Mainland Brits and the Irish have been coming to terms with each other for around a thousand years. We both have a certain amount of experience. We both have skin in the game. We're both going for a solution that pretty much leaves the border exactly as it is. All of which has prompted the crude Brussels thugs and Berlaymont bullies to fling insults at us again last week. If they seriously think we're stupid enough to trade peace and mutual benefit for protecting the EU's tax coffers, they are away with the fairies. It simply won't happen.
The Guardian reports that senior EU clerks have been 'eye rolling' over the border issue; I suppose this is the same as being swivel-eyed. And they're certainly lunatic if they imagine either we or Eire will change our positions.
Negotiations start again on Monday, and the Federast freaks have pompously declared they will be producing an end-of-term report to opine on whether the UK has submitted sufficiently quietly to the Empire's demands. The answer, as we all already know, will be negative.
Failing the EU's exam will be a singular mark of success for our negotiating team and they should be rewarded at this point; greeting cards, tributes from the floor of the Commons, a crowd-funded champagne fund, a ticker tape reception for the Eurostar carrying them home are all possibilities.
However, the half time whistle has not yet blown - and we must knuckle down at this critical stage of the game and ensure that we DO fail their crooked little tests in the next few weeks.
16 comments:
At this point we should just walk away and deliver a hard Brexit in one week. I think they might wake up - but don't bet the farm on it.
What puzzles me is why the EU, and the Remains in this country, make such heavy weather of our leaving. Or perhaps, since we all know exactly why they do, the real issue is why the rest of us take such notice of it. Partly I suspect, it is because we do not trust Theresa May to deliver what we voted for.
The EU and the Remains could be repeatedly told that all we want is to have the same relationship with the EU as all the rest of the world does. That is neither difficult to understand, nor difficult to do. The government is certainly not making that case, but it should.
Everyone with a Tory constituency MP should make sure s/he is plagued by demands for practical remedies such as: a rebuttal unit to shoot down EU and Remain tripe; complaints about BBC bias; dissemination of Leave organisations such as http://facts4eu.org/ and similar.
Despite Raedwald's optimism here, and despite the fact we won the Leave vote battle, but we are losing the Leave war. Unless we all start doing more to help.
Apparently borders should only be porous when you want to swamp the place with poor, hungry or angry folk from other non-specific hell-holes.
Government protecting itself for no good reason other than its self perpetuation. You can't tax freely moving goods.
As Oscar Wilde said when he was asked whether he had anything to declare and he replied that he only had his genius.
right-writes
The 4 nations and proto-nations have been at each others' throats for 10 thousand years ever since the ice retreated and created our islands. We are not old nations but ancient nations. Poor continental Europe has never understood this: they naively and laughably imagine that just because many in Ireland, Scotland and Wales dislike the English it means that they love them: it really is like a pub brawl and when an outsider interferes everyone unites and turns and beats them to a pulp. They never, never seem to learn.
I'm reminded that it really, really is a big deal us leaving EU. Huge. One of those happenings that gets a chapter all to itself in some as yet unwritten history book. My only worry, is the way things are with history and historicism these days is that the end of this project will be incorrectly recorded. The Who Did What When stuff gets fiddled with, like the worst cases in days gone by that nobody really knows about:
Two days before Lincoln’s inauguration as the 16th US President, Congress, consisting only of the Northern states, passed overwhelmingly on March 2, 1861, the Corwin Amendment that gave constitutional protection to slavery. Lincoln endorsed the amendment in his inaugural address, saying “I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.”
Quite clearly, the North was not prepared to go to war in order to end slavery when on the very eve of war the US Congress and incoming president were in the process of making it unconstitutional to abolish slavery.
Here we have absolute total proof that the North wanted the South kept in the Union far more than the North wanted to abolish slavery.
If the South’s real concern was maintaining slavery, the South would not have turned down the constitutional protection of slavery offered them on a silver platter by Congress and the President. Clearly, for the South also the issue was not slavery.
The real issue between North and South could not be reconciled on the basis of accommodating slavery. The real issue was economic. The North offered to preserve slavery irrevocably, but the North did not offer to give up the high tariffs and economic policies that the South saw as inimical to its interests.
Blaming the war on slavery was the way the northern court historians used morality to cover up Lincoln’s naked aggression and the war crimes of his generals. Demonizing the enemy with moral language works for the victor. And it is still ongoing. We see in the destruction of statues the determination to shove remaining symbols of the Confederacy down the Memory Hole.
So who will get blamed when the EU folds?
Steve
The best solution would be for Ireland to also secede from the EU. They will have a far better future if they detached themselves from a failing union and strengthened links with the UK, piggybacking on the Trade Deals the UK will negotiate with the USA, Australia, NZ, Canada and others.
And it would serve the thugs in the Berlaymont right.
So far, we are very fortunate that the EU doesn't yet have an army that can force us to remain.
If we let Brexit drag on too long, they might have time to get a force together. By the time the southern states of the EU decide to leave, it could be too late.
"Anonymous said...
So far, we are very fortunate that the EU doesn't yet have an army that can force us to remain."
