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Article 50

Discussion in 'Politics, Religion and Ethics' started by Markham, Jan 26, 2017.

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  1. Markham
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    Markham Guest

    It was his leader, little Timmy Farron, who got a drubbing** at PMQs today. In the words of Guido's Commons sketch-writer "Tim Farron then rose for a stream of consciousness rant on Brexit bereft of any logical coherence. So absurd was it that Nigel Adams got up next and presaged his question by noting “that it is quite difficult to follow that, Mr Speaker, but back in the real world…”. Alec Shelbrooke behind him then broke into such a fit of laughter that the Speaker had to reprove him, and all attention turned to the burly Elmet and Rothwell MP only to see George Osborne giggling along next to him on the backbenches. Eyes wide and manically laughing like a child high on Haribo, the former Chancellor was clearly having a whale of a time joking around with the cool kids."

    Three Lib Dem MPs oppose their leader's position so will either vote with the government or, as they did at the last Brexit vote, abstain; they are Norman Lamb, Greg Mulholland and John Pugh. Tom Brake, the Lib Dem MP for Carshalton and Wallington will be joining Labour's Ann Clwd and the SNP's Eilidh Whiteford all being Remain-supporting MPs whose constituents voted to leave and they will be voting against the Bill.

    ** As did your comrade and mine:

  2. Timmers
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    Timmers Well-Known Member Trusted Member

    I see Diane Abbott didn't turn up to vote, sick apparently :)

    Sick we are leaving the EU I expect :)
  3. Markham
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    Markham Guest

    More likely she was nursing a hangover:

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    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 2, 2017
  4. Markham
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    Markham Guest

    The SNP's "wrecking amendment" which called for MPs to refuse to endorse the proposed European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill at its Second Reading, was defeated 336 votes to 100 votes.

    The government easily won the Bill's Second Reading vote 498 votes to 114 and Britain has now passed the point of no return as far as triggering Article 50 and leaving the EU are concerned.
  5. Timmers
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    Timmers Well-Known Member Trusted Member

    Moving forward a couple of months, I wonder what information we will receive on how the negotiations are panning out?
  6. Markham
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    Markham Guest

    I'm wondering whether anything substantive will be discussed before the French and German elections have taken place and Hollande is replaced by Le Penn and Merkel by Schulz (probably).

    One thing is for sure, the EU will attempt to stick us with a large "exit" bill of upto £60 billion, some of which comprises our contributions for the next 3 or 4 years and which has already been allocated to various spending budgets. Recipient countries of EU funding will not take too kindly to be told that they'll be receiving quite a bit less until the new budgets take effect in 2021 and the net contributors are unlikely to agree to an increase in contributions to make-up the shortfall (although I can remember a German member of this forum boasting that his country could easily do that "from pocket change"). We also have to pay our share of the EU's very generous index-linked pension scheme for all its employees. We have, I believe, a moral obligation for the latter charge - the pensions - but apart from that, refuse to pay any more.
  7. Timmers
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    Timmers Well-Known Member Trusted Member

    Well, the money side of the divorce negotiation will not be amicable that we can say with all certainty, I was thinking earlier that maybe a neutral go between might be a good idea as passions will be running high.

    I really cannot see the negotiations going well as I am sensing more and more bitterness from the EU as the days pass, I think we will be settling for the "no deal is better than a bad deal," something that I would be personally be happy with but a lot of people wouldn't.
  8. Aromulus
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    Aromulus The Don Staff Member

    I would just love to see some decent rules for expats to continue with the existing status quo.
  9. Timmers
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    Timmers Well-Known Member Trusted Member

    One would think or hope that this issue is number one on the agenda when negotiations begin.
  10. oss
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    oss Somewhere Staff Member

    Dom would you be potentially at risk?

