LEAVERS - update on the 'invoke A50 now' petition. I have the reply.

[Surferjet]

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Dear xxxxxx

The Government has responded to the petition you signed – “Invoke Article 50 of The Lisbon Treaty immediately.”.

Government responded:

The British people have voted to leave the EU and their will must be respected and delivered. We should not trigger Article 50 until we have a UK approach and objectives.

The British people have voted to leave the EU and their will must be respected and delivered. The process for leaving the EU and determining our future relationship will be a complex one, so we need to take time to think through our objectives and approach. We want to ensure the best possible outcome for Britain and the future UK-EU relationship. As part of this, the government will of course work closely with the devolved administrations to ensure we get the best deal for the UK as a whole. We should not trigger Article 50 until we have a UK approach and objectives, so Article 50 should not be invoked before the end of this year.

Department for Exiting the European Union

Click this link to view the response online:

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/133618?reveal_response=yes

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The Petitions team
UK Government and Parliament

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Peregrina - why on earth would the EU bother to reform now? They took no notice when DC threated the leave referendum, they're hardly going to bother now.

I disagree that DC was given little. And sadly we now won't have time to see some of what he was given come to fruition.

I think the political and economic pressure that many of the EU countries are under domestically (and the fact that there are elections in Germany and France next year) mean that the 27 (28?) will inevitably have to move towards a recognition of this and concurrent reform.

Oh and Small. I asked you to give facts on your assertion that we are going to get Brexit Lite you have been telling us about with glee. But nothing. And then all of a sudden you come out of the woodwork to crit. my contribution. Well I'm not going to reply to you unless you give me that curtesy. You so sneeringly told us that you had no problem getting facts re your PHD!!! Well 2 days on still nothing! Pot - Kettle.

I also disagree with the idea that DC was given little - but he wasn't helped by the strength of the right wing press, his own austerity programme and the 'anti immigrant' narrative the Tories (especially the current pm) have been running for years and years.

We were in a good place -

• no schengen
• no euro
• veto over change without another referendum
• no ever closer union
• migrant brake for at least five years.

We threw it all away in some stupid hissy fit whipped up by the right wing press and a few charismatic (if you like that sort of thing) politicians.

I'm with ken Clarke on this.

"I am not keen on the way politics is going in the EU with the surge in the right wing in many countries. I would like to keep us as far removed from that as possible."

Corcory, can you not see that you have just made your own contribution to the surge in the right wing here in this country, which in turn has given succour to the far right across Europe (and the US too). How on earth have you managed to turn that into "keeping us as far removed from that as possible"?

"If we don't Leave then the the issues that caused the Leave vote, as Surfer says won't magically disappear they will fester and erupt."
The problem is that the issues that appear to have caused the leave
vote are actually nothing to do with the EU and so won't go away when we do leave. So the rise of the right is inevitable.

corcory, thank you for eventually posting you list of reasons you voted Leave, unfortunately all it has done is further proved the point made up thread that the Leave campaign was deliberately vague in order that voters could dream up their own vision of the future.

Yours is a masterclass of having your cake and eating it.

I genuinely can't comprehend what has given you the impression that anything you've listed is achievable.

Much of it is based on an over inflated sense of the UK's importance for example

I do not feel that we will loose the financial centre that is London. The alternatives are really not tenable

I'm truly astounded by that comment. How do you think negotiations will work?

Allowing the UK to keep our passporting rights is one of the EU's trump cards and will come at a price, that price likely being freedom of movement.

What makes you think we can insist we continue to passport without conceding anything?

If we loose our passporting rights the financial institutions will have no option but to move to another European city in order to trade. It won't matter that that country might have higher corporation tax rate- staying in the UK won't be an option.

I don't expect countries to join in the next year or two but this was a 'once in a life time vote' so we should have been thinking about what the EU would be like in 40 years not just the immediate future. So by the same token, there should have been a proper discussion about what we were aiming for instead, set out in documentary form as with the Scottish Referendum. Yes, Cameron most certainly can be blamed but nor should the rest of Parliament be let off scot free.

I am one of the leave voters who is old enough to remember before we joined. We have been roundly chastised for that but I think we have a much greater insight into what it can be like out of the EU.
So am I. At the time we had been bankrupted by the war, and were increasingly losing our Empire, so no longer had the labour and wealth of them to carry us.

