Brexit : May can still avoid Brexit train wreck - but she will have to take a new line

[OnDoutside]

This is an article from one of the foremost Irish Economists, Colm McCarthy.

I think I'm restricted in the amount of the article I can post here but there's a free signup for anyone interested below

May can still avoid Brexit train wreck - but she will have to take a new line

The EU-27 won't call the UK's bluff despite its negotiating stance bordering on fantasy

'What the hell does your government think it's doing?" a former Conservative minister asked the Irish Times' London correspondent, Denis Staunton, last week. "Do they not know the pressure she'll come under to just walk away?" The UK Prime Minister Theresa May has already capitulated to pressure from the ultra Brexiteers in her party and has chosen a costly and disruptive route to departure from the European Union. These post-referendum choices are the source of the difficulties over the Irish border and of the bewilderment in Europe about the UK government's negotiating objectives revealed in the leaked memo from the Irish foreign affairs department last week.

The British electorate chose to depart the EU but it is the British government that has chosen to implement this decision in a manner that has created the stand-off with Europe, concerns about Britain's longer-term economic prospects and conflict over the Irish border.

SNIP

Nigel Dodds, the Democratic Unionist Party's deputy leader, told a BBC interviewer last week that he favoured a walk-away position for the UK in the upcoming negotiations on the withdrawal deal. No deal is better than a bad deal according to Dodds, at least as a negotiating tactic, in line with the position expounded regularly by bravura Brexiteers in London. But bluffing in negotiations does not work if your counterparty knows for sure that your stated preference is a bluff. And a no-deal outcome for the UK, including Northern Ireland, would be a chaotic train wreck, as the bravura Brexiteers must surely understand. Michel Barnier and his EU-27 negotiating team regard the no-deal preference as nonsensical and have been ignoring the bluffers.

Neither Northern Ireland nor the Republic should welcome a hard border down the Irish Sea: as Dodds quite correctly pointed out, NI does far more trade with mainland Britain than it does with the Republic, and he must know that the same is true for the Republic.
Speaking later to Sky News, Dodds had this to say about the position of the Irish government: "Their real aim is to try to get to a situation where either they try to force the United Kingdom as a whole to stay within the customs union, which is in their interests clearly. Or, if they fail that, to at least force Northern Ireland to stay within the customs union and the single market…"

The DUP chose to campaign for Britain's departure from the EU, as was its entitlement. But the DUP has yet to explain why the form of departure chosen by May and her colleagues is in Northern Ireland's interests. Why would it be a bad outcome for Northern Ireland if the UK (all of it) left the EU but stayed in the single market and customs union, Varadkar's preference, minimising economic damage and preserving an open border?

https://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/colm-mccarthy/may-can-still-avoid-brexit-train-wreck-but-she-will-have-to-take-a-new-line-36353480.html

[Pope George Ringo II]

1. Unfortunately, Brexit itself is the train wreck.

Mitigating that damage is one thing, but there's just no positive outcome if we continue to go forward with this thing.

[OnDoutside]

3. There has to come a point where the Pro-EU Tories stand up, or that train will crash.

[Pope George Ringo II]

5. They're set on respecting the referendum

Of course, the referendum was built on lies and no actual details of a finished deal. The bottom line is probably that the train is going to crash, and it's going to be a tragedy.

[OnDoutside]

8. That's only a smokescreen, the Tories have been split

Over Europe since they joined 45 years ago. Their fear is just like the GOP, if the moderates stand up to the Looney right, they could split the party. Sometimes you have to do what's right.

[Pope George Ringo II]

11. Corbyn doesn't help, either.

He seems to think the EU is the major obstacle to a workers' paradise.

[OnDoutside]

13. Yes, that's true. The Labour Party really got unlucky with this clutz. The ONLY positive was his

about turn on Brexit. This piled the pressure even more, on May.

[Pope George Ringo II]

15. There's a lot of blame to go around on this disaster

But even the sane moderates don't feel like they've got a mandate to fix it because of that damned pie-in-the-sky referendum.

[OnDoutside]

17. There's enough information at this stage for them to see that it is a disaster. In that climate,

they should have the nerve to start demanding a final Yes/No Referendum. We, in Ireland, had to have a second go at the Nice Treaty !

[Pope George Ringo II]

19. Nice is actually one of the arguments against it in a Leaver's mind.

The EU is accused of having a history in Ireland, among other places, of voting until it gets the desired result. The Leavers didn't vote to leave once because of honest, informed reality. A second go on the final terms--and I want to see that second referendum on an actual set of terms--is only going to wind up the cranks again, this time on an EU conspiracy.

In all honesty, I think we have to accept that if you could reason with these people, they would never have voted for Brexit in the first place.

[OnDoutside]

20. Looks like the Irish government won't collapse, as Frances Fitzgerald

Is set to resign, thus making the no confidence vote redundant.

