[EU] Brexit negotiations at a standstill

[kalworth]

The UK? Not even a footnote in this game of thrones between the US, EU and China.

That's an argument for Brexit. I'm sick of these stupid bloody power games. They can all kill each other for all I care.

Similarly stop telling me financiers are leaving the country, and that German don't like Brexit. You may push me over the edge in a second referendum if I'm really drunk or something.

Remainers really need to stop making fantastic arguments for Brexit. Brexiteers are quite incapable of it. Just try shutting the fuck up and you might get the results you want.

[kalworth]

If it turns into an affirmation of brexit that would be fine, but I believe a lot of yes voters in 2016 genuinely thought we would leave the EU with a great deal and everything would be roses and blue passports. A massive amount would still vote yes, but it wouldn't take many opposed to a hard brexit to swing it back.

As someone said on last page, a 3 way vote with a 2nd preference (so basically if you really want to leave with a deal, but we cant get one, is it still leave or stay) would be the best way forward. And it's not a cancellation of the first vote (and the end of democracy apparently), it's an informed clarification on the result.

I think I might be one of the only people in the country who voted no and would changed to yes (as I now get paid in dollars and a low pound is nice. About as selfish as you can be).

I'm in the same position-I massively benefited from the collapse of the pound financially for similar reasons.

But I'd urge you to vote remain in a second referendum regardless-apart from anything else it is one thing when brexit is still an idea, but an actual no-deal may be a shitstorm no amount of money will compensate for.

Plus, you get to be one of these smug, superior bastards who can genuinely say they put the interests of the country before their own.

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Dude we completely agree on something Brexiteers are incapable of tying their own shoelaces at this point.

Well, that has never been in doubt.

I'm being completely serious here: I think Brexiteers mostly cost their own cause votes. Every time I saw Nigel Farage it hardened my resolve to vote Leave. The problem was the Leave campaign shot themselves even more comprehensively in the foot with most voters by focusing on economic gains that the general public never saw.

[Realitytrembles]

@Skroe
@Slant

The idea that the Special Relationship will vanish upon Brexit is unsupportable, imo.

The UK will continue to be:

a NATO member with some of the best intelligence and spec ops units on the planet

a nuclear-armed state

& most important of all, to Americans, the British are family. We will never permit an existential threat to the UK.

[Shalcker]

I'm not going to seriously engage with a serf of Vladimir Putin about the nature of representative democracy. As a subject of an authoritarian regime / rogue state, you don't have any frame of reference as to what we're discussing.

Are you saying that current UK isn't representative democracy?

Because otherwise it's hard to reconcile two parts of your message where you both praise the system and simultaneously admonish products of same system.

[Skroe]

@Skroe
@Slant

The idea that the Special Relationship will vanish upon Brexit is unsupportable, imo.

The UK will continue to be:

a NATO member with some of the best intelligence and spec ops units on the planet

a nuclear-armed state

& most important of all, to Americans, the British are family. We will never permit an existential threat to the UK.

(1) the UK's contributions to NATO missions have been shrinking for a decade, as they've eviscerated their military power. The US coordinates more with France now, and has for some time.


(2) I know you have this strange nuclear weapons fetish, but you need to understand that the UK's nuclear deterrent is not a popular thing in the actual UK. About a fourth the population supports unilateral nuclear disarmament, and another 30% on top of that wants to cut spending on Trident and replace it with a cheaper deterrent. Only about 35% of the population wants to keep spending on their arsenal as is.

Also UK ships haven't gone on ever fewer patrols according to reports, due to, you guessed it, austerity driven budget cuts.


(3) The US will never permit an existential threat to the UK of course, but the days of the US thinking of the UK as its principle military ally in Europe are long, long over. Nowdays the focus is on Germany, Poland, Italy and France. This idea some Americans have about the Special Relationship is very very early 2000s. The relationship's changed a lot since then, and the UK sharply curbed its military power and it's assistance to the US in many global affairs.

And what happened? We started dealing with the Germans and the French.

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Are you saying that current UK isn't representative democracy?

Because otherwise it's hard to reconcile two parts of your message where you both praise the system and simultaneously admonish products of same system.

Go bad-faith post somebody else, Russian. I'm not biting.

[dribbles]

(1) the UK's contributions to NATO missions have been shrinking for a decade, as they've eviscerated their military power. The US coordinates more with France now, and has for some time.


(2) I know you have this strange nuclear weapons fetish, but you need to understand that the UK's nuclear deterrent is not a popular thing in the actual UK. About a fourth the population supports unilateral nuclear disarmament, and another 30% on top of that wants to cut spending on Trident and replace it with a cheaper deterrent. Only about 35% of the population wants to keep spending on their arsenal as is.

Also UK ships haven't gone on ever fewer patrols according to reports, due to, you guessed it, austerity driven budget cuts.


