Remainers - What do you want? When do you want it?

[optionalrationale]

We had the referendum, we had the legal challenge, we had the Supreme Court ruling, Article 50 has been triggered. The United Kingdom will no longer be part of the European Union.

So my questions to Remainers are
What do you want? When do you want it?

Here's what I want..

I want the negotiations to go well. I want future relations with our neighbours to be cordial. I want a good deal for UK and the EU. I want us to walk away if their demands are unacceptable (and stem from vindictiveness and to deter other members from following our lead). I want the UK to be free to make good trade deals with any country it wants. I want the UK to lead in creating a new model of trade without excessive interference in each partner's social and political arena.

More than happy to not accept jingoism.

Peregrina
Can you read? I mentioned the Commonwealth troops. My family were part of that volunteer army and helped to liberate Burma and Italy.

You have an utter disdain for your own country

Peregrina I was talking about Direct Grant Schools, though they did not all become private, mine did but not before a lot of soul searching about how to best preserve the ethos of inclusivity. Looks like Horton Grammar is remembered for encouraging girls to university www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/community/memorylane/4424685.Girls_were_taught_in_idyllic_surroundings_at_Holton_Park/

optional Some of our posts crossed, so it's debatable who mentioned the Commonwealth troops first. My own family also helped liberate Burma and Singapore. So what does that prove?

I don't like Theresa May, that does not mean I have a disdain for my country. On the contrary, I see her current behaviour as potentially doing great damage.

Whatwouldrondo
"Aside from being hard working I see none of those virtues in May."

You have far more power and opportunity to remove May than I have to remove Junkers or Tusk.

Optional There is a difference between utter disdain and having studied the history and not accepted the "this island story" version of it. Both DH and I have great uncles who were in the Chindits and they certainly did not.

Peregrina
"I don't like Theresa May, that does not mean I have a disdain for my country. On the contrary, I see her current behaviour as potentially doing great damage"

You have far more power and opportunity to remove May than I have to remove Junkers or Tusk.

but the Channel Islands were. Did you know this?
If you don't mind me saying optionalrationale you have a slightly aggressive tone, however.
In fact the British government colluded with the betrayal of 2000 Jews and Channel Islanders to be slaughtered by the Nazis.
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/papers-reveal-islanders-collaboration-with-nazis-1560945.html

WhatwouldRondo
Hello? Did you see my mention of the Commonwealth and the US. I am reacting to the disdain of a pp calling Dunkirk as "A great betrayal". These were British and Commonwealth troops laying down their lives in France for the defence and liberty of the French (as they did just a generation before). And you call Dunkirk a "A Great Betrayal"?

DH also has a grandfather who was left with the rest of the volunteer defence force, and British and Canadian regular army to stand alone, abandoned by Churchill, to defend Hong Kong. They fought to the last stand, including being forced to abandon civilians, nurses and patients in hospitals, and civilians who thought they were safe to gather in a hotel ballroom to rape and then starvation in Stanley Camp. He spent the rest of the war in Argyll Street camp and ultimately in a Japanese work camp. He was somewhere near disdain than jingoism as well.......

Womam12345
Tell me, how many of your beloved French and Poles collaborated with the Germans?

WhatwouldRondo
"Abandoned by Churchill"

Fuck me... so no mention at all of which country started the war... oh no... that would be so politically incorrect...

Churchill was the real tyrant

Are you on drugs optionalrationale ?

Optional So you think that Churchill overplayed his hand in Europe and the East because he was defending the French? Nothing to do with the last gasps of a spent empire? Or more accurately the beginning of the last gasps, Brexit being one last desperate heave......

I am reacting to the disdain of a pp calling Dunkirk as "A great betrayal".

If you read what I said, it was that the French regarded it as a betrayal. I did know people evacuated from Dunkirk, (now deceased). It wasn't an experience they wanted to repeat. My DM always felt that one close friend had his life blighted by it, it affected him so deeply.

Optional I can assure you that the British who fought for Hong Kong, many of them civilian volunteers, and then starved in the prison camps, were quite sure they had been abandoned. The UK did very well from Hong Kong and Singapore in times of peace but when they faced an enemy, who by the way shared your jingoistic nationalist self belief and sense of righteousness, they were left to their fate. Those Hong Kong Chinese who supported them had an even worse fate, tens, quite possibly hundreds, of thousands thrown off a cliff with no record.

