Utterly ignorant.Topper wrote: ↑Fri Jan 18, 2019 8:17 am https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad ... -a-victory
"A Guardian editorialist got somewhat carried away, as the Guardian almost always does in its lobotomous socialist biases"
It seemed to be a mistake to communicate to Brussels (the administration of the European Union) that she had to have a deal and did not want to leave with no deal, as this emboldened the Brussels negotiators to be inflexible.
Unless Brussels makes substantial concessions very soon,
to tell Brussels to accommodate her countrymen or lose Europe’s most prestigious nation and second-largest economy,
What the author of this article (or opinion piece or whatever it is), and apparently many British politicians, fails to grasp is that Brussels has no concessions to give. The rules are the rules. If you want to be a member, these are the rules you get. If you recant your membership, you still owe the amounts you have run up in the bar, and you lose all your membership privileges There is nothing to negotiate.The European Union severely provoked Britain’s vote to depart by refusing to make the slightest concession to Cameron, who had promised “full-on treaty change” and came back from Brussels (as I wrote at the time in Britain) with less than Chamberlain gained at Munich.
If you want to change the rules, each of the other 27 member states has a veto.
You can talk to Brussels, Brussels can listen to your concerns, but they cannot concede anything unless all 27 remaining members agree to it. Not a majority. Not two thirds. All.
What Britain has done is pretty much behaving like a petulant teenager declaring that they no longer want to be part of the family. They plan to stay in the house, demand free meals and wifi access, but will no longer do any chores and no one is allowed to enter the room. These demands are of course ludicrous and will not get accepted.
Either you stay under the same terms as before, or you leave and then you are on your own.
Now, the EU has been willing to offer terms like those Norway or Canada has, but the UL has been completely oblivious of the hard facts and have continued to demand to have all the benefits and none of the obligations. If they really thought the 27 other nations would unanimously agree to that they must be either very stupid or very conceited, or perhaps both.
The quote about most prestigious nation suggests conceit. i mean, wtf?
I know the Leave campaign claimed that the UK could still be part of the open market, while negotiating separate trade deals on the side and stopping migration from other parts of the EU, but that was never going to happen.
The voters were promised a unicorn, and now they are getting a pony with an ice cream cone taped to its forehead.
The truth is that there never was a unicorn.
Yeah, you see comments like that a lot. No of course not. Why should they answer to the respective national governments? And the European parliament is a later addition to the construction that has very little power. They are consulted on various issues, but decisions are made by the Council or the Comission. So the bureaucracy answers to the Commission. The Commission consists of 28 commissionaries, each one apponted by a member state. So the national governments each have a representative in the Commission. They are not directly elected, but neither is the president of the USA or a supreme court judge. There is still a democratic procedure behind it. Yeah, I know, boring. But I get frustrated when people keep complaining about the lack of democracy in the EU. The provisions are clear, all member states must be democracies, and the people in the Commission and the Council are apponted by the governments of these member states. Thus the popular vote in each member state indirectly influences who gets appointed. It's not perfect, but it's a compromise between 28 countries with different political systems (albeit all democracies)....the authoritarian pettifogging of the encrusted and compulsively meddlesome bureaucracy in Brussels, which is not answerable either to the major constituent governments or to the European Parliament (which has more interpreters than legislators most days).
Also, the constant outcry over the Britons having EU legislation forced upon them is a total myth.
A study shows that since they entered the EU, they have been on the winning side of votes 87% of the time. That's pretty good, imho. If you cannot deal with being part of a 28 member organisation where you getyour way 87% of the time, yeah, fine. You probably should leave.
I think the problem is that national governments like to take credit for everything good that happens and pass blame for everything bad, and they've been so successful in doing this that the voters have grown accustomed to the idea that everything bad comes from Brussels. That's what came back to bite Cameron in the ass.
That combined with an increasing tension between cities and the countryside, where people outside the cities have started using pretty much any vote as a chance to protest, regardless of what the outcome will be. And the Russians have noticed this and started help poking the electorate in ways that benefit the Kremlin. Putin is good at this game.
Don't get me wrong. The frustration and tension was already there, Putin did not create that.
But he has been very good at using the internet to harness this frustration and use it to his advantage.
One third of tweets regarding brexit during the campaign leading up to the referendum originated on Russian servers.
Breaking up the EU. Creating division within the US. Weakening NATO. He's doing great.
The West really needs to step up its cyber game. Right now the Russians are winning.