The EU was never capable of dealing with Brexit

[Blackleaf]

As we head towards the inevitable, it is worth understanding the simplest of truths: the EU was never capable of dealing with Brexit. And an even bigger truth must be whispered very quietly: they can’t conclude Free Trade Agreements...

The EU was never capable of dealing with Brexit

Charles Day
1 July 2019
The Spectator

We are now meandering towards a real Brexit deadline. In typical British fashion, we’ve let the other two times that they bumped into us with their trolley in the supermarket go. In similarly typical fashion, the third time is about to be “not on”.

But as we head towards the inevitable, it is worth understanding the simplest of truths: the EU was never capable of dealing with Brexit. And an even bigger truth must be whispered very quietly: they can’t conclude Free Trade Agreements.

We turned insular immediately after the vote. We blamed ourselves and began a long internal debate which almost never mentioned the EU – just a lot of class warfare and Godwin’s law. But a Withdrawal Agreement (WA) is – and was – a distraction. It is not needed in any comparable treaty.

Take a look at what NAFTA says:

Article 2205: Withdrawal

A Party may withdraw from this Agreement six months after it provides written notice of withdrawal to the other Parties. If a Party withdraws, the Agreement shall remain in force for the remaining Parties.

And the CPTTP, which says:

Article 30.6: Withdrawal

Any Party may withdraw from this Agreement by providing written notice of withdrawal to the Depositary. A withdrawing Party shall simultaneously notify the other Parties of its withdrawal through the overall contact points designated under Article 27.5 (Contact Points).

A withdrawal shall take effect six months after a Party provides written notice to the Depositary under paragraph 1, unless the Parties agree on a different period. If a Party withdraws, this Agreement shall remain in force for the remaining Parties.

While all EU treaties prior to Lisbon had this to say:

…

That’s right, nothing. The idea of a WA is entirely novel to law. It was invented in the Lisbon Treaty, but that very same Treaty doesn’t bother to define it.

Without definition, words in an agreement are utterly pointless – if I sign one with you, promising you a made-up sum of money, then that means nothing at all. So why have we all fixated on a Withdrawal Agreement (WA)?

Because, you see, leave or remain voter, admitting the truth was much harder; but, the EU, under the Lisbon Treaty, just doesn’t function. It’s been easier to waste three years arguing about the text of a unicorn WA – which turned in to a shopping list of the EU27, than to accept that truth.

When was the last time the EU concluded an FTA? You may have been misled into thinking it was Japan – no, that wasn’t not ratified. Canada? No, not ratified either.

Every EU state has one really big trading partner – the USA. Good idea to get an FTA with them isn’t it? No. The EU couldn’t even pretend to sign that one. It was vetoed. What about Brazil? They’re a colossal market. Best not to ask, but no. The Australians? Incredibly charming, honest trustworthy people – surely we have got an FTA with them? Err, no…says Brussels.

The sad fact has always been that Ivan Rogers is right – in the end, they won’t manage to do one with us either. If it interests you, look here for their own view of their record (note even they only claim South Korea). Look a bit closer and the detail of even that one FTA is here.

The truth is that membership of the EU took away our ability to make our own FTAs. The reward was hardly any FTAs and increasingly global isolation. Now we see the culmination of that – they won’t even be able to conclude one with us. If the EU can’t – and three years of voluntary inaction has shown it can’t – conclude an FTA with the UK then honestly, what hope does it have?

Theresa May is the first sad casualty of this truth. But what is the point of castigating her successor, whichever charming blonde-haired wonder he be, with this false pursuit of a WA? A WA means nothing, Tweedledum-like it has been perverted in to a weapon against the UK for daring to try to leave. We, rightly, rejected it. But even had we accepted it, it would not have made the slightest difference. Stage two after the WA is accepted or rejected is an FTA negotiation – but, whisper it with me, they can’t conclude FTAs.

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/07/the-eu-was-never-capable-of-dealing-with-brexit/

 

[White_Unifier]

Especially when the Brittish themselves know what they don't want (to stay in the EU) but don't know what they want (Finnish, Canadian, or Swiss model, default to WTO rules, or total or partial unlilateral global free trade, etc. etc. etc.).

If I were the EU, I'd have kicked the UK out by now and tell it to come back to the negotiating table once it knows what it wants.

 

[Blackleaf]

Especially when the Brittish themselves know what they don't want (to stay in the EU) but don't know what they want (Finnish, Canadian, or Swiss model, default to WTO rules, or total or partial unlilateral global free trade, etc. etc. etc.).
If I were the EU, I'd have kicked the UK out by now and tell it to come back to the negotiating table once it knows what it wants.

You're a quick reader. Are you Johnny 5?

 

[MHz]

The UK was never capable of dealing with Brexit

 

[Blackleaf]

The UK was never capable of dealing with Brexit

The UK voted for it and wants it. Mr Johnson - who recently called the French "turds" over their Brexit stance - will deliver it.

