We're going to have to call a halt to Brexit aren't we? Part 2

[gelnames]

I hope the contributors to the first thread carry on here.

I also hope you accept my cheekiness in starting a new thread as a lurker on the first one.

Off you go!

The same answer from me. Don't be so stupid.

Thanks hippy, but what!!

Anyway, seems that people have moved on from this topic. That's fine, I only posted to see if there was any more interest.

Sovereignty and membership of multilateral institutions

In essence, the question the country has to answer on 23 June - whether to leave or remain - is about how we maximise Britain’s security, prosperity and influence in the world, and how we maximise our sovereignty: that is, the control we have over our own affairs in future.
I use the word ‘maximise’ advisedly, because no country or empire in world history has ever been totally sovereign, completely in control of its destiny. Even at the height of their power, the Roman Empire, Imperial China, the Ottomans, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, modern-day America, were never able to have everything their own way. At different points, military rivals, economic crises, diplomatic manoeuvring, competing philosophies and emerging technologies all played their part in inflicting defeats and hardships, and necessitated compromises even for states as powerful as these.
Today, those factors continue to have their effect on the sovereignty of nations large and small, rich and poor. But there is now an additional complication. International, multilateral institutions exist to try to systematise negotiations between nations, promote trade, ensure co-operation on matters like cross-border crime, and create rules and norms that reduce the risk of conflict.
These institutions invite member states to make a trade-off: to pool and therefore cede some sovereignty in a controlled way, to prevent a greater loss of sovereignty in an uncontrolled way, through for example military conflict or economic decline.
Article 5 of NATO’s Washington Treaty is a good example of how this principle works: NATO member countries, Britain included, have agreed to be bound by the principle of collective defence. An attack on any single member will, according to the treaty, be interpreted as an attack on all members, and collective defence measures - including full military action - can be triggered. Britain could find itself bound to go to war because of a dispute involving a different country - a clear and dramatic loss of control of our foreign policy - but on the other hand, NATO membership means we are far more secure from attack by hostile states - which increases our control of our destiny. This is an institutionalised trade-off that the vast majority of the public - and most political leaders - think is worthwhile.
Looking back at history - and not very distant history at that - we know what a world without international, multilateral institutions looks like. Any student of the way in which Europe stumbled its way to war in 1914 knows that the confused lines of communications between states, the ambiguity of nations’ commitments to one another, and the absence of any system to de-escalate tension and conflict were key factors in the origins of the First World War. The United Nations may be a flawed organisation that has failed to prevent conflict on many occasions, but nobody should want an end to a rules-based international system and - so long as they have the right remits - institutions that try to promote peace and trade.
How we reconcile those institutions and their rules with democratic government - and the need for politicians to be accountable to the public - remains one of the great challenges of this century. And the organisations of which the United Kingdom should become - and remain - a member will be a matter of constant judgement for our leaders and the public for many years to come.

Theresa Mays thoughts on Sovereignty ^^

Did I wake up in North Korea? What happened to democracy?

Arguments that do not count
But before I do that, I want to deal with several arguments that should not count. The first is that, in the 21st century, Britain is too small a country to cope outside the European Union. That is nonsense. We are the fifth biggest economy in the world, we are growing faster than any economy in the G7, and we attract nearly a fifth of all foreign investment in the EU. We have a military capable of projecting its power around the world, intelligence services that are second to none, and friendships and alliances that go far beyond Europe. We have the greatest soft power in the world, we sit in exactly the right time zone for global trade, and our language is the world’s language. Of course Britain could cope outside the European Union. But the question is not whether we could survive without the EU, but whether we are better off, in or out.
Neither is it true that the EU is the only reason the continent has been largely peaceful since the end of the Second World War. Nor is it about ‘the kind of country we want to be’, as the cliche is usually put. Nor is the decision we face anything to do with our shared cultural heritage with Europe. Of course we are a European country, but that in itself is not a reason to be an EU member state.
And nor is this debate about the past. Really, I cannot emphasise this enough. We are not in 1940, when Europe’s liberty was in peril and Britain stood alone. We are not in 1957, when the Treaty of Rome was agreed, Europe was a Group of Six and the Cold War was a generation away from its conclusion. We are not in 1973, when Britain was the ‘sick man of Europe’ and saw the European Economic Community as its way out of trouble. We are not even in 1992, when Maastricht was signed and the reunification of Germany had only just taken place.
We are in 2016, and when we make this important decision, we need to look ahead to the challenges we will face - and the rest of Europe will face - over the next ten, twenty, thirty years and more. Those challenges - about security, trade and the economy - are serious, complex and deserve a mature debate. We need our decision to be the result of a hard-headed analysis of what is in our national interest. There are certainly problems that are caused by EU membership, but of course there are advantages too. Our decision must come down to whether, after serious thought about the pros and the cons, we believe there is more in the credit column than in the debit column for remaining on the inside.

