| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Tell our enemies they can take our lives... | |
| Posted by: | T P Howell | |
| Date/Time: | 19/03/17 12:44:00 |
| Reading this chain of posts –mainly particularly thoughtful and well informed –reinforces the main, overwhelming issue. Whichever way you look at it (and from whatever side of the UK’s various internal and external borders) Brexit (hard or soft) is an incredibly bad idea - full stop. Theresa May is not “playing her cards close to her chest”. She has no cards: just trying to conceal that fact from the British people by bravado and bluster. The various people I speak to around the rest of Europe are completely nonplussed by the apparently hostile approach to the negotiations currently being taken by May and her colleagues. The consensus is “If you really want to leave, come and talk to us and we will try and sort something out – but you’ll get nowhere by making threats”. It’s just not going to be an effective negotiating strategy. John Major summed it up in (of all places) the Mail on Sunday this morning: - “It was dishonest and wrong to promise the British people an easy, favourable deal with the EU, wrong to promise swift new trade deals, and wrong to state that the Irish peace process would not be unsettled by Brexit.” I get the sense that the UK is currently going through a right-wing coup d’état (not to come over as all MB). By using the traditional tactic of “fear of the other” (that all our economic challenges are the fault of foreigners, whether here or in Brussels), the UK is being bounced out of the EU. The consequences are that: - business taxes will be slashed: - personal taxes will have to be increased to pay for a failing economy: - employment and consumer rights will be slashed: - environmental protection will be slashed: - control of monopolistic abuse by big business will be slashed; - regulation of the financial services sector will be slashed and we will return to the casino banking that got us into this mess in the first place; - funding for the NHS will be slashed (not least because there will be no money to pay for it), allowing health services to be further privatised; - social protection, including pensions, will be slashed; - income inequality will increase; - etc. etc. We can already see the attempts to make this happen in the US under Trump (so far apparently frustrated by the complexities of the US political system). What the doctrinaire free marketers have failed to achieve through the general election ballot box they now appear about to achieve in a single stroke through the referendum ballot box. Brexit is madness. We will destroy within a decade the wealth and security built up in the United Kingdom over the last the seven decades of cooperation and engagement with the rest of Europe. For the sake of the whole country (and not just the very few who will benefit from Brexit), and the sake of our children and future generations, we must stop this madness before it is too late. |