Brexit – where now? The flow diagrams
jonworth.eu
jonworth.eu
I have no idea what's going on. I tried to ignore it, but my friends who care deeply about it can get quite upset so I've been pulled into several private conversations. Because of that, on several occasions I've looked around the web in an effort to easily understand what's going on.
No luck.
Two things come to mind. First, complexity can be used as a wonderful shield against openness and accountability. You can be as open and accountable as anybody would like, but as long as most people find the situation impenetrable and you do not, it doesn't matter. It's the same thing as not being open at all. Second, I don't see how any reasonable public discussion happens at all in an information environment like this. It's a fail. If they wanted no public discussion, they should have made that choice. This is probably the worst situation a democracy can find itself in: lots of upset people arguing about things which they have no idea the true status of. You might as well watch a puppet show. There's no nuanced conversation possible. It is contrast turned as high as possible.
It's not the decision as much as the uncertainty. I can't help but think the net failed us here -- but I don't know how it could have done better. The betting markets at least will give you an up/down version of the likely outcomes. Oddly enough that might be the best source of information.
There never should have been a referendum to begin with, and the idea that a simple majority vote could have such dramatic consequences was frankly actually undemocratic.
Based on how entrenched certain positions are (see the DUP, for example), the (rightly) strong opposition to a No Deal, and the fact that ANY deal is going to make a majority of people unhappy, it would seem there is no majority in Parliament willing to be connected with the actual outcome.
Therefore, it seems the most likely scenario by far is simply an extension. That will probably lead to a General Election or a Second Referendum, where the "choice" can be said to be given to voters, which would also give MPs cover for any decision made.
The EU will not decide against an extension either, as their preferred outcome is the UK remaining in the EU. The longer this drags on, and the more impractical Brexit options are shown to be, the more the likelihood the UK decides to remain increases.
The only way I see the UK actually leaving the EU is if hard Brexiteers decide to back May's deal; however, that would be considerably more politically risky for them than simply continuing to take a hardline position — even if the end result is remain.
The term you seem to be searching for is some variant of 'stupid', 'ill-advised' or 'deceitful'. There is nothing undemocratic about it; democracies famously turn up flavour-of-the-month decisions in defiance of tradition and whatever the elites think is a good idea. That is why most democracies don't generally go with the old school approach where the whole town meets on a hill and counts hands; the results are too volatile for the powerful to be comfortable with them.
The referendum was infinitely more democratic than the decision to join the EU, which was taken by PM John Major and his colleagues when they signed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.
No-one asked the people.
Really no different than any other treaty in the UK. Not everything must be put to a public vote. The Executive has the power to sign treaties. Parliament may only advise, or in the extreme, withdraw confidence and call for a new government.
The consequences of joining were far less dramatic than the consequences of suddenly leaving.
I have no dog in this fight (not British or European) but this statement sounds like false equivalence to me.
Basically, May negotiated a deal with the EU but the UK Parliament does not want it, mainly due to the so-called backstop. The backstop emerges because May has a red line that the UK must leave the single market and the customs union, and this is difficult (if not impossible) to reconcile with the Good Friday Agreement, which forbids a physical frontier at the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
The fact is that, as Northern Ireland is part of the UK, it is simply impossible to make the (whole) UK exit the single market and customs union while honoring that agreement. If you place a border in Ireland, you violate the agreement. If you don't place a border in Ireland, then obviously goods and people can circulate freely, so Northern Ireland is effectively part of the EU for customs union and free movement purposes.
This is the very simple (not complex at all) reality that the UK government and parliament have been voluntarily ignoring all the time. To try to reconcile the contradiction, Theresa May proposed the so-called backstop: basically, Northern Ireland stays in the customs union until a technological solution is found that allows to have a non-physical border (yes, I know, bollocks. It won't happen. But Brexit proponents are like that). The EU signed this because May insisted and because why not, if no such miracle solution is found then Northern Ireland remains in the union so it's no problem for the EU. But the hardline Brexiteers in the Tory party (rightfully) pointed out... well, exactly that: that the backstop would imply that Northern Ireland would stay in the customs union forever. Hence, the process is stalled because May's deal has no consensus in parliament, but there is no consensus either for Brexit without a deal or for cancelling Brexit (all of this has been voted this week, with the result of "no" to everything).
