Thirded so long as we can drop the border down to include Cumbria, Northumberland, and Tyne & Wear... maybe North Yorkshire, too. I'd love to be Scottish if they'd be happy to have us!
This kind of cycle back and forth between full-throated conservative idiocy and then demanding to be saved from the consequences of their own actions is what really makes me so depressed about the majority of voters.
I could excuse a young person maybe for being naive and inexperienced enough to think conservativism might have some kind of merit, but grown-ass adults have literally no excuse to ever believe the right-wing ever about anything.
I fear the EU will take them right back and set a precedent for leaving and rejoining without so much problems as figuring out new contracts and agreements.
I'd demand worse terms for every time they leave and then try to rejoin (aka the cut was 50% but now the contribution has to be at least 55%)
I dont think so. Its in the EU interest for them to come back in. It will show others that leaving is not a good idea. However, they wkbt want it to be easy as it might encourage others to leave. They will join in the same terms as new entrants.
They will have to join the euro and they wont get their previous favourabke rebate for agriculture.
Its still a good deal for both sides but Britain make a mistake, as most are aware.
All it takes is for one member country, no matter how tiny, to say "No" and it's no, and in some countries like Belgium even a single region (say, "mighty" Walonia) can block it.
For example, I expect that Spain will want Gibraltar back as a condition for a Yes on a UK Membership vote.
Joining at this point would require an insane effort on the UKs side. I am pretty sure that an undemocratic institution like the house of lords would not be acceptable under current EU laws and that is not even accounting for the UKs voting system. The UK would also have to join the currency union. The last point alone makes rejoining very unlikely in my opinion. I think the only thing UK citizens can realistically hope for is, at best, something similar to the Norway model.
Norway is a rule taker that pays into the EU without any influence. They're also tiny and they know it.
This is said with love from a neighbour who would love to see Norway join the EU.
I don't think the UKs collective ego would allow them to join on Norway terms.
If I remember it correctly, members of the EFTA such as Norway have a vote with veto, and during the Brexit Deal negotiations they weren't at all keen on having the UK joining the EFTA because it's far bigger than all the others and would likely dominate.
I've been patiently waiting for all these Brexit benefits we were promised. But they haven't been forthcoming. In fact, it's just been a shambles from day one. We've just given ourselves more problems to (not) deal with.
That's how politics work. Conservatives do a few awful things then it swings over to the liberal side... then the liberals go a bit too fast and it swings back.
I just can't believe the US wasted it's political clout on fucking Biden. Another Obama would have been killer, but instead we have the guy nobody really wants and is only chosen because his opponent is hitler 2.0
Well you forgot the most important step to get those benefits, that would be the application to become America's 51st through 89th states. Though most of your 39 counties probably don't have the necessary population to become their own states.
That would actually be pretty good tbh, mostly because the football hooligans would have to start waving a different flag and that would be hilarious to watch.
Also it would make the us impressively wide, almost (?) shorter to fly away from it to get to the other side.
Even if that's true (and it probably is, because it was a pretty thin majority to exit in the first place) it would be absolute political suicide to go into this election on the promise of getting us back in.
The anti EU brigade are lunatics and people who voted leave are easily lead. The last thing we need is "Look, they're ignoring your will!" followed by Emperor Farage...
It's a completely moot point for another reason. The EU isn't just going to let them back in with the same sweetheart deal they got as founding members. That alone means this won't happen for decades if at all .
Would be kind of funny if the reverse of Brexit happened. Have some pro Europe lunatics take over the fight and make a brexiteer accept the worst deal to re-enter the union.
I suspect that the majority of voters never wanted to leave in the first place. Results-wise, there was like 1.2% in it. And the leave voters were more likely to actually turn up. The problem is that too many "remainers" didn't actually vote.
The original Brexit vote should have been at 2/3 majority vote. The fact that it was a simple majority was absolutely bonkers and I'm sure the ones who put it in the ballot knew exactly what they were doing. They all made massive sums of money on Brexit while the morons who voted for it are losing their shirt.
Nowhere is this more evidenced than in this statement from the article.
But once the 18% who say they don’t know are taken out, 52% back EU membership with 48% opposing it - a complete reversal of the 2016 Brexit referendum result.
A full 18% of those polled couldn't even make up their damned mind about it. And the people who wrote this chose to clip those idiots out of the picture in order to create the narrative they wanted for this clickbait as fuck article. And I will bet you anything the the Brexit framers would make serious bank on any effort to rejoin. [/removes tin hat]
Oh it's worse than that. It was never even legally binding, it was just a finger-in-the air - only after the fact was it treated like the cast iron democratic will of the people while over in the real world the Electoral Commission would've actually declared the whole thing void if it was a legally binding referendum because of illegal overspend by the grifters pushing it in the first place.
The whole thing is maddening to think about, honestly
People need to remember the vote happened immediately after the EU migration crisis. Anti-EU sentiment was at a high all across the union.
I don't know why people act like being anti-EU was a UK thing, not a shared issue across several members. People should remember that before they shit on the UK too much.
Shit, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, and perhaps others had a similar or higher level of anti-EU sentiment at the time compared to the UK. It's just that David Cameron was the only one stupid enough to gamble on having a referendum.
David Cameron may have gambled on the referendum but he still only had one vote in it. The citizens of the UK as a whole own the results. Also, as I recall, there were two elections after the referendum in which UK citizens doubled-down on Brexit by returning the Conservatives to government with landslide victories.
Also, anti-EU sentiment is one thing and may be common in various EU countries from time to time. However, voting for separation is quite another.
In any case, with such sustained support for the Tories post-referendum, it's hard to lay the blame for Brexit at anyone's feet except the UK citizenry itself.
