being many boats crossing the Channel in winter, he's got to try whinging about Brexit again just to make sure people don't ignore him.tailwindhome said:1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
The article was written 4 years after the referendum. People have already done the research into why people voted the way they did. Instead of reading some self-parodying Op-Ed, they can just look up all the survey results. In any case, it hardly matters to the job of actually reaching some future arrangement with the EU several months after we actually left.Stevo_666 said:
It still helps to explain why we are where we are. If it wasn't right, the referendum probably would have gone the other way.surrey_commuter said:
Yep we would not want anything that reduced national decision making.Stevo_666 said:
If you think we might rejoin in the foreseeable future then you're being too optimistic IMO.daniel_b said:
I could do, but there is no chance of that ever happening - perhaps it would have happened when I was much younger, and might have had more childish leanings towards nationalism etc, but I have gotten older, grown, and changed considerably since then.Stevo_666 said:
You could look at it like that, but recognising that we are different from our continental friends is not necessarily being insular (although one meaning of insular is 'relating to or from an island'daniel_b said:
To me this article reeks of an insular, inwards looking population here in the uk - and as it appears to regrettably be true, I find that incredibly sad, disheartening and depressing - both for myself, but even more so for the likes of my 7 year old daughter and her generation.rjsterry said:
Um... I guess it illustrates a point of view. One that ignores huge tracts of history but everyone likes a bit of mythology. Feels like someone thumbing through their Reader's Digest Encyclopedia of British History looking for events to back up their starting assumption.Stevo_666 said:Also from a more philiosophical standpoint, this might help a few people understand the current situation:
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/16/great-britain-never-never-will-european-country/
"“Britain is a European nation,” Remainers still often say when calling for the closest possible relationship with the EU after Brexit. I’m never sure what they think this means. And do our Continental neighbours agree? It is hard, perhaps impossible, really to feel the subconscious characteristics that stem from geography, history and culture. Certainly, we lucky islanders have rarely had existential worries about our “identity” or our borders. But France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary – to mention only the biggest – have experienced border disputes or territorial changes even within living memory. You can fight over these things, or you can try to transcend them. So thought Europeanism’s founding fathers, who included men from borderlands wanting to end a nightmare.
Rightly or wrongly, this can never be an instinctive British preoccupation. We could never have been at the heart of this “Europe”, with its quasi-religious mission to replace old nationalisms with an ersatz Europeanism seen as benign. “We have made Europe, now we have to make Europeans”, wrote one leading EU politician a few years back. We might theoretically understand the mistrust of popular sovereignty that has created the EU as a secretive elite power structure. But most of us can never feel this to be the inevitable price for peace. The 20th century taught us a different lesson: that the democratic nation is the bulwark of European civilisation, not its enemy. We instinctively feel that suppressing democratic choice is the truly dangerous course.
Like it or not, we are on the edge, as our eventual relationship with the EU ought to reflect. “Europe” is there, not here. Even the keenest British federalists talk about it as a different place which they wistfully dream of being part of. Semi-detachment runs through our history. We have had shifting relationships with different parts of the continent, so that it is hard even to say with which we have most affinity. Christianity came from Rome. Later we became a southern colony of pagan Scandinavia. Our language is Germanic. We went through a transformative four-century relationship with France. We had a long economic and security relationship with the Netherlands, for a time having the same ruler. For more than a century, after the Hanoverian succession, we were a power in Germany.
Britain has been both the ally and the enemy of every great Continental state, Catholic and Protestant, monarchy, democracy and dictatorship. Its monarch even has a plausible claim to be a sherif of Islam, a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed. It has never been tempted or forced to ally with the hegemonic Continental power to share in the spoils of dominating Europe. If national identity was important, 20 miles of sea were certainly no less; and trans-oceanic connections provided global resources to oppose Continental threats and work to create a “balance of power”. So Britain was the only major European state that never became an ally or a willing satellite of either Napoleon or Hitler, but decided to resist them even when the struggle seemed hopeless. Finally, it never made a serious attempt to join a triumvirate with France and Germany to control the EU. Independence has been our watchword.
