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turbinetree

(24,632 posts)
Tue Mar 19, 2019, 01:27 PM Mar 2019

In Brexit chaos, UK eurosceptics see dream ticket: new leader, new deal

Source: Reuters

World News
March 19, 2019 / 11:03 AM / Updated 11 minutes ago

Elizabeth Piper

LONDON (Reuters) - In a week when Brexit was plunged into deeper uncertainty, eurosceptics in Theresa May’s Conservative Party are eyeing their dream scenario - a new prime minister and a new deal to leave the European Union.

After parliament’s speaker made it even harder for May to get her EU divorce agreement approved by reluctant lawmakers, some pro-Brexit Conservatives have embraced the possibility of a delay, hailing it as a chance to reset talks under a new leader.

It is a risky strategy - a weakened May has been calling members of the so-called European Research Group of eurosceptic lawmakers to warn them that without her deal, they risk losing Brexit to pro-EU lawmakers in the parliament.

And by no means all eurosceptics will back their calls - others fear a long extension could risk Brexit and further destabilize a deeply divided and increasingly angry Britain, which voted 52-48 percent to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-eurosceptics/in-brexit-chaos-uk-eurosceptics-see-dream-ticket-new-leader-new-deal-idUSKCN1R01YD?il=0



How do you spell "clusterfuck"? Conservative Tories.........................absolutely amazing..................
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Thyla

(791 posts)
1. About the only positive thing,
Tue Mar 19, 2019, 01:33 PM
Mar 2019

if you can really call it positive, that May has done is she has so far kept the hounds at bay. The ERG are about the only ones who would welcome the PM job and are exactly the ones you need to keep as far away as possible from it.

Yes, clusterfucks all round.

ancianita

(35,812 posts)
2. So, is this EU and British parliaments' denying the voice of voters through referenda in general?
Tue Mar 19, 2019, 01:54 PM
Mar 2019

I'm puzzled, because if the exit and trade plans are the problem, they've had years to sort that out, yes?

What's the point of an extension? Exhausting the public will?

turbinetree

(24,632 posts)
3. Check out this article..................
Tue Mar 19, 2019, 02:01 PM
Mar 2019

UK aims to salvage Brexit deal as EU says: make up your mind

By JILL LAWLESS and LORNE COOK 53 minutes ago

LONDON (AP) — Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plan has been derailed in Parliament. Now she is at the mercy of an exasperated European Union.

May was preparing Tuesday to ask the EU for a delay of at least several months to Brexit after the speaker of the House of Commons ruled that she can’t keep asking lawmakers to vote on the same divorce deal that they have already rejected twice.

Chief EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said the bloc wouldn’t automatically grant the request. He said a long extension “must be linked to something new, a new event, or a new political process.”

“The real question is, what is the purpose of it. What is it for?” Barnier said in Brussels.

“To get out of this uncertainty, we need choices and decision from the United Kingdom.”

May had hoped to win over her domestic opponents and bring her deal back to Parliament before a summit of the 28-nation bloc in Brussels on Thursday and Friday.

https://apnews.com/719f8c9d2f654a2a88f654c6c229387a

I really believe that May is trying to use the March 29, day as threat, she has no plan, she will have to use austerity to implement her conservative Brexist plan....................

ancianita

(35,812 posts)
6. It sounds as if she's caught in the middle between Brits and EU and parliamentary elites.
Tue Mar 19, 2019, 02:25 PM
Mar 2019

This is elite scoffing at the will of the British voters, under cover of making May "a problem."

She does have a Brexit plan. So what are they really doing here.

GulfCoast66

(11,949 posts)
10. This is in no way the fault of the EU.
Tue Mar 19, 2019, 06:06 PM
Mar 2019

They negotiated in good faith. But May negotiated a deal that cannot pass. Because there is no positive outcome of Britian leaving the EU. May is in a no win position.

There are no options that may the U.K. stronger or wealthier.

Denzil_DC

(7,188 posts)
13. "This is elite scoffing at the will of the British voters" LOL
Wed Mar 20, 2019, 08:13 PM
Mar 2019

Who the heck do you think have been pushing Brexit the hardest and stand to benefit most from it? It's "the elite". Rich financiers, media barons, Putin stooges and lifelong politicians.

According to a recent study, there is no significant class-based difference between Leavers and Remainers.

That "will of the people"? It was a non-binding referendum. If it had been a binding referendum, its result would have been declared legally invalid because there were so many irregularities.

