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Brexit: give me a positive effect (2022 remastered edition)

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Tony L said:
The NI Brexit issue perfectly illustrated in a single Venn diagram: Twitter.
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Isn’t it even simpler? Brexit was a vote to erect trade barriers and we are now complaining because we have trade barriers. And further, having negotiated and agreed to trade barriers, we are now angry with the countries we demanded trade barriers with, because we have trade barriers.
 
eternumviti said:
Yes, we shouldn't allow ourselves to forget that we are no longer the empire at the table. We're just an awkward ex-colony, and auntie Europa is going to put us in our place.
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Edited as this feels closer to the truth of it. Sometimes the truth hurts, but it's a kindness really. It's time we moved on from our grandiloquence. To paraphrase Corporal Jones: 'we don't like it up us, Captain'.
 
laughingboy said:
Well I didn't see this coming. Peter Hitchens in today's Daily Mail is arguing for English Secession. English Restoration, he calls it. His reasoning feeds on the Imperial Imaginary yet at the same time rejects it, as if to say: the Empire shows how great we are, but we should give it up entirely in favour of English UDI. Only then will we be the pure England of my imagination. The purest, most distilled essence of England.
It is utterly baffling.
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If Hutchins is demanding the break up of the UK, why doesn’t he just say so.

The Mail seems to be calling for a Little England, but doesn’t want to get blamed for breaking up the great in Great Britain. At the same time it wants to attribute all the was mighty about our Empire to the English.

The Hitchens article looks like another step towards Rees Mogg’s Sovereign Individual in which the perfect future is one in which power is decentralised to the extent that it rests in the hands of a few oligarchs.
 
ks.234 said:
If Hitchens is demanding the break up of the UK, why doesn’t he just say so.
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He is arguing for the break-up of the UK. The title of the piece is 'Why England should leave the UK...'

I don't think that Hitchens is motivated by the Sovereign Individual, he's much more of a traditionalist. He has looked into his soul and wants to be a proud Englishman.

He wants the simplicity of an English identity that aligns with all the national myths: King Arthur, Queen Bess, the Magna Carta, Raleigh, Drake and Nelson, the beneficent Empire, Victorian self-righteousness, Kitchener, Churchill, pageantry and pomp. One problem is that he wants it at any cost to the people of England (after all, he asserts, they want this too). Another problem is that I fear they could be persuaded.

His employers, meanwhile? They want small states that can be corrupted and controlled. They want government in the interest of the wealthy. They are pushing for an England in the mould of the BVI.
 
laughingboy said:
He is arguing for the break-up of the UK. The title of the piece is 'Why England should leave the UK...'

I don't think that Hitchens is motivated by the Sovereign Individual, he's much more of a traditionalist. He has looked into his soul and wants to be a proud Englishman.

He wants the simplicity of an English identity that aligns with all the national myths: King Arthur, Queen Bess, the Magna Carta, Raleigh, Drake and Nelson, the beneficent Empire, Victorian self-righteousness, Kitchener, Churchill, pageantry and pomp. One problem is that he wants it at any cost to the people of England (after all, he asserts, they want this too). Another problem is that I fear they could be persuaded.

His employers, meanwhile? They want small states that can be corrupted and controlled. They want government in the interest of the wealthy. They are pushing for an England in the mould of the BVI.
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Yes, I agree that Hitchens is backward looking, but it was more his employer that I was referring to when it comes to looking forward. It seems to me that breaking up of national institutions like the U.K. is a continuum of breaking up trans national institutions like the EU, and whether in the name of The Sovereign Individual or in the name the small corrupted state controlled by the wealthy that you describe, the end result will be the same kind of plutocracy.
 
I think the plan was for the UK to chum up with the Trump-led US post-Brexit, but even if Trump had won a second term, the benefits would have gone one way only, with the UK as a bargain basement store for US venture capitalists. As it is, Biden has made it clear that Brexit was a mistake and that the US owes the UK no favours.
 
ks.234 said:
Yes, I agree that Hitchens is backward looking, but it was more his employer that I was referring to when it comes to looking forward. It seems to me that breaking up of national institutions like the U.K. is a continuum of breaking up trans national institutions like the EU, and whether in the name of The Sovereign Individual or in the name the small corrupted state controlled by the wealthy that you describe, the end result will be the same kind of plutocracy.
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Yes, as David Puttnam put it six months ago, we are sleepwalking towards autocracy.
 