(3) The US will never permit an existential threat to the UK of course, but the days of the US thinking of the UK as its principle military ally in Europe are long, long over. Nowdays the focus is on Germany, Poland, Italy and France. This idea some Americans have about the Special Relationship is very very early 2000s. The relationship's changed a lot since then, and the UK sharply curbed its military power and it's assistance to the US in many global affairs.

And what happened? We started dealing with the Germans and the French.

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Go bad-faith post somebody else, Russian. I'm not biting.

Never read so much bollocks from a supposed American in all my life.

As for coordination with the French, do you know any American fluent in French and I don't mean those that can only say freedom fries? When are they letting the French, or Germans for that matter in FVEY then? The answer is they won't because they don't trust them, they'll have to stay in the outer circle.

Friendly advice, stick to your Trump bashing threads where you'll be as effective in them, as will be proven upon his re-election in 2020, as you could ever hope to be in a topic about brexit and the UK that you quite obviously know nothing about.

[Skroe]

I mean the special relationship did kill a UK administration. It's not weird that they withdrew afterwards.

And it shouldn't have. That's the thing. The United Kingdom in the early 2000s had the ear of the most powerful country in the world by far. The ear in a way no other country did.

And what did they do? They immaturely and irrationally overly focused on if Blair was Bush's poodle, and did inquiry into inquiry about inquiry over the Iraq War, because they had buyers remorse.

I'm not sure what the British expected. The world's 5th largest economy (at the time) could be the respected consigliere to the world's only superpower, or they could navel gaze about their role in the world and end up in obscurity. There was no third option. And they chose obscurity. First with their defense cuts. Then with austerity. And finally with a wider global diplomatic retreat. And that all of course, presaged the Scottish Referendum and of course, Brexit.

So they made themselves irrelevant. The late Bush, then Obama Administration swapped their focus to France and Germany. Trump's Administration has continued it. The next one will go even further.

Frankly, I get a little chuckle when I watch PMQs on Youtube sometimes, and they talk about the British government's position on some far flung global crisis. A flood, an airline crash, some security incident. And they talk like it's the 1990s or 2000s, when in truth 2019 United Kingdom is and will remain completely irrelevant in all these affairs because of choices they've made up to this point.

And this alone, ironically, just underscores why the EU matters anymore. The UK without the EU as a force multiplier or America as a senior partner is back to what it spend most of it's history: a somewhat obscure European island backwater.

[dribbles]

Meanwhile back on topic very well done to Nigel Farage and the brexiteers for sorting out a future veto of any proposed EU extension...

Last week @arron_banks & @Andywigmore went to Veneto, the heartland of Italy's Lega Nord. Today, the plan is revealed. The fascists have agreed to help Britain exit without a deal. Salvini will block an extension of article 50.

https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/s...97205712093184

Tick tock...

[Pann]

MPs have voted to approve the Spelman/Dromey amendment. (which rejects no-deal at anytime)

Ayes: 312

Noes: 308

Majority: 4

[Huehuecoyotl]

MPs have voted to approve the Spelman/Dromey amendment. (which rejects no-deal at anytime)

Ayes: 312

Noes: 308

Majority: 4

That is a huge result, and proves beyond any doubt that there is no appetite for no-deal. Dribbles can tick tock all he likes, this is one more nail in his coffin.

[Pann]

Damn, that's tight. Do you have spread by party?

Not yet. Whilst it is non-binding it is significant as the Tories were whipped to vote against it.

[Huehuecoyotl]

Damn, that's tight. Do you have spread by party?

It isn't tight, this was the vote on the amendment ruling it out completely. I expected that to be tight. The vote on ruling it out for 29 March would have been a majority of 400+.

[Pann]

That is a huge result, and proves beyond any doubt that there is no appetite for no-deal. Dribbles can tick tock all he likes, this is one more nail in his coffin.

I wouldn't celebrate just yet. The vote tomorrow and the EU's response are extremely important with regard to no-deal.

[Skroe]

Never read so much bollocks from a supposed American in all my life.

As for coordination with the French, do you know any American fluent in French and I don't mean those that can only say freedom fries? When are they letting the French, or Germans for that matter in FVEY then? The answer is they won't because they don't trust them, they'll have to stay in the outer circle.

Friendly advice, stick to your Trump bashing threads where you'll be as effective in them, as will be proven upon his re-election in 2020, as you could ever hope to be in a topic about brexit and the UK that you quite obviously know nothing about.

Get ready for more because I'm setting up shop.

You know, I didn't come to this position easily. There was a time, not long ago where I was on the opposite side of this.

And then I got to see up close the wonderful things you people did. Maybe you're too close and can't see it. But let me tell you, as a friend to the UK, you folks need to decide what the hell you want to be and actually do it seriously.