What did "the will of the people" vote for (52-48%, let's not forget)? The major pro-Brexit figures and campaigns before the referendum insisted point-blank that it wouldn't mean leaving the single market, that no moves to trigger Article 50 would happen until clear negotiations had been completed, and all sorts of other promises that have been reneged on because Theresa May is an elitist, cloistered ideologue who thinks that the whole country's major concern is to "stop freedom of movement", on which red line the rest of the utter balls-up she's made of this whole situation is founded, and has little concern other than trying to patch together her disintegrating party, good of the nation be damned, and ensuring that her husband and his cronies become even richer than they already are.

Thyla

(791 posts)
8. Not really any doing of the EUs at all
Tue Mar 19, 2019, 02:37 PM
Mar 2019

They are perfectly happy to sign off on the negotiated deal, it is the UK parliament and probably more so public who are the ones not happy with the deal.

Who knows what the UK pols are up too but one way or another they have to sort their shit out.
The EU will not be seen as the ones who put in place red lines so the UK crashes out with a no deal, the UK can manage that on themselves seemingly. But they will get their extension but need an actual reason first. May has no effective deal so somewhere they will need to change tact. Whether that is a resignation, general election, peoples vote or trapping Nicholas Cage and putting him in a swarm of angry bees it's purely up to the UK now.

Yavin4

(35,357 posts)
4. This has been their plan all along.
Tue Mar 19, 2019, 02:02 PM
Mar 2019

Tories want to throw the UK into chaos to give them the context to demand draconian austerity measures. Privatize everything including healthcare. A huge windfall for Neoliberals and predatory capitalists.

ancianita

(35,812 posts)
5. Wasn't the Brexit vote to exit from the neoliberal austerity policies Brits suffered from all along?
Tue Mar 19, 2019, 02:13 PM
Mar 2019

Yavin4

(35,357 posts)
7. That's what it was "sold" as.
Tue Mar 19, 2019, 02:32 PM
Mar 2019

The Brits' austerity program had nothing to do with the EU. The UK does not have a common currency with the EU.

ancianita

(35,812 posts)
9. I don't get enough real news to know anything but the anti-May news, so I pay attention to books.
Tue Mar 19, 2019, 04:14 PM
Mar 2019

Last edited Tue Mar 19, 2019, 06:16 PM - Edit history (1)

Here's what Anand Giridharada says about Brexit in Winners Take All. I'm paraphrasing much of it here.

I've read how Bill Clinton said that the pro-Brexit majority voters wanted to give up aid from the EU, that they had no idea what they were doing, that their vote was an "us v them" false consciousness. He said it at an "influencer" conference of philanthropic folks who hold that good business is win-win and doesn't increase wealth disparity.

But I don't think Clinton, hanging with corporatists, knows who the British "them" actually was.

Giridharada says that Clinton knew but wouldn't acknowledge their internal class struggle with austerity economics. For too long, Brits suffered fiscal "discipline" favored by City of London banker elites and their continental financial counterparts.

They suffered direct cuts to education, health care and reduced mobility; that caused them to wonder how there was always money to help foreigners; and why working class Brits didn't get as much trade benefit with the EU as the EU got.

True, Brits might have started out as racist or xenophobic, when immigrants to the EU easily transited to Britain. But the Brits' vote seemed to come more from economic stresses they felt from Parliament’s zero sum spending. Brits saw they were the only ones living with forced sacrifice, fewer services and less money, unlike their bankers or MPs.

What they stayed angry about -- along with us and millions around the world who'd been attacked for being "tribal" -- was that the austerity was one-sided. That the EU won and they lost.

That things were too good and easy for, and too rigged in favor of elites. British elites -- on TV, internet and in the news' seen living behind gates, in private jets, boats, clubs, getting private health care, private schools, tax havens -- lived like the world's elites. They saw that privatized, stateless people were seen as winners of a system that created unequal accountability in the British way of life. And they were the losers.

Niall Ferguson said the problem was no longer about rich v. poor, Brit v foreigner, but about people who claimed to belong to everywhere versus people stuck somewhere. The problem was about a sense of place. Somewhere people and Everywhere companies. The Somewheres were no longer fooled by the Everywheres love of borderlessness unaccountability belief in the inevitability of market cures for all ills or technological 'progress.' They weren't seeing or feeling those things. They stopped trusting elites. And so their Brexit vote.

Theresa May spoke to that after the Brexit referendum.

Today, too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass on the street...if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don't understand what citizenship means.


Until elites act to unsequester themselves, to balance their global aspirations with local community meetings that require their engagement with messy democratic issues, and live with difference themselves, they will be rejected.

The British people are too smart, their lives more complicated and stressful than to be explained away by elites as ignorant.

And globalists will try to get Brit elites to kick her out for standing up to their disdainful view of Brexit voters, one they self-servingly promote to the world as mere ignorance.

