An "offer" from Belgium

[Gordon R]

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Brussels should butt out and let the UK and Eire sort out the border, the only interest the EU has in that border is as a means to put pressure on  the UK in these so called 'trade' negotiations.

This is correct, but I'm sure Remainers will whinge  and say it isn't possible. It is, but doesn't suit their prophet of doom speech.

[Vince Green]

3 hours ago, 12gauge82 said:

So what your saying is, that the UK won't put in a hard border, Ireland won't put in a hard border, but the EU might force Ireland to do so as they wouldn't be happy with that situation, causing all the misery that could potentially go with that, sounds like another reason Ireland and others should leave the undemocratic mafia gang that is the EU and it reaffirms why this country voted to leave. The UK has clearly stated it's position, no hard border!

I don't think the EU could care less about Ireland or its borders, they just want to inflict maximum damage to the Brexit negotiations 

[12gauge82]

11 minutes ago, Vince Green said:

I don't think the EU could care less about Ireland or its borders, they just want to inflict maximum damage to the Brexit negotiations 

Totally agree.

[Retsdon]

1 hour ago, Gordon R said:

Few of the issues now being mentioned were issues in the referendum.

But they were - or at least they should have been.. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36470809  This was WTOs director general back in June 2016. But at the time we were all (and I include myself) too busy in our echo chambers listening to like-minded individuals and reinforcing our own prejudices. 

But the whole Brexit debate was hysterical and toxic in the extreme. On the one hand, you had the remainers shrilly branding anyone who didn't agree with them a racist bigot, sonething which meant that anything else they had to say was immediately suspect. And on the other you had Brexiters like Johsnstone and Rees Mogg glossing over the consequences of leaving to the extent that they were, in effect, outright lying.Consequently what should have been a considered decision based on informed debate became instead a tribal census.

And so here we are...

[scotslad]

Welll said again retsdon.

I think a few are still in there scho chambers.

Its no wonder very few folk with differing opinions come on these political threads as they just get called 'remoaners' and they carry on with the blinkers.

 

I don't consider myself massively well informed politiacally but i'm also not blindly blinkered by my own strong opinions/views and try to see both sides of the argument

The whole ireland issue was talked about before but as was the norm anything negative was a scare story.

 

The brexit mob won't like it but u remiind my so much of the snp, that's the exact same line they took and rubbished anything negative as 'project fear', sadly for modern politics/life often those that shout loudest and more often win the argumnet

 

If the EU is a members club, we have paid a fortune to stay in it up till now, as do many other countries and have bent over backwards to accomodate its rules.

They're simply has to be a price for leaving, we can't expect to have tarrif/quota free trading, free travel for us to europe to work but none the other way round etc

So they're has to be 'proper' borders to regulate and enforce this, its really not rocket science.

If things pretty much carry on as they are except the EU kitty is 350mil lighter each week why would any other nation stay in it??

[Gordon R]

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But they were - or at least they should have been

I rest my case. I am at a loss as to how we could have a considered decision based on informed debate. No-one, but no-one knows the full script, so just how would this have been achieved. Would this same system apply to a General Election? The system we have is good enough to run the country and our lives, but not good enough to say whether we should stay in the EU.

A very strange proposition.

[12gauge82]

Retsdon and Scotslad, they are your opinions and you are of course entitled to them, however, unfortunately for you the majority does not agree with you and we are leaving, to you or anyone else who voted leave and have now changed your minds, tough, untill leave is given a fair crack at the whip it would not be right to ignore the referendum although I strongly believe another referendum now would produce an even bigger majority, but who knows. As for the border "issue" as has been said, neither the UK or Ireland will pit a hard border in place so an actual border is a non issue propagated by the EU who want to cause issues.

[scotslad]

12 i've said i voted to leave and still would tomorrow, BUT i'm not so disillusioned to think it will be all sunshine and roses and all uk's problems will be automatically solved.and thats befure u add in westminster making a complete mess of everything.

