advertisement


Brexit: give me a positive effect... XV

Status
Not open for further replies.
My post above directly addressed the question, and constitutes a bit of an 'I'm alright Jack' stance. B2B of our nature is largely managing, albeit with increased costs and some changes to our buying practices. I've clearly stated here before that I have had sleepless nights over the impact of Brexit upon small and medium sized exporters, most particularly those whose business has relied upon exports to individuals on the continent, and those whose European business has been effectively destroyed by the weight of non-tariff EU bureaucracy that has been imposed upon them.

So, post-brexit british companies will now face broadly the same import/export paperwork and regulations that existed when we joined the then common market (with the aim of avoiding those regulations). Colour me shocked. Who could have foreseen that :rolleyes:.
 
So, post-brexit british companies will now face broadly the same import/export paperwork and regulations that existed when we joined the then common market (with the aim of avoiding those regulations). Colour me shocked. Who could have foreseen that :rolleyes:.

The bonfire of red tape would be visible from the moon but that would mean rejoining the EU.
 
I don`t think Brexit was a fine balancing act at all.. .

I suppose that depends which camp you belong to. There are those who see our place in a shiny, utopian community of borderless, centrally administrated regions as far preferable to what they perceive as an ugly, morbidly decadent, post-colonial, pseudo-sovereign relic (the TonyL camp), those who hold that the EU isn't primarily an ideologically driven supranational political project at all (PsB), or those who place open border trade far above any other consideration (most other people here?). To them, Brexit is, quite naturally, not a fine balancing act at all.

Inaction is as good as endorsing it in my book...

What would you like Her Maj to do, and how do you think she could do whatever that is constitutionally?
 
What would you like Her Maj to do, and how do you think she could do whatever that is constitutionally?

Refuse royal assent and therefore force the dissolution of Parliament.* The Tories have broken the law, acted unconstitutionally, are eroding our civil liberties daily, lied to the Queen, and have shown blatant and corrupt disregard for due process. Hasn't Boris & his cronies done enough damage? There's no guarantee the FPTP system would get rid of them.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_prerogative_in_the_United_Kingdom
 
The highest rates of tax cobblers only applies to poor people, and the arseholes (for there is no other more polite word to describe them) want the rich taxed less.
 
I suppose that depends which camp you belong to. There are those who see our place in a shiny, utopian community of borderless, centrally administrated regions as far preferable to what they perceive as an ugly, morbidly decadent, post-colonial, pseudo-sovereign relic (the TonyL camp), those who hold that the EU isn't primarily an ideologically driven supranational political project at all (PsB), or those who place open border trade far above any other consideration (most other people here?). To them, Brexit is, quite naturally, not a fine balancing act at all.
I despair... I have always argued that the EU, and the EC and EEC before it, is and have been political projects since the 1950s. The EU is just not a federal state , or a superstate, or an empire, or the 4th Reich.
(After all these years, this has to be a damning indictment of my writing skills, or your reading comprehension, or the general hopelessness of these threads, or a sad combination of some or all of the above.)
 
Indeed, the action moved elsewhere from London after WW2. The direction of travel was toward cohesion and peace in Europe between long established democracies and it still is. Brexit for me at least is a geopolitical death throw and a cruelly expensive one. Sending unprotected aircraft carriers to China’s back yard is a symptom of the same disease.Give it up.
 
Indeed, the action moved elsewhere from London after WW2. The direction of travel was toward cohesion and peace in Europe between long established democracies and it still is. Brexit for me at least is a geopolitical death throw and a cruelly expensive one. Sending unprotected aircraft carriers to China’s back yard is a symptom of the same disease.Give it up.

It didn`t have to be so. Churchill refused to get involved with the early stages of the European Coal and Steel Community so that when it was formed in 1952 we were left out - it then became the Common Market which we petitioned to get in, initially unsucessfully, by the time we did get in it was already fully formed , we missed the opportunity to make it more to our liking.

Churchill was a great wartime leader - useless in peacetime.
 
Refuse royal assent and therefore force the dissolution of Parliament.* The Tories have broken the law, acted unconstitutionally, are eroding our civil liberties daily, lied to the Queen, and have shown blatant and corrupt disregard for due process. Hasn't Boris & his cronies done enough damage? There's no guarantee the FPTP system would get rid of them.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_prerogative_in_the_United_Kingdom
Refuse Royal Assent - last time was 1707/8. Won't happen.
 
It didn`t have to be so. Churchill refused to get involved with the early stages of the European Coal and Steel Community so that when it was formed in 1952 we were left out - it then became the Common Market which we petitioned to get in, initially unsucessfully, by the time we did get in it was already fully formed , we missed the opportunity to make it more to our liking.

Churchill was a great wartime leader - useless in peacetime.

On that basis Spaffer scores 1 out of 2 against his hero/role model. He too is useless in peacetime, but he’d be a useless as a wartime leader as well. The only thing he is good for is spaffing.
 
I despair... I have always argued that the EU, and the EC and EEC before it, is and have been political projects since the 1950s. The EU is just not a federal state , or a superstate, or an empire, or the 4th Reich.
(After all these years, this has to be a damning indictment of my writing skills, or your reading comprehension, or the general hopelessness of these threads, or a sad combination of some or all of the above.)

