Brexit. Why do Brits want Out of the EU?

While Britain’s dealbreakers are well known, we look at what they are for its negotiating partners. Not all are shared, yet all will play a part in any final deal

Monday 20 February 2017 07.00 GMT
The British government’s key Brexit red lines – controlling EU immigration, ending the jurisdiction of the European court of justice, calling time on further big EU budget contributions – are by now well known, set out first in speeches by Theresa May and later confirmed in a government white paper.

But what of the EU’s red lines? Here we map the concerns, priorities and demands of each of the UK’s 27 negotiating partners. Some are shared, more or less, by all; others are strictly national. All will play a part in the deal Britain gets – because Brexit also means what the EU27 want it to mean.

... the assimilation of Turks in Germany which started earlier. These are processes that can take generations to complete ...

Some local reaction to such things is entirely normal and certainly not necessarily equivalent to the rise of the Fascist states of the 1930s.generation, and without bombings; mass murder or the rise of Fascism.

we assimilated hordes of Irish, Italian and Eastern European immigrants.

georgeob1 wrote:

we assimilated hordes of Irish, Italian and Eastern European immigrants.

France too absorded millions of emigrants from Poland, Spain, Italy and Portugal (mainly) during the 20th century, without too much pain. But note the pattern: these are all Catholic European countries, and they were emigrating to a predominently Catholic European country (France). It was still pretty hard for them to get accepted, they were mocked for decades (called "rital", "polack", etc.).

Muslim emigrants today meet with much greater challenges.

All made serious efforts to adapt and become Americans, and the process was very rapid.

The first idea that sprang to mind was Notre Dame and the hunchback.

Muslims living in Western countries should indeed adapt to their environment but the environment must also make some room for them. E.g. mayors need to approve the construction of mosques, something which in France has often been a battle, but mosques cannot call for prayer (the azam) under present conditions. It would lead to trouble if they did, especially at 4:00 a.m., the time for the first prayer... but even at noon or at night. Yet our fiercely secular culture doesn't blink an eye when church bells ring, because church bells have always rung in the past...

In view of the challenges currently faced by non- Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, the Emirates, Kuwait, etc., I believe the problems you cite are truly trivial.

Britain is politically dead from the neck down. Leaving the union may be risky, but staying is worse

Here is the question the people of Scotland will face in the next independence referendum: when England falls out of the boat like a block of concrete, do you want your foot tied to it?

It would be foolish to deny that there are risks in leaving the United Kingdom. Scotland’s economy is weak, not least because it has failed to wean itself off North Sea oil. There are major questions, not yet resolved, about the currency it would use; its trading relationship with the rump of the UK; and its association with the European Union, which it’s likely to try to rejoin.

But the risks of staying are as great or greater. Ministers are already trying to reconcile us to the possibility of falling out of the EU without a deal. If this happens, Britain would be the only one of the G20 nations without special access to EU trade – “a very destructive outcome leading to mutually assured damage for the EU and the UK”, according to the Commons foreign affairs committee. As the government has a weak hand, an obsession with past glories and an apparent yearning for a heroic gesture of self-destruction, this is not an unlikely result.

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