The lure of opportunity overseas pulled us away from Continental ambitions. Though the Glorious Revolution of 1688 began the “second hundred years war” with France, ending only at Waterloo, the struggle became increasingly global, fought not only on the plains of Flanders, but in India and America. After Waterloo, Britain refused to be part of the Holy Alliance, a Great Power scheme to run the Continent, becoming instead the patron and protector of independent states, including France, Belgium, Greece, Spain and Portugal.
Britain made little effort to shape the unification of Italy during the 1850s, and watched with limited concern and negligible influence as the separate German states were turned by Otto von Bismarck into a new and powerful Empire by aggressive wars against Denmark, Austria and France. Even had Britain wished to interfere it could scarcely have done so. It was never a superpower, but always a medium-sized state, sometimes having to punch above its weight but not getting into the ring at all if it could avoid it. Bismarck joked that if the British landed their army in Germany, he would have it arrested, and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli declared that Britain “was really more an Asiatic power than a European”.
Was this a great geopolitical mistake? Many who later supported European integration thought so. But Brexit proves that it was too late to alter it. The millions who emigrated over the last two centuries in search of a better life did not cross the Channel or the North Sea to become Europeans, but went to English-speaking countries across the oceans. Today, two and a half times as many British citizens live in the “Anglosphere” as in the EU, and Britain’s main ethnic minorities are from Commonwealth countries. Even when we were striving to be “at the heart of Europe”, we were less economically integrated than any other EU member, and for 20 years our trade has been increasingly moving away from the Continent.
Opinion polling shows that our views of the EU are not very different from those of our Continental neighbours – that is, unenthusiastic or worse. The difference is that they feel that they have no choice but to remain members. Economic calculation weighs. But so do the instinctive feelings that stem from geography and history. The detached or semi-detached countries – Norway, Switzerland, ourselves and the non-Eurozone member-states – are all in different ways outsiders.
Our peculiarity – or so General de Gaulle thought when he vetoed our entry into the European Economic Community – was that we were too global: “an island, sea-going, bound up, by its trade, its markets, its food supplies, with the most varied and often the most distant countries”. It has taken us half a century to realise he was right, and finally to go with the grain." )
We're not different, we are all human beings with internal organs, who need to breath air, eat food, and drink water to survive.
Working together instead of harking back to some bygone era that some people think can be rekindled and is romantic is such a backwards step, it's beyond belief.
My only hope, seeing as the referendum was carried by the older voter, though I appreciate not exclusively, and that the younger the voter was, the higher percentage wanted to stay in, is that within my daughters working life there is enough common sense to ask to rejoin.
I just have to hope they will accept us back - if I were them, I probably would not, but again, the generation of Europeans who had to deal with this little britain nonsense will have changed by then, so hopefully memories are short enough to not influence that in a negative fashion too much.
We may technically be an Island, but that does not mean we have to have an island mentality - that's a lazy reason imho, in the vein of 'god told me to'
However it goes back to some of the original arguments that what we want to achieve does not require this expensive bureaucratic institution that takes away areas of national decision making, has no reverse gear and which applies rules that are a compromise for its 20-odd members rather than one that are suitable for the UK.
A good grading bloc plus some sensible agreements to cooperate in other areas could do most of that without the downsides. As seen in other parts of the world.
