Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

The good thing is that now Brexit will happen, and soon, so we can all move on.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union hopes for a quick British parliament vote on Britain’s withdrawal from the bloc and clarity on London’s plans following Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s triumph in elections, the head of the European Council said on Friday.

Charles Michel, who chairs EU summits, congratulated Johnson and also said the EU was ready to negotiate a free-trade agreement with Britain but called on London to work in good faith.

“We expect, as soon as possible, a the vote by the British Parliament ... It’s important to have clarity, as soon as possible,” Michel told reporters as he arrived for a second day of an EU leaders summit. “We are ready,” he said of trade talks.

EU greets Johnson victory with relief and reluctance

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU leaders welcomed Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s election triumph on Friday as a chance to put three years of Brexit frustration behind them, but the Czech premier spoke for many in the bloc when he said Brexit was “bad news for Europe”.

Leaders said they now wanted a quick divorce and to move on to talks on a free-trade accord with the EU, even if they are likely to be difficult.

“I’m relieved for my country,” Ireland’s Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said at an EU summit.

A so-called orderly Brexit with a transition period is crucial for investors and businesses who fear a “no-deal” departure would disrupt trade and financial markets.

“We expect a vote on the withdrawal agreement as soon as possible,” European Council President Charles Michel told reporters, referring to the deal that Johnson and the EU struck setting the terms of Britain’s exit on Jan. 31, 2020.

“It’s important to have clarity as soon as possible,” Michel said.

Leaders from Italy to the Netherlands echoed that sentiment, with Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel saying: “Boris won the election by telling everyone he wants to deliver, so now it’s time to deliver.”

Senior German conservative lawmaker Norbert Roettgen, an ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, said on Twitter that now the size of Johnson’s victory was clear “Brexit has become inevitable”.

EU leaders, like many British voters, have tired of stop-start Brexit negotiations and the three extensions to Britain’s departure date they have granted, although all deeply lamented the British decision to leave.

“It is obviously a giant success for Boris Johnson. He is a charismatic leader,” Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said.

“He won and now they will leave, unfortunately. That is bad news for Europe,” he said.

NO SHORT-CUTS ON TRADE

For many in Europe, Britain was seen as a pragmatic, free-trading nation whose position as one of the EU’s two military powers along with France gave the EU a bigger voice in the world.

But now the world’s biggest trading bloc is resigned to London leaving and wants to get on with unraveling more than 40 years of British membership, even if that is likely to take more than the 12 months that some in London are hoping for.

Leaders said the EU was ready to negotiate a free-trade agreement but called on London to work in good faith, underlining EU fears that Britain might try to reinvent itself as a low-regulation rival.

“#EU is ready for the next phase. We will negotiate a future trade deal which ensures a true level playing field,” Michel tweeted.

Varadkar cautioned there would be “no undercuts on labor rights” and clinching a trade deal by the end of 2020 was “enormously ambitious.”

EU trade pacts with countries such as South Korea, Japan and Canada have taken between five and nine years to complete, while EU officials warn that Johnson’s plan to diverge from the EU, rather than mirror EU rules, could make negotiations even more complicated.

Nearly twice as many Labour voters defected over Jeremy Corbyn's leadership than party's Brexit stance, poll finds

Despite Corbyn's claim the election 'was taken over ultimately by Brexit' just 21 per cent cited the issue as their main reason for switching parties
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Pollsters Opinium found that among 2017 Labour voters who defected at last night's general election, 37 per cent of them cited the leadership of the party as their main reason.

Despite Mr Corbyn's claim the election “was taken over ultimately by Brexit”, 21 per cent said they defected due to the party’s stance on EU membership while just six per cent said their main reason was Labour’s economic policies.
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Election result: 52% of votes go to pro-referendum parties despite decisive victory for the Tories

Vote share split echoes ratio from 2016 referendum

More than half of voters backed pro-referendum parties at the polls despite Boris Johnson's decisive general election victory.