If parliament keeps voting no to everything, then the default result is no-deal brexit.
Honestly I don't think there is that much complexity. It's just a very simple problem: that you cannot have Brexit including an exit from the customs union that involves Northern Ireland and the Good Friday agreement at the same time. That's pretty much all there is to it. If it seems complex, it's because the UK politicians don't want to admit it and just keep running in circles.
You know what's funny? That even if the UK parliament never agrees and there is a no-deal Brexit, that problem doesn't disappear. In the event of a no-deal Brexit, the UK will be in violation of an international treaty (the Good Friday agreement), and the EU (and even the US) will ask them to honor the treaty. Fun times, indeed.
I think this issue leads people to overestimate how much support the EU is giving to Ireland. How much they will support Ireland is still to be seen, but for now it seems to be more like "wait, agreeing to do what you already agreed to do is supposed to be the easy part; how can we negotiate with these people?"
IMO, the updated flowchart is way too optimistic. I don't see any reason to suspect parliament won't keep doing what it has been doing, either nothing in particular and crashing out or, more likely IMO, finding a consensus around an impossible plan, crashing out, and blaming the EU for not accepting it. If they were actually going to do anything different the time for that seems to have come and gone a long time ago. "Revoke article 50 if we can't come up with a plan" went down to a huge defeat Thursday as it has previously.
Edit: Looks like I should have checked the news first, sounds like there may actually be a general election. Edit2: Maybe not as clear as the headlines suggest.
The only reason the Irish border is being described as "unsolvable" is because that suits the agenda of people who want the referendum to be ignored (as in Europe they always are).
As for the others the key word is MaxFAC, I believe, but I looked at the French "smart border" arrangements more closely than the Irish proposals.
If anything it's politics has broken the 'net, not the other way round. But the net provides a means to save politics.
Presumably I didn't see these adverts because I was categorised as a Remain voter, but I can't imagine what my opinion would be if every time I went to Facebook I saw "leave the EU to save the polar bears". I'd like to say I'd immediately search the truthfulness but, honestly, I've got better things to do with my life than google every comment I see online.
The Internet provides a great way for information to be open, but not everything on the Internet is necessarily transparent. Argubly, this is a good reason for regulation on things like advertising to make it more transparent (although what that regulation is, I don't know) which I think would be a case of "politics saving the net".
Of course, there's the "old way" of information being shared which is subject to failure too[2]. But a centralised and curated method like newspapers makes it easier to combat falsehoods.
Overall, I do agree that the Internet is a great tool for information sharing and I think we're better with it, but it's not without its own issues.
[1] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1059068463933743104.html [2] https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/
If I understand each of us correctly, my position is that the internet has provided a ton of information and drama, just nothing of use to the general public. Your position is because of the vast amount of information, we can identify these problems and route around them.
I can certainly see where you might be correct. I think the key question is this: does the emotional impact of all the noise outweigh the nuggets of useful information a person may find here or there? (And I use the term "noise" generously. A cynic would consider this a form camouflage)
In a way, this is the discussion the net is having all over, right? Do you get more social control by creating these made-for-internet dramas that hide the actual important stuff? Or does the fact that the information can exist much easier now and be published instantaneously to millions easily overcome that?
I'm with the "people decide based on emotion, then use reason to justify their decisions" group of folks, but that's only because I come at this from a sales/startup angle. It very well may be different in the political realm.
Anybody that's easily swept up by rumours and bullshit was always just getting sucked in by the tabloids and the mainstream press anyway so their situation remains unchanged.
What is particularly interesting in the case of Brexit, and perhaps tangential is how the Brexiteers keep getting caught out speaking out both sides of their mouths time after time. They make a deal in Brussels and then fly home and speak to factory workers in Grimsby contradicting that deal. It's reported immediately online and goes straight back to Brussels where they're "like really?".
However I want to make sure you understand my point.
"...I think anybody that's educated can filter out the noise usually and get at some element of the truth...Anybody that's easily swept up by rumours and bullshit..."
You understand that's not the way it works, right? This isn't an intelligence test. My point was about how humans make decisions, not how stupid people gossip and believe things they shouldn't. That's a great topic, but not my point. You don't educate or smart your way about of being human. It doesn't work like that.
