EU launches legal action against UK for breaching withdrawal agreement | Hacker News Reader

EU launches legal action against UK for breaching withdrawal agreement

theguardian.com

31 pointss_dev27 comments

Will be interesting to see if Nichola Sturgeon can get a referendum in the next few years. Can't see the Scottish sticking with the Union for more than another decade.

Even previous Conservative PMs have said BJs plant to break law is absolutely shocking.

Westminster will not agree to a referendum any time soon, so unlikely to happen.

There are 800 pending cases of infringements by EU countries. It's not exactly unusual... https://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/scoreboard/performance_...

I fully expect the government to cave in over the internal market bill. They can't afford to walk away from a deal and they know it. Boris has enough of a majority that he can ignore the nutcases at the fringe of his party.

Finally! It was time that the EU started to take serious actions about UK behaviour.

I do wonder how long Boris is going to last as PM before he's thrown to the dogs by the 1922 committee. I assume once the steaming pile of shit that is Brexit is somehow "completed" by the end of the year he will step down rather than be replaced. If there's anything the conservatives have been good at over the past 10 years it's recognising when a leader has had their time so they can pivot to someone new.

They've only had 3 leaders in the last ten years - Cameron went after losing the Brexit referendum and Theresa May's departure was pretty slow and painful for everyone.

In the minds of many conservatives Cameron was very successful for the first 5 years so I'd ignore his first term.

Well according to history it seems that once people see that the democracy and it's organisms are again back at work (like purging corruption, fixing major social problems/systems, or even a change in public perception) then the population seems to dismiss populist figures and place their trust back in the hands of moderate parties.

Because in some sense these caricatures, like Boris, pop up when people are fed up with the status quo - even if they don't quite understand it, or if they are just able to see part of it. They just know something is wrong in their point of view - which is probably true.

I can give you the example of Portugal, the population is so fed up with the cycle of same parties giving us the same outcomes (mostly fueled by corruption), and those parties refuse to handle the corruption... because you know, now it's their turn... and we're yet again in a set back. So an extreme right party is gaining A LOT of ground, and doesn't show signs of stopping.

Our justice system doesn't have the tools (namely laws) to fight corruption, neither the bodies of the state have mechanisms to purge it. So, people are done with the status quo.

Hopefully here we have some changes that will stop this event from happening, because it's a matter of time.

Part of the problem with the UK version of democracy is the whip system. Its a system that is particularly bad when you have, like the UK has at present, a ruling party with a large majority.

To borrow a Boris Johnson turn of phrase, the vast majority of MPs in the Commons are great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies.

The MPs will talk the talk (like all politicians do), but when the time comes to walk the walk, they don't have the guts to go against the whip.

To save a trip to the search engine: http://enwp.org/Whip_%28politics%29#United_Kingdom

Interesting point, it also explains Spain and Italy. But in other countries I've seen those "anti system" parties coming in left/right pairs: Podemos/Vox respectively ForzaItalia/5Stelle. Doesn't Portugal have an equivalent leftwing counterpart?

>Doesn't Portugal have an equivalent left wing counterpart?

We do have them, it's BE, (hell we even have a Communist Party) - yet they are part of a "coalition" with the current government, so they are part of the problem, because they are pushing some of their agendas and avoiding any other agenda that destabilizes the current governmental solution.

So they are effectively part of the "system".

What's the result? The polls show that they are losing votes and popularity.

Also this is following the same trend: 5 Stelle and Podemos heading downwards, while the rightwing surviving all fine. Apparently blaming it on the foreigners is a universal and powerful differentiator. At the same time I'm sure it avoids focusing too much on changing the local mechanisms of power (just on changing the leadership), because in the end they're hoping to profit from them just the same.

Here they are blaming it on refugees, small minorities that receive government support, some criminal actors (like pedophiles), and politicians overall - things that generate anger in some people.

