Brexit

Return_of_the_STAR wrote:

Lagamorph wrote:

Squinty wrote:It's being reported by The Telegraph that the EU are going to withhold the rebate we get because of all this. No other sources have confirmed this yet.

That's pretty gooseberry fool if true.

I'd suspect it's more because of a lack of agreement on the exit bill, so the rebate is being offset against it.

Thats really not a good move if you ask me. It will make a lot of people very angry and make a hard exit much more likely. Even though the figure is far below what we would end up paying anyway. I would be very surprised if it was legal as well.

Photek wrote:

Moggy wrote:

Photek wrote:

Moggy wrote:This is the really interesting bit:

However, a leaked European Commission earlier this month showed that Dublin has Brussels staunch support in ensuring the controversy remains a priority.

It made clear that, in order to preserve the Good Friday Agreement, the Brexit divorce deal must respect “the integrity of the internal market and the customs union”, with Ireland remaining a member of both.

That meant the UK, to avoid a hard border with Northern Ireland, must also remain part of the customs union – something London has categorically ruled out, at least long term.

If Brexit means the end of the Good Friday Agreement, then we could be looking at a return to the days of IRA bombings on the mainland.

Yay, more good news!

No chance of that happening but it is odd that your government is saying talks were constructive and ours are like "eh?"

No chance of the Good Friday Agreement falling apart or no chance of the IRA resuming a bombing campaign if it does fall apart?

I'd say there was far more than "no chance" of either of those happening. Without an agreement, things are going to get messy and bitter and Northern Ireland is going to be in the middle of it.

The IRA doesn't exist and hasn't for 20years. To be honest I'm surprised you think they do.

Here's a piece about how 'the troubles' were a failure for the IRA and also that bringing a border back won't bring terrorism back, from Ex IRA members.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/the-ex-ira-men-united-ireland-it-s-all-guff-1.3041131

EDIT: Actually I'm properly annoyed you think the IRA would start re-training, re-importing guns and bombs and destroy Sinn Fein in the process. Now I know how a Muslim feels when the BNP start talking bollocks.

Moggy wrote:

Return_of_the_STAR wrote:

Lagamorph wrote:

Squinty wrote:It's being reported by The Telegraph that the EU are going to withhold the rebate we get because of all this. No other sources have confirmed this yet.

That's pretty gooseberry fool if true.

I'd suspect it's more because of a lack of agreement on the exit bill, so the rebate is being offset against it.

Thats really not a good move if you ask me. It will make a lot of people very angry and make a hard exit much more likely. Even though the figure is far below what we would end up paying anyway. I would be very surprised if it was legal as well.

Yeah I agree, withholding the rebate is not on. It will look petty and could be argued that the EU took money off of the UK before the UK defaulted on the divorce bill.

lex-man wrote:

Moggy wrote:

Return_of_the_STAR wrote:

Lagamorph wrote:

Squinty wrote:It's being reported by The Telegraph that the EU are going to withhold the rebate we get because of all this. No other sources have confirmed this yet.

That's pretty gooseberry fool if true.

I'd suspect it's more because of a lack of agreement on the exit bill, so the rebate is being offset against it.

Thats really not a good move if you ask me. It will make a lot of people very angry and make a hard exit much more likely. Even though the figure is far below what we would end up paying anyway. I would be very surprised if it was legal as well.

Yeah I agree, withholding the rebate is not on. It will look petty and could be argued that the EU took money off of the UK before the UK defaulted on the divorce bill.

They couldn't withhold the rebate as we don't send it to them. They could cancel the rebate and ask us to send more money but we wouldn't necessarily do it. So I'm calling bullshit.

Exclusive: David Davis could quit because 'he is being frozen out on Brexit strategy' by civil servants

David Davis could walk out on his job as Britain’s lead negotiator on Brexit because of frustrations that he is being cut out of key strategic talks in Whitehall, his friends fear.

Allies of the Exiting the European Union secretary said they were concerned he is not being included by civil servants in key talks about Britain’s negotiations about leaving the European Union. One source said that Mr Davis had not been shown a key Brexit Cabinet paper sent by Boris Johnson, the Foreign secretary, and Michael Gove, to the Prime Minister. The fear is that Mr Davis might resign in protest – in the same way that he suddenly quit as shadow home secretary from David Cameron’s front bench team in 2008.