More emails emerged last night showing she knew and was advised how to handle it in the media. Toast.

[Pope George Ringo II]

21. Indeed.

Now we just have to hope that Brexit doesn't make the Irish economy collapse.

[OnDoutside]

22. One thing we will have to face up to is that 45 years into the EU, we still have so much of

our trade with the UK, largely because it was easier to trade with a country that also spoke English. My son is currently in Primary School (age 5-13), and they are taught Mathematics, English and Irish as the main subjects (but they would also cover basic history, geography, science etc). When they are 8 and 13, they would do a lot of in class work for their Catholic Holy Communion and Confirmation. Nowhere in there do they teach them another European language, at a such a crucial age when kids are like sponges. Up to the age of 9 is the optimal time period to pick up a new language, most kids don't start learning French/German etc until they reach secondary school.

Instead learning Irish is compulsory until they're 18/19 years of age. Successive governments have pumped hundreds of millions into this over many decades and less people are speaking/able to speak Irish, yet kids spend 14 years studying a language that most will never use. We need to have that conversation.

Of the 1.76 million people who stated they were able to speak Irish, 73,803 spoke the language daily outside of the education system, which is 3,382 fewer than 2011. Some 32 per cent of Irish speakers in Gaeltacht areas spoke Irish daily outside the education system.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/census-2016-says-we-are-older-less-religious-and-speak-less-irish-1.3038927

[moondust]

2. Where's Cameron?

[OnDoutside]

4. On a beach far far away, if i were him !

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

6. Surfing in Malibu

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

7. The only way out is electing a PM who has credibility with the EU and a mandate to stop Brexit

There are a lot of political and economic interests in the EU who will settle for nothing less than the total humiliation of Britain in this process, overcoming that will be difficult.

[grantcart]

9. I visited Ireland and North Ireland last year

The idea of controlling population between the two is laughable.

Europeans will be able to land in Dublin and drive to NI and then enter England

Of course they will probably will be able to do the same with Scotland in a few years when they are independent.

[Pope George Ringo II]

12. Yes and no

Considering its Catalan problem, Spain would never allow the precedent to be set of a breakaway province subsequently being admitted to the EU. You have to assume a veto and an absolutely screaming hissy fit over an independent Scotland joining the EU.

Ireland is going to be ugly. The Common Travel Area and the Good Friday agreement simply require one thing, while Brexit simply requires the opposite. Varadkar is playing it tough and the EU seems to be backing him.

[OnDoutside]

14. Apparently the veto is only allowed at this stage of the negotiations. If they all vote to move it

onto stage 2, then there is no veto anymore, so now is the time for Ireland to get the border issue sorted. They'd be mad not to veto. A complication at the moment is this political bullshit row that the Shinners and Fianna Fail threw up, that threatens a pre Christmas General Election, but at least Varadkar and Martin have been meeting for the last 4 days to try and find a face saving way out for Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, without triggering an Election.

[Pope George Ringo II]

16. The election nobody wants is just weird.

[OnDoutside]

18. They all fear getting the blame for causing it !

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. I'd like him to back up his claim that immigration wasn't the reason for the Leave vote

The 'Leave' campaign campaigned primarily on issues relating to sovereignty and migration whereas the remain campaign focused on the economic impacts of leaving the EU. This choice of key positions is significant since Ipsos MORI survey data on which issues Britons felt to be 'important issues facing Britain today' shows that immediately prior to the vote, more people cited both the EU (32%) and migration (48%) as important issues than cited the economy (27%).

Sovereignty

On the day of the referendum Lord Ashcroft's polling team questioned 12,369 people who had completed voting This poll produced data that showed that 'Nearly half (49%) of leave voters said the biggest single reason for wanting to leave the European Union was “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK”.

Immediately prior to the vote, Ipsos MORI data showed that Europe was the third most highly ranked problem by Britons who were asked to name the most important issues facing the country, with 32% of respondents naming it as an issue.

Immigration

Lord Ashcroft's election day poll of 12,369 voters also discovered that 'One third (33%) [of leave voters] said the main reason was that leaving “offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders.”'

Immediately prior to the referendum data from Ipsos-Mori showed that immigration/migration was the most cited issue when Britons were asked 'What do you see as the most/other important issue facing Britain today?' with 48% of respondents mentioning it when surveyed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_of_Brexit

Immigration is always there in the top reasons, and if you ask the Leavers what they want sovereignty over, it's usually "immigration". But the writer claims "opinion surveys do not support the view that European immigration was the dominant, or even a principal, concern for most Leave voters", and I think he's just wrong on that. And as he says, the single market demands free movement of labour too, and that's why May is trying to get a deal without single market membership. She knows the right wing vote will tear her apart if she keeps free movement.