I disagree with the forming of an EU army..... We already contribute fully to NATO unlike many. This was a piece of Leave propaganda. As for NATO, it baffles me. Why are we so ready to support NATO which in practice means supporting American Wars? I think this goes back to us fooling ourselves that we have a Special Relationship with the US. We don't, it's time we woke up to that. Are you old enough to remember Suez? The Americans didn't back us then. I am just old enough to remember seeing the desperate anxiety on my parents' faces about another war coming, when they were talking about this.

When, after 2020 we no longer have to pay into the EU we will then be able to make our own decisions as to how we distribute the money and I expect areas like agriculture to have a much better tailored subsidy system that will suit our types of farming.
Well, OK, but under the present distribution of fishing rights the Government didn't chose to give this to small fishermen in the south and west, so I personally am not hopeful that they would properly consider the needs of agriculture and food production in this country, but would give any money available to their wealthy chums for grouse shooting and what not.

I expect other areas like scientific research to continue to receive funding.
I wrote to my MP on about this very issue. The collaborations are now so huge and involved that it's almost impossible for one nation to go it alone. Why cut off an important source of funds and staffing, just because the PM has had a spat with one wing of his party?

I expect deprived areas to continue to receive funding.
The Tories haven't had a particularly good record on this, so what will make them change?

I expect us to keep the employment laws and environmental regulations we currently have but that there may well be some regulations that industry may not need to adhere to if not trading with the EU ( I would not expect however that any health and safety standards would be compromised).
With people in the Tory party like Andrea Leasdom quite happy to tear up employment rights for staff in small firms, why do you think they will want to keep current regulations, but not tear up any which they find inconvenient? Who is responsible for zero hours contracts? It's not something which the EU has brought in, but greedy employers in this country.

I do not feel that we will loose the financial centre that is London.
I think we could, and the well paid executives will be able to move to Frankfurt or Dublin, commuting weekly, if they don't want to live their permanently, but it will be the junior staff and cleaners etc. who lose out.

I would like to see us have much more control of negotiating trade deals with countries all over the world. And so we will spend 10/15 years negotiating with 162 countries of the WTO? Well, OK.

Why should the EU reform now? The three contributors following your question Corcory gave answers, which I agree with, and I can't add much. Except that without a seat at the table we certainly won't be able to influence the debate.

I'm sorry to go a bit against the grain here. I too have tried to understand and struggled to accept that some of my friends voted Leave for what seems like no coherent reason. However, we are where we are. I think the issue right now isn't what Leavers wanted or believe should happen next, but rather what the UK population as a whole want to happen next. The Leavers, having won the referendum, don't get to choose the form of Brexit, as that wasn't on the ballot paper. So does the majority of the UK population (including majorities in all four countries) want a Brexit lite deal with full access to the single market? This is what the government should be working out (except they're not), and what the opposition should be pushing to clarify (if we had a decent opposition, sigh). I think that we Remainers, and any Leavers with a sense of democracy, should be pushing for a consensus on this.

That's not to say that the reasons for the Leave vote are not important, they are in terms of domestic policy (to address regional inequalities, education and lack of opportunity), but they are separate from the question of our future relationship with the EU.

I agree with you missmoon, although I would add, what is good for the UK as a whole. It should not be what the UKIP wing of the Tory party want, just because they make the most noise. Unfortunately, that seems to be what is happening.

I agree Peregrina, and I think that given the state of the Labour Party, this is what we should be campaigning / agitating for. Also, on a personal level, I feel that it's a way of taking back control of the situation. As long as we waste time trying to understand what Leave voters wanted (much of it gut feeling without any real basis in facts or reality) we are ceding the debate to UKIP and the Tory Eurosceptics.

we waste time trying to understand what Leave voters wanted (much of it gut feeling without any real basis in facts or reality)

Attitudes like this are the reason UKIP have grown in popularity & the reason they'll continue to grow.

You'll never learn will you.

I too agree that the focus now has to be on the fact that the ballot paper did not say anything about a hard or soft Brexit, so the undoubted majority in favour of the latter now need to make their voices loudly heard - above the posturing of dangerous people like Arron Banks, Liam Fox and Nigel Farage.

There will be a huge amount of pressure on the government from the right. Arron Banks, whose £5.6 million input and Trump style strategies were a key factor in winning the vote, has been quite clear about fighting for a 'real' Brexit through a party that may or may not end up being UKIP.

Leavers who think this sounds like a good thing, but also were keen on cash for the NHS, please remember that Banks has said both that the economy will suffer as a consequence of Brexit, and that the NHS should be privatised.

surferjet it doesn't matter what I think, does it? We just have different views on the UK's relationship with the EU. All I said was that I, personally, will not be wasting any more time trying to understand what type of Brexit Leave voters in particular would like. Rather, I will be trying to understand what the consensus is across the population as a whole.

