Orient Express to axe UK section after 41 years due to Brexit | Hacker News Reader

Orient Express to axe UK section after 41 years due to Brexit

theguardian.com

19 pointsrntn11 comments

"most people travelling across the Channel who do not have EU residency will need to provide fingerprints and facial recognition data... British travellers will pay €7 to give European authorities personal information not on their passports – such as criminal convictions, education and parents’ first names"

Fun times we are living in!

"Due to Brexit" is a simplification, it should be "due to passport control failure" - it's possible to have easy border crossing, it's just that most countries are too inept to implement it.

> "Due to Brexit" is a simplification, it should be "due to passport control failure" - it's possible to have easy border crossing, it's just that most countries are too inept to implement it.

We used to have an easy border crossing. Then...... Something happened?

Yes, the thing that has happened, as mentioned in the article, is the treating of ones neighbors, and indeed ones own people, as criminals at the border.

Post-Brexit there is no free movement. This is why Brexit happened. So they could do exactly this. This 'passport control failure' was the intent from the get-go.

There was no "free movement" beforehand either; we weren't part of Schengen.

That's not what "free movement" refers to here. See https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=457&langId=en

When you say "it's possible", do you mean "it's possible in the real world" or do you mean "it's possible if you can disregard the voters and and all that"?

> passport control failure

What?

Border crossing was easy because britain was part of the EU. Once britain choose to leave the EU, that meant there would necessarily be a necessary full border control. That is a direct consequence of Brexit: crossing between Europe and britain is now no different from any other inter-country border crossing, and the list of presented issues is no different from any other. The only reason it's presented as weird is because all the people who voted for Brexit still persist in their weird belief that britain is special and that leaving the EU would only prevent travel from the EU to britain and not the other way around.

> it should be "due to passport control failure"

Just out of interest, what do you think caused the "passport control failure"?

This used to be possible, since oh, maybe, the 1970s, right up to a few years ago.

That can be true of anything related to the EU. It’s entirely possible for a third country to have all the benefits the EU provides for its member countries.

The point is that being within the EU gave the UK those benefits for free, whereas being outside the EU mean they need to negotiate every single benefit, and in many cases create expensive bespoke solutions. A committee of highly paid people in some department somewhere in the UK needs to sit down and decide this is a problem, then some highly paid bureaucrats need to spend time understanding the EU regulations, the related UK regulations, and then some other highly paid person, or very often a consultant of some sort, needs to figure out a solution to this that would be acceptable to the UK. A UK diplomat or politician or groups of politicians and diplomats need to make this a pressing issue, they need to find someone in the EU to work with them on this, and then convince them about the new solution, and spend time, money and training on both sides implementing the solution.

When the UK was in the EU, on the other hand, a slightly greater effort would have been put in once to come up with this program and how to make it work, but the cost of this effort would be defeated against 28 countries as opposed to just 1. And the UK would also have had a very strong say in ensuring the program was implemented in a way that worked for it.

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