I admit I don't know how the Brexit vote process went. But it's been over for a long time. There are rumors that it got set up the way ours did, but I haven't read enough to be convinced. It just looks to me as if this so-called rock and hard place is one she's been PR maneuvered into. And that Brits are exhausted from dealing with.

After some reading on this, I'm included to sympathize with her and the voters. Brexit was the people's vote. She tries to make the elites of parliament respect their vote. They seem to fight the will of the majority and their referendum rights.

My inclination is to go with May and the original Brits' referendum.

Once Brexit is done, Brits will be able to narrow down who they're dealing with more clearly.

I feel frustrated for them and the unclear info I get every time I read the news. But I'm trying.

GulfCoast66

(11,949 posts)
11. Can't believe I am reading this crap on DU.
Tue Mar 19, 2019, 06:27 PM
Mar 2019

Brexit started racist and xenophobic and remains that way today. No scenario allows for a more prosperous Britain after Brexit.

And who do you blame besides the MPs? The bankers of course!

I was going to let it slide when you threw Clinton in with the corporatist and said that skewed his calculations about Brexit being bad for Britain.

But then you got to your good stuff. How it was not really about xenophobia, even though the leading Brexiteers openly state it is, but about the poor white British suffering as all the ‘foreigners’ take what is rightfully theirs. Oh, and the Bankers. Always the fault of the Bankers. Ironic, that.

Where I have heard this shit before?

ancianita

(35,812 posts)
12. You impugn my motives? Doubt my trying to understand a country I don't live in? Just where have you
Wed Mar 20, 2019, 11:35 AM
Mar 2019

heard this shit before. Do tell.

Denzil_DC

(7,188 posts)
14. If you seriously want to understand more about the background to Brexit,
Wed Mar 20, 2019, 08:28 PM
Mar 2019

then the starting point is to abandon the misconception that it was "a vote to exit from the neoliberal austerity policies Brits suffered from all along".

Here's a fellow American whose summary of the history to run-up to Brexit has yet to be bettered:

American tells bizarre story of how Britain went from leading the EU to leaving it in epic Twitter plea to rethink Brexit

An American political analyst has told the story of Britain’s rise within the EU and bizarre turn against it in a bid to make voters think again about Brexit.

The Washington-based Brexit expert has condensed five decades of history into 47 tweets that shows the madness of quitting a body it Britain did so much to build and make better.

As the battle over the minutiae of Brexit rages all around us, a timely reminder from across the Atlantic to look at the bigger picture…

https://politicalscrapbook.net/2017/07/american-tells-bizarre-story-of-how-britain-went-from-leading-the-eu-to-leaving-it-in-one-epic-twitter-plea-to-rethink-brexit/


The upshot of his argument, which is backed by reliable sources, is that the UK has been blaming the EU for years for policies that the UK itself supported, championed, and in some cases even insisted upon! The polices many Leavers object to were enacted as a result of the UK government.

And the UK's austerity drive was homegrown. It's been abandoned as official government policy even while the UK has remained an EU member, despite May's bleating about there being "no magic money tree" except when it comes to bribing the DUP etc. or wasting vast amounts of money on Brexit through sheer incompetence.

If you want to see neoliberalism in action, watch the UK in years to come if Brexit goes ahead. Trump and his pals are salivating at the prospect of the lucrative carve-up ahead, which could lose those of us in the UK most of what we value about our country.

GulfCoast66

(11,949 posts)
15. I can't judge your motives. Only you know them.
Wed Mar 20, 2019, 08:43 PM
Mar 2019

But you are heading down a dangerous path if you are only reading people telling you that Brexit is a good thing cause it is poor people sticking it to the man. Brexit is the opposite. It is a campaign based on xenophobic fears being whipped up in homogeneous white populations about societal change by wealthy people who have a lot to lose in a more democratic world. Exactly the same as Trumpism is here. The irony is most immigrants(foreigners as you called them) are not from EU nations but former colonies. You know, brown and black people.

And the quote you highlight about people who see themselves as citizens of the world being citizens of nowhere? That is straight nativist propaganda.

I remember Britain in the 70s cause my dad made me read news from an early age. They were a basket case and had to go to Europe for a loan. The EU saved their ass and had Thatcher not been elected they would be like Germany is today. But they have always felt exceptional! Kind of like most Americans.

You need to keep in mind that it is the right in Britain wanting Brexit. Along with a smattering of the far left who dream of returning to the 1960 socialist Britain. The ones who would have not voted for Clinton here but Green Party or even Trump due to his protectionist policies. The left, center left and center right were and are against it. If that does not inform your opinion nothing I can type here will.





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