Uhm, no. You're incorrect. The EU made provisions for a member retiring from the EU. It's in the Treaty of Lisbon. The UK invoked that clause and the process is written in the treaty. It's also not about "independence at any cost". I'm not sure where you heard that bs. The goal of Brexit was to remove the UK from the EU bureaucracy and establish a trade deal identical to the one Norway has with the EU. The trade deal is for both sides. It's not one-sided. EU goods in the UK, UK goods in the EU. The EU, on its side, has agreed to this, but imposed a number of bureaucratic measures that effectively slow down trade... measures that are not in place for Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Worse, UK and EU regulations are still very much a carbon copy of each other, so what... we reached the Brexit deadline and suddenly the regulations in the UK are no longer of a similar quality to those in the EU, when they are literally identical?
I'm not saying no-one is butthurt about it. I'm saying that it's a divorce and should be conducted in a civil manner.
As for the referendum being propagandist rhetoric, you're free to paint it any way you want. I saw scaremongering on both sides of the referendum, and not any different from any elections I've seen across Europe. Possibly the main difference was that there was (and still is) weak leadership on both sides.
"Making provisions for retiring from the EU" does not in any way mean that doing so will not have consequences. Also, having a formalized way of leaving is a fundamental requirement for any serious organization.
Not having that would be a
very big problem. So ... how is this an argument? "They said we could, so it shouldn't have any consequences to do so" is not a logical statement.
Also, you're quite grossly misrepresenting the EEA, which Norway is part of. The EEA is very much a "EU light" deal, where member states are subject to most EU rules and regulations, but have some autonomy at the cost of having no say in the formation of these EU rules (those are decided by MEPs and committee members, after all, which no EEC country has as they aren't EU members). It also has severe democratic problems in that, unlike as an EU member, once an EU rule is accepted and implemented, there is
no way of reversing this. This is a hot topic for debate in Norway after the recent election as one of the parties in the new government is very keen on pulling out of ACER and the most recent EU railway package (both of which, for the record, are deeply problematic). I'm just as ambiguous about EEA membership as I am about the EU, but I don't believe Norway resigning from the EEA would solve anything either. Quite the opposite.
Also, I never said that any such deal was one-sided. Trade deals literally
can't be, as trade is a two-way exchange even in the most exploitative of situations. I'd love to see some examples of bureaucratic measurements to slow down UK trade that don't exist for EEC nations though - any sources? Speaking from a Norwegian perspective, our trade with the EU is
extremely strictly regulated and policed, and any avoidance of bottlenecks comes from the strict adherence to those rules.
My main point though: you're arguing that the EU should accept a trade deal on (mostly) the UK's terms, and that this would be a logical and rational thing to do. Yet the UK has clearly demonstrated that it is
only in it for themselves, which completely undermines that idea. Through leaving the EU they rejected an established, functional if problematic, wide-ranging cooperative arrangement on the basis that
it wasn't sufficiently beneficial for them. Which, it is becoming clear, wasn't only untrue (the pre-Brexit exodus of highly educated and highly productive EU citizen workers in every sector from tech to academia and science to business is a good example of this, though by far not the only one) but is also rightly interpreted by the EU as an explicit statement of self-interest above all else. If it wasn't above all else, they would have stayed and tried to improve things from the inside. After all, the UK was part of first the EEC, then the EU, from 1973 onwards. They have been central to its development for five decades. They have received
massive benefits from this membership (it's not like the British economy was doing great in the late 60s or early 70s) - but they have also contributed to other countries, obviously. That's how cooperation tends to work. So the UK's leaving is then unambiguously a statement of not accepting this split, and a statement of a desire for a different deal that is more beneficial to the UK. Hence my question: why on earth would the EU be interested in this? Why would their response be anything but "yeah, sorry, you made your own bed"?
Let's try to look at this trhough an analogy: if you're running a company with a board consisting of 20-odd people each controlling large but variously sized and impactful departments, and one of the board members announces they are unhappy with their compensation (despite having been formative in company development for decades), are leaving the company to start their own, and then subsequently demand a cooperative deal with your company where they do mostly what they used to, just selectively more beneficial to them. Why on earth would the company say yes to that? The only situation in which that would make sense is if the department that split off delivered a unique and irreplacable set of funcitons. That is not the case for the UK, despite their own delusions of grandeur. They're just another country at this point. The UK voluntarily placed themselves on par with other reasonably geographically close non-member countries - except none of those have been spewing propagandist rhetoric towards them for the past 5+ years. Why would the EU be more inclined to give the UK a preferential trade deal than Turkey, or Marocco, or Russia, or any other country?
How is that absurd? As it stands, with the Nvidia takeover of ARM (and there is no reason for Nvidia to move the HQ from Cambridge), the UK would be in a position to tax companies in Europe when they license ARM IP, right? But the EU has the ability to sabotage the sale... So the EU uses this leverage to secure advantages for the bloc, going forward. It's a game. Nvidia has investors to account to. A $54bn that gets deflated because someone slams shut a >500 million consumer door is a big deal. No-one wants that to happen. Nvidia, UK or the EU. So they're now settling into the negotiation stage where the EU will try and get Nvidia to (I believe) open up labs in the EU and nominally "develop" something worthwhile there that the EU can claim to be "designed in the EU", just to avoid burying billions in a homebrew CPU architecture or RISC-V. I see this as the EU hedging its bets. You're free to disagree, of course.