TM's view on arguments that do not count ^^

Security
So I want to talk now about those 3 big, future challenges - security, trade and the economy.
A lot has been said already during this referendum campaign about security. But I want to set out the arguments as I see them. If we were not members of the European Union, of course we would still have our relationship with America. We would still be part of the Five Eyes, the closest international intelligence-sharing arrangement in the world. We would still have our first-rate security and intelligence agencies. We would still share intelligence about terrorism and crime with our European allies, and they would do the same with us.
But that does not mean we would be as safe as if we remain. Outside the EU, for example, we would have no access to the European Arrest Warrant, which has allowed us to extradite more than 5,000 people from Britain to Europe in the last 5 years, and bring 675 suspected or convicted wanted individuals to Britain to face justice. It has been used to get terror suspects out of the country and bring terrorists back here to face justice. In 2005, Hussain Osman - who tried to blow up the London Underground on 21/7 - was extradited from Italy using the Arrest Warrant in just 56 days. Before the Arrest Warrant existed, it took 10 long years to extradite Rachid Ramda, another terrorist, from Britain to France.
There are other advantages too. Take the passenger name records directive. This will give law enforcement agencies access to information about the movements of terrorists, organised criminals and victims of trafficking on flights between European countries and from all other countries to the EU. When I first became Home Secretary, I was told there wasn’t a chance of Britain ever getting this deal. But I won agreement in the Council of Ministers in 2012 and - thanks to Timothy Kirkhope MEP and the hard work of my Home Office team - the final directive has now been agreed by the European Parliament and Council.
Most importantly, this agreement will make us all safer. But it also shows 2 advantages of remaining inside the EU. First, without the kind of institutional framework offered by the European Union, a complex agreement like this could not have been struck across the whole continent, because bilateral deals between every single member state would have been impossible to reach. And second, without British leadership and influence, a directive would never have been on the table, let alone agreed.
These measures - the Arrest Warrant and PNR - are worthwhile because they are not about grandiose state-building and integration but because they enable practical co-operation and information sharing. Britain will never take part in a European police force, we will never sign up to a European Public Prosecutor, and 2 years ago we took Britain out of around a hundred unhelpful EU justice and home affairs measures. But when we took that decision, we also made sure that Britain remained signed up to the measures that make a positive difference in fighting crime and preventing terrorism.
The European Criminal Records Information System, financial intelligence units, the prisoner transfer framework, SIS II, joint investigation teams, Prüm. These are all agreements that enable law enforcement agencies to co-operate and share information with one another in the fight against cross-border crime and terrorism. They help us to turn foreign criminals away at the border, prevent money laundering by terrorists and criminals, get foreign criminals out of our prisons and back to their home countries, investigate cases that cross borders, and share forensic data like DNA and fingerprinting much more quickly.
In the last year, we have been able to check the criminal records of foreign nationals more than 100,000 times. Checks such as these mean we have been able to deport more than 3,000 European nationals who posed a threat to the public. The police will soon be able to check DNA records for EU nationals in just 15 minutes. Under the old system it took 143 days. Last year, the French used information exchanged through the Prüm agreement to locate one of the suspected perpetrators of the November attacks in Paris.
These are practical measures that promote effective cooperation between different European law enforcement organisations, and if we were not part of them Britain would be less safe.
Now I know some people say the EU does not make us more secure because it does not allow us to control our border. But that is not true. Free movement rules mean it is harder to control the volume of European immigration - and as I said yesterday that is clearly no good thing - but they do not mean we cannot control the border. The fact that we are not part of Schengen - the group of countries without border checks - means we have avoided the worst of the migration crisis that has hit continental Europe over the last year. It means we can conduct checks on people travelling to Britain from elsewhere in Europe. And, subject to certain rules and the availability of information, it means we can block entry for serious criminals and terrorists.
I have heard some people say - especially after the terrorist attacks in Brussels last month - that the very existence of extremists and terrorists in Belgium, France and other EU member states is reason enough to leave. But our response to Paris and Brussels cannot be to say that we should have less co-operation with countries that are not only our allies but our nearest neighbours. And anyway leaving the EU would not mean we could just close ourselves off to the world: the 9/11 attacks on New York were planned in Afghanistan. The 7/7 attackers trained in Pakistan. And most of the international terrorism casework that crosses my desk involves countries beyond Europe’s borders.
So my judgement, as Home Secretary, is that remaining a member of the European Union means we will be more secure from crime and terrorism.
But now I want to turn to the other challenges we face in the coming decades: trade and the economy.

