Raheem
Well-Known Member
I don't much shortage of irony here. Plenty for everyone.
Is Brexit actually going to happen?
- Thread starter Kaka Tim
- Start date
I don't much shortage of irony here. Plenty for everyone.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Your previous answer implied that you did not know what 'proposed measures' are. Now you state categorically that you have none. If you want to dodge questions by utilising pedantry then you need to get better at it. I'm sure we've been here before.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
i said what i understood by 'proposed measures'; your understanding of the term might be different. you are held back by your inability to phrase a decent question.
next
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
i'm sure you'll lead us back here again
bimble
floofy
The main bulk of funding from uk gov agencies goes toward programs that aim to 'encourage young entrepreneurs' / diversify and reform economies . eg main expenditures last year here. Fair bit of it clearly states the aim of reducing migration from these countries.
andysays
Love and solidarity
As a Leave voter, I'm kept pretty busy with generalised racism and sabotaging the GFA, but what little free time I do have is devoted to constructing Fortress UK in my basement out of recycled building materials.
I assume my fellow Leave voters are all doing the same...
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
you should have got the airfix fortress uk.
bemused
Well-Known Member
I watched the Sunday politics last weekend and Caroline Flint essentially say that she wouldn't support and EEA deal because it wouldn't inhibit free movement. MPs seemed to have condensed the entire Brexit process down to the free movement issue.
I suspect if the EU offered an EEA type deal without freedom of movement the UK would pull their arm off - and all the noise about 'rule taker, not maker' would fly out the window.
That interview is well worth watching because about three quarters in Chris Leslie suggests she talks like Rees-Mogg which made me chuckle.
Putting their country first always
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
they'll all fall meekly into line
sealion
Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive
FfyPutting their countryside stately home first always
Cunts
MickiQ
In My Defence I was left Unsupervised
Of all the countless words written on the subject of Brexit never have I seen the situation so accurately and concisely summed up.
ska invita
back on the other side
Sounds right to me....debate on free movement will be entertaining
never will there have been so much squirming by so few
Winot
I wholeheartedley agree with your viewpoint
Long article on ways in which FoM could be tempered within the EEA:
Brexit: free movement and the Single Market
Brexit: free movement and the Single Market
ska invita
back on the other side
Key bit is
"Therefore, there is no legal bar to variations being negotiated, given the political will. "
The EU need show zero political will. The only card the UK really has to play is No Deal drop out, and its only going to get increasingly impossibile to bluff that, nor to actually do it with parliaments approval.
All the EU need do is stick to their position and the UK will come crawling in the end. That's how it looks anyhow.
The exceptions they made to the likes of Lichtenstein were in the interest of a functioning union. To let the UK eat closed borders cake and have it is against the Unions interest, so seems very unlikely to me.
pocketscience
Well-Known Member
I'm not seeing why Lichtenstein having limits on FoM is "in the interest of a functioning union". Or at least not in the context of why the UK having limits would be against the unions interest.*
*Just woke from a nap - maybe i'm missing the obvious.
philosophical
Well-Known Member
I am not sure this is allowed, but the article I have copied and pasted below is from behind the Irish Times paywall. It is by
Fintan O'Toole. He mashes up The Italian Job and The Wicker man to inspire him with this article. Those interested might like to read it.
Brexit traps the DUP inside the Wicker Man
Boris Johnson’s outburst reminds us that Brexit is an English nationalist project – it cannot allow the English bulldog to be wagged by an Irish tail.
What’s the best cinematic version of Brexit? I’ve previously suggested the final sequence of The Italian Job, where the truck is suspended half way over a ravine and the crew can’t get at their great pile of gold bars without tipping themselves into the abyss. But from an Irish point of view, we probably need a double bill in which it is shown alongside another British classic from the same era, The Wicker Man. Some horror fans have already noted the prescience of Summerisle, where most of the film is set. It is an Atlantic island that has cut itself off from the mainland and adopted a crazy cult. The cult is led by Lord Summerisle, a man with a self-consciously orotund vocabulary, mad hair and a great line in sacrificing the young generation for his bonkers beliefs – Christopher Lee as Boris Johnson, in other words.