The article read like a parody or a game of trigger word bingo1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
He ought to start on about all the foreign truck drivers coming over here and not leaving again.rjsterry said:
I forget which political journo pre-emptively tweeted that Farage would claim the deal was a betrayal. I suppose what with his anti-mask wheeze looking a bit thin, and there really not being many boats crossing the Channel in winter, he's got to try whinging about Brexit again just to make sure people don't ignore him.tailwindhome said:1 -
he's just a twitter version of poopstirPross said:
He ought to start on about all the foreign truck drivers coming over here and not leaving again.rjsterry said:
I forget which political journo pre-emptively tweeted that Farage would claim the deal was a betrayal. I suppose what with his anti-mask wheeze looking a bit thin, and there really not being many boats crossing the Channel in winter, he's got to try whinging about Brexit again just to make sure people don't ignore him.tailwindhome said:1 -
Nothing wrong with hindsight in this case. As mentioned, I was trying to help those who seemingly still can't understand how something so ghastly could have happened...rjsterry said:
The article was written 4 years after the referendum. People have already done the research into why people voted the way they did. Instead of reading some self-parodying Op-Ed, they can just look up all the survey results. In any case, it hardly matters to the job of actually reaching some future arrangement with the EU several months after we actually left.Stevo_666 said:
It still helps to explain why we are where we are. If it wasn't right, the referendum probably would have gone the other way.surrey_commuter said:
Yep we would not want anything that reduced national decision making.Stevo_666 said:
If you think we might rejoin in the foreseeable future then you're being too optimistic IMO.daniel_b said:
I could do, but there is no chance of that ever happening - perhaps it would have happened when I was much younger, and might have had more childish leanings towards nationalism etc, but I have gotten older, grown, and changed considerably since then.Stevo_666 said:
You could look at it like that, but recognising that we are different from our continental friends is not necessarily being insular (although one meaning of insular is 'relating to or from an island'daniel_b said:
To me this article reeks of an insular, inwards looking population here in the uk - and as it appears to regrettably be true, I find that incredibly sad, disheartening and depressing - both for myself, but even more so for the likes of my 7 year old daughter and her generation.rjsterry said:
Um... I guess it illustrates a point of view. One that ignores huge tracts of history but everyone likes a bit of mythology. Feels like someone thumbing through their Reader's Digest Encyclopedia of British History looking for events to back up their starting assumption.Stevo_666 said:Also from a more philiosophical standpoint, this might help a few people understand the current situation:
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/16/great-britain-never-never-will-european-country/
"“Britain is a European nation,” Remainers still often say when calling for the closest possible relationship with the EU after Brexit. I’m never sure what they think this means. And do our Continental neighbours agree? It is hard, perhaps impossible, really to feel the subconscious characteristics that stem from geography, history and culture. Certainly, we lucky islanders have rarely had existential worries about our “identity” or our borders. But France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary – to mention only the biggest – have experienced border disputes or territorial changes even within living memory. You can fight over these things, or you can try to transcend them. So thought Europeanism’s founding fathers, who included men from borderlands wanting to end a nightmare.
Rightly or wrongly, this can never be an instinctive British preoccupation. We could never have been at the heart of this “Europe”, with its quasi-religious mission to replace old nationalisms with an ersatz Europeanism seen as benign. “We have made Europe, now we have to make Europeans”, wrote one leading EU politician a few years back. We might theoretically understand the mistrust of popular sovereignty that has created the EU as a secretive elite power structure. But most of us can never feel this to be the inevitable price for peace. The 20th century taught us a different lesson: that the democratic nation is the bulwark of European civilisation, not its enemy. We instinctively feel that suppressing democratic choice is the truly dangerous course.
Like it or not, we are on the edge, as our eventual relationship with the EU ought to reflect. “Europe” is there, not here. Even the keenest British federalists talk about it as a different place which they wistfully dream of being part of. Semi-detachment runs through our history. We have had shifting relationships with different parts of the continent, so that it is hard even to say with which we have most affinity. Christianity came from Rome. Later we became a southern colony of pagan Scandinavia. Our language is Germanic. We went through a transformative four-century relationship with France. We had a long economic and security relationship with the Netherlands, for a time having the same ruler. For more than a century, after the Hanoverian succession, we were a power in Germany.
Britain has been both the ally and the enemy of every great Continental state, Catholic and Protestant, monarchy, democracy and dictatorship. Its monarch even has a plausible claim to be a sherif of Islam, a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed. It has never been tempted or forced to ally with the hegemonic Continental power to share in the spoils of dominating Europe. If national identity was important, 20 miles of sea were certainly no less; and trans-oceanic connections provided global resources to oppose Continental threats and work to create a “balance of power”. So Britain was the only major European state that never became an ally or a willing satellite of either Napoleon or Hitler, but decided to resist them even when the struggle seemed hopeless. Finally, it never made a serious attempt to join a triumvirate with France and Germany to control the EU. Independence has been our watchword.
The lure of opportunity overseas pulled us away from Continental ambitions. Though the Glorious Revolution of 1688 began the “second hundred years war” with France, ending only at Waterloo, the struggle became increasingly global, fought not only on the plains of Flanders, but in India and America. After Waterloo, Britain refused to be part of the Holy Alliance, a Great Power scheme to run the Continent, becoming instead the patron and protector of independent states, including France, Belgium, Greece, Spain and Portugal.
