Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

DUBLIN (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May is “very, very unlikely” to win support in parliament for the Brexit divorce deal she agreed with the European Union, a eurosceptic member of her minority government said on Friday.

“The way the parliamentary mess looks at the moment, I would say it’s very, very unlikely,” Craig MacKinlay told Irish national broadcaster RTE when asked whether May could get the deal approved in a third parliamentary vote.

“That’s not just because of the ERG group (of Conservative eurosceptics). If we look at the new independent group who have been wholly opposed to this. You’ve got about 15 Conservative members on Conservative benches who are opposed to this, those who don’t want Brexit to happen at all.”

LONDON (Reuters) - More Britons will back leaving the European Union without a deal after the European Union offered a delay to Brexit, the former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party Nigel Farage said on Friday.

“It’s a very, very clear majority (to leave with no-deal) and it’s gaining a few percent every week,” Farage told BBC radio.

“I’ll predict that in the wake of what happened last night here, understanding that we are not leaving on March 29, that number will grow,” Farage said.

Farage said he would lead the newly formed Brexit Party into the European parliamentary elections, if Britain takes part.

Arriving at the summit, Iceland’s prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, was asked if she would welcome the UK in Efta (the European free trade association, which comprises the three non-EU countries in the EEA, plus Switzerland). She did not sound too keen. She replied:

I think the UK itself must think about the option, whether it is an option. From what I have read from the debate in the UK, they are also very critical of the components of the EEA agreement, which the Efta members are part of. So I don’t know whether that is the solution that the UK is looking for it.

Asked again if she would welcome the UK joining, she replied:

Obviously we would be happy to talk about that with the UK if that’s something the UK wants to talk about.

The extent and range of the impact of a no-deal Brexit is revealed in a confidential Cabinet Office document that warns of a “critical three-month phase” after leaving the EU during which the whole planning operation could be overwhelmed.

The classified document, seen by the Guardian, sets out the command and control structures in Whitehall for coping with a no-deal departure and says government departments will have to firefight most problems for themselves – or risk a collapse of “Operation Yellowhammer”.

“The … structure will quickly fall if too many decisions are unnecessarily escalated to the top levels that could have reasonably been dealt with internally …” the document says. It also concedes there are “likely to be unforeseen issues and impacts” of a no-deal Brexit that Operation Yellowhammer has been unable to predict.

The Cabinet Office has taken the lead in preparations for no-deal and is desperately war-gaming scenarios in the event the UK leaves without a coherent withdrawal plan.

The document includes a flow-chart of a routine no-deal day in Whitehall – which starts at 7am with “situation reports” from across the UK being sent to ministers and senior officials, and continues with non-stop assessments and meetings until 5.30am the following day.

[... ... ...]



... ... ...

There are two big lessons. First we are paying the price of our failure for years to explain the EU. What is it for? Security. It delivers good political relations among neighbours — the best guarantee of security you can get. We have benefited very directly from this. Being in the EU together meant that for the first time we worked with Dublin as equals. That, and the open border, enabled peace in Ireland. In Britain, no one noticed. The EU is a political project: the customs union and the single market are means to an end. Why did no one tell us?

The second lesson is that we are governed by the parties for the parties. The system would never get past a decent competition regulator. Most people know that it makes no difference how they vote. We are the oldest parliamentary democracy, and it shows.

They came to London from across Britain and Europe, filled with enthusiasm for the new three Rs: revoke, remain, reform

There are still a few things in public life that you cannot fake. You can fake photographs and you can fake news. You can fake conviction and you can fake emotions. You can fake a Twitter-petition and you can fake Facebook outrage. But you cannot fake an almighty crowd.

The numbers attending Saturday’s march for a second “people’s vote” on Brexit will no doubt be contested. The organisers claimed more than a million people were out; detractors inevitably argued a few thousand fewer. But make no mistake, for anyone who travelled to it, and shuffled along among it and who tried to find their way home after it, the Put it to the People march represented a formidable sea of humanity, and a powerful strength of feeling.
[...]
There had been suggestions that the march would be met by counter-demonstrations, but there were none in evidence. As the crowd first massed, with its blue and gold EU flags, I heard one or two shouts of “traitors” from those driving by. These “patriots” would have done well to talk to Brigadier Stephen Goodall, who led the “Veterans For EU” group.

Goodall will be 97 in June. He had travelled up from his home in Devon with four generations of his family including his great-granddaughter. During the war he helped to pull survivors out of the rubble of the Coventry bombing. He served in India and Burma and was awarded the Military Cross in 1945 for bravery behind enemy lines.

I had spoken to the brigadier the day before the march about his reasons for coming. “It was an easy decision,” he said. “There is not much time left for me to do anything and I just feel if we can even at this late stage get people thinking sensibly, then it will be worthwhile.” His great anxiety, as a former controller of the Slimbridge Wildlife Trust, was that our fractured politics would deflect us from the co-operative spirit required to combat climate change. “One thing that I always bear in mind from when we were in Malaya in the 1950s,” he said, “was this imperative that governance was first about reaching hearts and minds. We need politicians who think first of people,” he said, “not about their investments in the City of London.”

Goodall was pushed in his wheelchair near the head of the march, along with a brass band. It was impossible watching that sight not to make some comparisons with those few stubborn souls on the ill-fated “March to Leave”, moved to trudge along lonely hard-shoulders by Nigel Farage, only to find that he had turned up for the photo opportunity and left them to fend for themselves. Farage, alive to BBC requirements for “balance”, had returned to preach on Saturday to his handful of leaderless footsoldiers at a pub car park in Linby, Nottinghamshire: “You are the 17.4 million,” he told a crowd of 150.
[...]
Watching the crowd I was reminded of a book I reviewed for this paper not long after those electoral convulsions of 2016 here and across the Atlantic. The book, On Tyranny, by the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, was a little survival guide against the digital forces of populism and the brutalist politics they promoted. Snyder called above all for a “corporeal politics” in response, for voting with paper ballots that can be counted and recounted; for face-to-face conversation, and for marching rather than online petitioning: “Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on a screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.”

Those who did this on Saturday will no doubt be told in the coming days, as Britain determines the kind of country it will become, that they were wasting their time and effort. But this march mattered in the simple and fundamental way that mass marches always matter: as a reminder to those who make decisions in their name that democracy is not a settled state, but a shifting expression of collective will. As one little girl’s sign had it: “The people are STILL speaking”.