UK Politics
- Thread starter CriedWhenBrucieLeft
- Start date
Forostar
Ancient Mariner
Forostar
Ancient Mariner
Too bad, UK. Eat this:
First organize your shit, then we might give you some good deals.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39453338
First organize your shit, then we might give you some good deals.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39453338
Yesss...drive the pound down lower...looooower....
Let's not forget that you can't label everyone in the UK like this, or even all the people who voted for Brexit.
CriedWhenBrucieLeft
Meme Only Account
When I was a youngster my sister once organised her shit on my bedroom window.
Gross.
CriedWhenBrucieLeft
Meme Only Account
Just a little bit of Cried biography for you there.
Forostar
Ancient Mariner
Do you mean the pictures I posted? They do not label everyone, or all people who voted Brexit, but they criticize (and ridicule at the same time) these mentioned policies/attitudes from the responsible ones (UK government), and everyone else who have agreed (this includes a portion of the Brexit voters). There's a lot of truth in that "short history of...". If you have problems with openly criticizing or ridiculing these matters yourself, then suit yourself. I truly hope others still May.
Found the following on:
http://www.politico.eu/interactive/article-50-brexit-european-union-theresa-may-donald-tusk-donald-trump-us-cartoon/ & http://caglecartoons.com/
First published on Caglecartoons.com, Slovakia, March 29, 2017 | By Martin Sutovec
First published on Caglecartoons.com, The Netherlands, March 28, 2017 | By Joep Bertrams
published on Caglecartoons.com, The Netherlands, March 30, 2017 | By Joep Bertrams
First published in The Economist, U.K., March 29, 2017 | By Kal
Post-Brexit Economy
By: Paresh Nath
The Khaleej Times, UAE
March 14, 2017
Last edited:
This pretty much sums it up for me. The way I see it, the UK was pressured into joining the EU, the EU was never really popular there, and now the UK leaves. Why am I supposed to hold a grudge against them for that? It's their problem, not mine.
bearfan
Ancient Mariner
Hopefully this will be the attitude the EU takes (and the UK of course).
http://www.politico.eu/article/northern-eu-trio-dont-let-minutiae-hijack-brexit-talks/
THE HAGUE — The leaders of Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands made a joint appeal to the EU Friday not to let minor issues “hijack” the Brexit talks so negotiations can move onto trade as soon as possible.
“It’s not about that we fear that someone could hijack the negotiations, it’s about making sure that we avoid something like that,” said Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen at a mini-summit among the three countries in The Hague.
The three stressed that, due to their close trade ties with the UK, they would have much to lose the longer businesses are uncertain over what rules will govern trade with Britain after it leaves.
Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny said: “If the prime minister [Theresa May] says that what she wants for Britain is as close a relationship with the European Union as possible, we support that, and the less implications there are for tariffs, and obstructions and administrative bureaucracy the better for everyone.”
Before the future relationship can be sketched out, the European Council must determine that sufficient progress has been made on the first stage of the talks, on Britain’s bill for leaving the EU and the rights of citizens.
“We very much agreed that we will make sure that a decision [on progress] will be taken, that we prevent that some very small issue that might come up that could hijack the discussion,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said.
“We don’t want to wait for too long.”
The three hope their position will be reflected in negotiating guidelines set to be agreed at a European Council meeting in eight days.
Approval is needed from all 27 countries.
http://www.politico.eu/article/northern-eu-trio-dont-let-minutiae-hijack-brexit-talks/
THE HAGUE — The leaders of Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands made a joint appeal to the EU Friday not to let minor issues “hijack” the Brexit talks so negotiations can move onto trade as soon as possible.
“It’s not about that we fear that someone could hijack the negotiations, it’s about making sure that we avoid something like that,” said Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen at a mini-summit among the three countries in The Hague.
The three stressed that, due to their close trade ties with the UK, they would have much to lose the longer businesses are uncertain over what rules will govern trade with Britain after it leaves.
Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny said: “If the prime minister [Theresa May] says that what she wants for Britain is as close a relationship with the European Union as possible, we support that, and the less implications there are for tariffs, and obstructions and administrative bureaucracy the better for everyone.”
Before the future relationship can be sketched out, the European Council must determine that sufficient progress has been made on the first stage of the talks, on Britain’s bill for leaving the EU and the rights of citizens.
