How do we resolve the Brexit mess?

fulabeer said:
So as for a solution.
Re-joining doesn't seem viable at the moment. We have seen recently the self-serving vindictiveness of the EU in all it's glory.
I cannot see anything they have done to make it attractive to re-join. It would be a hard sell if it was going to be on worse terms than before. So like the Remoaners, they need to let it go and work constructively to find a solution for the future. Without EU reforms, it's never going to work.
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And this is our problem. Entitlement. First, the EU is not some convivial club, it’s an aggressive trade block that protects its own interests and is a bastard to negotiate with when you are a non-member, as we found out. The EU serves the interests of its members, not non-members, and has no interest or mandate to be ‘nice’.

Second, the EU has no interest or desire to make itself attractive to join. It doesn’t have to. The benefits are clear and obvious and if a country can’t see that or isn’t interested then don’t join. Currently, there is a queue of countries who want to join. One of them is fighting a bloody war in part because it wanted to join. The EU isn’t going to reform to suit the UK because the UK is no longer a member. We quit, and once we quit, bang went any leverage we had.

At some point, people have to start accepting the reality of our situation. There is no rejoin. Anything that smacks of cooperation with Europe is ruled out. We are stuck with a crappy deal for the foreseeable. Trade with the EU will be sub-optimal and more expensive, although NI will continue to benefit via Dublin (a member) lobbying on their behalf and still being within the EU Single Market.

But, if anyone is waiting for the EU to make themselves acceptable to the UK then they are deluding themselves as much as Brexiteers did in the first place.
 
The bizarre thing is that brexit gets more discussion on forums like this than it does in parliament or on news programmes. We’ve recently had very important by-elections and virtually nothing was said about the single most important and consequential event in British and European politics since the war.
We talk about it while those who brought us the disaster and those who still support it keep very quiet.
I am going to take it that that silence is a tacit acceptance of its total failure and the hope that metaphorically sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting ‘no no no’ will make it all go away.
Hopefully the next govt. will take a more pragmatic view and try to tackle this unmitigated disaster for the sake of generations to come.
 
inbetween said:
It will take decades because rejoin is not the same as remain. Look at Turkey, they started the process nearly 20 years ago and for many reasons they still haven't joined. There's no chance that the population will just accept rejoin at any price, no chance.

Rejoin will mean a negotiation to join and at the first pass that would likely mean taking the Euro amongst many other things compared to remain and that's where it will fall apart unless we can negotiate opt-outs. In reality virtually all of the energy for rejoin would be spent on negotiating how not to rejoin.... So really what is the point in rejoining?

A lot of people mistakenly believe that whilst we were in the EU we were 'given' freedoms to not take the Euro and so on but this isn't true. We had to negotiate our way out of certain aspects of the various treaties. The Major government had to negotiate the opt-out of Schengen and the Euro, it wasn't as though we just said no thanks.

Whilst in the EU we were better able to negotiate opt-outs but it's very different from outside. To be honest we would be better off negotiating some form of single market access/membership, I've always thought that EFTA would be a good fit for the UK. Obviously it would of been better to remain but that ship sailed 7 years ago.
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This is fantasy alternative history nonsense.

We can't join the single market and not the EU.

The EU isn't going to negotiate with the UK unless it means the UK adopting full membership.
 
The answer is to want to be European.

That means not 'accepting' the Euro, PR voting and Schengen, but enthusiastically embracing them and seeing this as a good thing.

Once the 1950s nostalgics have died off, and people stop pretending we were better off in 1958, or that the Commonwealth loves us, this will be a much easier process than people currently appreciate.

The advantages of being in the EU are huge. The advantages of being out of it are non-existent.

We need to drop the British (or rather English) exceptionalism, and it will be quite straightforward.
 
bluethrunthru said:
They were told it wouldn't apply to expats ( immigrants to the EU ) - They were also told it would and voted against their own interests because they were stupid and wanted to have FoM to Italy but stop Italians having FoM to the UK.

MSN

www.msn.com
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It was all about the wording. They were told that they will get special rights to stay, not realising that what they were meaning was that the host country would let them apply for citizenship and lose rights to the UK system.

Strangely, none of them asked the question before flying back to the UK to vote for it.
 
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