Analysis of election vote share reveals nearly 52 per cent supported parties in favour of a Final Say vote such as Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the SNP, compared to 47 per cent who supported Brexit-backing parties, such as the Tories and the DUP.

The split in vote share echoes the ratio of the 2016 Brexit referendum, where the Leave campaign scored victory by 52 per cent to 48 per cent.
... ... ...

The battle for UK membership of the European Union is lost and the question will not be reopened for 20 years, europhile former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine has said.

Lord Heseltine, who lost the Tory whip after urging people to vote against Conservatives to stop Brexit, played down the prospect of an immediate campaign to rejoin the EU, and said the focus must now be on ensuring that Boris Johnson’s withdrawal deal works for disadvantaged areas of the UK.

After securing a landslide majority in Thursday’s election, allowing him to get Brexit done, Mr Johnson was coming under pressure to strike a trade deal with Brussels which allows the UK to maximise commercial links by maintaining close alignment with EU regulations.

French president Emmanuel Macron has said that an ambitious deal will require “ambitious regulatory convergence”, while Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar said he expected Johnson to accept EU standards on the environment and labour rights as the price for access to European markets. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen indicated that an agreement to be reached within Mr Johnson’s deadline of 31 December 2020 can cover only areas like goods, fisheries and security, with the vital services sector to be dealt with later.

And the TUC warned that Mr Johnson must be ready to take his time to secure a deal which will support jobs and workplace protections in the northern and Midlands seats which secure his stunning victory over Labour. The PM was carrying out post-election visits in the north on Saturday to assure voters of his determination to spread opportunity across the UK.

But Donald Trump has said that a “far bigger and more lucrative” deal is on offer from the US if the UK breaks free of EU standards, and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has warned that Leavers will “reapply pressure” on the PM if he moves towards a “soft” outcome.

Lord Heseltine said the priority for pro-Europeans must now be to try to shape a future relationship with Europe which minimises the harm from Brexit.

“We have lost, let’s not muck about with the language,” the former DPM told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. “Brexit is going to happen and we have to live with it.

“There will now be a long period of uncertainty, but we can’t escape from that, so we must do the best we can.”

Brushing off the prospect of an immediate campaign to rejoin, Lord Heseltine said: “I don’t think it’s gone, but it won’t be my generation. It will be 20 years or something before the thing is once again raised as an issue.”

The deputy general secretary of the TUC urged Boris Johnson to “put your money where your mouth is, engage with the unions, engage with working people” to get a Brexit deal that protects workers’ rights.

Paul Nowak told Today: “There are some contradictions in the Prime Minister’s position. He said before the election that he wants to protect and enhance employment rights, but if you look at that withdrawal bill, it delivers none of those protections.”

He added: “The Government needs to now widen the conversation to include businesses, to include trade unions.

“And I think our message clearly to Boris Johnson would be to put people before politics, to deliver a Brexit deal that does protect jobs and employment rights and I think that means getting a right deal not just a quick deal – and I think it does mean standing by the commitments he’s made to those voters in the North East and in the Midlands who may have voted for the first time.”

Mr Nowak warned: “A deal that threatens jobs and people’s employment isn’t a deal that we can live with.”

Belgian MEP Philippe Lamberts, a member of the European Parliament’s Brexit Steering Group said that a trade deal with zero tariffs would depend on whether the Conservative party was able to “face up to its own contradictions”.

Mr Lamberts said: “They want the deepest possible access to the European single market, yet they want to undercut significantly EU legislation, and you can’t have both.

“So either you want total regulatory freedom and you do whatever you like – and if you want to undercut EU legislation then you do it, but then you lose access. Or you want access and you have basically to remain aligned with EU legislation, that will be the decision that Boris Johnson will need to make.”

He added: “If the United Kingdom wants to retain full access, including for services, that will have the adverse consequence that it has to remain aligned to EU legislation in services as well, and I understand that some in the Government would want to deviate from that quite significantly.”