TheDecameron said:
In other words the 21st Century ‘British Empire’ overplayed a bad hand using Frosty’s poker face.
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A bit more:

"Ironically, our government, which treated the votes of 16.1mn Remainers with contempt when it chose almost the hardest and most damaging possible version of Brexit, wishes to give fewer than 350,000 unionist voters in Northern Ireland and a vastly smaller number of potential trouble makers the power to break the withdrawal agreement with the EU, even though this would damage the prospects of the rest of the country. “It is time”, Frost says, “to put our own interests first”. Indeed, we should. The interest of the British people lies in the best and most stable possible relations with the EU, our biggest trading partner and closest neighbour. It is not to risk a deeper decline in UK trade in response to threats of violence from a tiny minority of British people."
 
Spraggons Den said:
If you are looking for a factor unique to the UK, could it be more to do with the over heating housing market perhaps.
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I think you'll find that the overheating housing market isn't limited to the UK. Its largely the result of a record period of ultra-low interest rates, and QE stimulated money sloshing around the asset-owning 'classes'. Central banks across the western economies have been addicted to QE. We're all about to pay the price for that one.
 
Joe Hutch said:
I think the plan was for the UK to chum up with the Trump-led US post-Brexit...with the UK as a bargain basement store for US venture capitalists.
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Yes, this vision of a UK-US power play, with the UK acting as Muttley to America's Dick Dastardly, is hinted at in Liam Halligan and Gerard Lyons' book, Clean Brexit.
Clean Brexit said:
We believe that on balance, EU membership is good for Ireland. The situation is changing fast, though, as Irish entrepreneurs and companies forge links across Asia, Latin America and Africa, and international investment pours into pours into the Republic, much of it from the US. Certainly, a US-UK trade deal could change Irish priorities significantly. For now, though, we believe the best strategy for Ireland - a strategy that happens to align with what is also best for the UK - is to put Irexit on the table and to leave it there, in full view, for EU negotiators to see.
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Now, why would Ireland want to do that, unless the plan was to expand the anticipated UK-US free trade area as soon as it was in place?

https://twitter.com/rafaelbehr/status/1526930703849594880
 
eternumviti said:
I think you'll find that the overheating housing market isn't limited to the UK. Its largely the result of a record period of ultra-low interest rates, and QE stimulated money sloshing around the asset-owning 'classes'. Central banks across the western economies have been addicted to QE. We're all about to pay the price for that one.
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House prices inflated in periods of high inflation and before QE, more that they did after and with low inflation.

House prices inflated steeply with Thatcherism
 
Are you saying that house prices haven't increased sharply over the last 10 years, and that the market is not overheating?
 
laughingboy said:
Yes, this vision of a UK-US power play, with the UK acting as Muttley to America's Dick Dastardly, is hinted at in Liam Halligan and Gerard Lyons' book, Clean Brexit.Now, why would Ireland want to do that, unless the plan was to expand the anticipated UK-US free trade area as soon as it was in place?

https://twitter.com/rafaelbehr/status/1526930703849594880
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With "UPDATED FOREWORD BY GISELA STUART AND UPDATED AFTERWORD BY JACOB REES-MOGG".
I wonder what the updates were.
 
Joe Hutch said:
It's like that bloke on here a few days ago arguing for Brexit because it would help preserve our 'race'. But Peter Hitchens has always been barmy.
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Was there really someone here making such a foolish comment? Which "race" was that, the Celts, the Saxons, the Normans or some later iteration of our population over the previous 2 thousand years or so?
 
ks.234 said:
Isn’t it even simpler? Brexit was a vote to erect trade barriers and we are now complaining because we have trade barriers. And further, having negotiated and agreed to trade barriers, we are now angry with the countries we demanded trade barriers with, because we have trade barriers.
Click to expand...

No. Brexit was about avoiding the EU regulations that could affect the management of trillions of £, as offshored in the Caimans and Jersey, by the rich sponsors of the tories.

I genuinely believe that anything else was simply a smokescreen to push through the "deal", regardless of it's implications or associated lies.
 
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