Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

More than 600,000 EU citizens have already applied to stay in the UK post-Brexit, Home Office figures reveal.

But the settled status scheme for EU citizens seeking to remain has room for improvement, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration (ICIBI) in the UK has said.

David Bolt made seven recommendations to improve the scheme, with more attention needed for vulnerable applicants and those who want to challenge a decision by the Home Office.
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Europe has breathed a collective sight of relief after EU officials announced that serious discussion of Brexit would be banned at an upcoming leaders’ summit.

Ahead of Thursday’s meeting in the Romanian city of Sibiu, one senior EU official said the summit would be "in principle Brexit-free”.

For two years now the UK has repeatedly crashed EU meetings about other issues and steered discussions towards Brexit – often to the great annoyance of other countries.

But since April, when the leaders agreed to delay the UK’s departure until October, the continent has gone on a “Brexit holiday” and is using the time to discuss other issues.

Theresa May is staying away from the Sibiu meeting, though the UK is expected to be represented in the margins.

The summit is intended to be a re-launch of the EU after a series of crises like Brexit, migration, and economic problems in the eurozone. Its date was originally picked so that it would take place after Britain’s departure, a plan which has since been overtaken by events.

Speaking at a lunchtime press conference in Brussels, Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, summed up the view in the EU capital with a quip.

“Everyone understands English,” he said, as he switched languages from French. “No one understands England – but everyone understands English.”

He struck an ambivalent tone on Brexit, telling reporters: “I don’t have fears, I don’t have hopes [for Brexit].

“I was saying the other day that by comparison to the British parliament the Egyptian sphinx are open books. Either they stay or they will leave. If they stay, they stay. If they leave, they leave.”
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The UK and Irish governments have announced how negotiations designed to re-establish power-sharing in Northern Ireland will work.

The political leaders of the main parties will meet at least once a week, and five working groups will be establish to discuss different areas of contention. These are:

1. Programme for government - priority issues that might be the focus of a future executive including heath, education, and the economy.
2. Transparency, accountability and the operation of the executive.

3. Reform of the petition of concern - the system that give parties a veto in order to ensure that legislation passed has cross-party support.

4. Rights, language and identity issues - this is likely to include the controversial issue of whether the Irish language should be enshrined in law.

5. Improving the sustainability, stability and operation of all the Good Friday Agreement institutions.

Each party will nominate three representatives to the working groups, and the UK and Irish governments will "advice and support" the Northern Irish politicians.

Three years and roughly eight million political lifetimes ago, a man called Barack Obama stood in a room in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and told Britain that if it voted for Brexit it would go “to the back of the queue” for a trade deal with the USA.

Britain, you may know, ignored that advice, and yet, for some mystifying reason, it appears to find itself not to at the front of the queue, and not even at the back of the queue. But rather, its role is now that of a tramp, waiting hopefully at closing time by the bins out the back of America.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in town this week, taking his turn to stand in a room in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Pompeo is a kind of Trump-lite yoghurt in a 19-stone carton. The job became vacant, you might recall, after the last guy called the president an idiot, and in a rare moment of shrewdness in the Oval Office, Trump replaced him with one of the few people on planet Earth who would be in no position to do the same.
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And more to the point, here was Pompeo, outlining the “special relationship” as he sees it, which is to say that if Britain wants to trade deal which it wrongly imagines will salvage its economy and international reputation, it will do precisely what its told.
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This is not the first time “special relationship” has turned out to be so special that one half of it comes to visit the other half and mercilessly criticises it while it does so. The word "special" has a dubious status in the modern lexicon. Not everything described as special is done so in a good way.

Britain, in other words, will do what it’s told and wait to see what it gets. Still, what do you expect when you’re dealing with a comedy act? Not so much at the front of the queue as sat in the front row, a place for the vain, the masochistic, the desperate or the downright stupid. Or, occasionally, all four.

Mike Pompeo spells it out: When it comes to trade, Britain is basically a tramp waiting at America's bins

Quote:

Three years and roughly eight million political lifetimes ago, a man called Barack Obama stood in a room in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and told Britain that if it voted for Brexit it would go “to the back of the queue” for a trade deal with the USA.

Britain, you may know, ignored that advice, and yet, for some mystifying reason, it appears to find itself not to at the front of the queue, and not even at the back of the queue. But rather, its role is now that of a tramp, waiting hopefully at closing time by the bins out the back of America.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in town this week, taking his turn to stand in a room in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Pompeo is a kind of Trump-lite yoghurt in a 19-stone carton. The job became vacant, you might recall, after the last guy called the president an idiot, and in a rare moment of shrewdness in the Oval Office, Trump replaced him with one of the few people on planet Earth who would be in no position to do the same.
[...]
And more to the point, here was Pompeo, outlining the “special relationship” as he sees it, which is to say that if Britain wants to trade deal which it wrongly imagines will salvage its economy and international reputation, it will do precisely what its told.
[...]
This is not the first time “special relationship” has turned out to be so special that one half of it comes to visit the other half and mercilessly criticises it while it does so. The word "special" has a dubious status in the modern lexicon. Not everything described as special is done so in a good way.

Britain, in other words, will do what it’s told and wait to see what it gets. Still, what do you expect when you’re dealing with a comedy act? Not so much at the front of the queue as sat in the front row, a place for the vain, the masochistic, the desperate or the downright stupid. Or, occasionally, all four.

The government was warned last year that it would face a bill of up to £20m if sued over the procurement of no-deal Brexit ferry services, the National Audit Office has revealed.