Mr Farage admitted that the influence on the prime minister of his Brexit Party and the European Research Group of backbench Tory eurosceptics has “disappeared for the time being” as a result of Mr Johnson’s overwhelming victory.

But he vowed to be “not too far away from the action” as the UK’s new relationship with the EU takes shape.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, the architect of Brexit said: “Questions over the future shape of Brexit and Britain’s place in the world are now entirely in the hands of Johnson.

“With half of his Cabinet having voted Remain, and substantial global pressures on him, it will be tempting for him to pursue the easy option of a soft Brexit.

“Whatever happens over the coming months, I will make sure I am not too far away from the action. The fact is that if Brexit does not ‘get done’, as Johnson has promised repeatedly over the last six weeks, pressure will have to be reapplied.”

Brexit definitely gained a lot of popularity since that initial vote in 2016.

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union, or leave the European Union?

In hindsight, do you think Britain was right or wrong to vote to leave the EU?

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Under Johnson’s EU withdrawal deal, Northern Ireland will already be in a different economic and legal space from England, Scotland and Wales. Now Northern Ireland has, for the first time, elected more nationalist than unionist MPs. While it will probably remain constitutionally part of the UK for some time to come, since a formal break could return the province to bloodshed, in reality it will be ever more integrated with the rest of the island of Ireland.

Scotland, meanwhile, has voted as emphatically for the Scottish National party (SNP) as England did for the Conservatives – and that on an explicit SNP commitment to a second Scottish referendum in which Nicola Sturgeon’s party will argue for Scotland to leave the British union in order to rejoin the European one. As an Englishman, I want Scotland to stay with us, to enhance the strength, diversity and openness of the multinational nation that is Britain. There are also strong economic and prudential arguments for Scotland to stick with England. But if I were Scottish, I would now probably vote for independence, knowing that small countries generally do rather well inside the EU. If Johnson continues to deny the Scots the right to a second referendum, that will make them even more likely to eventually vote for independence, when the opportunity does arise.

That result would take us back to the 17th century, before the 1707 union, and some would even say back to the 16th century, when only England and Wales were united under one sovereign. There is a huge irony here. Brexit, which has been fuelled at the top by English post-imperial delusions of grandeur, is the very thing that will probably end up demolishing even the original, smallest English empire, the one embracing these islands.

All this will take years to unfold, and the final denouement is not inevitable. Maybe the Scots will after all stick with the devil they know. But it is not too soon for us liberals – in the broadest sense – to start fighting the battle of England. Brexit is at heart an English nationalist project. The flag of St George, the language, the mystique, the emotional appeal of England and Englishness have been misappropriated by nationalists and xenophobes, not to mention those even further to the right, such as Tommy Robinson once of the soi-disant English Defence League.
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The battle to keep Britain in the EU is lost; the battle for a European England has only just begun. When we remainers marched in our hundreds of thousands through the streets of London, bearing our improvised posters and European flags, we were not just defending British membership in a particular set of European institutions. We were also defending a certain idea of Britain and, within that, a certain idea of England: open, tolerant, internationalist, civic and civil, attentive to the social foundations of individual liberty and not just to its raw economic expression. These are values we share with millions of other Europeans.

In this sense, we were also standing up for a European England. And we can do so still. In this hour of defeat I feel impelled to say, with Orwell: I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward.

Move is being considered by EU officials in face of Johnson not seeking extension beyond 11 months

EU leaders would take the initiative and request an extension to the transition period, keeping the UK under Brussels regulations beyond 2020, under a plan mooted for dealing with the unlikelihood of Boris Johnson seeking a delay.

The move is being considered by EU officials as a way out of the problem posed by the short time available to negotiate a new relationship and the prime minister’s insistence that he will not seek an extension beyond 11 months.

With a majority of 80 secured by the prime minister, the UK is expected to leave the EU on 31 January – in fewer than 50 days. At the end of the transition period on 31 December 2020, the UK is set to exit the EU’s customs union and single market and enter newly negotiated arrangements.

