Brexiters have become unmoored from reality for a long time.
US won't look after UK with generosity
Canzuk is not a thing and is not happening
Britain won't trade more with China just cos you've left Europe.
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But rejoiners need to work in the reality-based world.
Dismissing argument by saying that, for example, Europe rewriting its fundamental treaties to make Britons an exceptional category for mobility or trade is frankly puerile.
(it ignores the reality of treaty change)
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Time to deal with reality. in particular one fact: former remainer interests are not ours.
Maria Ramirez is right, of course, Diego Garcia means nothing for Gibraltar.
But I will reiterate, what we are seeing is a very bad tactical decision - not for the first time - on the part of Gib and esp. the former Tory government coming back to bite them.
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During the WA negotiations on Ireland and the chicanery that has gone on since, has been about "facts on the ground".
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I'm including the NI Protocol Bill, by which the UKG could ignore parts of treaties it had signed up to, and the UK ask that they would try "alternative arrangements" and then revert to checks at Larne in the event they didn't work.
So, I listened to the Spectator's big Tory fringe event on Brexit.
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(See, who says you don't need foreigners to do the jobs that Britons don't want to?).
It has to be said, the panel didn't inspire confidence. Hannan is a veteran zealous Euroskeptic, Jacobs is part of the Europhobic industrial complex, while IDS is the worst kind of reactionary Tory.
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The main subject was around the lack of a dividend. There was some polite chat then about deregulation, particularly as regards AI and other hi-tech areas, and regarding trade deals, particularly to import cheaper food, which to date the panel found uninspiring.
@chrisgreybrexit opens his last paragraph of Friday's blog with a quite profound point. I don't think it's arrogant to say in 2016 I knew more than the vast majority of the population about Europe. Yet I've been surprised every day.
It's like staring at the Milky Way.
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It is the simpliism of the media and politicians towards quitting, and indeed the simpliism of the electorate, who should have smelt a rat, that frustrates.
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Nevertheless, the basic problem, in trade terms, is clear. The UK is outside of the institutional structures that enable free trade.
When the euro was just a wee slip of a currency, a global financial crisis happened. This had a traumatic effect on many small countries, in particular on Greece. There, a fiscal crisis reared its head
Government revenues were no longer adequate
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This represented, frankly, an existential crisis for the euro, which was still untried as a reserve currency on the world stage; for Europe as a whole, as unity would almost certainly have fractured with the euro; and for Greece, it'd have been blown back to the 70s
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The MSs cobbled together solutions, with international institutions, but could not agree on a particular way forward to resolve the problem. And so it trundled on.
Eventually they concluded that treaty change was needed to allow ECB solutions to bolster and protect the euro
The idea is out there and widespread that the UK electorate were somehow innocent babes in the woods when it came to the votes that shaped Britain's relationship with Europe, especially 2015-24.
I do not subscribe to that idea.
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Voters were told that they held all the cards, that their economy would boom and Europe's would suffer, unless Europe gave the British voters what they wanted. That Audi and Mercedes would force Europe to concede.
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Voters were told that they could take back control of their borders, take Europeans' right to live and work in the UK, even remove them from that state, but that they themselves would retain the right to work, live and retire in Europe.
The Economist has absolutely smashed it out of the park with this article. A classic Economist analysis piece, clipped style, but not being said elsewhere.
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So, firstly we have the current situation: the UK is governed by a hard Brexit party.
It has good features, but on Europe it is further to the tight than the RN, Fd'I or even paries like the SVP in Switzerland.
That's just the reality, hard as it is to hear.
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How is this possible?
Pro-Europeanism is really popular in the UK.
(we can argue about what proportion is exceptionalism, transactionalism or just contrarianism, but either way 🇪🇺 is far more popular than Brexit)