I'm waiting for the EU to invade Poland to "sort out" the country's refusal to accept their quota of Mrs. Merkel's illegal immigrants and the their non-compliance with the EU's wishes to cancel their judiciary reforms.
Silly aside. The latest version of Maps on my iPad/iPhone shows the A1 as the E15 as well. If you zoom in between every A1 marker is an E15! Clearly the Fat Controller in Brussels is not quite ready to give up control.
Anonymous
Very convenient but you are lying.
The REASON the south rebelled was specifcally so they couls keep slavery - they said so in their secession documents
G Tingey, The Confederate states did not specify slavery as the (sole) reason for their attempt to secede. The increasing interference by the Federal government in the States rights was always a factor cited in the secession documents.
Anon's contribution shows that the North, and Lincoln, were prepared to compromise on the one issue of slavery. That is interesting and sheds new light on the topic. As well as showing up the BBC.
G. Tingey said @ 17:29
'Anonymous
Very convenient but you are lying.
The REASON the south rebelled was specifcally so they couls keep slavery - they said so in their secession documents'
I don't post lies Mr Tingey. Indeed why would I risk being ridiculed, like you are every time you post? To answer your point:
If we look carefully we can find a phoney hook in the South Carolina Declaration of Causes of Secession (December 20, 1860) as long as we ignore the reasoning of the document. Lincoln’s election caused South Carolina to secede. During his campaign for president Lincoln used rhetoric aimed at the abolitionist vote. (Abolitionists did want slavery abolished for moral reasons, though it is sometimes hard to see their morality through their hate, but they never controlled the government).
South Carolina saw in Lincoln’s election rhetoric intent to violate the US Constitution, which was a voluntary agreement, and which recognized each state as a free and independent state. After providing a history that supported South Carolina’s position, the document says that to remove all doubt about the sovereignty of states “an amendment was added, which declared that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people.”
South Carolina saw slavery as the issue being used by the North to violate the sovereignty of states and to further centralize power in Washington. The secession document makes the case that the North, which controlled the US government, had broken the compact on which the Union rested and, therefore, had made the Union null and void. For example, South Carolina pointed to Article 4 of the US Constitution, which reads: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” Northern states had passed laws that nullified federal laws that upheld this article of the compact. Thus, the northern states had deliberately broken the compact on which the union was formed.
The obvious implication was that every aspect of states’ rights protected by the 10th Amendment could now be violated. And as time passed they were, so South Carolina’s reading of the situation was correct.
The secession document reads as a defense of the powers of states and not as a defense of slavery.
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/south-carolina-declaration-of-causes-of-secession/
You need to do some reading, Mr Tingey.
Only a small minority of southerners owned slaves. Slaves were brought to the New World by Europeans as a labour force long prior to the existence of the US and the Southern states in order that the abundant land could be exploited. For the South slavery was an inherited institution that pre-dated the South.
Diaries and letters of soldiers fighting for the Confederacy and those fighting for the Union provide no evidence that the soldiers were fighting for or against slavery. Princeton historian, Pulitzer Prize winner, Lincoln Prize winner, president of the American Historical Association, and member of the editorial board of Encyclopedia Britannica, James M. McPherson, in his book based on the correspondence of one thousand soldiers from both sides, What They Fought For, 1861-1865, reports that they fought for two different understandings of the Constitution.
Steve
Anonymous at 19:27
Excellent piece of research. As ever there is much more to this than meets the eye, but clearly the issue of slavery was not the determining factor.
So, there we have it Tingey. Time for you to wind your neck in an stow your tits!
rapscallion said @ 07:49
'Excellent piece of research. As ever there is much more to this than meets the eye, but clearly the issue of slavery was not the determining factor.'
Thank you. One needs to know where to look these days as the pool of honest historians gets shallower by the year - mostly due to political correctness (cultural Marxism) that insists a certain narrative be maintained. The Left loves to ban things including intellectual curiosity and the truth.
The Union Army committed many crimes after the war including the mass rape of Southern women and pulverizing whole towns with artillery. The record of these events has been handed down through the families of Southerners.
Men took to hiding their womenfolk below ground as freed slaves were encouraged to rape at will. Physical evidence of such places still exist including names scratched on the walls. Bad blood is there to this day.
Steve
The reality of history is always more complicated and messy than the simplified stories in the books. You can't possibly boil the life histories and changing motives of millions of people down to a single narrative.
Yet children have to be taught some kind of outline of what has been happening for the past three thousand years. And the past three billion years.
Events keep swirling, but human nature doesn't change much, and much can be explained by greed, ambition, nepotism and tribal loyalties -- as Shakespeare well understood. The same characters keep on reappearing, with minor variations.
Don Cox
Anon
OH YES YOU DO
The very-conveniently anonymous, doesn't even use a nom-de-plume, so coward as well as a bully ... is a DELIBERATE LIAR
OK?
{ especially in your post above this }
The Slaveowners Treasonous Rewbellion (II) was fought & instigated by them, [ They did not have to fire on Ft Sumter, but they deliberately chose to ] -not just to keep slavery, but to extend it into Western states.
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