But the most interesting parallel is the arrival on Summerisle of Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Neil Howie, innocently intent on doing his duty of investigating a suspected murder. He thinks of himself as embodying the majesty of the British state. He is upright. He is judgmental. He is righteous. And he is very devoutly Presbyterian, possibly even of the Wee Free variety. He is, of course, the Democratic Unionist Party. Howie becomes increasingly aware that he has no idea where he really is, that he has taken a one-way trip to a place with its own fatal laws. Lord Summerisle eventually summons him to his horrible death: “We confer upon you a rare gift, these days – a martyr’s death. You will not only have life eternal, but you will sit with the saints among the elect. Come!”
A 500km-long border barrier with turnstiles that open when we brush our passports against the 'gizmo'?
It is true that Lord Boris did not say these words in that private dinner with Tory diehards last week. But what he says on the recording leaked to Buzzfeed places Irish unionism right inside the giant Wicker Man with the torches just about to touch the kindling. It is not so much the idiocy of Johnson’s repeated belief that an international border is just like moving around London, though having previously compared the Irish frontier to passing from one London borough to another, he now compared it to travelling on the Tube: “You know, when I was mayor of London … I could tell where you all were just when you swiped your Oyster card over a Tube terminal, a Tube gizmo. The idea that we can’t track movement of goods, it’s just nonsense.”
‘This folly’
Fatuous as these comparisons are (a 500km-long border barrier with turnstiles that open when we brush our passports against the “gizmo”?), the real point is what came next, the hissy fit about this whole bloody Irish border business: “It’s so small and there are so few firms that actually use that Border regularly, it’s just beyond belief that we’re allowing the tail to wag the dog in this way. We’re allowing the whole of our agenda to be dictated by this folly.” Infantile as this is, it expresses a kind of truth – one that is not yet spoken in public but soon will be. The truth is that the Brexiteers don’t give a flying frig for Ireland, North or South – and that includes Irish unionism and the DUP.
The DUP has gone one further than poor Sergeant Howie and helped to construct the wicker cage in which unionism will be torched.
Johnson and his chums ignored Northern Ireland in their Brexit campaign. That seemed to be the ultimate height of irresponsibility but they have now gone further – they are exploiting it. Their current strategy is to use the EU’s offer of a special deal for Northern Ireland, preserving many of the advantages of the single market even while leaving it, as an opening through which they can force the EU to concede the same have cake/eat cake privileges to Britain. They are trying to turn the sympathy that comes from a horrible conflict, in which nearly 2 per cent of the population was killed or injured, into a way of getting one over on Michel Barnier. This is political depravity.
The Brexit balloon
But it won’t work and when it doesn’t, the rage that Johnson uttered in private will become more open and explicit. The Brexit balloon is supposed to soar into the skies when it cuts the ropes that bind it to Brussels. But its occupants are realising that there is another rope that keeps them earthbound – the one that ties them to Newry and Strabane. To salvage their fantasies, they will cut that rope too. Brexit is an English nationalist project – it cannot allow the English bulldog to be wagged by an Irish tail. If the tail has to be cut off – sorry but pass the shears old man.
The DUP thinks it’s the dog of course, but it’s not. To the Brexit believers, we are all part of the same Irish “folly”. The DUP has gone one further than poor Sergeant Howie and helped to construct the wicker cage in which unionism will be torched to appease the gods of Brexit. It could still save itself by voting with the opposition when the EU Withdrawal Bill returns to the House of Commons today. Or it can murmur ecstatically Kipling’s Ulster 1912: “We are the sacrifice.”
Fintan O'Toole. He mashes up The Italian Job and The Wicker man to inspire him with this article. Those interested might like to read it.
Brexit traps the DUP inside the Wicker Man
Boris Johnson’s outburst reminds us that Brexit is an English nationalist project – it cannot allow the English bulldog to be wagged by an Irish tail.