It said the Department for Transport's (DfT) accounting officer thought there was a "high likelihood" of a challenge over the contracts with Brittany Ferries, DFDS and Seaborne Freight.

She also warned Eurotunnel could sue.

In March, the DfT agreed to a £33m settlement with the firm.

In response to the National Audit Office's (NAO) report, the government said it had "carefully considered the legal risk at all stages of the procurement".
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Quote:

The government was warned last year that it would face a bill of up to £20m if sued over the procurement of no-deal Brexit ferry services, the National Audit Office has revealed.

It said the Department for Transport's (DfT) accounting officer thought there was a "high likelihood" of a challenge over the contracts with Brittany Ferries, DFDS and Seaborne Freight.

She also warned Eurotunnel could sue.

In March, the DfT agreed to a £33m settlement with the firm.

In response to the National Audit Office's (NAO) report, the government said it had "carefully considered the legal risk at all stages of the procurement".
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BBC

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Throughout the entire process, it appears from here, the Brits have been negotiating essentially with themselves, rather than with the EU27. And when they have tried they have proved inconsistent, incoherent, entitled and wholly incapable of compromise either with themselves or their neighbours.

Above all, Britain has been unrealistic, and startlingly ignorant of the workings of an organisation they have belonged to for nearly 50 years. So much of what has been proposed from the UK side has simply been impossible – but because it continues to view Europe through that uniquely British prism, it proposed it all the same.

Here’s the key thing: the EU is a legal construct, a rules-based organisation built on a half-century accumulation of laws and treaties. Its greatest single achievement is the single market, which its remaining members strongly believe has raised prosperity and living standards across a continent, and whose rules are non-negotiable.

So it was never going to be possible for Britain to “negotiate” Brexit with the EU27 – especially since, in the memorable words of Xavier Bettel, Luxembourg’s prime minister (a man not often listened to with great attention in London): “When the UK was in, all it wanted was opt-outs. Now it’s going to be out, and all it wants are opt-ins.” Ultimately, Brexit was always going to mean what the EU27 said it meant.

It has taken a uniquely British combination of ignorance and arrogance to assume otherwise: a blind faith that solutions that did not actually exist in the real world could and should be accepted; that the EU27 would roll over and give Britain all it asked for; that Brexit – as ministers promised – “has no conceivable downsides” and would be “the easiest trade deal in history” because “we hold all the cards”.
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in the memorable words of Xavier Bettel, Luxembourg’s prime minister (a man not often listened to with great attention in London): “When the UK was in, all it wanted was opt-outs. Now it’s going to be out, and all it wants are opt-ins.”

Just a reminder for those, who still don't know it:
- Europe is a continent with 50 sovereign states, the UK being one of those.
- the EU is a political and economic union in Europe with 28 sovereign member states.
- the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community (as it then was) on 1 January 1973 and is still a member country of the EU.

Seriously, I'm not going to explain an adult what an economic union is and how it works.

Nigel Farage’s Brexit party is on course to secure more support at the European elections than the Tories and Labour combined, according to the latest Opinium poll for the Observer.

In the most striking sign to date of surging support for Farage, the poll suggests more than a third of voters will back him on 23 May. It puts his party on 34% of the vote, with less than a fortnight before the election takes place.

The poll suggests support for the Conservatives has collapsed amid the Brexit uncertainty, with Theresa May’s party on just 11%. Labour is a distant second, on 21%. The Lib Dems perform the best of any of the openly anti-Brexit parties, one point ahead of the Tories on 12% of the vote.

With the Brexit party securing more than three times the level of support for the Tories, the poll confirms the concerns of senior Conservatives that it is haemorrhaging support as Brexit remains unresolved. Just a fortnight ago, the Brexit party was neck-and-neck with Labour on 28%. Now it has a 13-point lead over Jeremy Corbyn’s party.

The Conservatives are now only narrowly ahead of the Brexit party when voters are asked who they would vote for at a general election. The Tories are on 22% support, down 4% on a fortnight ago, with the Brexit party on 21% backing. Labour leads on 28%, but is down five points on the last poll.

Leave voters seem to be flocking to the Brexit party. A fortnight ago, it was joint first with the Conservatives among leave voters in terms of general election voting, with both on 33%. It now appears to be the clearer choice of leave voters, with 40% saying they will vote for the Brexit party and 27% backing the Conservatives.

May is also close to losing her lead over Corbyn as to who voters regard as the best prime minister. Her lead has dropped from four points to just one point.

The Opinium poll also found that despite the dominance of Brexit as an issue since the 2016 referendum, there was a significant proportion of voters who did not know each party’s position on it. The poll reveals 36% are not aware of the Conservative party’s stance, while 38% say the same about Labour.

For those who said they knew, 23% think the Conservatives support a soft Brexit, while 23% think they support a hard Brexit. For the Labour party, 25% think they support remaining in the EU, while 31% think they support a soft Brexit.

Opinium polled 2,004 people online between 8-10 May.

The German states, for instance,have of course an interstate commerce as well as the four constituent countries of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

European Union law is the system of laws operating within the member countries of the European Union.
Wikipedia's report History of the European Union might be some help.

I have no idea, where and when you've studied International Law.
But you must have missed a lot of courses.

Get educated about "treaty" in general.
Then, related to the EU, the Treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community, the Treaties of Rome : EEC and EURATOM treaties, the Merger Treaty - Brussels Treaty, the Single European Act, the Treaty on European Union - Maastricht Treaty, the Treaty of Amsterdam, the Treaty of Nice, and the Treaty of Lisbon - just mentioning the main treaties.
And "no", I'm not going to explain them here.