I used to love to discuss politics with folks, mainly because it was the one area in which really smart people believed really stupid things. It was -- and remains -- an excellent place to observe clanning and how the human mind works. (I stopped bringing it up, though, because as it turns out, text conversations have a completely different dynamic than in-person conversations.)
Thanks for the chat!
I'm not sure what events you're thinking of here, but no "Brexiteers" have been involved in negotiations for a long time. May went behind their backs and they all resigned, the cabinet has been dominated by Remainers like May ever since.
The reason it's such a farce is because the entire process is being run end to end by people who desperately want to ensure leaving can never happen without actually being too obvious about it (they've failed at that too).
It's about people being less in touch with other flesh and blood members of their species, and more into their own bubble of truths or "truths". People want to hear the fairytales they like. The internet as it exists today has certainly contributed to that.
I will literally fall over if it actually comes to pass, but like I said, this was my somewhat tongue in cheek speculation about 6 months ago (although I predicted that the budget would fail leading to a general election and an opportunity to repeal Brexit at that point, so I'm already technically wrong).
The people rocking the boat were just a bunch of jerks who wanted to get richer.
Market destabilization through false rumors and societal disruption is very very real.
There are 650 MPs in Parliament, with vastly different constituencies and agendas. You would need 326 currently elected MPs to be on board with this plan, not even considering the possibility of election results changing those dynamics.
And at the beginning of this process it was not clear that the UK could unilaterally rescind Article 50, either, which adds further risks and complications. Not to mention the referendum itself was decided by over 33 million people casting votes.
That is a completely impractical collective action problem and a conspiracy theory on par with others like the moon landing or 9/11.
Still... Why did Boris Johnson drop out of the leader race when we was practically a shoe in for PM? I think there are some shenanigans going on here and May has a really narrow tightrope to walk to survive...
They don't all have to be "in the loop" for this to work. Some of them just have to be gullible fools and we've seen a lot of that.
This is why the EU is so eager now to seize control of the timetable, and will now just boot the UK out if they don't shit or get off the pot.
- Why would a country give Florida a better trade deal or more rights than the US?
- How do Floridians benefit from suddenly being unable to freely cross the border to the US?
And this is why Brexit is so screwed up: the promise was "all the benefits you have now plus we'll renegotiate and get a bunch more when we aren't being held back anymore", but it's really hard to fundamentally see why/how that could happen.
EDIT: bunch of replies to this that maybe miss the main thrust of this question which is "Why would a country give a better deal to Florida in this scenario?"
Again, this is all the simplified, digestible summaries of arguments that were given to the British public during the referendum, hence the result of the vote. Of course, the MPs should be there make an informed decision because it's their full time job, not the general public that will only have a passing knowledge of it that is often learnt through biased media. 2 years of thorough coverage on the issue has made it clear to most people that the above summaries are not accurate, and mostly fabrications by people with a vested interest in destabilising and shorting the pound.
It's only recently that the matter of the rebate is being spun to bash the UK.
UK is not part of the Eurozone. It does not suffer from the downsides of a shared currency. Why would it matter where they send the money to? Every pound sent abroad can only be used to buy goods from the UK.
If you were talking about say Germany and Greece then the story would look completely different. If Greece borrows from Germany then the Euro will not be devalued but if it still had the drachma the drachma would become devalued which makes German products more expensive and local products cheaper. Therefore Greece can buy German products and borrow money from German banks cheaply which eliminates the incentive to produce them locally despite the massive trade imbalance.
There are many arguments against the Euro but as I said, the UK suffers from none of them.
Unfortunately, that kind of propaganda is incredibly convincing to a person with 0 political or economic education and becomes an issue when they have the same hard voting power as a person with a PhD or other form of expertise on the said topic. The only way the vote could have changed is if there was more effort from the Remain campaign, people were better educated on the aforementioned subjects, or the voting system for the referendum was based on a technocratic system (more of a think-tank).
Braxit was generally sold on two main pillars: sovereignty and making vastly better trade deals. Sure, there are sovereignty issues that make sense to drive Brexit, but it is the second pillar that never made sense.