The EU only has regulatory power over this deal as it pertains to trade impacting the EU, i.e. licencing to companies that do significant trade in the EU. I sincerely doubt they'd be willing to take the establishment of EU labs for ARM as any type of compensation for the risk that Nvidia might be more restrictive in ARM licencing for competitive reasons. Remember, the main tax income to the EU in this? It comes from taxing these companies locally + income tax on their employees. Also, your taxation example doesn't work - ARM and the companies licencing their tech decide
entirely freely which entities these are licenced from (except for trade embargoes and sanctions - but I doubt ARM will establish a global licencing entity in Iran or North Korea any time soon). That could be the UK company, or some spin-off in a Caribbean tax haven, or literally anything else. Establishing ARM labs in the EU would do
nothing to change this. Nothing whatsoever. And the EU - and the UK, and ARM, and Nvidia - are entirely aware of their inability to control this. Also, you say "nobody wants [the ARM acquisition to fall through]", and list the EU as one of the entities not wanting this. Why would they want that merger to go through? There is no benefit to the EU in such a thing - if anything, it
removes ARM from their immediate geographic and economic vicinity. The European Commission mostly seems good at trying to uphold actual functioning competition and try to hold back on monopolizing tendencies (though it's by no means perfect - it's just a bit less ineffectual than most entities nominally trying to do the same), which is a much more reasonable explanation of why they would be skeptical of an Nvidia-ARM acquisition.
The EU wouldn't even qualify as a democracy under their own made up rules.
Did you read my previous posts?
They are a protectionist outfit at best.
As are all countries and international cooperative organizations, sadly. I would rank them reasonably low on the scale of just
how protectionist though - they do a lot of foreign aid, investment in third party countries, and their trade deals are slightly less draconean than most. Not by much, but slightly.
A pseudo United States of Europe that doesn't even have a suitable military.
IMO, not having a common military is one of the best sides of the EU, as it acts as a buffer between military and economic power. The US is a prime example of how wrong things can go when you have a lot of both with no separation.
As far as trade wars go .. the US under Trump offered the EU a tariff free trade deal and of course the EU turned the US down ... due to the fact the EU hoses the US in tariffs.
You seem to not know what a trade war is. Refusing a trade deal is not a trade war. Failed negotiation is not the same as outright conflict.
Right now the UK is being punished by the globalist but the Brits are tough enough to weather this out.
Lol, "the globalists". That phrase always cracks me up. Wasn't it mentioned above that the UK is joining the CPTPP - an extension of the Trans Pacific Partnership? Also know as the most explicitly neo-imperialist, forcibly neoliberalist, undemocratic trade agreement ever drafted? It's pretty hard to be more "globalist" than backing something like that.
Unlike western Europeans, most Americans couldn't fathom the idea of some unelected officials in Brussels calling the shots for us including the EU courts.
Instead they fathom the concept of an electoral system not updated since when horseback messengers were the fastest means of conveying election results, giving them the most indirect democracy on the planet? Yeah, that's not much better. As I said above, the EU has significant and deep-seated democratic problems, but that really doesn't make it any worse than your contrasting examples here. Also, all Brussels officials
are elected - they are representatives of the elected governments of each member state. The apparatus surrounding them are hired bureaucrats, but that is the same in literally every democracy across the globe. And no, the courts are not elected - that would be
really problematic. It's clear that the EU needs significant reform to make a claim to functional democracy (abolishing the veto, among other things), but it's by no means the worst thing out there.
btw seeing how you think Farage is xenophobic I'm guessing you feel the same way about Viktor Orban for the simple fact he believes his country should be able to control their borders as in Hungary is a sovereign nation with a democratically elected government.
No, I believe Viktor Orban is xenophobic
due to his consistent use of xenophobic rhetoric and propaganda, just as I see him as dangerously antidemocratic due to
his consistent war on critical thinking and
undermining of democratic processes, and a lot more.
So you don't think a sovereign country should be able to control its own borders?
I would be all for that if they managed to do so without being extremely racist and xenophobic while doing so. All you're doing here is drawing up a straw man argument - nobody has argued against what you are saying, we have argued against the deeply problematic and antidemocratic policies, actions and attitudes demonstrated by the people in question. We (or at least I) have also argued for the logic of consequences from actions and accountability, rather than the wishful thinking made-up dream scenario where Britain had the negotiating power to get a better deal with the EU from the outside than from within. Neither of these topics relates to "the right to control their own borders". That is such a broad and vague concept, and one that mainly pertains to the physical movement of people (and goods, but that is mostly secondary, at least in the rhetoric of both Farage, Orban and their allies) and not internal laws, trade deals or consequences for actions. If you believe this issue can't be properly addresed without bringing it to a much broader and more general level like that, you need to argue for that stance, and not frame it as a misleading "gotcha" point.
j/k
