EE to reintroduce data roaming charges in Europe, following Brexit
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
In hindsight maybe that's a sign. The roaming regulation is one of the examples where citizens can very directly experience the impact of the EU. There should be more of that.
I assume the rest will follow suit.
Fuck Brexit.
(Here is it for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xad5Rl0N2E )
Possibly it was because a referendum campaign is fought in very different terms from a first-past-the-post campaign, which UK operatives are used to. In FPTP, you want to fire up your base, preach to the choir, strenghten your core support, so they'll actually show up on polling day and maybe bring a friend. You can do that by leveraging precise characteristics of this or that group, you can rely on a bedrock of shared beliefs to build your messages, and you can even plan on multi-election strategies.
In a one-off referendum you just need a massive amount of votes. There is no precision, there is little space for subtlety. You need to build bridges with very simple messages that can resonate with the largest possible demographics in the fastest possible way. Preaching to the choir is pointless - anyone who feels strongly about the specific issue, will show up no matter what. You need to persuade the dubious to show up for you. A Monty-Pythonesque sketch will not do that; a lot of people won't even get it, or will get it wrong. A funny guy going around promising unicorns and rainbows will do nicely, though.
When the impact of Brexit on daily lives and the fact that most / all of the promises made during the referendum won't be realised there must be a risk of a huge backlash.
They have a large majority at the moment but there are definite signs of cracks appearing. Short term political gain vs long term risk.
It's turned into a belief system and to question it is almost(maybe the same!!) like saying your religion is wrong
No matter how logical I am in trying to discuss the pros and cons, the conversation will invarably go to the statement - you just don't know the real impact yet
followed by a virtual fingers in the ear when discussing facts, then followed by them saying lets change the subject.
It's somehow been internalised to a degree that peoples existance depends on it working and them being right
That's because for many, it actually does. If "project fear" turns out to be right, a lot of people will get poor - and more importantly, they will have to admit that they were wrong, which is absolutely unconceivable and shameful in the pub-culture shouting match that political debate has turned into after the '80s.
when it does turn out crap (it's already started) I doubt people will say they're wrong.
I recon they'll either stay quiet and just convinently forgot they voted to leave or
argue they were right based on the <insert any made up arguement here> and the politicians were wrong and are to blame
Both are an acute cancer to society.
Man do I miss the days when he was just a bad joke. :(
I tried many time to talk anyone about the logic, nothing
after the vote the same.
and I'm not really an emotional person at all, but I realised early on this was emotional subject. I just wanted to understand the facts and the reasons
51% of the electorate who voted 5 years ago said they wished to leave the EU. This is absolutely true.
The nuance here is that of that 51%, their reasons for voting to leave and their intended/desired future arrangement with the EU was not uniform. Some wished to maintain close ties (common market, freedom of movement, regulatory alignment etc), others wanted a clean break from everything, and a spectrum of opinion in between the two
Brexit was many things to many different people. It’s this ambiguity and room for manoeuvre in defining what exactly “Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union” is, which has been seized upon by the power-hungry, who are a minority of all Brexiteers, but a sizeable portion of the Eurosceptic MPs of the Conservative party at the time.
It appears obvious that Cameron intended the referendum to silence the eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party once and for all, as the Alternative Vote referendum did to reform of “first past the post” in the previous administration.
This backfired on him spectacularly. And he resigned immediately once the gambit failed.
The UK was (is?) deeply split on what relationship it wants with Europe.
Phrased differently: no. I do believe the UK is deeply split on whether to believe certain media/politicians though.
https://fullfact.org/economy/brexit/
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/list-of-brexit-lies
Frankly, google "Brexit Lies". Even the spectator was laying in to the tories.
If you haven't seen the lies, respectfully, you're either blind or willfully ignorant.
"There will be no change for EU citizens already lawfully resident in the UK. These EU citizens will automatically be granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK and will be treated no less favourably than they are at present."
(Signed Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and Michael Gove. June 1st 2016.)
This one is pertinent as the deadline for "Settled Status" is looming. Johnson could pass a law honouring his promise to 17 million Leave voters who were reassured by his promise that their friends and family would not even have to apply for permanent residency in the UK, but hasn't.
