Westminstenders: The 3 Million get their first offer.

[RedToothBrush]

The UK have finally put forward their proposals for EU citizens living in the UK. These 'bargaining chips' have been offered a 'generous deal' which is nothing of the sort.

For an in depth look at what it means this is a good summary:
Analysis: what is the UK proposing for EU citizens in the UK and EU citizens in the EU?
This is written by a leading immigration law blogger.

What they suggest, is this is probably what will happen in the event of a no deal situation and that hopefully there can be a better final deal. That does seem to be backed by the comments about EU citizens not needing to do anything now (including apply to remain under existing rules under the 85page document) although they are telling the civil service to prepare for a no deal situation. But who knows? Who can trust them?

What we should all be paying close attention to is not just the detail of this, but the language around it.

Numerous politicians have said that they will wait and see what the EU proposal is, even though it has been out for a couple of weeks. This is an effort to discredit and smear the EU.

This comes after Davis had suggested that the UK had achieved a 'victory' by getting the EU to 'agree' to put citizens rights at the time of priorities to be dealt with, even though it was also the top priority for the EU who refuse to talk about anything else until the matter is settled. Everything is being couched as a victory, even if its merely agreeing with the EU and constitutes a compromise by the UK and a row back from previous comments.

Also flying about a lot is confusion over the ECJ and the EHCR. Some of it is ignorant. Some of it is an effort to discredit and smear the ECJ to force a harder Brexit.

The EU position can be found here: EU proposals for post Brexit EU/UK citizens
It is essentially to preserve ALL current rights.

The UK position is to reduce EU citizens rights. This would also enable them to reduce UK citizens rights in the longer term, so what happens here, isn't just about EU nationals rights its also about UK nationals living in the UK.

Of course the proposals also have more significance for UK citizens living in the EU. The UK government have frequently suggested their use of bargaining chips was to help UK citizens living abroad. What has been put on the table could not be further from the truth. The government is quite happy to screw over UK citizens living in the EU. Probably because they are traitors.

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block to a deal is who oversees it all. The UK want it all done purely by UK courts. This is NOT going to happen (unless we have a no deal). There is no way the EU will compromise on this, due to our dreadful track record in deportations with unlawful behaviour and lack of regard for family life. (Thanks Theresa). Systems on the table as an alternative to the ECJ are a new court system - perhaps even merely one with the same judges but with a different name to appease a ignorant British public - or arbitration which is unlikely as it tends to be for states and not businesses or individuals.

It will be interesting to see how this progresses as it should give a good idea of how much we will compromise.

Its also been pointed out that the paper on EU citizens have been the first public document on Brexit which has had any substance. If I was a cynic I might say that Davis is sitting on his arse waiting for the EU to publish their proposals before and merely copying the EU's homework and making changes to it. If that happens to really be the case, then its perhaps a good thing, as our lot really are bloody useless and have no idea what they are talking about.

Norway warned us about the Norway model last year. Popular with the people as it doesn't involve engaging with the EU, but the politicians see the downsides. Even worse for us given we once did have a fairly large say in EU matters.

www.politico.eu/article/eu-referendum-look-before-you-leap-norways-pm-tells-brexiteers/

Having said that, if we have to leave then it is the best next thing. It just all seems so unnecessary. The opportunity costs from this debacle are huge.

Irene wrt Turkey:
even within the Customs Union, lorries from Turkey typically wait 16-36 hours at the EU borders to enter.

All Turkish exports to the EU, including agricultural, have to factor this delay into their costs and logistics.
It puts manufacturing in Turkey at a disadvantage, because there is no seemless flow of raw materials, components & goods cross-crossing the border as EU members enjoy.

"Norway" option is imo less advantageous than being in the EU, obviously wrt influencing it.
However, it is the least painful Brexit and would give some of the "freedoms to act independently" that some regard as important for "sovereignty"

Norway used to be a popular option among leading Leavers.
It was often raised by their campaigners as an option
However, having won a narrow referendum victory, at one particular moment in time (and helped by Cambridge Analytica's mysterious tech)
many Leavers seem to have moved the goalposts since.

Absolutely, BigChoc.

If anything should make a sensible government with the interests of the country in mind stop and pause, it's the misleading and uninformed decision they facilitated.

FOM and May's red line over the ECJ seem to be the catalysts for Hard Brexit. She threw red meat to her right wing and UKIP in the hope it would cement her leadership and the Tory position. That turned out well too.