 

[Blackleaf]

The Brexit Party's 29 MEPs turn their backs as EU anthem Ode To Joy is played in the EU Parliament:

 

[Curious Cdn]

The EUs done very little other than watching you Brits disappear up your own arse-holes. I suspect that after the coming Boris no-go fiasco they'll tell you to bugger off and pick the fence behind you, after the last year of comedy routines from your Parliament.

You are redefining incompetence.

 

[Blackleaf]

they'll tell you to bugger off

I hope so.

 

[Curious Cdn]

I hope so.

Everybody is sick to death of you and your "Brexit".

 

[Blackleaf]

.
You are redefining incompetence.

Nothing incompetent about Brexit Party MEPs turning their backs on the EU's national anthem. It's called democracy.

 

[Blackleaf]

Everybody is sick to death of you and your "Brexit".

Why? Don't you support countries regaining their independence? Are you an imperialist?

 

[White_Unifier]

Nothing incompetent about Brexit Party MEPs turning their backs on the EU's national anthem. It's called democracy.

The EU isn't a nation. It has an international EU anthem, not a national one, silly.

And as for imperialism, the UK chose to join the EU, had a vote like the others as an equal partner, and is now freely trying to figure out what it wants to replace its membership in the EU.

How's any of that imperialistic?

 

[Curious Cdn]

Why? Don't you support countries regaining their independence? Are you an imperialist?

pot>kettle>black

 

[Blackleaf]

The EU isn't a nation.

Yet.

And as for imperialism, the UK chose to join the EU

Against the democratic wishes of the people.

The EU is an empire. It's imperialist.

 

[Blackleaf]

pot>kettle>black

So you're against countries regaining their independence and sovereignty - apart from your own.

It wasn't that long ago that it was fashionable amongst you Lefties to support countries regaining independence.

 

[Blackleaf]

The madness of comparing the Brexit Party to the Nazis

Remainers’ fury over that back-turning protest suggests they’re losing the plot.

BRENDAN O'NEILL
EDITOR
3rd July 2019

I fear for the stability of hardcore Remainers. They seem to be losing the plot. They have abandoned all sense of moral perspective. Consider their response to the Brexit Party’s protest in the European Parliament yesterday.

The BP’s MEPs turned their backs as the EU’s ‘national anthem’ started to play. And according to certain Remainers, such antics are akin to Nazism, echoing the behaviour of National Socialists in the Reichstag in the 1930s, and generally proving that Brexit Britain is a dark and scary hellhole vomiting up the worst politicians the world has seen since the darkest days of the mid-20th century.

To which the only reasonable reply is: u ok hun?

This was a perfect example of a furious, spluttering condemnation telling us far more about the person doing the condemning than about the people he or she is condemning. In this case, Remoaners’ shrill and illiterate screech of ‘NAZIS’ at the Brexit Party for staging a political stunt tells us nothing whatsoever about the Brexit Party but loads and loads about the increasingly on-edge Remainer set.

It tells us how distant they now are from people who think differently to them; how bitter and convulsed with fury they have become as democratic politics has dared to go in a direction they disapprove of; and how little they care for historical accuracy and truth.

No sooner had the BP’s 29 MEPs turned their backs on the young people playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy – imagine such a wonderful, humanistic work being co-opted by the grey technocracy that is the Brussels machine – than observers were thumbing their thesauruses in search of furious adjectives of condemnation.

Former TV journalist turned campaigner against democracy Gavin Esler said the Brexit Party had ‘shamelessly copied the Nazi Party’, on the basis that the Nazis once turned their backs on a Jewish speaker in the Reichstag in 1930. This is mad. The Nazis also published political pamphlets – is everyone who does that a Nazi? They wore uniforms and marched in formation – maybe all armies are fascist? They also overrode the democratic wishes of vast numbers of European people – perhaps Esler and his anti-Brexit, anti-democratic chums in that short-lived outfit Change UK are also secret Nazis? What an infantile game.

It got worse. One journalist said the BP back-turning made her cry. Others said it made them feel ashamed to be British. Britain is a nation known for its fair and honest engagement with the world and now these 29 xenophobic oafs have destroyed that reputation, Remainers cried. The people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Yemen – the ones who are still alive, at least – might beg to differ about that British decency thing.

Everyone shared a photo showing the BP back-turners alongside the Nazi Party back-turners as a kind of sixth-former-level ‘gotcha’ – ‘We knew you were fascists!’. It really is hard to believe that these people think this is a normal form of political debate. One Irish academic shared a Goebbels quote about the Nazis entering parliament as ‘enemies’, as ‘the wolf bursts into the flock’, and the moral infants of the hardcore Remainer set rubbed their chins in unison and said: ‘Yes! Exactly like the Brexit Party. Farage is our Goebbels.’

Everything about this is crazy. And chilling. Let’s get this in perspective. A political party that won more than five million votes in the EU elections in May and which is now the largest party in the EU parliament is not being anti-democratic, far less fascistic, when it engages in protest inside that parliament. On the contrary, it is behaving democratically. It is making a democratic political statement. In this case, that it is wrong, outrageous even, that Britons are still expected to send members to the European Parliament more than three years after we voted to leave the EU. The protest was saying, ‘The UK should not be in this parliament’. Nothing more, nothing less. Nothing hateful, nothing xenophobic, nothing Nazi-esque.