Remain meant keeping things as they were. That was clear.
Leave meant anything on an enormous spectrum of potential outcomes.
My mother and grandparents (anti-brexit) live abroad, were not able to vote, and are now living the consequences of it (they only have the UK nationality). It's crazy
I was able to vote.
Wikipedia:
"The Representation of the People Acts 1983 (1983 c. 2) and 1985 (1985 c. 50), as amended, also permit certain British citizens (but not other British nationals), who had once lived in the United Kingdom, but had since and in the meantime lived outside of the United Kingdom, but for a period of no more than 15 years, to vote"
Still, in my country there are phone companies that include extra roaming by their own like Vodafone which has the EU, Switzerland, Norway, UK, USA, etc.
Phone companies love increasing their profit margins by any means.
"Brexit means Brexit!"
"Get Brexit done!"
"We knew what we were voting for!"
"Two world wars and one world cup!"
"£350 million a week to the NHS!"
"Take back control!"
"The will of the people!"
"Leave means leave!"
"No deal is better than a bad deal!"
UK citizens got mugged. They were lied to over and over by the government. They lost rights and freedoms. They gained… Nothing.
I struggle so hard to understand that perspective. I don't see how anything good has happened as a result.
We now have: - a shortage of workers from the EU - harder to buy things from europe - harder to sell things to europe - more red tape when trying to drive in europe - higher insurance costs when going to europe - no rights to live or work in europe - thousands of EU citizens yet to apply for settled status and will be liable for expulsion - zero extra money for our health service - more expensive mobile phone costs
and that's just what I can think off from the top of my head.
Their salary depends on it, so of course they "are".
The UK would've been no different within the EU unless it chose to.
And with good reason, trying to outbid each other doesn't make a great strategy to keep a Union.
I don't get why I'm downvited, btw.
Pretty much sums up Brexit.
Maybe it will get worse but the anti-brexit campaigns at the time painted a much much more negative picture than what I am seeing.
Who said you can’t. I also ordered there but stopped doing because customs handling adds high fees now. I get charged a flat 10 EUR on top of every order and 20% VAT. Many online stores already charge me UK VAT first so I end up paying VAT twice and the refunding process is burdensome.
> I can go back to live there with little problem if I want despite being told otherwise.
Lucky you. I’m a EU citizen and either in the UK for a few years. I’m not settled and I can’t go back. I would need a corporate visa sponsor and would end up coupled to said employer with no legal protections.
> They did so much better at vaccinating because the EU didn't screw things for them like for all the member nations etc.
Maybe. But right now we’re pretty even and the situation looks better in the EU. Definitely have more freedoms than my British friends right now.
I have yet to see something positive to come out of Brexit. Even the good vaccination program happened while EU rules were still in effect.
Think for a second, for fuck's sake. You could order from China, Venezuela, or Kazakhstan before. Why on earth would have been ordering something from the UK impossible?
The problem was not individuals getting their packages from Amazon.uk or M&S. The problem is that taxes are mechanically going up, that paperwork is more expensive and complicated, and that there are delays at the borders, which make exporting anything perishable a non starter.
Also, you now have to pay additional dues and taxes. This seems inconsistently applied: I have several packages from the UK who went through he border fine, but other did not. But it still is a problem when it happens, and illegal when it does not.
Also, it now takes weeks where it used to take days.
Also, a lot of things cannot be exported plain and simple if standards diverge. Which they will, otherwise the UK won't have a deal with the US.
> Maybe it will get worse but the anti-brexit campaigns at the time painted a much much more negative picture than what I am seeing.
You should not have got your points for remaining from the Telegraph. Even the Grauniad never said that nothing whatsoever would be going to cross the border.
And again, we are only 6 months in.
Things like roaming charges are much less significant than travel restrictions and quarantine requirements; travel and tourism has fallen off a cliff, so we can't separate out the Brexit impact.
We've another critical Brexit event coming up in the form of the end of the settled status transition period.