Fuuuccckkkinng hell. This gives more if an incite into the minds of the Three Brexiteers than you might think.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/01/three-brexiteers-chase-buccaneering-spirit-of-empire?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
‘Three Brexiteers’ chase buccaneering spirit of empire in choice of art

At Davis’s base, 9 Downing Street, he enters the increasingly choppy waters of Brexit negotiations in Brussels surrounded by a distinctively maritime theme. He has ordered 34 works from the government’s collection including T Wright’s Shipping – Paddle Boat off Dover, William Marlow’s Hulks at Sheerness and John Tunnard’s Rocks at Sea.

To focus his mind further, there are also 10 copperplate engravings of scenes from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – originally produced for a 1929 edition of the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem – featuring scenes from the tale of a lost soul condemned to wander the globe following a disastrous voyage.

Two maps are among other intriguing choices at the Department for Exiting the European Union. One is A New Map of Europe, a colour engraving by Michael Burghers, the 17th-century Dutch illustrator, depicting a continent carved up along national lines three years after the nine years war, and Map of Northern Germany by Theodorus Danckerts, showing the core territory of Prussia in the run-up to its emergence as one of the great powers.

The sole portrait at the department is that of George Canning, a so-called “lost leader” of the Tory party, and a figure whom Davis might view as a political ancestor. Credited by some historians with detaching Britain from alliances with autocratic European powers in favour of focusing on Britain’s global imperial ambitions, he served as prime minister for only 119 days before his death in office in 1827.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rime_of_the_Ancient_Mariner
Wiki on The Rime of the Ancient Marnier

Read the Synopsis and see how far you get before you start going wtf as an inspiration for Brexit.

Cries

Davis is worse than I thought. Davis is into expeditions of explorers into difficult situations. Except he only does the romantic side of it and does not see the reality of it. The misfortune of others along the way are a mere side show that add to the glory of the hero.

The book Davis gave Barnier - Annapurna - is straight out of this romantic vision. He sees it with no acknowledgment of the harsh realities. He sees the French climber who achieved a task people thought impossible and achieved fame and heroic status and was viewed as restoring French national pride. He doesn't see the bungled inability to climb the original mountain, their lack of navigation skills, the treatment of those supporting the climb as exploitative and cruel, the reckless risk he exposed his loyal friends to, or the fact that Herzog only lived through luck losing his fingers in the process. It's all about the hero and the glamour of the Conquest of the Mountain.

I can not over state how disturbing I find this guardian article.

The choice of theme chimes perfectly with comments about Davis and Duning-Kruger.

The death rate in professional mountaineers is frightening. Young men who live life on the edge, driven by the idea of glory who over estimate their ability or fail to heed warning signs and the alarms of others. Even the successful ones who are thought of as incredible seem to eventually over estimate themselves and their luck runs out. Ueli Steck died on Everest just this year.

We are very aware of Gove and Johnson's ambition. Even though Davis stood for PM in 2005, I'm not sure we have had a full on glimpse of how bare and naked that ambition is.

He bares all the hallmarks and character traits of the climber who dies - more a George Mallory than an Edmund Hillary.

Mallory is famous for dying climbing the mountain, but an earlier attempt cost the lives of seven Sherpas and he was accused of poor judgement skills. And he still went and tried again getting himself killed in the process.

Hillary, though he had that burning ambition, was much more part of a team which included scientists and a general respect for the dangers the mountain posed. He certainly wasn't perfect, but also wasn't utterly reckless in the same way.

The way the two expeditions prepared was significant and wasn't merely down to an extra 30 years of technology being available but in the attitudes they had. The British Team were almost regarded as 'cheat' for the way they employed technology and sports science and psychologically to get to the top in a show of patrotic achievement.

Herzog was Hillary's contemporary, but he was an ideological purest when it came to preparation for mountain climbing. He attempted the summit without oxygen for starters. He had somewhat more in common with the character traits and preparation of Mallory and by rights he should have died. That he didn't was down to luck not judgment.

As PM, every bit as dangerous as Gove.

It is indeed possible to achieve incredible feats of endurance, if you are prepared to sacrifice enough - particularly to sacrifice the "lesser" people

However, voters were not asked if they wished to make sacrifices for Brexit

On the contrary, they were told they would become more prosperous, as well as enjoying a country less furrin.

