It was a decisive victory for Leave, and it was made very clear to everyone voting that it was a once-in-a-generation referendum, the outcome of which would be respected.
Well, the 2016 referendum doesn't seem very decisive, but you're right that the later election amounted to the population saying "yes we really mean it".
MPs would then have been voted out for overruling the will of the people.
There was a referendum. Remain lost. Last year we had another General Election, with the Conservatives campaigning on a platform to get Brexit done, and they won decisively.
Why would the US sign a free trade deal with the UK, when it wouldn't sign one with the much larger EU? I fully expect my government to insist on conditions favorable towards the much larger and much richer party in UK-US trade relations.
Because before the EU can sign off on a trade agreement, it needs to be unanimously accepted by every member state, which takes an absolute ton of time. The CETA deal with Canada was held up solely by a region of Belgium at one point.
It's a lot easier to get a trade deal with the UK, where you're only dealing with one government with a much more specific set of interests.
> Australia’s a perfect trading partner in a lot of ways but it’s just too far away in a world that cares about reducing carbon footprints.
On one hand, yeah. But on the other hand, an article floating around in the last few weeks pointed out that modern container shipping is really cost effective these days.
Apparently container ships have also been looking at modern/environment friendly approaches for a while now too (including big wind kites(?) I think). So, that's somewhat likely to further improve over time as well.
For the benefit of non-UK readers, the source in question (The Guardian) is a left-wing newspaper that is highly critical of the current UK government, and has been opposed to Brexit throughout the process.
The Guardian has gone from being a left wing newspaper critical of Conservative governments in general to something rather shriller that I will no longer subscribe to.
And the alternative "heavies" are as bad or worse. Something rather horrible has happened to British newspapers.
Every international treaty and trade agreement includes an adjudication process in case of disputes. The adjudication panel has oversight of interpretation of the treaty, not individual National course, for very obvious reasons. The ECJ is the transnational adjudication panel for the EU.
There’s nothing particularly special about the concept. It’s no different in principle than the WTO dispute resolution process, the International Court of Justice at the UN, or any number of other international arbitration, dispute resolution or treaty enforcement mechanisms past or present. All of those have the agreed power yo adjudicate on whether domestic UK laws are in violation of our treaty agreements.
I’ve not checked all of them, just about a dozen, but as far as I can tell they’re just regulations and European Council decisions. In other words they’re administrative interpretations of the application of laws. And entirely trivial ones at that. I’m not a lawyer maybe they meet the legal definitions of laws, but whether or not Apertame in particular is an ingredient that needs to be included on contents labels hardly seems like the stuff of international treaties.
We had a veto, rarely used, if we didn't like anything. We were very poor in effectively making use of the powers we had within the EU. Of course, now we have none of them, so the EU can do what it likes without worrying about us or our pesky veto now.
By definition, the laws the EU have forced on the UK were opposed by the UK government, and would not have made their way into UK law had they not been forced by the EU.
What I’ve actually been doing is resisting attempts to conflate two separate claims:
1) The claim that the EU has never forced the UK to do anything. Sheer nonsense. This is the claim I disputed all those levels above;
2) The claim that laws the EU has historically forced upon on the UK have been harmful.
There are plenty of examples of the latter (take the Tampon Tax as one [0]), but that’s not the claim I was making.
I haven’t advanced the latter claim because it is irrelevant.
Providing evidence of historic harm is not a prerequisite for principled opposition to the EU having the power to impose laws and overrule national courts.
> I live in the UK. Brexit will only make my life worse. I don't see any upside to it.
Brexit has clearly had a significant detrimental effect on your life, given it happened eleven months ago and you’re still writing about it in the future tense.
We are still in the transition period. But it is already having an effect. Brexit is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. Lots of other things are being ignored because of Brexit. And the country is more divided than I ever remember it being in the past.
GBP has gone from ~0.7 Euros to ~0.9 Euros since 2016. So if you sell your house and move abroad, you probably will find it's value has fallen significantly.
yes technically we left 11 months ago but all the rules etc stayed the same for the transition period, its only next year and in the following years that we'll start to notice the effects (like having to get ETIAS to go to Europe in 2022, or having to get health insurance because EHIC isn't a thing for us anymore, and here's hoping the mobile operators are nice and don't reintroduce roaming charges)
Is this supposed to be some kind of joke? Undercutting by other European nations? The GDP per capita of the EU (37k€) is barely below the GDP per capita of the UK ($44k). Even the typical "boogeyman" countries like Poland have a GDP per capita of $33k. The UK also has a massive "geographic advantage" when it comes to avoiding refugees. The vast majority of refugees do not arrive in the UK first which means the UK can often send them back to Italy or Greece. Seriously, this is just a textbook example of places with little immigration having more xenophobia simply because of lack of experience. People are scared of the unknown and that's all there is.
If I was worried about economic undercutting I would be worried about China and other Asian countries because they not only have the advantage in numbers, China is nowadays the go to place for manufacturing even for high quality products. The key aspect is that the quality control is managed by first world economies. For some reason the Chinese are really terrible at creating medium/premium quality brands.
You’re using PPP-adjusted figures which distort the picture. The latest wave of migration to the UK has been from Romania, not Poland.
I’m not talking about refugees, I’m talking about economic migrants, both skilled and unskilled.
In any event, please could you explain to me how adding approx. 3.5m EU nationals to the UK benefits young people?
Consider the challenges faced by young people in the UK today, including widespread unemployment and underemployment, and a chronic housing shortage where the supply of housing is virtually fixed.
There are plenty of brownfields in England. The housing supply can be grown at will. If it isn't, it's because large (English) landowners and other (English) landlords are effectively controlling the English Parliament - like it's always been since its formation, really, bar a short interlude after WWII.
Of course, how could I forget the brownfield sites.
I’ll let all the young people know there isn’t a housing crisis after all, and seeing as the millions of EU nationals residing in the UK don’t need housing, young people needn’t worry.
It’s good to know EU nationals don’t need housing, so the millions residing in the UK aren’t adding any pressure whatsoever to our existing housing crisis.
And yes, the fact that a lot of voters don't really know what's going on (or suffer from cognitive dissonance, fostered by the terrible English tabloid press) is a large part of what's going on.
But I'm sure things will improve dramatically from 1 January... /s
The UK has council taxes (poll taxes) instead of property taxes paid by landowners. Landowners benefit from the increase in values; renters don't.
Your council tax system basically seems batshit crazy to people from anywhere else. I am guessing that there's some serious history behind how the UK arrived at this point.
I recognize this, but I suppose there are many young people in the UK who viewed the entire EU as where their prospects and lives would lie. That is no longer true, unfortunately.
If young people in the UK genuinely didn’t want to do “menial” jobs, employers would either increase the pay until they filled the roles, or invest in the more highly skilled labour necessary to render those roles redundant.
I should point out I’m talking about both skilled and unskilled labour here.
British university graduates don’t stand a chance when they’re undercut by French, Spanish or Italian professionals with a decade of professional experience willing to work for peanuts.
I'm a bit curious about how you're being undercut in the labor market and simultaneously being priced out of the housing market. You seem to be implying that uncontrolled immigrants are earning less money, but buying more expensive homes.
EU nationals come to the UK, and they participate in both the labour and housing markets.
A small number act to stimulate supply in those markets (e.g. entrepreneurs setting up businesses, or construction workers building the pitiful number of new homes that get built each year), but the vast majority simply add to the demand-side, driving down wages and increasing rents and property prices.
This applies to both skilled and unskilled migrants. The former often come with savings and significant professional experience. Great for businesses, rubbish for our young people.