This was true in the Trump era. Prior to the pandemic, by most metrics America was doing very well in Trump's first few years. The economy was doing well, unemployment was low, and even metrics like African-American unemployment were reaching historically low levels. For the average American who didn't pay attention to the news, that time period was probably one where you had a job, it paid well, and things were looking good. But if you listened to the media you'd think that America was literally burning to the ground.
No, they do, but in most cases the effects emerge in the long run. Most laws take several months or years to go into effect, and then more time for patterns to emerge, and even more time for them being actually measured.
Take taxes. In the UK, the budget is approved in Spring (let's say 2020). Any change in income tax or corporation tax will go into force a year later, so April 2021. Individuals must file their returns the following January 2022, with nominal penalties for delaying an extra month. Statistical aggregation then takes place, which can take several more months. So basically, you won't know the immediate effect of a tax policy until almost 3 years later - and that's just for short-term effects! Actual long-term patterns might not be visible before 5 or 10 years have passed. In the meantime, we'll already be debating further changes, while we've not even fully absorbed the previous ones.
And taxes are as straightforward a field as you can have! Legislation on things like building standards typically carries some slack to give people time to adapt, and measuring effects of changes can be very hard even over a decade.
Both very substantially influence the day-to-day, but usually on very different time scales.
The UK is a great country. Over the long term it'll probably be fine, if it manages not to disintegrate. Even I, as a European, could see some possible upsides to Brexit. Not worth the downsides, but still. However, it requires playing it well and subtly, which the current government (and the couple of previous ones; Britain has been terribly governed for a long time)seems intent on not doing. It requires pragmatism, not ideology. At the moment it is looking weak and desperate. For example, I really cannot understand how someone would think that the UK was exploited as part of the single market, but the Australian farce is acceptable. Or why the TPP is an idea worth antagonising most of Europe.
Remember the UK citizens voted on this TWICE in practical effects. They want it. They may not be as stupid as you think they are.
Obvious troll is obvious.
But for posterity:
- Wanting something doesn't make it sensible. - A (slim) majority of people wanting a stupid thing doesn't make it any less stupid.
A sentence attributed to Italian singer-songwriter-intellectual Roberto "Freak" Antoni, or to author Marcello Marchesi, describes this concept in a great way:
"LET'S EAT SHIT! BILLIONS OF FLIES CANNOT BE WRONG!"
A confirmatory referendum - defined as "undemocratic", because of course a clarifying vote on a complex issue can't possibly be democratic, according to the Brexiters - would have killed it.
The most fervent supporters don't really want "Brexit" anyway. What they want is to put the clever people - the professionals who keep the lights on and the engines running - in their place.
Which is why there was so much cut-and-paste rhetoric about "metropolitan elites" and "We've all had enough of experts."
It was a very calculated campaign of disinformation and populist framing aimed at low-information authoritarians - the kinds of people who will reliably destroy their own country from the inside while convincing themselves they're "patriots."
Not really. After an initial wobble, the most hardcore brexiteer fringe swept to power with very large majorities. Yes, it's FPTP so you can say "not really", but in practice they did - the only strongly anti-brexit party, meanwhile, was soundly battered.
The English masses, for a period, really really wanted it. The only first hint of regret has been this month's byelection, a very small test.
https://labour.org.uk/manifesto-2019/the-final-say-on-brexit...
The fact that the Tories are currently whining about the deal they (1) negotiated, (2) signed, (3) won a general election in order to implement, and (4) explicitly denied further parliamentary time to study and debate the consequences of, certainly implies the politicians are dumb, regard of what it says about the voters.
The UK could've done exactly what it did whilst an EU member.
Why no other countries did it? Who knows. Maybe they thought they were already paying into the EU-wide scheme so why bother?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_in_Hungar...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-52380823
> Hungary has been using Russia's Sputnik vaccine for months and and Slovakia has also bought doses of it.
> Germany said in April it would begin talks to secure supplies of the Russian vaccine and Austria said it would buy one million doses, but only once the EU's medicines agency approves the jab for use in the EU.
> The Czech Republic and Poland have entered talks with both Russia and China.
So that's Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland - that would be 5 states, ~20%.
Ironically, a non-brexited UK government opposing the single-procurement EU program would have probably forced more EU countries to go alone. On practical matters, it's much easier to sabotage anything when you're inside the building, rather than outside.