What’s the best cinematic version of Brexit? I’ve previously suggested the final sequence of The Italian Job, where the truck is suspended half way over a ravine and the crew can’t get at their great pile of gold bars without tipping themselves into the abyss. But from an Irish point of view, we probably need a double bill in which it is shown alongside another British classic from the same era, The Wicker Man. Some horror fans have already noted the prescience of Summerisle, where most of the film is set. It is an Atlantic island that has cut itself off from the mainland and adopted a crazy cult. The cult is led by Lord Summerisle, a man with a self-consciously orotund vocabulary, mad hair and a great line in sacrificing the young generation for his bonkers beliefs – Christopher Lee as Boris Johnson, in other words.
But the most interesting parallel is the arrival on Summerisle of Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Neil Howie, innocently intent on doing his duty of investigating a suspected murder. He thinks of himself as embodying the majesty of the British state. He is upright. He is judgmental. He is righteous. And he is very devoutly Presbyterian, possibly even of the Wee Free variety. He is, of course, the Democratic Unionist Party. Howie becomes increasingly aware that he has no idea where he really is, that he has taken a one-way trip to a place with its own fatal laws. Lord Summerisle eventually summons him to his horrible death: “We confer upon you a rare gift, these days – a martyr’s death. You will not only have life eternal, but you will sit with the saints among the elect. Come!”
A 500km-long border barrier with turnstiles that open when we brush our passports against the 'gizmo'?
It is true that Lord Boris did not say these words in that private dinner with Tory diehards last week. But what he says on the recording leaked to Buzzfeed places Irish unionism right inside the giant Wicker Man with the torches just about to touch the kindling. It is not so much the idiocy of Johnson’s repeated belief that an international border is just like moving around London, though having previously compared the Irish frontier to passing from one London borough to another, he now compared it to travelling on the Tube: “You know, when I was mayor of London … I could tell where you all were just when you swiped your Oyster card over a Tube terminal, a Tube gizmo. The idea that we can’t track movement of goods, it’s just nonsense.”
‘This folly’
Fatuous as these comparisons are (a 500km-long border barrier with turnstiles that open when we brush our passports against the “gizmo”?), the real point is what came next, the hissy fit about this whole bloody Irish border business: “It’s so small and there are so few firms that actually use that Border regularly, it’s just beyond belief that we’re allowing the tail to wag the dog in this way. We’re allowing the whole of our agenda to be dictated by this folly.” Infantile as this is, it expresses a kind of truth – one that is not yet spoken in public but soon will be. The truth is that the Brexiteers don’t give a flying frig for Ireland, North or South – and that includes Irish unionism and the DUP.
The DUP has gone one further than poor Sergeant Howie and helped to construct the wicker cage in which unionism will be torched.
Johnson and his chums ignored Northern Ireland in their Brexit campaign. That seemed to be the ultimate height of irresponsibility but they have now gone further – they are exploiting it. Their current strategy is to use the EU’s offer of a special deal for Northern Ireland, preserving many of the advantages of the single market even while leaving it, as an opening through which they can force the EU to concede the same have cake/eat cake privileges to Britain. They are trying to turn the sympathy that comes from a horrible conflict, in which nearly 2 per cent of the population was killed or injured, into a way of getting one over on Michel Barnier. This is political depravity.
The Brexit balloon
But it won’t work and when it doesn’t, the rage that Johnson uttered in private will become more open and explicit. The Brexit balloon is supposed to soar into the skies when it cuts the ropes that bind it to Brussels. But its occupants are realising that there is another rope that keeps them earthbound – the one that ties them to Newry and Strabane. To salvage their fantasies, they will cut that rope too. Brexit is an English nationalist project – it cannot allow the English bulldog to be wagged by an Irish tail. If the tail has to be cut off – sorry but pass the shears old man.
The DUP thinks it’s the dog of course, but it’s not. To the Brexit believers, we are all part of the same Irish “folly”. The DUP has gone one further than poor Sergeant Howie and helped to construct the wicker cage in which unionism will be torched to appease the gods of Brexit. It could still save itself by voting with the opposition when the EU Withdrawal Bill returns to the House of Commons today. Or it can murmur ecstatically Kipling’s Ulster 1912: “We are the sacrifice.”
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