Re Turkey and the Customs Union...yes, there is substantial difference between what many people assume CU means versus what it does mean (or at least what the reality is in Turkey) e.g. private individuals must pay still pay duty on any EU imports with value including postage charges of total > 30 Euros (used to be max 75 Euros value per package allowed through but changed last year).

Imagine how many UK initiated Amazon orders this would affect, given a substantial proportion of items are dispatched from EU warehouses.

I still believe that a nation facing elevated shopping basket costs, stagnant wage-growth, paralyzed GDP growth and already saving just 1/5th relative to German citizens....will learn about the economic suicide that is Brexit via their wallets rather than a text book.

Unfortunately by that time, though, it's too late to reverse the mistake.

I vaguely remember reading the Ancient Mariner and 1984 around the same time at school, early 1979s and considering both quite scary and depressing

1970s

Six out of 10 Britons want to keep their European Union citizenship after Brexit – including the rights to live, work, study and travel in the EU – and many would be prepared to pay large sums to do so, according to research led by the London School of Economics.

The extreme cynic in me finds me asking if maybe this was the masterplan all along ? Make the benefits of EU citizenship available to an elite that can afford them. No more riff-raff "en Provence".

I know I floated this as an idea last year - making the point that it would put a dent in the narrative that was then being constructed which as that 48% of the electorate country just disappeared into thin air on the 24th June 2016.

But then I woke up, and came to the view that such an outcome will not be permitted by Mays style of Brexit. As we've seen, the plastic nature of UK democracy would make it the work of a teabreak to introduce a law (and we can have bets on what grounds. I'd put my money on "terrorism") that specifically and explicitly does not recognise EU citizenship acquired post-Brexit.

Since all that needs discussing at the moment is FoM (as until that is signed off, all other discussion is moot, and by the EUs nature, all other discussions predicate upon FoM) then I think it's obvious that as things stand - for whowhatever reason - the UK is preparing to abandon EU-resident UK citizens in order to try to have absolute sovereignty over UK-resident EU citizens.

It's interesting how navel-gazing the UK press is on this, not realising that all around the globe more than a few countries are quietly asking themselves if the UK knows what international treaties are, and whether they know how to honour them.

I don't think the news from Chine/Hong Kong is happening in a vacuum. It's happening because China can see that any international negotiating experience the UK has that hasn't resigned is going to be perpetually tied up in Brexit now.

imo, both government and Opposition have adopted the General Melchett policy:

"If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through"

Rime of the Ancient Mariner ????

Surely Kubla Kahn would have been more apposite ?

(I managed to fail my English Lit O level, and we never studied Coleridge anyway. So am pretty chuffed that I can recall the opening lines to both those poems . An early introduction to "Rumpole of the Bailey". )

lh I've been puzzling how to reconcile this 60% figure to the higher than 40 % supporting Leave

Is this genuinely from a representative sample of UK voters, as standard opinion polls,
or from a group that has been filtered in some way to overrepresent the educated or young ?

If representative, would a significant % be sufficiently arrogant to think that FOM should be in one direction only ?
(because Brits bring advantage to any country, whereas furrin folk in the UK only bring down standards)

I also - cynically - find myself wondering what the hell the Civil Service are up to in all this ? Pre-Brexit it was possible to have this view that they were acting as a pater familias, gently ensuring that whatever individual governments got up to, it was generally in the UKs interests.

I know there have probably been extremely private briefings where they have told the truth. And it's probably been waved away with an imperious gesture. But then who told the emperor his cloak was so fine ?

But as we hurtle towards the cliff edge, it's hard to shake a feeling that maybe this is what was intended from the off. The diffidence shown in "Yes Prime Minister" must have been based on something ...

Or maybe this includes those Leavers who genuinely weren't motivated by immigration and FOM

==> that would indeed suggest a majority in the country would accept EEA / EFTA Brexit :
Remainers, plus these Leavers (plus others as they start to realise the economic price)

lh I've been puzzling how to reconcile this 60% figure to the higher than 40 % supporting Leave

We have to start removing newspaper readers from polls. I don't care how hysterical the Express (which seems to have taken over from the Mail as Reichspaper) is wailing if it turns out it's readers don't vote.

People polled != people who voted in the referendum.

Also we are a year in - some people who had no opinion (if they were 17 last year) might have one. Particularly as a new Uni-leaving year is starting to wake up to what FoM means (and hopefully not what it meant ).

