Such protections as are in the Withdrawal Agreement, the unwillingness of the EU (and the EU27 states) to use us as bargaining chips and observe the principles of the EU treaties, our preparedness to fight for our rights using the EU and ECHR principles.
If the WA gets trashed by the UK and subsequently by the EU it will be down to us.
Grahame Pigney
P Help save paper - please don’t print this email unless you really need to.
P Sauvegardons la planète. Avez-vous vraiment besoin d’imprimer cet e-mail?
This sort of rhetoric is despicable and is racist and bigotry.
The vast majority of UK citizens would find this sort of rhetoric completely unacceptable.
Grahame Pigney
P Help save paper - please don’t print this email unless you really need to.
P Sauvegardons la planète. Avez-vous vraiment besoin d’imprimer cet e-mail?
There is no answer to the question you have posed because the EU has never held the UK back, unless stopping it slipping back into the myth of a non-existent and nonsensical Imperial power.
It was the UK, Margaret Thatcher, who fought for the Single Market, the Common External Tariff and the Rule of Law to be embodied in EU law and principles.
Whatever Margaret Thatcher’s faults and failures with regard to UK domestic policy her instincts about the collective power of the EU are indisputable.
Grahame Pigney
P Help save paper - please don’t print this email unless you really need to.
P Sauvegardons la planète. Avez-vous vraiment besoin d’imprimer cet e-mail?
What struck me as odd for a long time was the growing preoccupation with the war. As a boy growing up in 1960s England, the war not surprisingly loomed pretty large - it had only ended 15 years before, and had shattered the lives of our parents, aunts and uncles, etc - but there wasn’t any nostalgia for ‘glory days’ - just the opposite - most people were looking forward rather than back. It wasn’t until relatively recently that it began to loom larger as some kind of nationalistic totem.
It was the controversy over the wearing of poppies by footballers a couple of years ago that for me shed some light on what was happening. As many people realised, before the 2008 world financial collapse there was no such controversy - nobody got angry about footballers or anyone else not wearing poppies, and FIFA’s ban on them as political symbols was simply accepted, because everybody knew the red poppy was always unfortunately associated not just with remembrance, but with militarism and nationalism. That is precisely why the alternative white poppy was adopted as a symbol of remembrance explicitly linked with ideals of peace and internationalism. Now - but only over very recent years of ‘austerity’ and economic uncertainty - red poppies have become virtually obligatory for anyone in the public eye in the UK.
What changed? Increasing economic uncertainty, I believe - a constant background worry about livelihoods, fear of the future and therefore flight into past glories, real or invented - and so a coercive nationalism overtook the UK - driving many to vote for brexit among other things - but ultimately driven by economic insecurity.
The deal with Japan simply replaces (well almost) the deal the UK had with Japan as an EU28 member.
Although trumpeted as a big deal it is not very special and only represents a very small proportion of the trade between the UK and te EU that the UK is about to throw away.
How is this progress?
Grahame Pigney
P Help save paper - please don’t print this email unless you really need to.
P Sauvegardons la planète. Avez-vous vraiment besoin d’imprimer cet e-mail?
I have yet to see a Brexiteer come up with even the start of an answer to the question, I live in hope but suspect that the answer will shortly be demonstrated as we exit “for real” in January.
I agree with your first comment but I’m afraid I don’t - at all - with the second. I think most readers simply won’t notice at all that it is irrelevant to the covid crisis and just another helping of subliminal Europe bashing keeping the flames of anti-Europe feeling and rubbishy nostalgia ablaze, along with the frightfully funny references to not mentioning the war, sitcoms with 2-dimensional stereotypes of French or German people etc etc - because it fits in with the diet of trite xenophobic rubbish fed to an ignorant, historically (and otherwise) semi-literate public.
Of course I realise that YOU know that, but so many people, even some on this forum just haven’t understood.
In 2016 there was not a “No Deal” proposition. Just leaving the EU and staying in the Single Market & the Customs Union – the EU27 would give the UK whatever they wanted so that they could continue to sell BMWs/Mercedes/Audis, Prosecco, Champagne, Camembert et al….
That is leaving aside the rights and benefits of UK citizens, living, working, studying, owning businesses and properties or trading from/into EU27 countries.
UK citizens have been used as bargaining chips by the EU27 just as much as EU27 citizens with equivalent interests in the UK have been used as bargaining chips by the UK.
For those of us here in France we eagerly await the opening of the system to allow us to register, something that is supposed to happen on 1st October. Will that happen – who knows – France has produced multiple excuses for putting off the moment over the past 4 years, will it be any different now?
Grahame Pigney
P Help save paper - please don’t print this email unless you really need to.
P Sauvegardons la planète. Avez-vous vraiment besoin d’imprimer cet e-mail?
Perhaps your prejudice against ordinary UK citizens is being coloured by the rhetoric of Farage, Johnson et al.
Not surprising but your generalisation is offensive to UK citizens in general, as you would find it equally offensive if we characterised the French as being sympathetic to the Vichy regime, the Milice and other collaborative regimes/organisations.
A broader, better informed point of view is required to understand the actualities.
Grahame Pigney
P Help save paper - please don’t print this email unless you really need to.
P Sauvegardons la planète. Avez-vous vraiment besoin d’imprimer cet e-mail?
Lots of them were. As we say 4 murs c’est 3 de trop, but that is in the past now.
I am French AND Scottish by birth Grahame, which is why I have and always have had dual nationality, and I was educated mainly in the UK, so I do know what I am talking about.
Using an expression from an article from a very popular mass-circulation ‘newspaper’ as an illustration, I don’t think I am misjudging the sentiments of a fairly wide swathe of the UK electorate.
Assuming that you membership of this private website survives your heckling attitude I’m still waiting to have a civilised and rational discussion with you regarding the economic benefits of Brexit.
I was going to give you a poke to find out and stumbled on your news by accident. Félicitations !!!