TM's views on security ^^

We should remain in the EU

So I want to return to the principles I set out to help us judge whether Britain should join or remain a member of international institutions. Remaining inside the European Union does make us more secure, it does make us more prosperous and it does make us more influential beyond our shores.
Of course, we don’t get anything like everything we want, and we have to put up with a lot that we do not want. And when that happens, we should be honest about it. The Common Agricultural Policy, the Common Fisheries Policy, the free movement of people: none of these things work the way we would like them to work, and we need to be smarter about how we try to change these things in future. But that does not mean we have no control over the EU. Britain can and often does lead in Europe: the creation of the single market was driven by Mrs Thatcher, the competitiveness and trade agendas now pursued by the commission were begun at the behest of Britain and Germany, and I can tell you that on matters of counter-terrorism and security, the rest of Europe instinctively looks towards us. But it shouldn’t be a notable exception when Britain leads in Europe: it should become the norm.
And turning to the final test: to what extent does EU membership bind the hands of Parliament? Of course, every directive, regulation, treaty and court ruling limits our freedom to act. Yet Parliament remains sovereign: if it voted to leave the EU, we would do so. But unless and until the European Communities Act is repealed, Parliament has accepted that it can only act within the limits set by the European treaties and the judgments of the Court of Justice. The freedom to decide whether to remain a member of the EU or to leave will therefore always be in the hands of Parliament and the British people.
I do not want to stand here and insult people’s intelligence by claiming that everything about the EU is perfect, that membership of the EU is wholly good, nor do I believe those that say the sky will fall in if we vote to leave. The reality is that there are costs and benefits of our membership and, looking to the years and decades ahead, there are risks and opportunities too. The issues the country has to weigh up before this referendum are complex. But on balance, and given the tests I set earlier in my speech, I believe the case to remain a member of the European Union is strong.

A different European policy

For each of the principles I set out earlier, however, I cannot help but think there would be more still in the credit rather than debit column if Britain adopted a different approach to our engagement with the EU. Because we should be in no doubt that, if we vote to remain, our relationship with the European Union will go on changing. And that change - with new treaties on the horizon - might be for the better or worse.
And to those who say Britain cannot achieve what it needs in Europe, I say have more belief in what Britain can do. I say think about how Britain built the single market, and let’s be that ambitious - in the British national interest - once again.
Let us set clear objectives to complete the single market, to pursue new free trade deals with other countries, to reform the European economy and make it more competitive. Let’s work to ensure the countries of Europe can protect their borders from illegal immigrants, criminals and terrorists. Let’s try to make sure that more of our European allies play their part in protecting western interests abroad.
We need to have a clear strategy of engagement through the Council of Ministers, seek a bigger role for Britain inside the commission, try to stem the growth in power of the European Parliament, and work to limit the role of the Court of Justice. We need to work not only through the EU’s institutions and summits, but by also pursuing more bilateral diplomacy with other European governments.
And it is time to question some of the traditional British assumptions about our engagement with the EU. Do we stop the EU going in the wrong direction by shouting on the sidelines, or by leading and making the case for taking Europe in a better direction? And do we really still think it is in our interests to support automatically and unconditionally the EU’s further expansion? The states now negotiating to join the EU include Albania, Serbia and Turkey - countries with poor populations and serious problems with organised crime, corruption, and sometimes even terrorism. We have to ask ourselves, is it really right that the EU should just continue to expand, conferring upon all new member states all the rights of membership? Do we really think now is the time to contemplate a land border between the EU and countries like Iran, Iraq and Syria? Having agreed the end of the European principle of ‘ever closer union’, it is time to question the principle of ever wider expansion.
Stand tall and lead
So this is my analysis of the rights and wrongs, the opportunities and risks, of our membership of the EU - and the reasons I believe it is clearly in our national interest to remain a member of the European Union.
And I want to emphasise that I think we should stay inside the EU not because I think we’re too small to prosper in the world, not because I am pessimistic about Britain’s ability to get things done on the international stage. I think it’s right for us to remain precisely because I believe in Britain’s strength, in our economic, diplomatic and military clout, because I am optimistic about our future, because I believe in our ability to lead and not just follow.
But I know what a difficult decision this is going to be for a lot of people. I know, because of the conversations I have with my constituents every Saturday. Because of the discussions I’ve had with members of the public - and members of the Conservative Party - up and down the country. And because I myself have already gone through the process of carefully weighing up what is in Britain’s interests, now and in the future, before making my decision. Ultimately, this is a judgement for us all, and it’s right that people should take their time and listen to all the arguments.
So as we approach polling day, and as the country starts to weigh up its decision, let us focus on the future. Instead of debating the peripheral, the ephemeral and the trivial, let both sides of the argument debate what matters. And let us do so in a serious and mature way. Let us concentrate on Britain’s national interest. Britain’s future. Our influence around the world. Our security. And our prosperity. Let us make our decision with the great challenges of the future in mind. Let us have more confidence in our ability to get things done in Europe. This is about our future. Let us, Great Britain, stand tall and lead.
Document information
Published:
25 April 2016
From:
Home Office
The Rt Hon Theresa May MP