Mr Davis has been been a vocal exponent of the Government’s Brexit policy, making two speeches this week and a third on Britain’s trade deal with the EU after Brext next week. Allies of Mr Davis, who is known as "DD", said Mrs May had been 'captured' by civil servants Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet secretary, and Oliver Robbins, the former DExEU permanent secretary, who now works in 10 Downing Street advising Mrs May. One said: “The officials are forming a phalanx around the PM and they are trying to cut DExEu out the loop and move the centre of gravity to Number 10. DD is becoming increasingly frustrated."

Did you watch Theresa May try to make the best of her Swedish photo opportunities yesterday? Or listen to David Davis as he urged the EU side to blink first, rather than the UK side?

They both know that time is short to guarantee the UK gets what it wants and pushes the EU to move to the next stage of vital Brexit talks at the next leaders' jamboree in December.

What's been missing until now is a sense of when the UK will be able to resolve its own short-term position.
Is the cabinet willing to sanction a political move to offer the promise (not the figure) of more money on the table to settle our EU accounts?

And if ministers are willing to do so, what do they expect in return - and when?

It's been all too obvious that the EU side has, for a long time, been clear that they'll only budge when the UK is ready to promise - even vaguely or implicitly - a lot more cash.

The hold-up has in part been that the UK has been pushing to make sure that taxpayers at home don't shell out when they don't have to.

And also because UK and EU officials have taken a very different approach to settling the bill.

But it's also the case that cabinet ministers have not been ready to agree how they want to proceed, and without that political agreement, it's been hard for the negotiations about the money to progress.

Support, or not?
However, the crunch is coming fast.

I'm told on Monday there will be a significant meeting of the small cabinet committee that decides the Brexit negotiating strategy.

Several government sources say the meeting of the Brexit strategy group could change the course of our departure.
The question to be answered on Monday could be profound.

One source told me: "People have to decide if they really want to make progress and support this prime minister, or not."
For some in government that tight group of cabinet ministers must on Monday take a decision as vital as that - do they want to do a deal with the EU, or not?

Of course there is bravado on both sides.
As ever, whether thinking of talks on the continent, or in government, take every utterance with a pinch of salt.
Brexiteer ministers believe that they need to be clearer about what the UK would get in return for paying a bigger bill - a view that would no question have sympathy among swathes of taxpayers.

They are not, thus far, ready to sign up to what they see as Number 10's version of the next move - a promise to pay a lot more cash, potentially as much as 50bn-60bn euros.
They do not rule it out completely, but not before it is clear what we get in return.

But the lack of clarity in government about our eventual destination - whether we are closely, or loosely tied to the EU after departure - makes that hard to conclude.
One insider said: "We still have to settle the broader question - what do we actually want? That's the point to consider."

The discussion on Monday could therefore spill into conversations about the future relationship after Brexit, as well as cold hard cash.

For some in government, Monday feels vital. For others, it's OK in theory to let another decision point go past without conclusions.

But if they don't reach any conclusions, some in government believe that sets us on a course to crash out with no deal.

Time is running short for the discussion in government that Theresa May has put off for so long.

But one insider said there is no "limping" on until March: "We have to just decide."

Donald Tusk's deadline is hypothetical, but the pressure to move on is now not just coming from Brussels or Berlin, but from some elements in government.

Theresa May is yet to give her own public view.
But hard conversations don't get easier the longer you wait.

twitter.com/pointlesslettrs/status/931912746131697666

twitter.com/RCorbettMEP/status/932026687679758336

twitter.com/eurosluggard/status/932025484434722817

Squinty wrote:They seem to have changed their tune about hard Brexit. They were in support of it a while back.

Press Gazette wrote:Express to be found as worst offender for misleading Anti-EU coverage

The 25 anti-EU stories which prompted IPSO complaints in the run up to the 2016 referendum

1. Daily Express, 18 January 2016; Europe’s leaders have no plan to cut immigration

The article claimed there was an “annual tidal wave of 228,000 non-EU migrants who use European passports to gain access to Britain”.
The online version of the article was amended on 4 March to reflect that the 228,000 figure was not an annual one, but referred to the total number of EU citizens born outside the EU living in Britain.

On 19 April, IPSO ordered the Express to also issue a print correction for the error.