But Ursula von der Leyen said on Friday, at the end of a two-day leaders’ summit in Brussels, that negotiating a future relationship in such a timeframe would be very challenging.

The European commission president said the negotiations would instead have to prioritise key EU issues, such as the trade in goods and fisheries, and leave others for after 2020. Such a “sequencing” could leave arrangements for the UK’s financial services sector and the landing rights of British air carriers out of an initial deal, among other issues.

Such a staged approach would be unwelcome in Downing Street and would, in itself, be difficult to complete given the clashes expected on both the UK’s future alignment with EU laws and the level of access to British waters given to European fishing fleets.

The withdrawal agreement stipulates that the transition can be extended by “one or two years” but that this must be agreed before 1 July next year. It is recognised in Brussels that Johnson will find it politically impossible to seek an extension to the transition to allow all the issues to be agreed.

On breaking his word by asking for a delay, Johnson would have to open negotiations on how much extra the UK would pay into the EU budget. Free movement of people would also continue.

Instead, it is understood initial discussions have taken place in Brussels about the EU asking the British government for an extension, given the complexity of the talks. It is likely that the EU would also need to sweeten the offer of an extension by minimising the costs that the UK would face.

Sources suggested that such a move might offer Johnson a better chance of gaining cabinet approval, and avoid a cliff-edge exit from the EU’s structures on 31 December 2020, including the imposition of tariffs.

The development highlights the difficulties facing the negotiators as they prepare for talks. The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, said on Friday that he believed the negotiations in the next year would be far tougher than those over the withdrawal agreement.

Some EU capitals were left frustrated by Von der Leyen’s comments about the need to sequence the talks, believing it risked antagonising the UK.

Mujtaba Rahman, a former European commission official and now managing director for Europe at Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm, said: “The EU side hasn’t fully agreed how best to handle phase two and the big internal debate in Europe is about prioritisation. The commission wants to prioritise talks – akin to how it favoured sequencing in phase one ‪– and start with the areas where there’s no fallback, such as the free-trade agreement, level playing field and governance.

“But EU capitals do not, as member states, worry about pre-judging Johnson’s preferences and his ability to make difficult concessions if the things that UK wants aren’t on table at the outset, such as services.”

Finally, I expect that, with Brexit soon to be off the political table, more attention will soon focus on the several other acute economic and political divisions remaining within the EU.

However, I have long believed that the poorly defined goal of "ever closer union" and the bureaucratic state that has emerged from it, risks overreach and the destruction of all its greatest achievements. I also believe that was the essential driving force for Brexit in the UK.

Generally, "ever closer union" has never been and still isn't specifically a call for political union but "the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen" (Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union).

All the EU-treaties actually say "ever closer union of the peoples" of Europe, not governments.

It's hard to unite the peoples without controlling, or at least bypassing, circumventing and ultimately replacing their national governments.

Writing in the Observer, the Labour leader, who has announced he will step down when a successor is elected in the spring, describes the results as “desperately disappointing”.

He says he believes Labour paid a price for a Brexit policy that was seen by some voters as an attempt to straddle the divide between remainers and leavers, and by others as wanting to rerun the referendum.

(Reuters) - The top priority of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government is to leave the European Union on Jan. 31 and secure a new trade deal with the EU by the end of next year, cabinet office minister Michael Gove said on Sunday.

After the Conservatives were re-elected last week with a majority of 80 seats, Prime Minister Boris Johnson will pursue twin priorities in government - to fulfill his promise to “get Brexit done” and plough money into Britain’s health service.

“What I can absolutely confirm is that we’ll have an opportunity to vote on the Withdrawal Agreement Bill in relatively short order and then we will make sure that it passes before Jan. 31,” Gove told Sky News.

“We will have concluded our conversations with the EU about the new framework of free trade and friendly cooperation by the end of next year.”

Gove also said the government’s top domestic priority would be shoring up the public health service, seen by aides as essential to holding onto the support of traditional Labour Party-supporting voters in the north and central England who voted for the Conservatives, often for the first time.