    Even after all the time you have been in the UK?
  11. walesrob
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    walesrob Administrator Staff Member

    I discovered today my EHIC card was out of date, so went online to renew. I noticed on the website they state that they do not foresee any changes to the EHIC agreement despite Brexit. Only time will tell if that will still be the case now that Brexit is to become a reality.
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  12. Markham
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    Markham Guest

    There are about 3 million EU nationals living in Britain and about 1.3 million British nationals living elsewhere in the EU. Theresa May has sought a bilateral agreement between the UK and EU safeguarding the position of Britons abroad and EU nationals living in Britain but to no avail. Malta currently holds the revolving presidency of the Council of Europe and there is a summit being held here on 9-10 March at which she plans to trigger Article 50 and it is believed she will attempt to re-raise the ExPat issue at that meeting. However the EU might decide to tie the ExPat resolution to other components (eg the financial contribution Britain must make) in the negotiations which would hold us all hostage.
  13. Markham
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    Markham Guest

    Quentin Letts is, to my mind, the most surgical of journalists reporting on what happens in Parliament. He is the Mail's sketch-writer and has written some purple prose about this very man and his party in today's edition:

    A callow, long-privileged MP, posh as turn-ups, rises on his hind legs in the House of Commons and drawlingly accuses supporters of Brexit of being 'the monied elite'.

    This politician — himself stinking rich and elitist — is notorious for breaking a promise that he would not raise college fees for university students.

    Yet in his oration he claims to speak for 'the youth of today'. His entire speech is an attack on the EU referendum result.

    The people's verdict is dangerous, he avers, employing all the oratorical hand gestures of the pompous statesman.

    'Call me old-fashioned,' he says, reaching for what he hopes is a Churchillian tone, 'but when a country decides to go on a radical, uncompromising departure to a new and as yet entirely unpredictable future ... it is a country embarking on a perilous path, and I hope our consciences will not pay for it.'

    Whaaaaaat? Is this the same politician who, just a few short years ago, campaigned for voters to be allowed a say on whether to stay in the EU?

    [​IMG]
    'It's time,' said this very same man, 'for a REAL referendum on Europe.'

    Well, we just had one. And now he disputes its result. When such a man speaks of 'our consciences', it is hard not to bite the top off one's ballpoint pen.

    The name of this maestro of hypocrisy is, of course, Nick Clegg.

    Yes, that's Cleggy's face on that 2008 poster in his pre-government days. He looked a bit fresher then — different hairdo, chubbier smile — but didn't we all?

    Underneath the mop fringe, however, it was the same cynical, untrustworthy Clegg as the one who made the above-mentioned speech in the Commons on Tuesday during the Brexit debate on triggering Article 50.

    Mr Clegg's nine-minute contribution was one of the most nakedly dishonest speeches I have had the misfortune to hear in the Commons. The man is as shameless as a charity store shoplifter.

    For full disclosure, I should add that in his speech he attacked the Mail, which, of course, campaigned for people to vote to leave the EU if they believed in Britain, its culture, history and freedoms.

    But back to that poster. It dates to a time when the Lib Dems were in Opposition (as, thank goodness, they are again today).

    Mr Clegg, then leader of his party, calculated that electoral advantage was to be had by demanding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, which was another step on the road to the creation of a European federal superstate.

    Of course, it could be argued that he cynically took that position because he knew there was no chance of such a referendum ever being held.

    For at the time, the Labour government had no intention of holding a vote on our European membership and the Conservative Party was in two minds.

    But in principle — if we can use that word in relation to Mr Clegg without attracting a drainful of sardonic laughter — the Lib Dems and their then leader were all in favour of a referendum on Europe.

    A 'REAL' referendum, even, as their poster declared!

    But as ardent Europhiles, if they had succeeded in their 2008 campaign to have a referendum, would the Lib Dems have respected the result if it had gone against Brussels?

    Or would the insistently pro-EU Mr Clegg & Co. have insisted that the British people were misguided, and force them to return to their polling booths and try again until the 'right result' was secured?