No light was shone on the Brexit Party by yesterday’s fuss and fury, but a great deal was shone on those sections of the Remainer elite that are absolutely committed to thwarting Brexit, and by extension democracy itself. These people are now so ensconced in an opinion-proof, dissent-proof echo chamber that they view everyone outside of that chamber – which is the majority of people – as an alien being, the lowest of the low, an actual Nazi, scum.

The chattering class’s branding of Brexiteers – as well as right-wing people, Trump voters and populists in general – as ‘fascists’ or ‘Nazis’ is really a form of dehumanisation. It ‘others’ people completely. It says, ‘These people are beyond political debate and moral reason. They are the same as the worst people in human history.’

It is an entirely intolerant approach to political difference and discussion. In an eye-watering irony, it does the very thing they accuse ‘the new Nazis’ of doing – it others entire groups of people, especially the less well-off people who were more likely than educated, upper-middle-class people to vote for Brexit. It seeks to override the democratic wishes of these Untermensch and re-install the rule of well-educated, well-connected experts.

I would never refer to Remainers as Nazis – because I am not an historical illiterate who thinks anyone who disagrees with me is a fascist – but seriously, if you want to centralise political power in Europe, thwart the largest act of democracy in UK history, put the little people back in their box, and demonise those who disagree with your or protest against you, then you should definitely think twice before calling other people fascists.

Perhaps the worst thing about the ‘Nazi’ screams at the Brexit Party yesterday is the way this normalises the Nazis. This is the most nauseating side-effect of today’s constant use of the ‘fascist’ slur and the never-ending warnings that Europe is sliding back into the 1930s – the fact that it drains away the uniqueness of the Nazi era, the sheer horror of it, and makes it appear as just another political period, not unlike our own. This relativisation of the era of the Holocaust is a crime against historical truth.

Indeed, it is in itself an unwitting, inverse form of Nazi apologism. In making the Nazi era seem mundane, as if it consisted simply of disagreeable politicians executing stunts, as if it was very much like what we face in 2019, the angry elites do Nazism itself a favour by denuding it of its unprecedented evil and making it seem ordinary. They’re whitewashing Nazism, and that is the most unforgivable aspect of their unending hissy fit over the 2016 vote to leave the EU.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/07/03/the-madness-of-comparing-the-brexit-party-to-the-nazis/

 

[Blackleaf]

'It is a great honour to speak on behalf of the largest single party in this place.

May I say that if I needed any convincing at all that the best thing for Britain is to leave here as soon as possible it was the way that those elections were conducted yesterday because if that is this place's idea of democracy then that is a serious betrayal of every country that is represented here because it is not democratic at all.

That is just one of many reasons why Britain is right to be leaving this place, hopefully on Halloween.

And it is right because there is a pattern consistent throughout history of oppressed people turning on the oppressors.

Slaves against their owners, the peasantry against the feudal barons, colonies, Mr Verhofstadt, against their empires and that is why Britain is leaving.

And it doesn't matter which language you use we are going and we are glad to be going.' - Brexit Party MEP Anne Widdecombe to the EU Parliament

 

[Curious Cdn]

I wonder if you've all become so disagreeable that you can't live with each other, anymore?

You Union is the probably next entity to break up.

 

[Blackleaf]

I wonder if you've all become so disagreeable that you can't live with each other, anymore?
You Union is the probably next entity to break up.

If that happens - which it won't because, obviously, Brexit will strengthen the most successful political union in history - you'd be complaining again because you don't seem to like nationalism and countries regaining their independence, something which was seen as a good and noble cause not too long ago.

The reality is that, even though you don't like it, there are people in other countries who are rather proud of their countries and are fighting to free themselves from foreign domination. This isn't bad or racist - otherwise it was bad and racist for Canada to become independent. It means Gandhi and George Washington were bigoted racists (well we know Gandhi was). And being in a sovereign state yourself your strange stance sees rather hypocritical.

"I want Canada to be sovereign and independent but not Britain."

It's hypocrisy and a stance against a noble and just cause - freedom... Brexit.

 

[pgs]

If that happens - which it won't because, obviously, Brexit will strengthen the most successful political union in history - you'd be complaining again because you don't seem to like nationalism and countries regaining their independence, something which was seen as a good and noble cause not too long ago.

The reality is that, even though you don't like it, there are people in other countries who are rather proud of their countries and are fighting to free themselves from foreign domination. This isn't bad or racist - otherwise it was bad and racist for Canada to become independent. It means Gandhi and George Washington were bigoted racists (well we know Gandhi was). And being in a sovereign state yourself your strange stance sees rather hypocritical.

"I want Canada to be sovereign and independent but not Britain."

It's hypocrisy and a stance against a noble and just cause - freedom... Brexit.

Don’t worry blackie Canada is as close to imploding as it has ever been .