As do I.

What you seem unable to comprehend or acknowledge is the clear and ambiguously unambiguous direction of travel, unchanged if routinely obfuscated since the foundation of the Coal & Steel Union, and born of the philosophies of the neoliberal movement and Kalergi-Coudenhove pan-Europeanists of the 1920s and 30s, towards the objective of European integration, explicitly the creation of a Federal union, and ultimately a United States of Europe (Europa), with the power emanating from the Brussels-Strasbourg axis, and the former sovereign states divided into 'regions'. It's clearly written through the Treaties, as through the centre of a stick of Brighton rock, in the words 'Ever Closer Union'. It is achieved not by the traditional European convention of force of arms, but through the progressive creation of what is already a technocratic superstate, with ambition and indeed existing reach far beyond the boundaries of the EU itself. Its modus operandi is incomprehensible institutional complexity, the creation of an illusion of democracy which is in reality the antithesis of democracy, closely allied to the careful crafting of itself as an avatar for the virtues of peace, progressivism, tolerance and human rights, all of it enthusiastically swallowed whole by its accolytes, the whole caboosh interweaving sleight of hand, obfuscation, creative accountability (and accounting) and downright lies in order to push the agenda ever onward, and draw the strings of power ever closer to the centre.

So, yes, the project is indeed unfinished, and cannot yet be considered a 'federal state', though in technocratic and regulatory terms it has arguably already achieved the status of superstate, or at the very least of deep supranational identity. You could safely argue that its achievements in regard of supranationality have extended beyond the mere technocratic by reference to the Greek showdown, and the manner in which the EC/ECB/Merkel axis directly dictated terms to the governments of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland in response to the Euro crisis, one self-inflicted entirely by the creation of the monetary union itself.

You stated in your last post on this subject that the EU cannot be considered a superstate, federation or empire (or even, as you elaborate again, a 4th Reich) because it doesn't have a President, an army, a foreign policy, central tax-raising powers or a transfer union. This is disingenuous. It (or at least its executive arm) does indeed have a President, and its manifold institutions have many more of them. In respect of the supremacy of EU law (for EU law is supreme) it might even be argued that the President of the Commission is already more powerful than the leaders of the individual states, though those same leaders are at least nominally (and severally, which is to say in ensemble rather than individually) her boss.

The Common Foreign & Security Policy (CFSP), currently chaired by the deeply inadequate but only accidentally corrupt Josep Borrell, is one of the three 'pillars' of the EU elaborated in the 1993 Maastricht Treaty, and within the CFSP's remit lies direction of the Common Security & Defence Policy (CSDP), which is referred to, tellingly, as the EU's 'course of action' in regard of a military. Within the CSDP's remit there exists the EU's usual tidal wave of abbreviated agencies and directorates - PESCO, EEAS, EMPU, EUMC, EDA, EEAS, MPCC, EUMS, CPCC, JSCC, and, most importantly of course (or not), an OHQ. The CSDP claims for itself a budget of €223bn, a personnel count of 1.4m active soldiers and 2.3m reservists, 513 commissioned ships, 35,000 armoured vehicles, 1677 fighter aircraft etc. These are, of course, the combined budgets and forces of the individual national entities, but the fact that they are considered to be even vaguely within the remit of the CSDP tells us of the reach of the EU's ambition. The current reality is a 1000 odd strong Franco-German 'Eurocorps', based in Strasbourg, with a headline target of a 60,000 strong rapid reaction force 'managed'(?) by the EU whilst simultaneously 'under the control' of the individual participating members.

However, talk of armies, however much it might excite the UK MSM, is mere deflection. As I said above, the EU approaches the objective of 'ever closer union' by technocracy and obfuscation, not guns.

The EU project remains incomplete not only because the CFSP remains subject to unanimity and/or QMV. More importantly, fiscal policy remains within the remits of the members, and there is no transfer union, both central tax-raising and spending powers and a transfer union being essential to the long-term stability of the Euro project, and their eventual annexation by (sorry, transfer to) Brussels is essential to the closure of the existing EU executive deficit. The fact that all of these rocks of EU integration have now finally hit against the hard places of the constitutions of some of the individual EU members, and a wider biteback against EU overreach, does not mean that the wish to overcome them doesn't remain a solid ambition of the EU institutions, as well as of the more integrationist of the national leaders, Macron currently the noisiest amongst them. Even now he is stoking talk of the EU army and closer integration, whilst in the background the pandemic has provided useful cover for the capstan to click up a few more notches in the continuum towards EU fiscal authority. The EU has never missed the agenda-centric opportunities presented by a good crisis.
 
EV,
Thanks for your meaty post. We would seem to agree on quite a lot, which probably means I have to read it more closely. Substantive answer in the mail tomorrow (this is not an idle threat!).
 
I suppose that depends which camp you belong to. There are those who see our place in a shiny, utopian community of borderless, centrally administrated regions as far preferable to what they perceive as an ugly, morbidly decadent, post-colonial, pseudo-sovereign relic (the TonyL camp), those who hold that the EU isn't primarily an ideologically driven supranational political project at all (PsB), or those who place open border trade far above any other consideration (most other people here?). To them, Brexit is, quite naturally, not a fine balancing act at all.