Our success at procuring vaccines was, at best, dumb luck. If we had any idea what we were doing as a country, our death rate wouldn't have been so high and perhaps we wouldn't have needed to be so desperate for vaccines.
It's like setting yourself on fire and then being really proud of yourself when you manage to find a fire extinguisher.
- Channel 4 heavily criticised the PM and pulled an ice-statue-replacement stunt after he failed to show for an interview, so they're being sold off.
- Johnson wants to strip electoral watchdog of prosecution powers
- Threatening to reduce the power of the Supreme Court
- Department of Education strongly encouraged schools to make children sing a One Britain, One Nation song (it's as bad as it sounds)
- Heavily trying to push through a Bill to ban protest, including single-person "protests"
- Government often completely bypasses Parliament, by making announcements outside of Parliament, much to the chagrin of the Speaker. This is weird as they have a whopping majority, so it's very deliberate what they're doing.
- Gov is looking at withdrawing from European Convention on Human Rights
- Priti Patel
- Taking control of BBC with cronies in top jobs
- Requiring ID for voting (blatant voter suppression). We do not have a fraud problem.
I could go on...
All the elements of social democracy - worker rights, environmental standards, democratic representation, a welfare state - will be replaced with profiteering and spivvery.
Of course if Brexit had been sold as that, hardly anyone would have bought it.
The UK is now in a race between fascism and incompetence. Neither is a good outcome, but an economic implosion followed by popular protests might just about turn this around before protest and resistance are banned by diktat.
From another point of view the UK hasn't been a true democracy for decades. This is the country which hatched a number of coup plots against Harold Wilson, who was a rather stodgy and mainstream left-of-centre politician by European standards, but was considered a Soviet extremist by the Establishment - while that same Establishment protected insiders like Anthony Blunt who actually confessed to recruiting spies for the USSR.
Blunt had gone to the right schools, so was given immunity from prosecution. He was allowed to keep his knighthood, and continued to work - for the Queen, no less - until he retired.
If the intelligence services had had their way the public would never have been told. The story only came out in 1979 because a journalist broke it.
The UK continues to be motivated by a very strange kind of class-based nationalistic extremism. Establishment insiders get almost infinite privileges, no matter what they do or how much they damage the country, while outsiders are treated with suspicion, contempt, and abuse.
Brexit is just the latest twist in that story.
Laziness or faulty memory?
As someone else posted, this is one of those "What have the Romans ever done for us" things.
I'm born in 1990, so I don't remember the time before the EU, but I've lived in five different EU/EEA countries with very limited bureaucracy. I can't imagine how difficult that would have been before.
cherry picking the EU policies much? The EU has shown again and again they are completely incompetent to make a proper economic market in Europe, or even have semi-consistent regulations across the different borders.
"again and again" - yet you fail to cite a litany of actual examples?
Well yeah, that's because the EU is not a state, and it gets the powers that the member states want to delegate. The alternative would be the loss of sovereignty of the member states; do you think it would be better? Some things are consistent. Some others, when the tradeoff was deemed unacceptable, are not (think VAT and things like that).
This is a common talking point amongst Brexiteers. Either it is tyrannical and draconian, or it is ineffective and impotent. You cannot have both.
Anyway, the point is that it is still much better than if each country were doing its own thing and if we had trade wars within Europe like we used to before the EEC.
Today we’re back up to 16.
What a waste of everyone’s time.
Edit: easier to read link than the europa one: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55887043 - in this case over 70 bits of paper for some fish
the corporate world can much easier capture the political class of its homebase country versus a large and inhomogeneous collection of countries
this works as a two-sided knife: on the negative, not easy to scale businesses across Europe. that is a real problem. on the positive, poor regulation or governance doesn't travel far.
the challenge will be to keep the benefits while smoothing the negatves. I suspect its possible
The vast majoriry of people here experienced the benefits of EU "globalisation" without any of the downsides. And when you are enjoying the benefits of a system, it's really quite difficult to see those who are not.
(International distribution is the real wild card, but that's more hidden from view, since everyone here posts in English and the English of non-native speakers is mostly astonishingly good.)