TM our PM on why we should stay in the EU , last year !!!!!

frumpety

Theresa May seems to be changing her mind a lot:

24 April 2016: "We have control of our borders"

5 June 2017: "We will leave the European Union and ... take control of our borders"

You're welcome

Ilove do you have a little link to that statement she made on 5th of june 2017 ?

Does she understand that the internet exists I wonder ?

Or maybe she does , and when it all goes tit's up , she can come back with a big fat 'told you so'

So Leavers is TM an idiot or a liar ? And which would you rather have in charge of the country's destiny ?

do you have a little link to that statement she made on 5th of june 2017 ?

Click on the date. She says it at 0:31 in the video.

(www.express.co.uk/news/uk/813159/Theresa-May-Brexit-immigration-European-Union-general-election)

Britain will never take part in a European police force, we will never sign up to a European Public Prosecutor, and 2 years ago we took Britain out of around a hundred unhelpful EU justice and home affairs measures. But when we took that decision, we also made sure that Britain remained signed up to the measures that make a positive difference in fighting crime and preventing terrorism.

But how on earth can this have happened , almost a hundred EU justice and home affairs measures that the UK declined to be a part of ? The EU is a separate entity that dictates to the UK , how I ask again, could this have happened ?

We're going to have to call a halt to Brexit aren't we?

Yes. it gets more ridiculous by the day.

No, we aren't going to call a halt to Brexit. Time to accept that it's going to happen.

Well 18 months is a very long time in politics Silvery , but not a very long time to come up with a decent plan or idea of how the country is going to manage after March 2019.

Well 18 months is a very long time in politics Silvery , but not a very long time to come up with a decent plan or idea of how the country is going to manage after March 2019

Red, white and blue. Strong and stable. Poker game or something.

I am literally sick of the pointless waste of time and money that is Brexit. If we are leaving by March '19 the government need to get their arses in gear and start buying up land round the ports and the Northern Ireland border to process the huge increase in customs checks on freight. They need to have proposed a solution to the NI border situation to Eire that satisfies the Irish government and doesn't break the Good Friday Agreement. They haven't even started that beyond some vague willy waving and mumbles about a made up electronic system so that there will continue to be an invisible border. I was in Ireland last week and the narrative on the news is that the UK clearly hasn't a clue what it's doing. Interviews with Irish politicians suggest that they are finding the whole situation farcical, and it would be funny if it wasn't so serious. And Ireland is just one of the 27 countries in the U.K. with a view. Getting them all to agree on anything approaching a favourable deal for us is not on the cards.

We'll end up with WTO which will, for some inexplicable reason, please the Brexiters, but with leave our economy in a mess. Either that, or it will take about 30 years, double the number of public sector workers as we will have to duplicate many of the jobs that are currently done in the EU (e.g. We'll either have to set up our own medicines agency, or pay into the EU pot for continued access to theirs), and end up with a mess of regulation that will be inferior to what we have now.

Still, sovrinty and forins, innit?

To me , Brexit is all about dumbing the UK down , we are in the EU and have, over the many years we have been in it , generally got a very good deal from it . Every remainer I know would agree it is far from perfect , but we have always had power and influence in it . We , the UK , have helped it become what it is today .

When or if we leave , we will lose that power and influence , we, who have always been regarded for our diplomacy , our strong and stable approach to almost all situations

The people who shouted loudest during the referendum campaign had nothing to lose , they are completely unaccountable , they will not be in any way poorer regardless of the outcomes , their fortunes lay elsewhere , certainly not in the UK . They simply do not care about the vast majority of the voting public, possibly the odd relative or school chum , and why should they ?