“We very much agreed that we will make sure that a decision [on progress] will be taken, that we prevent that some very small issue that might come up that could hijack the discussion,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said.
“We don’t want to wait for too long.”
The three hope their position will be reflected in negotiating guidelines set to be agreed at a European Council meeting in eight days.
Approval is needed from all 27 countries.
Forostar
Ancient Mariner
No Dunkirk spirit can save Britain from Brexit defeat
LONDON — How I wish that Christopher Nolan’s new film, “Dunkirk,” had not been released at this moment in history. The reviewers have been near unanimous in their praise: searing, complex, uncompromising about the savagery of war and death. Yet the essential message of the film, with its narrative of heroic retreat in order to fight another day, cannot help but feed the national pride in Britain’s capacity to triumph eventually, no matter what the odds.
Nothing could be less helpful to our collective psyche as the country blunders toward Brexit. We hear much about American exceptionalism, but Britain feels it, too. We are the nation of empire, whose ancestors once controlled a quarter of the globe; we are the mother of parliaments; we stood alone against Hitler; we have not been conquered for a thousand years. We feel remarkable.
The Brexit vote was driven by the belief that Britain was hobbled by being shackled to a moribund, bureaucratic group of nations. The Brexiteers convinced enough of the electorate that we needed only to be set free from Europe, with its tiresome regulations, restrictions and pesky immigrants, to become a proud, swashbuckling, dominant and richer country again.
This promise is a stunning misunderstanding of who we are, what we are capable of and where we stand in the world. Britain’s faith in its independent future is rooted in its economic performance. We are a tiny island, but we are — as the prime minister, Theresa May, and leading Brexiteers have frequently assured us — the world’s fifth largest economy. That ranking has given just over half the country the false confidence that we have nothing to fear from change.
The trouble with that statistic is that it obscures all the weaknesses that lie beneath the surface. We don’t have the skills, the manufacturing base, the drive or the productivity we would need to take off as an independent nation. For years, Britain’s inadequacies have been compensated for by its membership in the European Union. Now, they are about to become painfully apparent.
Education is a critical weakness. We claim to have a world-class system, but the latest figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that on scores for literacy and numeracy, 16- to 24-year-olds in England and Northern Ireland rank in the lowest four of the organization’s 35 member countries. More than half of that age group also have poor technological skills; they rank alongside Americans at the bottom of that pile. As a House of Lords report last week complained, businesses haven’t bothered to train Britons to make up for these deficiencies over the past decade because they could always recruit foreigners instead.
There aren’t enough British workers, with the right attitudes and the right skills, to fill the country’s jobs. The consequence is that we import huge numbers of migrants to do what Britons can’t or won’t. The manufacturing, nursing, care and catering industries all depend on foreigners. Nearly one-fifth of Britain’s university staff members are from other European Union countries. Almost 100,000 seasonal agricultural workers are needed every year to pick vegetables and kill chickens — jobs that farmers’ groups say it’s impossible to get Britons to do.
E.E.F., the manufacturers’ organization formerly known as the Engineering Employers Federation, reports that Britain is so short of workers skilled in science, technology and mathematics that three-quarters of firms struggle to fill skilled engineering posts, and a quarter recruit specifically from Europe to fill those gaps. A third of new nurses each year are European. Only one in 50 applicants to the sandwich shop chain Pret a Manger is a Briton.
Despite all these imported skills, Britain’s economy has stagnated since the financial crisis. A majority of workers still earn less in real terms than they did nearly a decade ago. Gross domestic product has been inching upward simply because there are more people in the country, but the only measure that matters, per capita G.D.P., has not risen at all over a decade. It is a shocking record. For every hour we work, we produce about a fifth less than the average among the Group of 7 countries. Only Italy has performed worse than us in productivity growth over the last 10 years.
Britain’s prosperity is also undermined by the very uneven spread of wealth. There are a handful of rich regions, with London pre-eminent, but much of the country is surprisingly poor. Nine of Northern Europe’s 10 poorest regions — including West Wales, Cornwall and Lancashire — are in Britain.