WhatwouldRonDo
"Nothing to do with the last gasps of a spent empire? Or more accurately the beginning of the last gasps, Brexit being one last desperate heave"

You know I am actually really really glad that the thread has allowed the RMNW crowd to reveal their true colours. I actually started out as Reluctant Remainer but your attitudes here absolutely convince me I was right to change my mind.

So you lay the blame for WW2 on Churchill and the "last gasps of a spent empire"... So nothing at all to do with a failed Austrian artists who became leader of Germany, murdered 6 million Jewish men, women and children and started the conflict that led to the deaths of 30 million people..

WhatwouldRonDo
"The UK did very well from Hong Kong and Singapore in times of peace but when they faced an enemy, who by the way shared your jingoistic nationalist self belief and sense of righteousness, they were left to their fate."

And tell me, how did the French do when "faced by an enemy"?

Interesting non sequitur there optionale.

However I will offer you the respect of answering your point even if you do not bother to address mine. The French did what any country faced with a well equipped army marching over its borders would have done -we were saved, and almost were not, by 20 miles of sea and a war machine that overreached itself. We were of course not short of collaborators who would have welcomed the Nazis, quite a few of the aristocracy, even the odd Royal they could have put as a puppet on the throne in the manner of Pu Yi

Having followed politics since I was old enough to vote, a good number of years now, the one thing I have learnt is that it is never black and white. Having seen some of the stories spun in my life time, which don't square with my own experience, it has caused me to question what happened with events before my own lifetime.

I recollect being about 10 or 11 and learning a little more about WW2. We had declared war on Germany, after they invaded Poland. My question to my mother was, did that mean we started the war? The response was, 'that was different', which left me a bit baffled. Could we have done more to stop Hitler? Would some other politician have handled him differently? Would that person have been successful, given that there was a strong streak of irrationality in Hitler?

Great answers ron and peregrina great questions.

Optionale So we have a new bit of derogatory rhetoric, well done. Another right wing tactic, label then other. If you are actually a reluctant remainer then in theory we are not far apart, I do not think the EU was perfect, but I did think the benefits outweighed the problems and that we were better staying in to change it that suffer the damage of leaving. Now all I care about is that we leave with the least possible damage to our competitive advantage in the global economy, and as someone who is involved in that I do see that potentially Brexit could be devastating and damage the economy to the extent that the Britain I know, the one we celebrated at the Olympics, with a health service, welfare and social care, as well as punching above its weight in business, science and tech will be undermined. I did not underplay the enemies we faced in WW2 but my interpretation of how we responded is pretty mainstream amongst academic historians, and they are not a bunch of lefties. That is the thing about history, like Brexit, it is not one or two tunes all proceeding sequentially to a progressive conclusion, it is a cacophony (and that by the way is not original, it is courtesy of a Chinese historian opposing the Maoist version of history)

I do not think the EU was perfect, but I did think the benefits outweighed the problems and that we were better staying in to change it that suffer the damage of leaving.

I agree with this. My anger now centres round the fact that after getting on for 10 months there appears to be little proper planning in place. Soundbites of a 'red, white and blue Brexit' won't develop the computer programs to deal with Customs requirements, and sadly, having worked in IT in Government, I know something of their IT project overruns.

Where is the industrial strategy?

What plans are there to resolve the problems which could arise in N Ireland?The Good Friday Agreement took hard graft by a number of people. 'A country which works for everyone' won't cut it.

Just three areas....

I'm well aware of the sacrifice many made in WW2
My fil never met his father, killed in 1943
The idea that the UK infrastructure suffered in any way like mainland Europe is ridiculous.
Yes, some cities were targeted (Coventry and London for example) but most cities towns and villages had roads, railway lines, running water and electricity after the end of the war.
Unlike most of mainland Europe which is where most of the fighting took place.
I would suggest you watch the world at war to see just how the French and Germans and Belgians had to live after May 1945....I'm pretty sure English people didnt have to eat bread made from grass or eat their dogs and cats to survive?
I don't recall outbreaks of cholera or typhus in any uk cities?
However, I find misery top trumps distasteful so I shall desist.

Although I would point out - since you mentioned the battle of Britain - that many of the pilots were Polish and Czech...
The great marian Rjewwski of the Polish cipher bureau gave us the means to break the enigma code....
Not to mention the brave Cossacks who charged German panzer tanks on horseback with swords...
I hope we don't need the assistance of our European friends again. Why in God's name would they give it?