No thanks. Uk was the most neoliberal of the union. We are better now.
While yes would be cool. Not unless britain really learned their lesson and adopts many EU standards like EURO, Schengen, and doesnt have the sweet deal as they once had. Being married to a brit its hard reality but nah ppl voted for this, fuck you.
Younger ppl who couldnt vote or voted yes should get EU benefits. The rest, fuck no
Edit: imo also give more autonomy to scotland, wales, cornwall and give north ireland back to ireland!
I think it’d be hilarious if Canada, Australia and New Zealand joined the EU before the English got back in.
By leaving they gave up all their special exceptions, and rejoining would mean that they have a worse deal than the one they had when they got fed up and left the EU. It’s like they’ve been looking at Trump’s Iran strategy.
Having a worse deal because they messed up and left fornthe wrong reasons is still better than no deal.
They have to gife up the pound and they lay the same as everyone else instead of having a rebate due to less agricture. As their borders are finding out, subsidising food security is not a bad thing.
They had a favourable deal before as an enticement to join as the benefits were less clear for a smaller organisation. The benefots sre now very clear indeed, so they should take the regukar deal and learn the lesson of populism ans election interference. I doubt they will do both.
EU citizen living in the UK for many, many years.
The EU would restore all the exceptions that Britain had. They might call it something else, but the advantages of having the UK back in would be too great to ignore.
And I say this as someone that regularly rolls my eyes at the inflated sense of self-worth the UK constantly displays. The UK has become the south-Italy of the north; poor infrastructure, poor governance, poor outlying areas, yet we act as if we still are owed an empire.
Just like former general and president of france de gaul predicted…
EU citizen who lived in the UK and chose to leave the UK with Brexit, here.
I totally disagree.
In the EU Britain mainly blackmailed the rest with its veto - hence all the exceptions - mainly pushed for American levels of Capitalism and often even for American interests, and by the time of the Leave Vote it was basically a posh version of Orban’s Hungary. Worse, in meanwhile it has only managed to become more right-wing that back then: the Brexit Tories weren’t Far-Right enough for a significant proportion of Britons, so the extreme far-right ultra-nationalist Reform appeared and got more than 14% of the vote.
As for the rest, the main export of Britain was Financial Services, an almost purely rentierist business domain and were one of the most notable offers from Britain is International Tax Evasion services.
I can see why YOU as an EU citizen who chose to live there after Brexit would want to have Britain back in the EU: it would give you back in Britain a level of rights very close to those that native Britons have, making you way better than before.
What I don’t see is what most people living in the EU right now would gain from Britain being an EU member, especially an EU member with privileges other countries do not have (i.e. the exceptions).
Personally, I think the only acceptable thing is more integration of the UK in the Single Market, NEVER Britain having a vote on the affairs of the 470 million people in the EU, much less a veto (which is what you get with EU membership), and even the Single Market integration has to be limited since even back when it was an EU member Britain was known for willingly (in that it’s authorities couldn’t care less as long as those products did not end up in the British market) being a massive backdoor for illegally bringing non-compliant products into the Single Market.
Fortunately, when Britain swerved towards Fascism, it actually left the EU so the harm it could do to the other 470 million EU citizens was limited, but as Hungary showed, if such a country slipping towards Fascism does not chose to leave the EU, it’s almost impossible to deal with, so it would be an incredibly bad idea to make an EU member of a country which is now even more far-right than at the time of Brexit, even if with the most basic, zero exceptions, membership.
FWIW, I have a U.K. citizenship at this point too, so my rights in the EU and the UK are the same.
Good for you.
My point still stands though: from the point of view of somebody living in the EU, having the UK back isn’t all that much of a gain, especially anybody who looks at how the UK voted back when they were members and even more so if the UK and its people upon returning had more rights than other EU countries and citizens (i.e. if they go their exceptions back).
IMHO, it would be literally impossible to get governments in all 27 member countries to accept that Britons should get into the EU with more rights than the citizens of those countries and you need all 27 to approve a new member since it requires an unanimous vote.
(Frankly, you as an EU citizen not knowing this shit is surprising: for me as an EU citizen living in Britain during the Leave Referendum and subsequent shit show of the Leave negotiations was highly educational about the details of how the EU operates. Were you one of those people who “would be alright either way” because of having both citizenships and voted Leave?!).
But even more simple than that: bringing Britain into the EU without it changing enough Politically and as a Society that the chances of another Brexit were very low, would be the EU setting itself for yet another such event when, say, Reform UK got enough power that a section of the Tory Party felt that anti-Europeanism would get them into power.
The Political reality of present day Britain is the rise of the complete total nutter Far-Right in the form of Reform UK and Far-right ideas so normalized that even the Labour Party is spewing anti-immigrant and transphobic rhetoric.