The U.K. is not a very large country by itself (no longer a global empire) so it is puzzling at best to think that the rest of the world is dying to give it amazing trade deals. The U.K. has friends who would be happy to trade with it, but a market 1/10th the size of the EU is unlikely to get many trade deals that are better than the EU.
Also one cannot forget why EU and ancestors was created. To avoid another war in Europe and in my opinion it was pretty successful.
NATO was formed in 1949 and has more relevance to preventing war in Western Europe than any subsequent organisation. By the time the EU was formed the Berlin Wall had fallen!
The EC&SC, EEC and EU could exist because of peace in Europe.
If it was only about NATO, wouldn't it be super easy for one country to just leave NATO and act in bad faith? It's harder to leave when your economies are dependent on each other.
Tough I am not that knowledgable about history of EU so it's very probably you are right and I am making fool of myself
The EC&SC was political from the beginning. The idea was to intertwine the economies so much that war becomes a lose-lose game. So the economic integration was always a means to a political end.
There are suburbs of the city that are in German and French territory: Basel trams and buses will get to either side, with no notice you are crossing a national border.
You can cross the Rhine from Weil am Rhein (Germany) to Huningue (France) through a footbridge, with the only thing marking the cross being a German and French flags side by side, on the French side of the river.
https://en.radreisen.at/data/thumbs/_data_pic_Frankreich_Reg...
No border, no checks, even normal police nowhere to be seen. 75 years ago (and pretty much over the course of their history) these two countries were at bitter war between themselves.
I cannot fathom why people would do anything that could cause returning to those times a possibility.
As flawed the EU is, it has been instrumental in ensuring decades of peace. The (partial but undoubtful) loss of sovereignity for individual members should be considered a fair price to pay.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
What has Brexit got to do with that?
The EU imposes high tariffs on food in order to protect French farming. This is well known and has been discussed for years, often in the context of "when will Europe stop making Africa poor by refusing to buy its food".
A big part of the argument for leaving the EU is that British farming is a lot more efficient, so doesn't need so much protection, so food prices could be lower after exit. Why would the government raise tariffs on food so high its own population starved? That would make no sense at all.
1) Add #U to the URL then the path to the diagram to create a link that loads it directly:
https://www.draw.io/#Uhttps://jonworth.eu/downloads/29jandia...
2) File->Embed->HTML gives you an HTML snippet that you embed in your page to render a vector version of the diagram. Click the viewer opens up a lightbox, zoomable vector version, that can include the diagram data in the snippet, and a edit option from the lightbox to navigate to the editor with the diagram loaded.
3) draw.io is open source, https://github.com/jgraph/drawio, if you don't want to depend on a third-party for the viewer, clone the repo, host it as a static site (doesn't need a back-end) and reference the viewer on that site instead of www.draw.io.
Yet they seen convinced that the only thing they can do is do yes/no votes to reach a majority for one of the N alternatives. If this is for legal/constitutional reasons (it most likely is) then it’s a horrible mistake to not have realized this and corrected it.
Parliament needs a simple and legal way to swiftly select the most popular option among N options where none have a majority. This isn’t a dangerous legal loophole - the acceptance of such an N-way tie and the selection of the N options can still be decided with majority.
There should be a ranked or Condorcet vote and the winner should be enacted. It should have happened a year ago at least.
In Westminster, voting usually happens by each MP physically moving into one of two lobbies. That is a very time consuming process, that can easily take twenty minutes per vote. There are no ballots, let alone a computerised voting system.
That the recent indicative votes happened on paper is extraordinarily modern. Preferential voting would clearly be a step too far.
I believe that's planned for Monday
It's not. It's for completely pragmatic reasons.
The bind they're in is that, even if they select a winner, the process doesn't stop there. There will be subsequent votes on primary and related legislation to pass before we're completed.
Unless there is a majority for a way forward, or enough MPs are willing to concede that their objections aren't actually principled, much of that legislation is likely not not pass.
And, to my understanding, there were discussions about priority voting for the alternatives. It is conceivable that that will still occur. But it just moves the intractability to a different stage (much like splitting out the political declaration is doing).
When that fails, this.
I believe this is the plan for Monday if the PM's deal doesn't go through today. I.e. list the options you will accept in order of preference.
It’s slightly risky but overall seems like a reasonable approach to me, in the circumstances.