I would love for the UK to rejoin the EU, but the survey results mentioned in the article don't really support the claim that there is a general desire to do so. A shift from 52% against to 52% in favor of EU membership is really not that significant.
This is not a "will the UK try to rejoin one day" trend, this is a brexit regret trend.
The people responding "rejoin" to these polls probably imagine that EU accession will be done on the previous terms. If you did the same graph but made it clear to pollees that rejoining would entail a switch to the Euro and many more legislative constraints, it would almost certainly read overwhelmingly "Stay out".
[..] 43% in favour of rejoining the bloc, compared with 40% who want to stay out. But once the 18% who say they don’t know are taken out, 52% back EU membership with 48% opposing it [...]
That's not a "majority of voters", that's a "majority of people who report to know what they want". These are not the same populations.
My hope is that Labour are playing this smart. They'll bang on about how Brexit won't change, but that "we'll look to increase economic and social strengths via our relationship with the EU". We'll reintroduce entry to the single market, ensure freedom of movement, and basically rejoin in everything but name - and then eventually say "well, if we want to rejoin it's basically a tick in a box".
The EU will likely be happy for the UK to rejoin, even without punishment. The most reliable ally in the battle against Euroscepticism is a former Eurosceptic that can say how shit things were after leaving, and how much better they are since rejoining.
If the UK applies to rejoin, this time no Thatcher UK Rebate or any other special exceptions. UK leeches were a thorn in our side for way too long. This time you better pay what you actually owe. And say bye-bye to your stupid currency. Euro adoption or nothing.
With the fight over the pound in the 80s and 90s when they first formed the EU, I would be very surprised if the EU didn't force the UK to adopt the Euro to rejoin
I'm pretty anti-brexit, but I'm not sure whether I'm pro-rejoining. Taking the clusterfuck we've landed in and turning it in to somehow an even bigger clusterfuck may not necessarily yield good results and definitely won't be some silver bullet. The massive middle finger we'd justifiably get from the EU should probably give us pause.
What's done is done. From day 1 after the referendum it was obvious to everyone that the UK would spend the next 50 years trying to mitigate the impact of that ridiculous decision. Hotting the "rejoin" button is not necessarily a short cut to the end.
This is exactly why I don't think they're coming back just yet. If there's one thing leavers and remainers agreed on it's british exceptionalism. Remainers didn't want to leave because EU in general was beneficial, remainers didn't want to leave because UK had a good thing going in the EU and giving it up was stupid. Remainers want to join only if they get at least some of their special privileges back.
Maybe in another 10 years they'll be more receptive towards joining without special privileges.
I'm ready now. Fuck sterling, fuck the vetos, fuck the opt-outs, etc. Yeah, the special arrangement we had was amazing and put us in a privileged position and we'll be diminished if we rejoin without them, but that's still a far better situation than we find ourselves in now. So yeah, warts and all; I'm in.
Is Brexit an ignorant, lazy, myopic tantrum you can undo?
No, you can only ask to join again, then start the discussion and if everyone agree, join again. But this time it will be on EU terms, not UK terms.
And the process can take years.
The conservatives still have power in the UK and will continue to have influence for the foreseeable future. As long as conservatism has any place in UK politics, the UK should not be permitted to re-join. Conservatives will eventually just re-Brexit.
There is simply no place in a healthy, modern society for a conservative government. Let the UK rid themselves of their plague of conservatism first before being allowed to further harm the UE with this dangerous illness.
The "conservatives" nowadays are just another far-right party, only they're led by posh twats instead of rabble rousers and unlike in most of Europe (with noteable exceptions being Hungary and maybe Austria), in the UK are mainstream rather than fringe.
The conservatives still have power in the UK and will continue to have influence for the foreseeable future. As long as conservatism has any place in UK politics, the UK should not be permitted to re-join. Conservatives will eventually just re-Brexit.
I see what you are saying, but I don't think you are completly right. Re-join can takes years and it will be under the EU rules, not UK, so no more special treatment like before. That alone is difficult to sell to UK, but I am not sure that if UK re-join people will vote again to exit, given that Brexit was sold with lies that was already exposed.
There is simply no place in a healthy, modern society for a conservative government. Let the UK rid themselves of their plague of conservatism first before being allowed to further harm the UE with this dangerous illness.
Disagree. A good government is a balance of progressivism and conservatism. Real life it is not black or white but a shade of grey (for the most part).
While balance can be good some times, the idea that a group of business interests and oligarchs coming together for the sole purpose of lowering their tax bills and buying the nations assets for peanuts, maskerading as a political party, could provide said balance is a strange one.
Conserving the established power and wealth as well as keeping everyone else down is the only thing they look to conservatives look to conserve. The rest is the lies they tell, in order to get in to do it.
Crucially, although 52% of people polled think the downsides of Brexit outweigh the positives, engagement over Brexit is at the lowest it's ever been. Most people simply don't care about the issue any more.
Well such timescale would in any case depend on EU, not on convenience for any british parliament. There are now N. Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, [ Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo ?], Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, [Turkey ?] all in the queue to join EU. On the other hand, it might help from point of view of geographic and economic balance, otherwise the centre of 'gravity' will shift even further SE away from Brussels. I think to expand EU has to reform processes, to end all vetos and generalise multi-speed / opt-outs.
Meanwhile a new british government could implement obviously convenient win-win cooperation step by step, until there isn't so much left to change. And I'd be happy to see Scotland and Northern Ireland take a lead.
Sure, but diplomacy is not logical, and EU has a habit (mistake?) to do things in mega packages (look at 2004). Last I heard, the gossip was 'by 2030'.
Nope, everyone behind Ukraine is now screwed. If they want to speed things up they need to help Ukraine win it's war. Sorry, I don't make the rules I just pretend to know them.
Although... Moldova and Georgia might as well. We all know they're next on Putin's list.