Indeed, as I will explain more below, the European Parliament doesn’t create laws, just approve them. Great Britain is already out ot the European Council (which launches laws).
The House of Commons, the UK Parliament, rejected the UK government’s “Withdrawal Agreement from the European Union“, for the third time. According to the EU’s ultimatum to Great Britain, the UK will be thrown out of the EU on April 12, in 14 days. This expulsion is unwise, and no civilized way to proceed. I will thereafter suggest a different course: extending massively Article 50, putting Brexit on the European backburner, a slow simmer in the background, leaving time for Great Britain to figure out its existential issues, its Brexistential issues… Shile Europe is allowed to reconsider the future, the planet, civilization, progress, democracy, and other things which have disappeared from the Brexit debate…
The interminable Brexit process is paralyzing Europe (both UK and EU). The temptation is to expedite it, in the hope of being done with it. That will not work: instead, it will make the situation way worse. If Brexit happened on April 12, 2019, in two weeks, ten years of divisive negotiations would ensue. How to avoid that? Forget about it! Forget about Brexit, send it to the purgatory of the House of Commons, under the good care of its weaker, the excellent right honorable gentleman, Speaker John Bercow.
Another new NO, the ninth, was added on Friday. The Third No on the withdrawal agreement.
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How And Why LEGALLY EXCLUDE the UK From The EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT (Until the UK Decides to Revoke Article 50, & Remain In the EU):
Europeans have to let the British Parliament find a solution and have it ratified by the British People, in a referendum. That will take at least a year. Meanwhile, the rest of the European Union has to protect itself from the pathology known as Brexit. That means that Great Britain should be EXCLUDED from taking part in the next European Parliament.
I don’t care what the legalistically minded come up with, mumbling that EU member nations have to be represented in Parliament, that we can’t have a precedent, bla bla bla. Right, the EU is very legally minded, a French characteristic, now permeating the EU. However, sticking to the law causes rigidities which, in turn can only be removed by those periodic revolutions shaking France.
The spirit of the law always beats the letter of the law. The letter of the law has already been broken: Article 50 extended only until tomorrow, March 29, 2019, the appartenunce of the UK in the EU. Hence the letter of the law (24 months!) has been broken. Yet the spirit survives.
So, in a way, the UK is (sort of) out: the European Council, after one meeting with UK PM Cameron, four days after the fateful Brexit, never met as 28 members again: the UK got excluded. So the new spirit of the law is that the UK is partly out of the EU. The European Council is really the government of the EU (the European Commission just implements what the EC wants).
The European Council is more important than the European Parliament (European Parliament vote laws, but doesn’t suggest them). So, no EU Parliament for the UK. Instead UK in an indefinite Article 50: all rights and duties of membership, except for voting. In many democracies, convicts don’t vote for a while. Hey, Britain self-convicted.
The solution above, extending Article 50 by two years, but no Parliament for the UK, will free the EU from Brexit. The EU will be free to progress, pass laws mitigating plutocracy, climate change, foster research, education, etc. In particular financing of UK science and advanced tech by EU budgets will proceed. Also Eurosceptics will be informed that leaving the EU, and activating Article 50, has a democratic cost, and gives a forerun of what it means to be out of the EU: no more European legislating possible.
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And what will happen to Great Britain? Polls show the UK would vote for Remain at this point. Within two years, the British People will come to its senses, in spite of the shrill shrieking propaganda of its plutocratic media (the EU should pass laws to limit plutocratic propaganda). So We the British People will vote to stay in the EU. Then a special EU Parliament UK election can be held.
The non-participation of the UK in the EU Parliament will prevent Parliamentary sabotage, which would otherwise paralyze Europe some more. However, if legal minds of the stupid kind insist on having that… the fact is that Article 50 should be extended 2 years, while Speaker Bercow and the House of Commons figure Brexit out.
Why? No bad feelings, looking forward… In the end no Brexit.
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Enough, children, who go by the self-glorifying name of “leaders”! Learn from history!
The British Parliament voted No No No No No No No No, No, on all the possibilities of Brexit, a wide spectrum selected by the very interesting Speaker Bercow. A European ultimatum expires April 12. On that date, Great Britain is supposed to have decided to leave, and how. (If if with a deal then the effective day will be in May.)