Voting against your PM on an issue you disagree on is one thing. Actually bringing down your government is quite another.
There should have been an election already. I think it was dishonest not to bring down the government in the recent vote of No Confidence, since it was and is blatantly obvious that absolutely nobody has confidence in Theresa May’s government. But they feared letting Labour in.
Edit to add: I would have thought some emergency compromise might work, eg a moderate Tory who backs the consensus plan as PM, maybe Corbyn as deputy, maybe Keir Starmer as Brexit secretary. Get the Brexit process on an even keel now, agree to call an election later.
That’s probably unthinkable on all sides, though. I feel like Corbyn in particular doesn’t actually care much about Brexit either way, and is much more focused on just winning an election and getting a Labour government in.
Or more specifically they fear letting Corbin in. I imagine that if a more center-left, pro-Europe 'Blairite' MP was Labour leader then perhaps some of the more moderate pro-Europe Conservatives might have been willing to give it a punt.
If the deal isn’t passed today, the April 12th deadline is for the UK to come up with a new suggestion.
If the deal fails, the UK could request a longer extension, or even revoke article 50.
The EU has strongly signaled that they’d be open to adjusting the political declaration in favour of a customs union, for example. If the UK were to vote for that early next week, it could in principle be agreed on both sides fairly quickly.
The main EU requirement is that to avoid a no-deal exit on April 12, the UK has to actually do something different, not simply ask for more time. If the UK requested time for a general election or a second referendum, that would probably be accepted by the EU (although it’s not guaranteed).
--
Edit: See comments below - I got the dates wrong.
With a deal, the deadline is May, allowing time for some of the necessary domestic legislation.
Deadlines April 12 -- if mays deal has passed, extended to May 22 to allow domestic legislation to be passed to implement the deal
If not passed by then, then uk leaves with no deal
However May's government can ask for an extension at any point up until April 12th. This extension will rely on the UK participating in the EU elections. Those elections can be held if announced by or on April 12th -- there's a reason it's that day and not April 3rd or 19th.
It's almost certain we'll be looking at a long delay, and either a referendum or general election
I agree, but how many legislatures around the world actually work like that? Certainly not the UK or USA.
Who knows, maybe this fiasco will spur on voting reform in the UK parliament! Apparently they already use STV for committee positions, so it’s not unthinkable. I thought Wednesday’s use of approval voting in the main House was a very promising step in the right direction.
So it’s enough to find a majority for the method/process, and the selection of options to use. There is no need for a majority for a single option.
So at no point would there be anything but normal yes/no votes with normal majority requirement in the legal sense.
It’s a bit like how some US states can agree to put their electoral college votes to the majority winner.
The bar is (sadly) very low for people to say “this voting system is too complicated, nobody will understand it!”
You say “Condorcet” as if that’s a complete solution, but there could be a preference cycle with no way to break it. You’d need to pick a specific method, like STV, and every method has flaws.
This is a very intense situation, where many people feel like they’re under intense pressure, with very short deadlines. On top of that, it’s being done in public, and everybody is juggling multiple concerns (doing the right thing in the short term versus long term, helping the country, helping their party... Being seen to help their country and/or party, protecting their own careers, etc etc)
Overall I think it’d be very difficult and risky for Parliament to adopt even a slightly novel voting system at the last minute, even to resolve a major crisis.
I assume this is going to fail again which gives it a 80% hard brexit chance with 20% rescinding brexit.
I have always been all-in on "no brexit" for last three years. It's a dog and pony show.
And it's going to be voted down, of course.
Is this actually different, or did everyone forget that?
It appears that Theresa May is trying to run the clock past the April deadline for a long delay, so we're back in a "her deal or no deal" situation. Then again the EU will probably not stand for that.
That's why they are voting on the withdrawal agreement by itself. They haven't done that before.
I've always been fascinated by the "drive it off of the cliffs" mentality, and I don't mean this as an affront, in any form or fashion.
For example, what is your opinion of the breakdown of the Good Friday agreement? Is there a genuine belief that the bombings wouldn't recur or is it more of an NIMBY, so not my concern? (Again, not an affront, I genuinely want to understand.) Or what's the opinion on Scotland having another referendum on independence, since they voted remain?