Very sadly the leaving isn't/won't get a fair crack at the whip as westminster and lords are ******* it up at every oportunity

 

I voted to leave fully expecting things to get worse intially and there to be a hard border in ireland and trade tarriffs because when u read throu the BS on both sides there is a strong likely hood thats wot'll happen unkess we cave in and hand away our borders, fishing rights etc.

We can't have it all

[Retsdon]

Well, either way it will all come out in the wash at some point. Five years feom now someone, somewhere will be saying , See? We told you so.'  Ut right now everything is just speculation.

[12gauge82]

Agree with everything Scotslad and retsdon say above, as a country we need to get behind the effort to leave, if after a fair crack it doesn't go as planned we can reassess where we are.

[Rewulf]

Article from the telegraph

The Peers vs the People power grab confirms the thesis that led to Brexit

Last Monday, Viscount Hailsham moved Amendment 49 to the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, in the House of Lords. I realise there can be few less enticing ways of starting a newspaper column, so please let me explain.

First, a word about Lord Hailsham himself. Even the invariably well-informed readers of The Daily Telegraph may struggle to call to mind exactly who he is. I can assist by deploying the words “Douglas Hogg” and “moat”. As Mr Hogg, the future viscount was an MP. In claiming his parliamentary expenses, according to the Telegraph investigation at the time, he pleaded costs of “around £2,000” for the cleaning of his moat in Lincolnshire. This made him famous.

Mr Hogg reacted angrily, saying that he submitted his moat expenses only to show the parliamentary authorities the pitiless price of maintaining his lovely house and to argue that they should pay him a proportion of the total rather than quibbling over each bit. Other costs itemised included piano-tuning, bee removal, having his stable lights fixed and the services of a mole-catcher. This sad affair put paid to his political career in the Commons.

But Mr Hogg is also, through heredity, Viscount Hailsham. So he stood, more than once, in the strange little by-elections that occur in the Lords when one of the 92 hereditary peers who still sit in the chamber dies. Lord H’s Conservative colleagues obstinately refused to elect him. Undaunted, he kept pointing out that former Cabinet members normally get peerages and that – lest we forget – he sat in the Cabinet as Minister of Agriculture for two years in the 1990s. (Colleagues called this “Hogg-whimpering”.) Eventually, an exhausted David Cameron gave in and made him a life peer in 2015.

Lord Hailsham constantly proclaims his devotion to Parliament. As he put it himself on Monday, he is one of “the heirs of a very long and noble tradition”. If tenacity in securing for himself the privileges of both Houses is proof of this, there have been few greater Parliamentarians than the third Viscount Hailsham.

The pro-Brexit extreme are MPs who want to implement the referendum result. The anti-Brexit extreme wants to discard what the people voted for. It is the difference between keeping your promises and breaking them
So there Lord Hailsham stood, telling peers about his amendment.

The EU referendum vote two years ago was only, he said, “an interim decision”. He made no mention of Parliament’s intention, declared when it enacted the referendum, to implement the result, nor of the fact that Parliament triggered Article 50 to leave, nor that the Bill he was trying to amend is Parliament’s legislation for withdrawal. He is proposing something else. He wants Parliament to improve upon the decision of the people and, if so inclined, to reverse it.

The Hailsham clause insists that Parliament must vote on the draft of any agreement between Britain and the EU, probably before that agreement is final. It empowers Parliament, if unhappy, to force Mrs May back to Brussels to start again, under its instructions. Thus Parliament would become, for the first time ever, a proxy negotiator rather than a legislator. Reverting to powers for the unelected Chamber not seen since the Edwardian era, the amendment also gives the Lords a seeming veto over any withdrawal agreement. It is designed to remove completely the option of “No deal”. The Prime Minister would then have no bottom line against Brussels.

The House of Lords passed the Hailsham amendment – and eight others with a similar lack of relevance to the actual Bill, which is about withdrawal, not the negotiations. These include forcing Britain to stay in the customs union, and a proposal, moved by Lord Patten of Barnes (that’s the podgy one who was chairman of the BBC until the Jimmy Savile fiasco, not the one with the bouffant hair who used to be Education Secretary) about the Northern Ireland border.