You may not know this, you children who are called leaders, because you studied just what was Politically Correct, but war is a serious thing, and a seriously sneaky thing. Apparently innocuous indifference and turning-away can turn into alienation, and war. The personal history of my family has helped me know these emotional truths. I was graced by a family which harbred resistance fighters, more than 100 Jews, which was chased by the Gestapo, while my dad arrived in France in combat, fighting Nazis… In my lifetime, I have known what it feels like to be bombed by fascist racists, and to have a young uncle who was an elder brother to me, killed by Islamist terrorists (crucially helped by a double dealing French government).
Also I spent decades studying history, in particular of the European kind. It is not as simplistic as usually depicted. The first battle of Fontenoy (around 50,000 killed by arrows, lances, swords, and axes, in a few hours of hand to hand combat) was an enormous butchery, Franks against Franks. There was a second, even more famous battle, in the same place of Fontenoy, 1,000 years, a millennium, later, this time English against French. As one can see, French military history is rich, unparalleled… These two battles of Fontenoy were pretty much brothers against brothers, not civilization against savagery, and should never have happened.
Yes, Europe had plenty of civilization against savagery battles. France was involved in all of them (the Mongols gave up their conquest of Europe, when the top Mongol generals argued that the heavy losses they had suffered in Hungary were a foretaste of suffering again the same fate as their ancestors the Huns in France). In the Eight Century, the Franks repelled three invasions of Europe by the savage Arab Islamists, over a period of thirty years. Of course, Islam would never have happened if Catholic fascism had been defeated at the Battle of the Cold River, three centuries before Muhammad’s birth. At the Cold River, the Western Emperor, Eugenius, a secular professor promoted by the head of the Occidental Roman army, Arbogast, confronted the catholic bigot, Oriental emperor Theodosius (originally a Spaniard). Arbogast, a Frank, controlled, for many years, a Roman army full of Romanized Franks. Theodosius was allied with the Goths. Theodosius and his goons had invented the notion of “heresy”, and laws, decrees, making “heresy” punishable at the pleasure of the government.
There is a direct line between this, and the government of Brunei establishing the death penalty for homosexuality in 2019, according to Sharia. Indeed, at the Cold River, the Frigidus river, unexpectedly, Arbogast was defeated and those who wanted heresy to be punishable by death, and Catholicism to pursue its reign of terror, won. Not only that, but, left without an army, the Occidental Roman empire promptly fell to the invading barbarian hordes, 14 years later (406 CE).
The millennium of European wars started when the French of West Francia turned their backs on the rest of the “Roman” empire (actually the west of present France, the most occidental third of the “Francia” of the Franks from 500 CE to 950 CE, including Paris had very good reasons to reject the empire… which had failed to protect them against the Viking; instead the count of Paris, soon to be duke, did the work, battling back from the ramparts, with 200 men, 10,000 bloody Vikings… while the Roman/Carolingian emperors prefered negotiations with the Viking). That turning of all French backs was, to some extent, justified. However it caused alienation between Europeans. By 1200, all of Europe was united against the French-Paris monarchy (and lost the battle and war against the “French” king Philippe Auguste, at Bouvines).
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Treat The British Well, They Don’t Have To Be Too Punished, This Is Not Versailles:
The interminable Brexit is paralyzing Europe. The temptation is to expedite it. That would be a mistake for the British: once they inspect the situation in all details, they will come to the conclusion, except for a few vested interests, like plutocrats and media moguls, and the odd deluded fisher, that staying in the EU is the less bad of all bad possibilities.
I am of the opinion that Germany was treated very well by the Versailles Treaty (contrarily to common opinion). That’s because I studied the situation in details, and I didn’t buy the Nazi opinion about Versailles. However, there is definitively a risk of mistreating a deluded Britain about Brexit. OK, the British have the wrong mentality about the European Union. This is a particular bad case of “fake news”. Just like Islamophilia is a particularly bad case of “fake news”.
So yes, there is “fake news” problem. But does that mean that British or Muslims should be mistreated? As individuals? No. The problem is that Brexit would hurt most british and European citizens, So the rest of the European Union has to be patient.
Not having the UK NOT sit in the EU Parliament will have the advantage that a lot of laws of the pro-plutocratic, anti-federal, and unequal laws, in particular the monstrous British rebate, and the even more monstrous Swiss rebate, can be legislated out.