Anyone old enough to remember the peace process that was the decade+ leading up to the GFA is probably concerned that things could all too easily kick off again. All it takes is one kid doing something stupid at the border...
They saw how the Lib Dems were treated for putting country above party in 2010. Rather than a unifying coming together of viewpoints to reach a consensus, we've now got a massively polarized electorate.
It (Brexit) is a hell of a mess, I have no idea how you guys are going to get out of this one.
Neither have I, but I imagine that time, geography and economics will sort it out.
EU changing, old guard turning over. UK voters changing each year due to the grim reaper and 17 year olds turning 18 (about 600k churn each year).
Charts are really useful. Hope they are updated.
As he said on twitter he is banking on Mv3 losing and I assume the same which leaves with 80% no-deal brexit and 20% no brexit.
I am betting on brexit being rescinded. The deal falling thru and the parliament dumping it.
Anyway, the central delusion of Brexit is that the British public vote to have a foreign sovereign government give them something. Technically they voted for the British government to leave the EU, but what they really voted for is to have the EU give them an unbelievably awesome deal that screws over the EU. That is not going to happen, so now we're witnessing this mass political delusion crash into reality.
One being that the 3rd vote passes, the PM resigns (which she's already agreed to do), a new leader is elected and a general election is held soon after which will essentially be a 'second referendum' election in which we end up rejoining the EU in less than 5 years. A true Schrödinger's brexit.
And no matter the outcome, we've lost our dignity. We'll never get back our reputation for stability.
The two extreme options are the canceling the deal and a hard brexit. Both have a minority of supporters and a majority of opponents for whom backing either option would be political suicide thus making that extremely unlikely. It's basically an empty threat. The past few days have shown there is a lot of movement in people grudgingly supporting this or that but still no majority for anything. So, that makes May's compromise deal the inevitable outcome. But nobody wants to own that, just yet.
All the posturing we are currently seeing on all sides is basically preemptive ass covering of politicians playing the "but I had no other choice" card. Hence Boris Johnson suddenly agreeing to back May. Not a surprise; he's smart enough to not want to be associated with an actual career ending hard brexit. This way he supports May and has a shot at taking over as prime minister without actually being the one that was in charge at the key moment. I doubt it will work out for him but it fits a pattern of taking populist positions but being reluctant to act accordingly.
IMHO the more likely a hard brexit becomes, the more likely it is there will be meaningful movement on the EU side to prevent exactly that. In good EU tradition all 'hard' deadlines become highly fluid when they get closer. Today was one until last week when they grudgingly extended that by 2 weeks. As the next date draws nearer, I fully expect that extensions to that will again be negotiated successfully. This will continue as long as the British parliament doesn't break it's current deadlock of actually voting in favor of just about anything.
Odds of no deal being offered 2/1, as is 2019 referendum
Fri Mar 29 17:34:54 GMT 2019
No, she implied it. And May isn't really known to keep her promises in the first place.
The options are so obfuscated behind political complexity AND ever-changing that a simple voter (me) can't hope to keep up.
The moment you half-understand a scenario it is outdated, the days it takes to form a layperson's reasonable opinion are wasted grasping at now-irrelevant information.
It takes multiple hours per day to try and understand the details and their strategic importance.
I will forever remember this as a contradictory moment when the British public's political awareness was both at its greatest and weakest.
No positive outcomes look possible any more.
But that wasn't why. It was to stem the haemorrhaging of MPs and voters to UKIP for the 2015 GE. As such, the calculation was that anything other than a straight fight wouldn't resolve the question.
I see no reason to disagree with that calculation. I mean, say it was a 2/3rds vote and we got the result we did. How likely would it be that Farage et al would just say "Fair cop" and move on?
The truth is it was a high risk punt, same as with the Scottish referendum and AV vote, to kill any constitutional questions for a generation. If it had succeeded as the other two had done, we would likely have Tory hegemony for at least another decade. And Cameron could have argued (quite reasonably) that he was the most democratic PM in our history.
And the way I see, it the calculation was based on the idea that the British people are generally pretty conservative (with a lowercase c). This worked well for AV (I mean who votes to retain FPTP?), reasonably well for Scotland and spectacularly well for Brexit. The only problem was that, it turns out, we're too conservative: we didn't want the status quo, we wanted the Edwardian era back.