Or to put it another way, whether people voted Leave or Remain is irrelevant to the current situation, and I refuse to be drawn into the kind of "us vs. them" arguments such as the one you are trying to drag me back into.

crossroads and Kaija I agree completely, and this is what we have to fight. In the end, it will be impossible to bring about a change of this magnitude without consensus across the country as a whole.

Missmoon I agree with surferjet here. 52% of the vote was for leave it is not helpful to lump them all together and assume they made their choices wilfully without checking facts nor that they are all kippers or Tories (1/3 of labour voters voted leave) it's this attitude that means Remainers get called condescending and makes it super hard to have a constructive conversation.

Surferjet looking forward to your answer on my earlier q (no rush)

Missmoon I disagree that it's clear we should be trying to maintain access to the single market, I don't think that is what many leave voters want if it means cutting freedom of movement. Neither David Davis or Liam Fox are arguing for that.

I absolutely agree with you though that what wasn't on the ballot paper was what we do next. It's very clear even from this thread alone that why people voted and what they want next are in utterly different and contradictory directions. I'm interested in understanding if leave voters were so unhappy that they decided to vote for change without knowing what that was and are happy even if it means what we get in the future is worse that what we have now

*maintaining freedom of movement

I'm always amazed by the Leaver's assertions that we will continue to fund the regions, scientific research, farming, fishing etc. etc.. Where will all this magic money come from? The economy has apparently already shrunk by more than 10 year's worth of EU contributions, so that's an awful lot of money that we won't be able to spend on anything! Successive governments have shown little interest in throwing money at these, why do you think they will suddenly start to do so now?

As for the City - Paris is already making doe eyes at banks and suggesting tax breaks, and Frankfurt won't be slow as they've wanted to take over from London for decades and have most of the infrastructure already in place. Dublin will take a slice, particularly from the English speaking world, and Amsterdam and Brussels will probably have their own enticements. It's all done electronically now, so the location is far less important than it used to be, but London had the cachet, the infrastructure, the workforce, and the passporting to the EU. Without the last it will lose the first and become just another minor banking centre.

The "conscription to the EU army" thing - surely even you must realise that this is pure bullshit rubbish? There's no way the other 27 sovereign states would even contemplate agreeing to this for a second!

As for scarily nameless "other countries" joining the EU in 40 years - well, we would still have had the veto on that. And, if they were ready to join they would have improved their economies, human rights, infrastructure etc. to the point where they would be welcome, it's not just a case of staying the same for 40 years and bingo you're in!

And yay!, I can't wait to start negotiating deals as the considerably weaker partner with China, the USA, Russia etc. etc., what could possibly go wrong?

But Crossroads why do you really think the EU would bother to give us any more concessions if we had voted to remain? We got little or nothing from DC's negotiations when he used the threat of leaving. Had we remained we would have had little or no negotiating powers at all.

And our negotiating powers now are....?

And the better deal than the one we had before is...?

Solid argument that one.

Sorry surfer, but a lot of what leavers voted for or want has no basis in reality. See below:

Oh cocory thanks for your remarks, as someone else noted I got castigated for using facts and data previously, for being over invested, I thought explaining my position a little bit would shed some light on it.

You yourself keep saying you want "facts" but when you get told them you make sneering remarks.

To be fair your arguments aren't based in reality, an EU army wouldn't have happened and we had a veto on that, as it wouldn't be politically expedient for a British Prim Minister to endorse, it wouldn't have gone ahead. But really it was scaremongering on behalf of the Leave campaign.

fullfact.org/europe/hunt-eu-army/

Brexit lite?

Well if you look at what the French, Germans and others are saying, that they want to keep the UK being an important partner but that the deal must work for the EU too, and that there will not be a better deal for the UK than EU countries already get, it comes to the brexit lite conclusion.

We can also model, and there have been studies that have done this, the Tresury, BOE and IFS have done it, the impact on the UK of different types of Brexit.

We can model the brexit lite scenario by using the example of Norway, which essentially is a worse deal than we have now.

CETA is another example we can use as a basis, but again means having to accept and implement EU regulations on products and standards etc, but has no access to services.

Or we go for WTO rules, which would be far more damaging to the economy, costing consumers £9 billion, movement of industries.