Even with the EU sliding rightwards, very few countries in it have an Overtoon Window so far to the right.
Off topic: So lets say the conservatives correlate with the nazis in germany…then what with the EU? Should we preemtively invade germany? (Me as a germany, please do that in that case!!)
Aside from the joke element of your post, Fascist is not the same as ethno-Fascist, so somebody who is a Fascist isn’t necessarily a Nazi-style one: they can simply be a traditional Fascist like the kind that for a while ruled Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece.
You can easily tell the difference between the two because ethno-Fascists are all about how they represent an ethnicity which is somehow a superior ethnicity and use claims that they’re protecting themselves from another ethnicity who are describe as “violent” and even “vermin” to justify extreme violence against that other ethnicity. Traditional Fascist are all about The Nation and the superiority of it and it’s people, which probably explains why for example unlike the ethno-Fascists they seldom engage casually in the most horrendous of violent acts, such as murdering children just for being of the wrong ethnicity.
The only present day ethno-Fascists I know are Zionists (who claim to represent the Jewish People, who are “God’s chosen people” and have been stealing from, raping and murdering Palestinians and any other Muslims they can read whilst claiming they’re only “defending themselves”.
Mind you, conflating accusations of Fascism with accusations of Nazism and other similar purposeful absurdist misportrayals of the critique of others is in my experience (of living in Britain) a pretty common technique from the British Far-Right.
Where is the notion coming from that a country has to change their currency to EUR to join the EU? Of the last 3 members to join, 2 adapted the EUR (Croatia and Bulgaria) but Romania kept their own. So it is not a requisite as far as I am aware.
Sinw the maastricht treaty in 1992, all new member states are obliged to join the euro. They dont do so until their economy and currency hits some benchmarks. The uk ciuld purposely try not to, but they are already stable and developed.
Ah thank you for the explanation!
They’ve been swindled by the same organized misinformation machine
I see headlines like this and think, “oh, haha. The onion has done it again.” Then I read the actual source, and get sad.
The entire thing is absolutely logical if you think of them as having a pure “what’s in it for me” and “I’m alright Jack, screw everybody else” mindset.
I was living in Britain at the time of the Leave Referendum and a great majority of Britons were convinced that Britain is a superior country with superior people (the Press there pushes relentlessly a spin of “Look how much great and wiser Great Britain is” on international news as well as lot of soft-nationalism, hence the putting the flag in everything and, more generally, the high levels of “flag shagging”).
Whilst many of these Britons still concluded that even then, Britain was better off in the EU (one of the main pitches from the Remain campaign was literally “Britain should remain in the EU and reform it from the inside” - in other words, that Britons knew better than the other 470 million people and hence the EU should change to be what Britons thought it should be), more than enough still believed the whole bollocks anchored on the view of Britain and Britons as superior that “Free from the ‘chains’ of the EU” Britain would prosper more than as an EU member.
So it made absolute sense back then for a Briton with a pure “what’s in it for me” mindset who totally believed in the superiority of Britain and Britons to think that Britain would be far more successful outside the EU doing their own Trade deals with others and not having to make compromises with other EU nations than inside the EU having to obey common rules which were the result of compromises between all EU countries - after all, it should be easy for such a great nation with its superior people to achieve more than it did when having to compromise with other European countries.
After Brexit and a couple of years to see the effects of it, all of that turned out to not actually be the case.
So it makes absolute sense that NOW, the very same pure “what’s in it for me” person would think that Britain should be in the EU.
I wouldn’t even be surprised if their vision for Britain in the EU is some kind of “we’ll get back what we had before” (i.e. the exceptions) and "after we’re in we’ll change the EU from the inside"or that the the kind of “logic” put forward by Brexiters during the Leave Referendum for why Britain would leave and still have “the same level of Single Market access as an EU member, without the same obligations” is now used to claim that “we’ll get EU membership with the same conditions as we had when we left” (i.e. have the same exceptions as before).
IMHO, Britain hasn’t really evolved Politically or as a Society since then, so the exact same mindset that caused Brexit is alive and well there, only now after Brexit has become a fact it’s informed by the consequences of it hence the smartest of them now have a different Make Britain Great Again plan which this time involved being inside the EU rather than outside.
Difficult to decide whether to post articles on LAMF and nottheonion. And no shortage of such articles.
It’s not particularly LAMF. Civil servants aren’t political, they just run the department according to whatever policy the government of the day has.
While I agree with the general sentiment that civil servants shouldn’t be political, getting selected as the head of a department, or the leader of an organization has significant political overtones. Mind you, my understanding of the role is directly related to the TV series “Yes, Minister,” so there’s likely to be a few gaps.
Not for nothing Whitehall is known as the House of Cards. Look at any aspect too long and you’ll see its more hole than cheese.