You want to talk about the UK's security role in the world? I have seen, in the past eight years, the UK retire ships like the HMS Ocean decades early. I've seen them rip weapons off of new warships rather than pay for their upkeep. I've seen them cut their Army to the size it could scarecely be called one. I've seen them reduce their expeditionary capability by over half. I've seen them retire helicopters of certain types to so few, they might as well name them like they do warships. I've seen the Royal Navy become little more than a militarized coast guard. Nice aircraft carrier you got. You folks planning on putting your own F-35Bs on it anytime soon or you just going to borrow ours and our Marines to pretend that the aircraft carrier has actual aircraft? You folks actually planning on defending that carrier with some air defense ships of your own, rather than allied ones as well? Because you ripped those missiles off your ships last year to save some money. How does it feel having a tiny fraction of the combat formations now that you did in 2003?

The United Kingdom isn't serious about its role in allied security. It says it is. But it isn't. It's military spending is primary to keep tradtional ship building, helicopter building and tank building industries open and their towns out of decline, but it's become a military power that's gone from second in the west and third in the world to third or fourth in the west and maybe tenth in the world. It has, since 2003, lost the ability to find military conflicts independently of the United States.

You want to talk about the UK's role in global affairs beyond warships and tanks? Let's talk about the fact that your Foreign Office has shrunk by nearly 80% since 2001. You know, after 9/11, the US outsourced rallying the international response to the attacks to the UK and France. In one of the most selfless things anyone has done for the US in decades, our two closest allies pretty much ran the entire UN and multi-lateral foreign policy operation, while the US State Department focused on the very complex bilateral negotiations with countries in Central/South Asia, including India, Russia, Pakistan, China and Iran to get them to tolerate / allow a US military force in the very heart of the continent, around all of them, without making them nervous that the bombers we were sending to Kabul weren't going to take a detour. We needed our best diplomats to do that job, so your best diplomats rallied global support on our behalf.

Yeah that's all gone now. You shut that down. You didn't wan't to pay for it. Brexit didn't do it. You did. Austerity. Cameron.

And let's talk about David Cameron, the man who launched a war in Libya with the help of Sarkozy, and forgot check in with the British Armed Forces to make sure they had enough missiles and bombs to wage said war. It fell to President Barack Obama and the US Pentagon, which did not think that a military campaign in Libya was wise or a good use of resources, to bail you people out. Cameron didn't do the international diplomacy job, and when the time came to fire weapons, it relied on the reluctant US to the muscle. What the fuck were you people doing?

Of course that was a prelude to Cameron again, fucking things up. It was about two years later when Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons and crossed Obama's red line... something that actually demanded an American and Western response to defend the Rules based world order (you know, something the UK helped build). The Russians and Chinese were never going to allow another Libya bait-and-switch via the UN. So it fell to NATO to authorize the campaign. Obama got all of NATO to agree, but David Cameron elected to get a Commons vote he didn't actually need. And in his genius, he held the meaningful vote before he had his staff go around the room and count heads to see if he would win the vote. And because NATO had to act unilterally, his ineptitude and stupidity in losing a vote he should have won closed off NATO as an option. It was Vladmir Putin who eventually bailed out Obama, and the red line Assad crossed is something the West is still paying for.


I could talk about the fact that US intelligence and law enforcement has been screaming at the top of their lungs about Russian and Arab money in British (particularly London) real estate for years, and the British political class, very much liking this money as a kind of stimulus, decided to speak no evil, hear no evil.

I could talk about the fact that the UK rolling out the red carpet for China to build nuclear reactors and national-level IT has been screamed about as a major security risk by the US and European partners alike.

Or maybe I should talk about how the Obama Administration reportedly seriously considered letting Germany into Five Eyes a few years back... one part as a kind of peace offering after the Snowden affair, and another part because the UK has let its signals intelligence collection atrophy since 2009. Experts weighed in some time ago: the reason GCHQ probably doesn't have anything on Trump-Russia, is because GCHQ doesn't really "do" Russia anymore. The only reason we reportedly didn't is because Germany has a problem with how compromised some of its politicians can be. France is likely to join at some point. And yes, Germany too eventually. They'll have to, because the UK doesn't do its part anymore.


So listen up my British amigo. You have a choice here. You can go on pretending that the UK has got it all right since 2000, when in fact, it's been living in pretty much an ongoing series of "what not to do's to be relevant in a changing world". Or you can recognize your problems and fix your shit.

Seriously increasing military spending, growing your forces by large numbers and unmothballing stuff you did would be a nice start.

Restoring the size of your diplomatic corps back to its historic levels rather than the pip-squeak amateur hour its become is essential.

Expanding American-British-European coordination on global affairs is the only way the UK, a country of 65 million, will play any role. Ironically, it would have more influence in that regard in the EU than outside of it.