The prosperity we do have is highly dependent on our trade with Europe. Just about 44 percent of British exports, and more than half our imports, are with the European Union. Britain owes much of the foreign investment in its key industries, in cars and pharmaceuticals, precisely to the fact that the country provides an entry point for Europe. London’s financial and business services are a powerhouse of the economy, making up a third of Britain’s G.D.P., and cornering the union’s markets in this area.
Brexit means that we are about to willfully blow up all these ties. It will make all our trading relationships with our nearest neighbors more difficult and expensive. It will cut the flow of European Union migrants here. As Simon Tilford at the Center for European Reform has pointed out, Britain will be much less attractive to the foreign-owned businesses that generate half its exports once they cannot sell to the Continent without barriers. We will no longer be allowed to sell financial services freely in the European Union, and whatever access we negotiate for goods will have to be, as the union has made clear, substantially worse than what we have now.
The consequences will be serious and lasting. The organization that speaks for big business, the Confederation of British Industry, calculates that by 2020 the country’s G.D.P. could be 3 percent to 5.5 percent lower than if we had stayed in the European Union.
New trade deals with the rest of the world cannot make up for Brexit. According to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a leading think tank, leaving the single market will cost Britain a fifth of its trade in goods (and a quarter in services). Even if we negotiated free-trade agreements with 10 leading nations, including India, Brazil and the United States — a process likely to take years — that trade would make up for only about a quarter of what will be lost.
(Continue here)
LONDON — How I wish that Christopher Nolan’s new film, “Dunkirk,” had not been released at this moment in history. The reviewers have been near unanimous in their praise: searing, complex, uncompromising about the savagery of war and death. Yet the essential message of the film, with its narrative of heroic retreat in order to fight another day, cannot help but feed the national pride in Britain’s capacity to triumph eventually, no matter what the odds.
Nothing could be less helpful to our collective psyche as the country blunders toward Brexit. We hear much about American exceptionalism, but Britain feels it, too. We are the nation of empire, whose ancestors once controlled a quarter of the globe; we are the mother of parliaments; we stood alone against Hitler; we have not been conquered for a thousand years. We feel remarkable.
The Brexit vote was driven by the belief that Britain was hobbled by being shackled to a moribund, bureaucratic group of nations. The Brexiteers convinced enough of the electorate that we needed only to be set free from Europe, with its tiresome regulations, restrictions and pesky immigrants, to become a proud, swashbuckling, dominant and richer country again.
This promise is a stunning misunderstanding of who we are, what we are capable of and where we stand in the world. Britain’s faith in its independent future is rooted in its economic performance. We are a tiny island, but we are — as the prime minister, Theresa May, and leading Brexiteers have frequently assured us — the world’s fifth largest economy. That ranking has given just over half the country the false confidence that we have nothing to fear from change.
The trouble with that statistic is that it obscures all the weaknesses that lie beneath the surface. We don’t have the skills, the manufacturing base, the drive or the productivity we would need to take off as an independent nation. For years, Britain’s inadequacies have been compensated for by its membership in the European Union. Now, they are about to become painfully apparent.
Education is a critical weakness. We claim to have a world-class system, but the latest figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that on scores for literacy and numeracy, 16- to 24-year-olds in England and Northern Ireland rank in the lowest four of the organization’s 35 member countries. More than half of that age group also have poor technological skills; they rank alongside Americans at the bottom of that pile. As a House of Lords report last week complained, businesses haven’t bothered to train Britons to make up for these deficiencies over the past decade because they could always recruit foreigners instead.
There aren’t enough British workers, with the right attitudes and the right skills, to fill the country’s jobs. The consequence is that we import huge numbers of migrants to do what Britons can’t or won’t. The manufacturing, nursing, care and catering industries all depend on foreigners. Nearly one-fifth of Britain’s university staff members are from other European Union countries. Almost 100,000 seasonal agricultural workers are needed every year to pick vegetables and kill chickens — jobs that farmers’ groups say it’s impossible to get Britons to do.
E.E.F., the manufacturers’ organization formerly known as the Engineering Employers Federation, reports that Britain is so short of workers skilled in science, technology and mathematics that three-quarters of firms struggle to fill skilled engineering posts, and a quarter recruit specifically from Europe to fill those gaps. A third of new nurses each year are European. Only one in 50 applicants to the sandwich shop chain Pret a Manger is a Briton.