    For that certainly seems to be their position now, with Clegg, on Tuesday, putting forward the case for a second referendum, disingenuously saying that people were not aware of what they were voting for.

    Or is that really his party's true position? For there is one thing of which we can be sure: the Lib Dems have a shameless history of facing in different directions at once.

    We have witnessed this on drugs policy, on economic policy, on defence and nuclear power. And now it is happening on Brexit.

    There are only nine Liberal Democrat MPs today. And yet, wonderfully, they have contrived to disagree on Europe.

    Two or three of those nine political leviathans are uneasy with their party's vehemently anti-Brexit stance.

    The rest are out-and-out Remoaners who are determined to set their face against the electorate, come what may.

    This is classic Lib Dem behaviour that can be traced back to the party's mid-1980s birth, which saw a gradual merger of the socialist/interventionist/urban SDP and the more live-and-let-live, rural-based Liberals.

    Those two traditions have never quite been reconciled — indeed, they loathe each other — and the party, as a result, is as directionless as a wonky-wheeled supermarket trolley.

    Was there ever a more ragged, inconsistent group of opportunistic political loons?

    What, apart from giving a pulpit to the risible Clegg, is the point of the Lib Dems?

    And why on earth should such a minuscule party — currently led by that soapy little man Tim Farron, who whinges that Theresa May has 'no mandate for the hard Brexit she is pursuing' — think it can defy the wishes of over 17 million people?

    (It is worth noting that voters in five of the six areas in Cumbria, the county where Farron is an MP, were in favour of leaving the EU, as were the majority in Sheffield, the city where Clegg is an MP.)

    Apart from the niche comedy value that they bring to British politics, what are the Lib Dems' core philosophies?

    Will they change their mind again on the EU referendum? Are they for or against deficit reduction?

    For or against the nation state, defence spending, family values and much else besides?

    The answer to these and other questions is: 'Yes and no.' Are they even a democratic party?

    This is a question worth asking because they opposed the democratically long-overdue equalisation of constituency sizes, solely out of pique with the Tories in the last Government.

    Most preposterously, they have a bloated representation of more than 100 peers in the House of Lords, a block of anti-Brexit zealots who could well try to use their strength in the Upper House to stymie Theresa May's efforts to reach a free-trade deal with the EU.

    These unelected Lib Dem peers, some of them seriously mouldy and humdrum political specimens, have repeatedly organised against our democratically elected Government — and this from a party that has long claimed it does not believe in an unelected Lords.

    ou might be tempted, on hearing that information, to think 'what a bunch of hypocrites'. You might not be wrong.

    Since the EU referendum, they have presented themselves as the 'purest' opponents of Brexit.

    Pure is indeed the word, for these people are maddeningly pious and superior in their airs.

    Their opposition to Brexit is, to put it mildly, an odd position for a party with 'Democrat' in its name.

    They are setting their face against the majority vote in the biggest election ever held in this country. Why? Principle has nothing to do with it.

    They are driven solely by electoral manoeuvring, sensing that Labour has deserted the pro-Brussels ground and the Lib Dems might be able to exploit their weakness and win over some centre-Left Europhile votes — and indeed, some disenchanted Labour voters may indeed be tempted to desert to Mr Farron and his desperados.

    For his part, Mr Clegg may well be right in guessing, as he plainly has, that students have short memories, and that some of their more impressionable number will turn to the Lib Dems.

    But they should beware. A hyena never changes its spots.

    The party that reneged on its college fees promise, just as it reneged on a deal on constituency boundary changes, and just as it has so cynically changed its tune on a European referendum, is a party most certainly not to be trusted.
  14. Timmers
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    Timmers Well-Known Member Trusted Member

    Your point about the Lib Dems not being a party to be trusted to me stands out, we all know that few if any politicians can be trusted but Clegg stands head and shoulders above all the rest when it comes to telling lies.

    And looking at the poster your post he obviously doesn't have a good enough memory to be a convincing liar :)
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