Verdict: SERIOUSLY MISLEADING

2. Daily Express, 12 November 2015; 75 % of new jobs go to EU migrants in one year

The page-two article reported figures from the Office of National Statistics. The complainant said that the vast majority of new jobs went to people born in the UK. He said the figure refers to changes in employment rather than new jobs.

The Express corrected the story: “The figures referred to, published by the Office for National Statistics, refer to net changes in employment and not to the number of people entering employment, or new jobs. The figures showed that the number of UK Nationals in employment increased by 122,000 compared to an increase of 324,000 in non-UK EU nationals.”

Verdict: SERIOUSLY MISLEADING

3. Express.co.uk, 29 January 2016; Now European Union bureaucrats could make Britons put out SEVEN bins every week

Peter Jones complained that the article reported an academic study commissioned by the European Union has if it were policy. The complaint was resolved via IPSO when the Express agreed to take the story down just after a month later.

Verdict: SERIOUSLY MISLEADING

4. Daily Telegraph, 6 February 2016; Abu Hamza and the latest blow to British Sovereignty

This front-page story stated that an ‘EU law chief’ had ruled that the daughter-in-law of a terrorist could not be deported from the UK.
The complaint was upheld by IPSO just over two months later and resolved by the Telegraph publishing a correction on page two and amending the online version of the article. The correction reflects that this was an opinion of the EU advocate general, rather than ruling that would be applied to the UK.

Verdict: MISLEADING

5. The Telegraph, Mail Online, Express websites, 17 February 2016; More than 700 offences are being committed by EU migrants every week, official figures suggest; Criminal convictions for EU migrants leap by 40% in five years: 700 found guilty every week in the UK but less than 20,000 foreign criminals have been deported; EU migrants convicted of 700 crimes each WEEK – but only thousands of them are deported –

In Facts said the stories were misleading because they did not make clear that they were not based on conviction data, but were “convictions and ‘updates’ to convictions such as appeals and breaches of court orders”.

Verdict: MISLEADING

6. Daily Express, 8 March 2016; Now EU wants asylum control – Madness as Brussels plots to tell us who can come and stay in our country

In Facts said this front-page story was a follow-up from a piece in the FT and was misleading because it did not make clear David Cameron had promised to opt out of the European Commission proposal.

Article amended on 20 June 2016 to make clear the UK has an opt out and would not be forced to join any new system.

Verdict: PARTIALLY MISLEADING

7. Daily Express website, 7 March 2016; EU seeks control of our coasts

The Express said: “The EU has drawn up plans to seize control of the British coastguard service as it creates a Europe-wide border force.”

In Facts said the European Commission proposals only applied to Shengen area countries (so not the UK).

IPSO ruled the article was not misleading: “As a member of the EU, there was a possibility that the UK could be subject to these new proposals.”

Verdict: NOT MISLEADING

8. The Sun, 9 March 2016; The Queen backs Brexit

Following a complaint from Buckingham Palace over this front-page story, IPSO ruled that it was “significantly misleading”. The Sun was forced to publish the adjudication setting this out on page two, with a small mention of the correction on page one.

Verdict: SERIOUSLY MISLEADING

9. Mail Online, 30 March 2016; Britain could stop ten times more terror suspects from entering the country if it leaves the EU, justice minister says as he blasts EU rules for allowing terrorists to ‘waltz into Britain’

In Facts said: “Dominic Raab, the pro-Brexit justice minister, never said the UK could ‘stop ten times more terror suspects’ if it left the EU. He said that, since 2010, the UK has refused entry at its borders to 67,000 non-EU citizens compared to 6,000 EU citizens.” It also said that not all those stopped were terror suspects, so the headline was wrong.

Mail Online has since changed the headline to say: “Britain has stopped 67,000 non-EU nationals from entering the country but only 6,000 EU nationals, justice minister says as he blasts EU rules for allowing terrorists to ‘waltz into Britain’”.

Verdict: MISLEADING

10. Mail Online, 3 April 2016; Report shows the NHS is nearly at breaking point as massive influx of EU migrants forces doctors to take on 1.5 million extra patients in just three years

In Facts said the extra patients figure quoted included increases due to life expectancy and migration from outside the EU.

After being contacted by In Facts Mail Online changed the headline to read: “Figures show strain on NHS as doctors take on 1.5million extra patients in just three years – with Vote Leave campaigners blaming rise in EU migrants.”

Verdict: SERIOUSLY MISLEADING