Since that vote, we have seen many an MP push to remain in the EU when their own constituency voted to leave. This and the subsequent General Election saw the two main parties stand on a manifesto that said they would respect the vote and enact it.
Yet here we are, of two years spinning around the drain plug and in effect achieved nothing beyond disenfranchising people of our political process.
SO yes, no positive outcomes will happen as credibility and respect has been lost on so many levels.
Only way to break this enpass IMHO would be to cancel article 50, reenact it. Do another referendum and then total up the votes from the 1st and 2nd referendum and if we stay in the EU - we stay, if we leave, we go and plan for WTO and if the EU (one of many collectives in the World) want to do a trade deal, great, otherwise it should not get in the way and hold everything else up.
That approach, respects the initial referendum, appeases those who now say everybody changed their mind.
I would say though, that any second referendum has all MP's as neutral and they just deal with facts, no opinion, no FUD, no doom and gloom posting, no statistical waxing, no forecasts - nothing that is not a clear and solid fact - just actual facts.
But whatever happens, I lament how the EU has missed the opportunity to action this reform they have mooted for years and what Cameron initially sought and got palmed off with some token concessions instead that lead to him having to hold a referendum. The EU could of and should of looked at reform, that would of offered the people of the UK something different and a clear reason to do another referendum vote. Instead - pig-headed politics has prevailed on both sides.
But let us not forget - UK PM position is akin to seagull management, Cameron did something that did not go his way to he left instead of fixing the mess. May now in effect going to do the same thing by saying agree my deal and I'll quit - leaving you all to sort it out. Utter madness, but that is politics.
In short - politicians will say anything to get your vote, even lie and political manifesto's are not legally binding contracts. In effect, they can not only lie, but legally get away with it with the crux being - you can lie to get votes.
Much needs to change in politics and nobody has any faith that is going to happen.
We had a vote on proportional representation - that got shot down by the public. Which is ironic as that is how they are treating the referendum result.
Great work - props to Jon Worth!
But then I further did a stability analysis to see which of the probabilities needed to be more accurate, and thus require more careful measurement. That identified critical decisions and pathways, and which of the other party's decisions should be nudged.
Here, though, there's not really a lot to be gained by greater precision, although your point is taken.
> The rights and status of EU, EEA and Swiss citizens living in the UK will remain the same until 30 June 2021.
[0]: https://www.gov.uk/settled-status-eu-citizens-families/what-...
That's definitely not the case though, and I've replied to OP on the steps to securing a "Settled Status" for their partner.
Here in the Netherlands there is a pretty solid campaign to inform people (mostly business owners) to brace for impact.
Just look at this, I will also need to get international driving licence to visit my parents https://www.gov.uk/guidance/international-driving-permits-fo...
1. If you guys are married, she can apply for the EU Settlement Scheme[1].
2. If you guys are not married, you need to first register a civil partnership[2], and then she can apply for the EU Settlement Scheme.
None of these require EU citizenship for your partner.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/settled-status-eu-citizens-families/apply...
[2] https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/family/living-together-mar...
That said, I still in our current useless political climate do not see the UK not doing the right thing about displaced nationals in the UK. But equally, wished article 50 was not flawed in a way that in effect has rendered displaced nationals as negotiation pawns. That's unfair, however you look at it.
FWIW I lobbied several MEP's and EU leaders about this flaw in article 50 back in 2015 and in 2016, and all I got was ignored and no MEP or EU leader wanted to address the issue and I came away feeling that deep down, they like the current flaw as any public fallout can be laid upon those utilising article 50. Which is even more worrying.
In short, the EU is dictating Brexit direction more than the UK now.
So unless they agree May's deal, any other extension has to be voted upon.
However technically the UK could cancel article 50, then resubmit it and give an extension of upto 2 years as article 50 covers a 2 year period and in that time the end date can be earlier. Whilst technically they could do that and the EU would be powerless to stop them, it would be a complete and utter gaming of the political and legal system.
Probably yes - ultimately what happens in the EU is always and everywhere about politics. Written law hardly matters.
3. The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.
The treaties cease to apply two years after the notification date unless the Council decides unanimously to extend.
The ECJ read this and said, nope, unanimous consent not required actually, the country can simply revoke it (i.e. extend indefinitely) at any time.