Despite all these imported skills, Britain’s economy has stagnated since the financial crisis. A majority of workers still earn less in real terms than they did nearly a decade ago. Gross domestic product has been inching upward simply because there are more people in the country, but the only measure that matters, per capita G.D.P., has not risen at all over a decade. It is a shocking record. For every hour we work, we produce about a fifth less than the average among the Group of 7 countries. Only Italy has performed worse than us in productivity growth over the last 10 years.
Britain’s prosperity is also undermined by the very uneven spread of wealth. There are a handful of rich regions, with London pre-eminent, but much of the country is surprisingly poor. Nine of Northern Europe’s 10 poorest regions — including West Wales, Cornwall and Lancashire — are in Britain.
The prosperity we do have is highly dependent on our trade with Europe. Just about 44 percent of British exports, and more than half our imports, are with the European Union. Britain owes much of the foreign investment in its key industries, in cars and pharmaceuticals, precisely to the fact that the country provides an entry point for Europe. London’s financial and business services are a powerhouse of the economy, making up a third of Britain’s G.D.P., and cornering the union’s markets in this area.
Brexit means that we are about to willfully blow up all these ties. It will make all our trading relationships with our nearest neighbors more difficult and expensive. It will cut the flow of European Union migrants here. As Simon Tilford at the Center for European Reform has pointed out, Britain will be much less attractive to the foreign-owned businesses that generate half its exports once they cannot sell to the Continent without barriers. We will no longer be allowed to sell financial services freely in the European Union, and whatever access we negotiate for goods will have to be, as the union has made clear, substantially worse than what we have now.
The consequences will be serious and lasting. The organization that speaks for big business, the Confederation of British Industry, calculates that by 2020 the country’s G.D.P. could be 3 percent to 5.5 percent lower than if we had stayed in the European Union.
New trade deals with the rest of the world cannot make up for Brexit. According to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a leading think tank, leaving the single market will cost Britain a fifth of its trade in goods (and a quarter in services). Even if we negotiated free-trade agreements with 10 leading nations, including India, Brazil and the United States — a process likely to take years — that trade would make up for only about a quarter of what will be lost.
(Continue here)
Forostar
Ancient Mariner
I do not. I am emphasizing the points that were related to disliking foreigners, you know, the topic that you came up with. That does not mean I do not know more about it.
That's fine.
Fine.
Congratulations.
Good to know.
Dutch politics (and business) are not happy with Brexit. We like(d) to work a lot with the British, trade with them. It will be more fuss now. And we lost a partner for getting things done in the EU. It will be more difficult to
However, perhaps Brexit was a good idea. The UK did not seem to want to be part of it, for a while. They largely focused on own benefits, not the costs. The problem is that many people got fooled in the Brexit campaign. They got benefits and costs confused. Or chose quickly for one thing, without wanting to know about other matters.
Perhaps, but they didn't when they voted. If they fully did they would not have voted to leave.
As I said, people see benefits as problems. Certain people were not well informed. Perhaps still aren't. They did not have a balanced view.
They trapped into (or willfully chose for) nonsense. The we pay more than we get back was not true.
Yes, it is an opinion. And I am satisfied with it at the moment. If any arguments will change it, so be it.
Welsh Phantom
Ancient Mariner
I agree with your final sentence 
GhostofCain
Ancient Mariner
Fantastic to see such constructive comments. It seems you have taken the result of a democratic referendum (results that I am not happy with) personally.
Last edited:
GhostofCain
Ancient Mariner
Thanks. I am glad I am no longer a second class citizen with no right to vote, which is what happens to any EU citizen who lives in another country under the freedom of movement.
I wonder why there are no more people in Europe up in arms about this antidemocratic contradiction!
D
Deleted member 7164
Guest
Big part of Croat population is against these antidemocratic contradiction, this has been ruining our democracy ever since. If you have Croat citizenship, which you get with heritage and bloodline, you can vote. So if any of you EU citizens move to Croatia and start working/paying taxes here, you can't vote ever, while some asshole whose granddad emigrated somewhere, and he's never even been here, has a say from 10.000 miles of distance.
GhostofCain
Ancient Mariner
That is exactly the point and one of the (many) reasons why I became British.
Last edited:
Forostar
Ancient Mariner
Tell me all about it. My wife did the same.