Britain made little effort to shape the unification of Italy during the 1850s, and watched with limited concern and negligible influence as the separate German states were turned by Otto von Bismarck into a new and powerful Empire by aggressive wars against Denmark, Austria and France. Even had Britain wished to interfere it could scarcely have done so. It was never a superpower, but always a medium-sized state, sometimes having to punch above its weight but not getting into the ring at all if it could avoid it. Bismarck joked that if the British landed their army in Germany, he would have it arrested, and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli declared that Britain “was really more an Asiatic power than a European”.
Was this a great geopolitical mistake? Many who later supported European integration thought so. But Brexit proves that it was too late to alter it. The millions who emigrated over the last two centuries in search of a better life did not cross the Channel or the North Sea to become Europeans, but went to English-speaking countries across the oceans. Today, two and a half times as many British citizens live in the “Anglosphere” as in the EU, and Britain’s main ethnic minorities are from Commonwealth countries. Even when we were striving to be “at the heart of Europe”, we were less economically integrated than any other EU member, and for 20 years our trade has been increasingly moving away from the Continent.
Opinion polling shows that our views of the EU are not very different from those of our Continental neighbours – that is, unenthusiastic or worse. The difference is that they feel that they have no choice but to remain members. Economic calculation weighs. But so do the instinctive feelings that stem from geography and history. The detached or semi-detached countries – Norway, Switzerland, ourselves and the non-Eurozone member-states – are all in different ways outsiders.
Our peculiarity – or so General de Gaulle thought when he vetoed our entry into the European Economic Community – was that we were too global: “an island, sea-going, bound up, by its trade, its markets, its food supplies, with the most varied and often the most distant countries”. It has taken us half a century to realise he was right, and finally to go with the grain." )
We're not different, we are all human beings with internal organs, who need to breath air, eat food, and drink water to survive.
Working together instead of harking back to some bygone era that some people think can be rekindled and is romantic is such a backwards step, it's beyond belief.
My only hope, seeing as the referendum was carried by the older voter, though I appreciate not exclusively, and that the younger the voter was, the higher percentage wanted to stay in, is that within my daughters working life there is enough common sense to ask to rejoin.
I just have to hope they will accept us back - if I were them, I probably would not, but again, the generation of Europeans who had to deal with this little britain nonsense will have changed by then, so hopefully memories are short enough to not influence that in a negative fashion too much.
We may technically be an Island, but that does not mean we have to have an island mentality - that's a lazy reason imho, in the vein of 'god told me to'
However it goes back to some of the original arguments that what we want to achieve does not require this expensive bureaucratic institution that takes away areas of national decision making, has no reverse gear and which applies rules that are a compromise for its 20-odd members rather than one that are suitable for the UK.
A good grading bloc plus some sensible agreements to cooperate in other areas could do most of that without the downsides. As seen in other parts of the world.
The article read like a parody or a game of trigger word bingo"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
The fact that something happened doesn't automatically prove every reason that gets proposed for it happening, correct.- Genesis Croix de Fer
- Dolan Tuono0 -
You don't understand just how difficult a single currency would be for the UK. But then you do like to call those with a different view names so maybe that is the depth of your arguments.surrey_commuter said:
Fvckwits would never understand the argument, just tell them it had the Queen’s head on it and was their favourite colour and they will love it.john80 said:Good luck selling the euro to the UK population. This would be mandatory for any future nation joining.
0 -
Consider this - say the EU adopted the Pound as a single currency.john80 said:
You don't understand just how difficult a single currency would be for the UK. But then you do like to call those with a different view names so maybe that is the depth of your arguments.surrey_commuter said:
Fvckwits would never understand the argument, just tell them it had the Queen’s head on it and was their favourite colour and they will love it.john80 said:Good luck selling the euro to the UK population. This would be mandatory for any future nation joining.
Now how many of the objections would disappear?0 -
Deal
Prepare for a lot of
*XXX Won!
*We always knew we'd get a deal
*sOVrEigNty!!
*Got Brexit Done
*better off before/now
*Something about fish
I predict these will impact every GB election from now until the day we rejoin...We're in danger of confusing passion with incompetence
- @ddraver0 -
@surrey_commuter
You gotta love the French high stakes strategy.
Absolutely stone cold.
And as populist as anything BoJo does lol
0
