Brussels rejects Boris Johnson 'pipe dream' over single market access

[muriel_volestrangler]

Diplomats dismiss idea UK could stay in single market without obeying the rules, and German BDI also pushes back at claims

British people would still be able to live, travel, study and buy homes on the continent but the same rights would not be automatically extended to EU citizens in the UK, he wrote. Britain would also be freed from sending “a substantial sum of money” to the EU budget, which he said “could” be used for the NHS.

Johnson insisted the only change – “and it will not come in any great rush – is that the UK will extricate itself from the EU’s extraordinary and opaque system of legislation”.

EU diplomats reacted witheringly to the idea that the UK could stay in the single market without following the rules.

“It is a pipe dream,” said the EU diplomat. “You cannot have full access to the single market and not accept its rules. If we gave that kind of deal to the UK, then why not to Australia or New Zealand. It would be a free-for-all.”

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/27/brussels-rejects-boris-johnson-pipe-dream-over-single-market-access

[Xipe Totec]

1. Boris Johnson demands representation without taxation. nt

[Denzil_DC]

2. Ohdearohdearohdear.

It's not started well, has it?

Still reeling from the fact that the dweeb they've put in charge of the Brexit unit is ... *drum roll* ... Oliver Letwin.

For those who've never heard of him, or mercifully blotted him from their memories, where to start?

Oliver Letwin, profile: Another blunder from the Tory king of clangers

...

He is very clever. He is the politician others set to work analysing a policy so that its implications are properly understood – but he is not sent out to sell the results to a sceptical public, because his colleagues can never be sure what he is going to say next.

... when invited in 2012 to explain to a first-year secondary school class why they must wear helmets while cycling, Letwin did the opposite, saying that he did not think that cycle helmets or car safety belts should be compulsory. ...

In 2012, he also startled an audience of Coalition MPs by forecasting that the Government would have run out of ideas by the end of the year. True, perhaps, but not what a senior minister is supposed to say.

In 2011, he told Boris Johnson that “we don’t want people from Sheffield flying away on cheap holidays”. ... In 2004, Letwin reportedly told a meeting of private health providers that the NHS would cease to exist within five years of the Conservatives taking power. A party spokesman claimed that what Letwin was really saying was that the NHS would cease to be a “monolithic bureaucracy”.

...

During the 2001 general election, Letwin – then a shadow Treasury minister – had to go into hiding to escape journalists after he had suggested to the Financial Times that a Conservative government would cut public spending by £20bn a year. The figure deployed by the then Tory leader, William Hague, was £8bn.

And there are not many incidents in modern politics that match the comedy value of Oliver Letwin in 2011, walking absent-mindedly to work early across a London park, reading government papers and discarding them one by one in five little bins, oblivious to the newspaper photographer behind him.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/oliver-letwin-profile-another-blunder-from-the-tory-king-of-clangers-a6793436.html

Like David Cameron, I see a vibrant future in diplomacy for Mr Letwin.

[Surya Gayatri]

4. I KNEW a slapdown would be coming from Brussels in short order.

Talk about a delusional douchebag.

"EU diplomats reacted witheringly to the idea..."

I wonder what kind of language they were using behind the scenes. LOL!

[Matilda]

5. I'm glad to see the EU rapping Johnson's knuckles.

His statements were obviously unrealistic - what kind of dream world does this man live in?

But even worse - how come the Tories can even think of electing him leader? Surely what's needed now is somebody with their feet on the ground, somebody with plenty of common sense and honesty, to deal with what is going to be a very difficult few years?

Beyond the comic element, I've never been able to understand the fascination with Boris.