Any plan that included Trump winning was a bit shortsighted though.
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Brexit deal in sight? UK urges EU to move on fishing rights
- Thread starter SilentPanda
- Start date
- News
True, but crashing out is the part of the plan that matters to them. Not having Trump around to make a quick and easy deal where they sell off the NHS and reduce food standards is a minor inconvenience.
BoJo has been wanting a hard Brexit since before Trump was even remotely likely to be elected.
I still believe BoJo wants no deal myself, even though I'm really hoping to be proven wrong in a couple of days.
It is a major issue: how else can they make bank if they can't sell out to the US?
Boris didn't want a hard Brexit, he didn't want Brexit at all. He wanted a small Remain win to get more power in the Tories. Leave winning was problematic for him.
No deal is corrupt COVID contracts and more turned to 11 so still think it's highly likely regardless of the immediate fallout, the Tories have 4 years to suck the UK dry and make it whatever hellscape they please while robbing us blind.
I think people underestimate how attractive no deal is to these people and their friends, it's a buffet and a power grab of epic proportions and so what if the public gets mad, 4 years free reign and possibly more as they know how to sway people into voting for them, fear, hate and lies. Tories are in their element and untouchable, they act like it more every day and nothing pushes back.
To them it really doesn't matter, if they get mega rich and things go to pot, who cares, they might sign a better EU deal down the line but in the meantime, they feast. There is always an out, they can walk away and let others fix the mess but as long as they have their moment to make maximum return, that's fine to them.
I think people underestimate how attractive no deal is to these people and their friends, it's a buffet and a power grab of epic proportions and so what if the public gets mad, 4 years free reign and possibly more as they know how to sway people into voting for them, fear, hate and lies. Tories are in their element and untouchable, they act like it more every day and nothing pushes back.
To them it really doesn't matter, if they get mega rich and things go to pot, who cares, they might sign a better EU deal down the line but in the meantime, they feast. There is always an out, they can walk away and let others fix the mess but as long as they have their moment to make maximum return, that's fine to them.
The fish is a sticking point because it's easy to sell to people who are less politically/economically savvy as "ours", because it's fish caught in "our" water. Never mind that it's actually of little value to the UK economy and relies on selling a lot of that fish to the EU or that in terms of number employed it's rather miniscule, (e.g. the collapse of Debenhams alone is going to cost the jobs equivalent to~50% of the people in the UK fishing industry), but the same people fighting so hard about the fishing industry inevitably won't be contributing 50% of the effort there to keep Debenhams around.
It's just the damage it will wreak. Either many of us have been fooled by leftie propaganda or there really is a bigger picture concerning Utopia for all because I am really not getting it personally. The economic impacts of a No Deal Brexit will outweigh the financial consequences of COVID on the UK. Having lived through Thatcher, Major, Blair, Cameron et al, this just seems really, really intentionally destructive and at the worst possible time. I keep hoping that more sensible heads prevail, but cliches and platitudes tend not to do it.
Yeah that makes sense, I just can't fathom us choosing a no-deal Brexit because of just this issue.
The people in charge aren't using it to choose to no-deal Brexit, it'll just be their excuse. The people in charge are shooting for a no deal brexit in order to make a lot of money at the taxpayers expense (see also: all the covid contract nonsense for them and their chums).
The UK populace basically chose a no deal brexit at the last election for reasons I can't even really begin to fathom. Well, other than the last time I was in a UK voting booth, which I guess was in 2017, in the middle of nowhere, where some guy in front of me who clearly wasn't able to feed/care for himself properly said "let's all pray for a brexit", because he'd evidently bought in to whatever lies he'd been sold about sunlight lands outside of the EU. Probably a lot of poor saps like him who chose to make their lives even harder and didn't realise it...
Because the position of both major parties was let's get Brexit over so we can do real things.
Fish won't cause a no deal. If there's a no deal it will be a desire for no deal. I personally don't believe there is a desire by Boris for a no deal, this is just yet another bullshit Tory game of playing chicken with Brexit until the last second. The whole thing has been internal party political games since 2016. Yes, there are Tories who do want a no-deal but they aren't running the negotiations and don't wield the power they had when the margins in Parliament were slim; a trade deal will easily get through Parliament now.
Like clockwork, Boris will get some absurd 1% concession on fish worth less than resurfacing a pothole ridden high street and parade an 'incredible' Brexit deal, conveniently ignoring how much economic damage has been done by this awful negotiating strategy for the last 4 years.
Nah. Boris has wanted to leave Europe without a deal for ages because he believes it makes us look strong (and because then he could use it as an excuse to privatise even more institutions and sell them to Americans) and he was banking on Trump winning a second term so that these two, strong, independent countries that do not bow to external pressures, would make an incredible trade agreement that would keep us in the clear.
Then Trump lost and now Boris is stuck with the very sombre realisation that America isn't interested in a UK that's not a foot in the door for them into Europe and that Trump's replacement is far less inclined than him to side with the UK when it breaks international law.
So Boris is going to have to start making concessions and allowances and scale back on his demands because the last thing he needs is to make the UK an economic pariah to both Europe and America.