Yet no one talks about implementing EU norms to deal with corruption, implement ISO standards for corruption in public organizations/companies, justice system reforms, ban politicians from having jobs in companies/organizations that had businesses with the state (law firms, telcos, energy, construction, etc - this is the standard path for a "successful politician" career in Portugal), etc.

This is the true siphon of taxes, private deals where the state is always the underdog and has to pay rents in perpetuity adding up to thousands of millions of euros.

It's not the support of minorities, or the refugees boogieman that's coming to take our jobs...

>I can give you the example of Portugal, the population is so fed up with the cycle of same parties giving us the same outcomes (mostly fueled by corruption), and those parties refuse to handle the corruption... because you know, now it's their turn... and we're yet again in a set back. So an extreme right party is gaining A LOT of ground, and doesn't show signs of stopping.

Which party is that? Google seems to be failing me and saying the opposite.

The extreme right party is called Chega (stands for Enough!).

I'm saying it's extreme right in the context of the portuguese political spectrum and some of their stances/party program.

I noticed the guardian now wants you to register for free so as to enable personalized advertising - I guess they are no longer bound by GDPR.

on edit: as people don't seem to understand why I would think the Guardian is no longer GDPR compliant, relevant section

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/

When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.

it is obviously not necessary to get my personal details to show me the article, but they make me giving the personal details (which they will use to provided targeted ads, so sharing the data, conditional on giving access to the article)

When you sign up for an account your give your consent for them to store your email and identify you to send ads. That is GDPR compliant.

After even giving consent -- if you decide -- you have the right to withdraw that consent.

GDPR says you cannot require someone to give up privacy to provide a service if you can provide that service without their giving up privacy.

Therefore you cannot say if you give up your privacy I will show you the rest of this article, because there is nothing intrinsically requiring personally identifying the user for you to be able to display the article.

Thus if they say you will have to pay with your privacy or with money to see this, they are no longer GDPR compliant.

Of course a paywall would be GDPR compliant, ironically enough.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/

I will now go add this information to my original comment, as people do not seem to understand this matter.

> but they make me giving the personal details (which they will use to provided targeted ads, so sharing the data, conditional on giving access to the article)

No they don't. Click the X.

Ok thanks for the good advice, now - what I see:

The EU has launched legal action against the UK after Boris Johnson failed to respond to Brussels’ demand that he drop legislation that would overwrite the withdrawal agreement and break international law.

Ursula von der Leyen, the European commission president, announced that ....

The last line is greyed out

followed by

It’s important to say this is not a step towards a paywall

We need more readers to register with us to help sustain our independent, quality journalism. Without you taking this simple step, we miss out on revenues from personalised advertising – a critical source of funding for our future.

Through doing so, you’ll help ensure that our reporting remains freely available to everyone, and if we recognise you when you come back, we can improve your news experience too. You can still control your own privacy settings. Thank you.

--------------------------------------------

I admit I don't know exactly what "you can still control your own privacy settings" mean, I guess I could give them my details and find out.

I also admit I don't know what you mean by click the X as I didn't see any obvious X in that text that should be clickable. There is a text I'll do it later, but as I won't do it later I didn't bother clicking on that either. So maybe I'm wrong, maybe you can just promise to do it later. But I guess I won't click that either. What I read certainly seems to imply that they want me to provide my personal details so they can give it to advertisers unless I pay for a subscription, which fair enough, I just note that this would be against the rules of the GDPR and I thought, huh ironic.

Try going to that page with javascript disabled, it works just fine here.

You also have option to just NOT READ IT.

Just move on. You don't want adds, close the page. You don't want tracking close the page. Nobody forces you to be there. Instead of whining how you can not get stuff for free on the internet.

I did not whine about I wanted it to be free, I noted that the Guardian is no longer GDPR compliant, which I believe is the case if they say they want your data to show you the article. I thought that was ironic, given that they have probably made this change based on Brexit - although I believe the transition period still applies here so not sure why they made the change.

Click the "not now" button. You don't need to register to read Guardian articles.

You don't need to register. You need to read the modal and find the close button.

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