Yes, president Macron is understandably viewing this Brexit tragicomedy as something to flush down the toilet, ASAP. However, apparently innocuous and inconsequential acts in history have resulted in immense tragedies.
Don’t forget the present system in Britain was mostly created by a succession of French adventurers, warriors, magnates and plutocrats, with a few queens and duchesses in the mix (William of Normandy, the barons of Magna Carta, Eleanor d’Aquitaine, Yolande of Aragon, Isabelle de France, Edouard III/Edward III, Lancaster/Lancastre, de Montfort come to mind; the House of Normandy was succeeded by the House of Anjou). The estrangement between England and France was the fruit of personalities more than anything else. A striking example is Yolande of Aragon, who financed Joan of Arc’s army and the illegal kinglet (the “Dolphin”) connected to them, who got the “100 Years War” relaunched all by themselves. (Yes, now there is a lamentable cult of Joan of Arc amplifying that idiotic nationalism and bigotry.)
Small things can have big consequences: models supposedly show weather systems can be created by a butterfly flapping its wings, three weeks earlier.
Macron, the French president, doesn’t want to become that butterfly of doom, flapping Europe into division and thus oblivion. Macron doesn’t want to flap all wrong. Let Macron beat on French Yellow Jackets, if that’s his won, he does that well, the French love to be beaten up, so they can beat back. Revolutions make French law progress. But Macron shouldn’t beat on the British. That could lead to war.
The European Union will be optimal if it acts as an empire of the highest aspirations. That includes, first of all, bending over backwards not to mistreat European Peoples or nations. Europe should focus its energy on thermonuclear fusion and the space race now engaged between the USA, China, India, maybe Russia to be first (back) on the Moon. (The European thermonuclear reactor JET is based in the UK, it’s crucial to ITER, and its financing has been compromised by Brexit.)
Oh, by the way, Boris Johnson, ex-mayor of London and co-leader of the Leave (the EU) campaign, voted for the EU Withdrawal Agreement of May, today (his colleague had adopted the same position a week ago). Why? Because for the UK to leave the EU without a deal is an unfathomable catastrophe.
So, question, if the Leave campaign leaders can be that reasonable, surely the European leaders should be? Or are the leaders of the European Council truly that childish that they risk European strategic disaster, medium term? Jut on the basis of legalistically justified resentment?
Taking away Parliament from a EU country which has left the European Council, which originates European laws, only makes sense. Beating the Brits when they are down doesn’t. Give Great Britain time to rethink Europe. Two years. No Parliament.
Patrice Ayme
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The opinion of the British on Brexit has already changed a bit. It will change some more. Hey, even the New York Times is realizing it had Trump Derangement Syndrome. Here is a New York Times editorial on Trump today:, operating a U-turn on its opinion of Trump:
“Maybe the president brilliantly played the media. Or maybe we just played ourselves.
By Bret Stephens, Opinion Columnist
“Maybe we’ve had this all wrong.
Maybe Donald Trump isn’t just some two-bit con artist who lucked his way into the White House thanks to an overconfident opponent. Or a second-rate demagogue with a rat-like instinct for arousing his base’s baser emotions and his enemies’ knee-jerk reactions. Or a dimwit mistaken for an oracle, like some malignant version of Chauncey Gardiner from “Being There.”
Thanks to Robert Mueller, we know he isn’t Russia’s man inside, awaiting coded instruction from his handler in the Kremlin.
Maybe, in fact, Trump is the genius he claims to be, possessed — as he likes to boast — of a “very good brain.”
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Here is the full statement from the European commissionfollowing the vote in the Commons.
The commission regrets the negative vote in the House of Commons today. As per the European council (article 50) decision on 22 March, the period provided for in article 50(3) is extended to 12 April. It will be for the UK to indicate the way forward before that date, for consideration by the European council.
A “no-deal” scenario on 12 April is now a likely scenario. The EU has been preparing for this since December 2017 and is now fully prepared for a “no-deal” scenario at midnight on 12 April. The EU will remain united. The benefits of the withdrawal agreement, including a transition period, will in no circumstances be replicated in a “no-deal” scenario. Sectoral mini-deals are not an option.
The final two sentences refer to a claim often made by Brexiters at Westminster that, in the event of a no-deal departure, the UK and the EU would in practice negotiate a series of mini-agreements to mitigate the worst consequences. This is sometimes referred to as a managed no deal.
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 