I'll put these links here so you can check my "facts"

www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36639261
cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/brexit01.pdf
www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/25/wto-eu-uk-consumers-trade-deals
www.ft.com/cms/s/0/745d0ea2-222d-11e6-9d4d-c11776a5124d.html#axzz4Hlg5H1CP

Finally we must consider that a good many large stakeholders in the UK economy backed remaining, the car industry, pharma, aerospace, universities,financial sector, BCC, CBI and IOD, amongst many others backed remaining. They will be putting a vast amount of pressure on the Government to ensure that the economic conditions of brexit are beneficial to them.

And then we come to the Elephant in the room, the mandate, there isn't a mandate for hard brexit because the "win" was only by 3 %. This puts any government in charge of managing brexit at a distinct disadvantage, it can't turn round in 5 years time when things are worse and say: " well you all voted for it." because 49% of the vote didn't. This means they are likely to play a game called political expediency.

So to conclude, EU holds a stronger hand in negotiations, UK economic situation if relationship is changed dramatically is perilous, large stakeholders will be influencing government policy so that the negotiations are beneficial for them, and there isn't an overwhelming mandate for hard brexit.

Brexit lite is.

I notice Cocory that the frankly spurious rubbish that you posted for your reasons for wanting to leave have almost all been proved incorrect at some point or another.

The "reasonable" control of immigration argument, yup we've dealt with that one, its not reasonable, its a method of making your argument sound reasonable when actually it is far from it. You also don't give any reasons why you don't like freedom of movement apart from the " its racist only to let other people from Europe in" but again the reciprocal rights of UK citizens trumps this.

The EU army, see above.

David Cameron not getting enough concessions? Essentially it shows that you don't understand just how much more the UK was being given than other countries, oh and BTW in trade negotiations the UK will have to make concessions to other countries too.

We'll make new trade deals? Well, good, but to make the curent 5% of all trade that we goes the BRICS countires grow we're going to have to do something amazing. Also look at Hinkely Point, making deals with the Chinese etc are almost always going to be in their favour, India is very protectionist etc etc. Essentially it shows that you know very little about international trade and are simply repeating lines.

That's what your post is Cocory its just repeating lines from the exit campaign, almost all of it is spurious rubbish.

Keep attacking me though, please feel free, I'm certainly not intimidated by you or anyone else that likes to put the boot in to me, for one ad homs undermine your argument ( like you ever had a reasoned one) and two, I only see you as a bit of sport anyway, not a real intellectual challenge.

I only see you as a bit of sport anyway, not a real intellectual challenge

Oh smallfox, you sexy beast. 😘

Missmoon I disagree that it's clear we should be trying to maintain access to the single market, I don't think that is what many leave voters want if it means [maintaining] freedom of movement. Neither David Davis or Liam Fox are arguing for that.

It is statements like these that I fail to understand. So 37% of the electorate voted to leave (vs. the 35% who voted to remain). 16 and 17 year olds were excluded from the vote, as were settled EU citizens in Britain and UK citizens who have lived in the EU for more than 15 years.

That 37% were not asked whether they wanted to remain members of the single market or be outside it. So on what basis can anyone say that they don't think leavers want to remain part of the single market?

Even if all of the 37% (roughly 26/27% of the population) want to leave the single market, the vote was not about that.

It is now up to politicians, pressure groups etc... to sort out what type of Brexit it will be. The 37% are not in charge of what we get. They will have to add their voices to the many just like everyone else.

As for a soft Brexit not being what Liam Fox and David Davis want - they are incompetent buffoons who will soon be out on their ear IMO. They also represent a government which IMO has no mandate, and has a tiny majority in parliament.

It's all to play for.

I know I said I would bow out due to my earlier conclusions on why anyone -given the facts that have come to light since Brexit - would still defend their Leave vote with any coherence or indeed want Article 50 to be invoked quickly - or at all!

Having caught up with the thread forgive me for adding another little anecdote. As before, I will only speak from personal experience. Like the lies IDS told me to my face on the "Turks are Coming!" ...

As soon as Brexit occurred I happened to be in Frankfurt as I go there and to Paris and Milano often with my job.

Apart from thinking GB had gone barking mad, a couple of colleagues told me new housing and infrastructure was now being planned as FF would become the new financial centre in Europe. They were actually delighted as the price of property was going skyrocket high already!
Having first hand experience I can assure you our German friends are impeccable at carrying out structured implementation action plans with great precision and will be ready to take over in a jiffy.

The notion that the Banks haven't got a robust and quick alternative to up sticks from London and create a new Financial centre in Europe made me laugh out loud.