One of the people I know who voted leave, genuinely didn't realise that leaving the EU would mean ending FoM. They are younger than me, and much less politically engaged (no children, as of yet ...). They thought that FoM was just "a thing", and just down to the UK being "in Europe" geographically. Which suggests that the Remain campaign failed to ensure people weren't taking the EU for granted.

There is certainly a view I've heard expressed in Germany that the UK may need a hard Brexit - and a few years of the consequential pain afterwards -

to knock off its arrogance and delusions of grandeur, before it is prepared to accept realistic national aims:

i.e. a prosperous well-connected modern country that is a medium sized power, back again in the EU or at least EEA / EFTA.

Lh That degree of ignorance among more than a tiny% of voters would be horrifying

I don't know how much is specifically taught at German schools, or whether it is just general knowledge here, but teens seem surprisingly knowledgeable and quite sophisticated about using EU opportunities in their future

I suspect at least in the "Western" EU, this is not uncommon.

Wonder what Greece and Italy feels about the wonderous EU at the minute? Do they feel well loved and thought about by the other members? Are they basking in the caring, warm and secure embrace of the EU arms? They must be counting their blessings being part of the EU.

Maybe, hopefully, thanks to Mays glorious mistep, this is the phase the hardest Brexiters were hoping to steamroller over with a commons majority to stifle any naysaying ???

Regular posters will recall the obsession with speed which seemed to emerge after the referendum.

It might be possible that now we have hit a hiatus (totally down the the actions of the Tory party), the demographics are starting to shift slightly, and people who a year ago saw FoM as a more esoteric, theoretical prospect, are now realising that if it ends, so do any plans they may have had to work and study abroad.

One Uni friend of mine has 4 DC (16,17,19,21), and they are all either in or going to Uni, and all have plans that involve travel. Interestingly he's as Tory as they come, but they most certainly are not.

Now look at those demographics ....

Observer / Opinium Poll
Brexit and Grenfell both influencing opinion, so may change as memory of Grenfell fades.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/01/over-60-of-voters-view-theresa-may-as-pm-negatively-poll

LAB 45%
CON 39%
May net rating = -20%
Corbyn net = +4%

"May has suffered a startling decline in popularity since last month’s general election with a new opinion poll showing 61% of voters now view her in a more negative light than they did when the electorate denied her an overall majority on 8 June.

"On Brexit, 41% now disapprove of the way May is handling the negotiations on leaving the EU, against 32% who approve. Some 47% of those who backed leaving the EU approve of her handling of Brexit against 27% who disapprove, while 56% of remainers disapprove and only 21% approve.

While 43% support the way Corbyn reacted to the Grenfell Tower, 23% do not, and just 22% approve of May’s reaction, against 50% who are critical."

Lh That degree of ignorance among more than a tiny% of voters would be horrifying

It would be entirely consistent with the Bent Banana theory though.

And totally understandable. The famous "what have the Romans ever done for us ?" scene from Life of Brian was only funny because it had (more than) a kernel of truth.

Interior ministers from Germany, France and Italy meeting as Italy warns influx of migrants unsustainable and threatens to close its ports and impound rescue ships run by aid agencies carrying people from Libya. Over 500,000 migrants have passed through Italian ports since 2014.

Right I'm going out. You lot talk too much. We are just about to hit page 39.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/eu_referendum_2016_/2969314-Westministenders-Hey-Hey-were-the-Monkies?watched=1
Here's the next thread a bit early.

sos The question is what happens to the Uk
Wand whether we choose to harm our own economy

Brexiters keep trying to stop such thinking by distraction about absolutely anything else

• but a substantial majority of people in all E27 countries think they are better in than out

Refugees won't go away. They will keep coming to richer, safer countries regardless of in / out the EU.
The question is whether each country tries to handle this problem individually, or try to form a common policy.

Italy has had dire warnings about disaster in every post-WW2 government, but seem to roll along despite that.

Even Greece doesn't want to leave the EU, because staying in means fellow EU members are more obliged to support them financially.
German politicians on the left want them to at least leave the Euro, but Greece refuses even that

Greece''s problems are an example of where politicians' / national delusions can lead:
chose not to collect taxes, borrowed too much, wasted it on extravagances (including building up a disproportionately large military) and then ran out of money.
They had to borrow ever-increasing amounts just to pay debt interest. Creditors - including the UK - didn't want to forgive all the debt.
That spiral would lead to disaster in / out of the EU.