I'm not sure what you want. Do you want to live a fantasy or a reality. The reality is unless the UK makes some serious course corrections on things its done PREDATING Brexit by years, it is likely to find itself even less relevant and less influential 10 years from now.

It's not too late, but it's up to you. Regardless, the US will keep doing its thing, which is done more with Germany and France now as a matter of fact (you don't have to like it, but again, you people did that to yourselves). But seriously, I say this as someone who really thinks the Special Relationship WAS special and worth revitalizing. But it's gotta be legitimate, because talk is cheap. And all the United Kingdom nowdays does is talk.

[kaid]

@Skroe
@Slant

The idea that the Special Relationship will vanish upon Brexit is unsupportable, imo.

The UK will continue to be:

a NATO member with some of the best intelligence and spec ops units on the planet

a nuclear-armed state

& most important of all, to Americans, the British are family. We will never permit an existential threat to the UK.

We elected donald trump as president. Don't count on the US doing jack or shit unless you are willing to pony up a lot of trumpgeld if an emergency comes up.

[Pann]

Get ready for more because I'm setting up shop....

This has nothing to do with Brexit.

[Huehuecoyotl]

I wouldn't celebrate just yet. The vote tomorrow and the EU's response are extremely important with regard to no-deal.

I'm celebrating because it strongly suggests that MPs would vote for something else instead of no-deal. Whether that is an extension for a second referendum, or cancelling Article 50 completely. Or even asking for an extension for Norway+ to be negotiated. In my eyes this confirms that one of those will happen instead of no-deal, when it comes to it. And the EU will offer an extension on the basis of two of those, I suspect, regardless of what the ERG does to invoke help from other right wing nutjobs.

[Deja Thoris]

This has nothing to do with Brexit.

It points to the UK's role in the world. One which goes hand in hand with Brexit which is an insular choice.

[Pann]

I'm celebrating because it strongly suggests that MPs would vote for something else instead of no-deal. Whether that is an extension for a second referendum, or cancelling Article 50 completely. Or even asking for an extension for Norway+ to be negotiated. In my eyes this confirms that one of those will happen instead of no-deal, when it comes to it. And the EU will offer an extension on the basis of two of those, I suspect, regardless of what the ERG does to invoke help from other right wing nutjobs.

And seeing as we have nothing else that something else is likely to be May's deal or a variation of it. The Cons are not going to push for a 2nd ref so it is up to Lab to put an amendment before the house (as per their policy) but it looks like Jeremy has returned to his seat on the fence so I am not sure what will happen with that and I honestly don't see anyone in Parliament supporting a motion rescinding A50.

No-deal is still a very real risk.

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It points to the UK's role in the world. One which goes hand in hand with Brexit which is an insular choice.

Scrapping HMS Ocean is absolutely nothing to do with Brexit.

[Skroe]

This has nothing to do with Brexit.

It has legitimately everything to do with Brexit. Everything.

Brexit is fundamentally not just a process. It is about Britain's role in Europe, in the Trans-Atlantic area, and the world.

Special Relationship Britain was relevant because it had America's ear and has national institutions with a globe-spanning scope.

Post-Special Relationship, pre-Brexit Britain was relevant because it was America's man in the EU, and while reduced in its globe spanning scope, still parlayed its EU role into global influence.

mid-Brexit Britain (now) and post-Brexit Britain (future) will have to leverage something. The Special Relationship of old is dead and gone unless the UK fixes things it let die off, so that avenue is closed. It won't be America's man in Europe anymore, especially since America just deals directly with Germany and France now. Those national institutions with globe-spanning scope are basically no more.

So what is more relvant to the discussion of Brexit than the shape of post-Brexit Britain and it's role in Europe, the Atlantic and the world? Because it is doing so not from the baseline of the UK power and reach of around the year 2000. It will be Brexiting into it's new position in the world with the much reduced baseline of UK power and reach in 2019. You think this doesn't matter? Compare how powerful the UK was in 1947 versus 1966. The decline was very real then, and it's very real now.

The entire point of Brexit is that the UK things it will be stronger, more influential, richer, safer and more competitive on its own outside of the EU. It is doing that despite giving up much of what would make it exactly that. Maybe in 20 years if it very hard course corrects and does a literal 180 on the things I listed (and more), that will be true. But that would require a fundamental shift in the political direction in the UK, which for decades has been very much "let's focus on things closer to home and pull back". Problem is, that approach is incompatible with a stronger, more influential, richer, safer and more competitive Britain.

So in fact, there is literally nothing more relevant to Brexit than this. Because if the UK does do all that and is a stronger version of what it was decades ago, then Brexit will have suceeded. And in the far more likely case the UK contracts its power further and further by the year as its budget its stretched ever thinner, then the scope of Brexit-as-a-disaster will be quite clear.