Jesus this is infuriating. Even when it is your own business, these morons couldn't be arsed to do 5 mins of research. Just sitting and ruminating on it for a few minutes would have been enough to realise that Brexit is Godzilla-level stupid. A quick couple of googles can easily dispel the Brexiteer spells.
On BoJo, I honestly don't think he cares how we leave or what deals we do afterwards. He cares about himself and that's pretty much it.
He claimed remain was the only sensible option before hitching his wagon to the Leave campaign because it was politically expedient.
He's surrounded himself with incompetent cronies who know they have no chance of holding down similar jobs if he isn't there, so as to maintain loyalty.
While I think there's plenty of people below him who will push hard for a no deal Brexit, I honestly think he doesn't really care anyway. He got what he wanted, which was the top job in the land, now he's largely at the whim of those more driven by him. Previously that was Cummings but I think a lot of the people he left behind will push into equally mad directions.
That fisher glad that business was booming because he was taking advantage of a falling pound is something else. Reminds me of this interview from America where a Trump supporter said he's making more money than ever, and when pressed, said he worked for a debt-relief company. Unless you're hedge-fund rich, disaster capitalism will always be a losing game. Anyone who goes from making five-figures to high-five/low-six-figures gets crushed when the pendulum eventually swings back.
The deal that May was negotiating was the withdrawal agreement. That was completed, then slightly revised back to an earlier version when Johnson took over, signed, and is in effect.
The current set of negotiations are a separate set of negotiations, not a continuation of the process started under May's leadership.
Either fish has become too emotional a political issue for the UK government to easily let go of or (and I think this alternative is more likely) the UK government tried to artificially inflate the perceived importance of fishing to try to make it seem like a bigger bargaining chip than it really is so that the EU would give them more for eventually conceding on the issue, and now the UK government is getting annoyed that the EU, rather than offering big concessions over fish, is actively trying to solve the issue of fishing rights.
With fishing, the difficulty is that there is a ton of information out there, and not all of it is easy to parse, and there's plenty of people and publications parsing it in disingenuous and/or oversimplified ways.
Someone involved in fishing as a livelihood could very easily be looking at a small-picture snapshot of the industry where they feel limited by EU CFP catch quotas and perceive fishing vessels from other EU countries fishing close to their home ports as unwelcome competition (and likely heard stories about those vessels not adhering to catch quotas). Their perception of leaving the EU would be that their quotas go up, other EU countries don't get to fish in UK waters, and they'd continue being able to sell their own (increased) catch into the EU because there'd be a quick and easy trade deal.
In 2016 there were indeed plenty of sites that could be found on Google dispelling those myths. There were, however, plenty of alternative sites that would also have shown up, actively promoting those myths, some of which would have been difficult to disprove for anyone with just a cursory knowledge of the EU (which was ~99.5% of people in the UK in 2016).
In the case of this guy, yes, he clearly did no research, but even if he had, there's no guarantee that he wouldn't have just found some nonsense Brexit-supporting corner of the internet that assured him that the EU was wrecking his life and that voting to Leave would be the best thing he'd ever done. Sadly, what was necessary was not a bit of research in 2016, it was a societal effort to remove EU myths from the UK's national discourse starting at least a decade previously, and that never happened.
I suppose a lot of this goes all the way back to a complete lack of critical thinking within education.
I totally accept your point that the sentiment in the UK is was so geared to view the EU as a malignant entity, it would be incredibly hard to de-programme in such a short space of time. Especially when the Remain campaign was so lackluster and Leave was spreading all sorts of nonsense.
Still, I can't help but apply some personal responsibility at the doors of these kinds of blokes (and the majority of them are men). While EU law is difficult to understand, it doesn't take much critical thought to work out that cutting ourselves off from Europe would make our lives significantly harder. Especially if you business actually involves exporting to the EU!
Maybe the damage was already done but I personally can't totally excuse those who voted for this, same as those who voted for Trump or Erdogan or whoever. There is an abandonment of societal good in those choices, in the admission that they think this person would make their own lives easier.
I'm getting way to philosophical though.
That's as perfect a summary of the whole Brexit I have read as any.
Trying to outbureaucracy the largest bureaucracy on the planet is a monumentally stupid idea, overtaken only by the likes of "Florida man tries to steal chicken from alligator".
At least this guy can now at least see the error of his ways, which is a lot better than many. The Brexit boat has now sailed, but hopefully if the country realises how stitched up they have been by the time the next general election rolls around we might be able to get the Tories out, which is the only way we stand any chance at fixing the mess the last few years have created in addition to the Pandemic.
Yes, there's definitely a large level of personal responsibility here, and I don't want to absolve that particular guy of any (especially since he didn't do any research, even faulty research). I suppose a a quick summation of what I'm trying to say is that if he had sat down to figure things out in 2016, it likely would have taken him hours cross-referencing stuff, rather than five minutes on Google. So there's a level of personal responsibility in him not taking even a few minutes, and a level of societal responsibility that doing that quite likely wouldn't have been sufficient (or would have led him to the wrong answer).
Yes, it's weird, their perception of how the EU conducts negotiations has been way off right from the start, and although there were some improvements in that understanding during the course of the past four years, those have tended to be temporary. They're still publicly conceptualising the whole process as being something akin to a card game rather than expressing any kind of understanding that it's a whole lot more like a menu.