They can come back with zero special privileges, as one among equals.
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.
We should have gone full metric and adopted the Euro years ago. Then all this bollocks about pints and good old sterling would have been done with.
As usual with UK we do everything half arsed and settle for second best.Whores don’t get second chances… At least they don’t get taken back the first wife lol
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.
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.
Hey that’s exactly how it is with American conservatives. Just constantly causing more issues without solving anything whatsoever.
The main Brexit benefit appears to be the disintegration of the conservative party. Pretty good benefit really.
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
Brenter
Breturn!
Sure, no problem. But this time without all the unfair special rules and exceptions that the UK had.
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%)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.
A single region within a member country can veto an entire block’s will, even if the rest of the country assents? That seems very broken as a voting system, to me.
Belgium has an unusual constitution that lets its regions have veto power over some of its decisions in the international stage and adding a member to the EU is actually a change to a major Treaty that Belgium is part of.
For most EU member countries, there is no such thing, though I believe some (Luxemburg, Malta?) are actually smaller than Walonia in terms of population.
In regards of Gibraltar, the problem is it being a fiscal paradise. If one of the agreement was that Gibraltar has too have the same rules as the rest of the EU it could be enough for the Spanish government.
And if that meant enforcing the same for Ireland and Luxemburg, even better.
It’s my impression that it’s actually a lot more about national pride for Spain than about Gibraltar’s fiscal paradise status, since Gibraltar as not part of a member country can just be treated the same as any other offshore fiscal paradise, such as the Bahamas, which includes it being added to black lists. In this day and age, it’s not geographical proximity that matters when it comes to fiscal paradises.
This makes sense since Britain too doesn’t really gain much from having possession of Gibraltar so holding on to it is mainly a question of national pride for the UK - it would be strange if Spain’s motivations were wildly different.
PS: Also it’s funny how during the Leave campaign a lot of the “reason” why the EU would give Britain quasi-membership rights (without the responsabilities) after leaving the EU were a lot like this, about how those other countries or interests inside those countries would do it because they stood to gain monetarilly from it in the short term. All that turned out to be mainly wishful thinking and a serious misreading of the motivations of the leaders and people in said other countries.
Just found it funny how there are still people around thinking other countries are mainly motivated by the short term gains in sovereignty affairs, even whilst Britain itself again and again keeps doing things motivated by national pride when it comes to such affairs - one would’ve expected that “they’re a lot like us” would somehow been figured out by now.
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.
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.
You guys look at ursula van der liar and the shit EU is doing and think “we need that”? Wow
If there’s anything to be learnt from Brexit, it’s that the EU is (despite its shortcomings) better than no EU. Even for wealthy countries.
As far as i can see if you guys join EU again you will be going to war. What does the EU has to offer in return?
Ah yes, because any scenario where the rest of the EU going to war wouldn’t also basically mean automatically that the UK was also going to war already!
with that .ml tag you’d think someone would be better at remembering NATO is still a thing and the only non overlap between the two are countries that are defacto protected by it anyways.
I made a question and you came up all offended. The downvotes makes me think you are not alone. What to think about it?
with that .ml tag
.ml is not .mil
i am not going to blame you, you are not alone in making that mistake 😆
No, lemmy.ml is full of tankie brainlets.
that’s my point. read what i am reacting to.
I read the original post as ‘a tankie shouldn’t forget that NATO is a thing’ not as a confusion between .ml and .mil.
Of course we do, but it ain’t gonna happen. Best you can hope for is the custom union in seven to ten years’ time.
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.
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
Why would they. Like the above comments says they have much more to gain by UK having to slink back so why would they put barriers to that.
It’s also not as if the pound is a particularly weak currency like the French Frank or the German Deutsche Mark was.
They don’t want to make it easy to get back in, so that other countries aren’t tempted to leave in the first place. They shouldn’t reward temper tantrums.
I would have thought the inverse would have been true that they would want to reward coming back It seems like a petulant philosophical view to suggest that the EU would not let the UK back in.
After all doing so would demonstrate that leaving is non-practical
If a kid throws their ice cream on the floor, giving them another one soon afterwards doesn’t in any way teach the other kids not to throw their ice cream on the floor. This is very firmly a “no ice cream for you then” situation. I think labour realise they if they tried to rejoin, they would get a very rough ride indeed from the EU with massive amounts of playing hardball and that the best they can hope for in the next five years really is some softening and smoothing of the deal for being cooperative. We agree to fund EU science a bit, they let us back into erasmus, that kind of thing (although specifically not that).
But joining the EU takes a decade or more sometimes, and the “but it’s really very simple, we follow most of the EU rules already because we’re a former member” is as stupid as the “oven ready deal” and “German car manufacturers will insist we get a great deal” nonsense.
It’s also not as if the pound is a particularly weak currency like the French Frank or the German Deutsche Mark was.
The Deutsche Mark was famously stable and the biggest official foreign exchange reserves after the dollar, it was much stronger than the pound sterling.
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…
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 assume the UK would be obligated to adopt the Euro as a currency, and i have no doubt some people would absolutely rage stroke.
I don’t think that is essential for trade. A Norwegian/ Icelandic/ Swiss etc. approach could be adopted.
EEA does allow free movement of people though, which is most of what made us leave to start with. Mostly because of this prick pretending that hordes of dirty brown refugees were somehow the fault of that.
Yeah. If free movement of people is excluded you are down to a European Union–Turkey Customs Union type agreement.
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 .
I mean, they could just join on the same conditions as everyone else
That will never fly with the public , especially since one of the “normal” conditions is giving up the pound, joining the Euro, and giving up direct control of their monetary policy. There is no way a majority would support that in the UK . None of these polls will even bother asking something like that. The polls are about whether they want to turn back time to before Brexit, which is somewhat interesting but isn’t possible.
How I imagine that would go:
Can we just first have Scotland back in? Just to fuck with England.
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.
Not just in the UK, but everywhere.
[…] 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.
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.
This. It’s not just a switch to be flipped.
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.
somehow an even bigger clusterfuck
I agree that rejoining won’t magically solve all problems but I don’t see how it would make things worse.
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.
- it is more about the trend
- 52% is a lot, if the other party has 35% and the rest “do not know”…