What would you like Her Maj to do, and how do you think she could do whatever that is constitutionally?
Or just those who think that Brexit is a load of shite and retards like you keep saying everything is ok.
https://twitter.com/daniellambert29/status/1476623313535389699?s=21
 
As do I.

What you seem unable to comprehend or acknowledge is the clear and ambiguously unambiguous direction of travel, unchanged if routinely obfuscated since the foundation of the Coal & Steel Union, and born of the philosophies of the neoliberal movement and Kalergi-Coudenhove pan-Europeanists of the 1920s and 30s, towards the objective of European integration, explicitly the creation of a Federal union, and ultimately a United States of Europe (Europa), with the power emanating from the Brussels-Strasbourg axis, and the former sovereign states divided into 'regions'. It's clearly written through the Treaties, as through the centre of a stick of Brighton rock, in the words 'Ever Closer Union'. It is achieved not by the traditional European convention of force of arms, but through the progressive creation of what is already a technocratic superstate, with ambition and indeed existing reach far beyond the boundaries of the EU itself. Its modus operandi is incomprehensible institutional complexity, the creation of an illusion of democracy which is in reality the antithesis of democracy, closely allied to the careful crafting of itself as an avatar for the virtues of peace, progressivism, tolerance and human rights, all of it enthusiastically swallowed whole by its accolytes, the whole caboosh interweaving sleight of hand, obfuscation, creative accountability (and accounting) and downright lies in order to push the agenda ever onward, and draw the strings of power ever closer to the centre.

So, yes, the project is indeed unfinished, and cannot yet be considered a 'federal state', though in technocratic and regulatory terms it has arguably already achieved the status of superstate, or at the very least of deep supranational identity. You could safely argue that its achievements in regard of supranationality have extended beyond the mere technocratic by reference to the Greek showdown, and the manner in which the EC/ECB/Merkel axis directly dictated terms to the governments of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland in response to the Euro crisis, one self-inflicted entirely by the creation of the monetary union itself.

You stated in your last post on this subject that the EU cannot be considered a superstate, federation or empire (or even, as you elaborate again, a 4th Reich) because it doesn't have a President, an army, a foreign policy, central tax-raising powers or a transfer union. This is disingenuous. It (or at least its executive arm) does indeed have a President, and its manifold institutions have many more of them. In respect of the supremacy of EU law (for EU law is supreme) it might even be argued that the President of the Commission is already more powerful than the leaders of the individual states, though those same leaders are at least nominally (and severally, which is to say in ensemble rather than individually) her boss.

The Common Foreign & Security Policy (CFSP), currently chaired by the deeply inadequate but only accidentally corrupt Josep Borrell, is one of the three 'pillars' of the EU elaborated in the 1993 Maastricht Treaty, and within the CFSP's remit lies direction of the Common Security & Defence Policy (CSDP), which is referred to, tellingly, as the EU's 'course of action' in regard of a military. Within the CSDP's remit there exists the EU's usual tidal wave of abbreviated agencies and directorates - PESCO, EEAS, EMPU, EUMC, EDA, EEAS, MPCC, EUMS, CPCC, JSCC, and, most importantly of course (or not), an OHQ. The CSDP claims for itself a budget of €223bn, a personnel count of 1.4m active soldiers and 2.3m reservists, 513 commissioned ships, 35,000 armoured vehicles, 1677 fighter aircraft etc. These are, of course, the combined budgets and forces of the individual national entities, but the fact that they are considered to be even vaguely within the remit of the CSDP tells us of the reach of the EU's ambition. The current reality is a 1000 odd strong Franco-German 'Eurocorps', based in Strasbourg, with a headline target of a 60,000 strong rapid reaction force 'managed'(?) by the EU whilst simultaneously 'under the control' of the individual participating members.

However, talk of armies, however much it might excite the UK MSM, is mere deflection. As I said above, the EU approaches the objective of 'ever closer union' by technocracy and obfuscation, not guns.

The EU project remains incomplete not only because the CFSP remains subject to unanimity and/or QMV. More importantly, fiscal policy remains within the remits of the members, and there is no transfer union, both central tax-raising and spending powers and a transfer union being essential to the long-term stability of the Euro project, and their eventual annexation by (sorry, transfer to) Brussels is essential to the closure of the existing EU executive deficit. The fact that all of these rocks of EU integration have now finally hit against the hard places of the constitutions of some of the individual EU members, and a wider biteback against EU overreach, does not mean that the wish to overcome them doesn't remain a solid ambition of the EU institutions, as well as of the more integrationist of the national leaders, Macron currently the noisiest amongst them. Even now he is stoking talk of the EU army and closer integration, whilst in the background the pandemic has provided useful cover for the capstan to click up a few more notches in the continuum towards EU fiscal authority. The EU has never missed the agenda-centric opportunities presented by a good crisis.

...

FAGooFQXsAA-h3w
 
Status
Not open for further replies.


advertisement


Back
Top