Lord Patten (who is in receipt of an EU pension) made an amazing terror threat. His speech suggested that to install so much as one security camera checking the movement of goods from South to North would be like carrying “a can of petrol in one hand and a box of matches in the other”. His amendment requires that any change in our Northern Irish border arrangements must have the approval of the Irish Republic, thus making it potentially impossible for the UK to leave the EU in one piece. The Lords merrily passed it. All the amendments were helped on their way by the feebleness of the Government’s business managers and whips.

This coming Tuesday, yet another amendment comes before the Lords. This would remove from the Bill the date of our departure from the EU (29 March, 2019). Probably we would not leave at all.

This Peers vs the People power-grab confirms, almost beyond caricature, the thesis that helped Brexit win – that the EU is a project belonging to an arrogant elite.

As well as the Remainer swells like Lord P, many of the most active campaigners in the Lords are former mandarins – Cabinet secretaries, permanent secretaries, ambassadors, European commissioners.

With their legendary dexterity in drafting, and a gift for the reversal of meaning that would make even George Orwell’s satire redundant, they produced all these amendments in the name of upholding parliamentary sovereignty. The effect – fully intended – would be to make sure that, even though 17.4 million people voted to do so, we would never get that sovereignty back.

Thank goodness, Lords H and P, and all these Sir Humphries who are now Lord Humphries, have not yet succeeded in wresting our constitution back to its pre-1911 condition in which the Lords could defeat the Commons. So the question is: “What will now happen there?”

The amendments in the Upper House have been carefully worked out with Remainer Tory rebels in the Lower one, especially those with high-level legal experience. Their expressed solicitude for Parliament makes it easier for Labour peers and MPs worried about displeasing pro-Brexit voters to support them.

The amendments can now be “weaponised” in the Commons by those few (but possibly not few enough) Conservative MPs determined to reverse the referendum, defy their party’s manifesto commitment last year and ignore the evidence – firmly on display in yesterday’s local election results – that the Tories win only if voters believe that Brexit will happen.

Here, I think, Mrs May’s advisers misunderstand the situation. The current line of the whips is that “each extreme” of the Conservative Party should now give a bit to keep the show on the road. This is a false equivalence. The pro-Brexit “extreme” are MPs who want to implement the referendum result and support the manifesto policy of leaving the customs union. The anti-Brexit extreme (no inverted commas required here) wants to discard what the people voted for. You cannot split the difference: it is the difference between keeping your promises and breaking them. The Government has to take the risks required to implement its own policy.

In this week’s meeting of the Brexit “War Cabinet”, Mrs May was outgunned on her “customs partnership” compromise, thanks to the influence of the younger, rising ministers, Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, and Sajid Javid, the new Home Secretary. Both voted Remain, but both understand that, if the Government fails to accomplish Brexit, voters will see that it stands for nothing and it will therefore fall. Does Mrs May see that too?

[Gordon R]

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In this week’s meeting of the Brexit “War Cabinet”, Mrs May was outgunned on her “customs partnership” compromise, thanks to the influence of the younger, rising ministers, Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, and Sajid Javid, the new Home Secretary. Both voted Remain, but both understand that, if the Government fails to accomplish Brexit, voters will see that it stands for nothing and it will therefore fall. Does Mrs May see that too?

That is the crunch. A government who picks and chooses which promises to keep is nothing new, but this is the big one. If they don't deliver Brexit, their word will be as worthless as a Jeremy Corbyn assurance that he never met the IRA.

[Retsdon]

2 hours ago, Rewulf said:

First, a word about Lord Hailsham himself

 I once made a cup of tea for his father. 

[Vince Green]

When you say you are going to walk, whether its from a job, a relationship or the EU, you have to show that you mean it. Other wise you lose all credibility.

Churchill in the early years of WW2 had some serious undermining within his cabinet from people who thought that we should be getting round the table to sort out the difficulties with this Hitler chappie, give him a bit a talking to and tell him to mend his ways.

So nothing is new under the sun, a snowflake then is no different to a snowflake now.

Edited May 9, 2018 by Vince Green