Category - Brexit

I mentioned this a few days ago. The subject of associate EU citizenship for the very slight minority of us who weren’t so racially motivated (or so thick) as to vote to leave the EU.

Here is what Charles Goerens has to say on the matter in a letter sent out to those who have supported his proposals:

Dear Madam or Sir,

Let me first thank you for your email expressing your support for my amendment 882 asking for “associate EU citizenship” for citizens whose country withdrew from the European Union.

I am aware that you are numerous to worry about your future and I was actually overwhelmed by your spontaneous and many times very personal reactions that you shared with me in your emails.

Please accept my apologies for not being able to answer each and every email personally, but I want to let you know that me and my staff looked at every single email that was sent to me.

I would like to take the opportunity to explain the idea behind my amendment, which hopefully also gives an answer to the concerns that some of you have raised.

I tabled my amendment to the own-initiative draft report by Guy Verhofstadt entitled “Possible evolutions of and adjustments to the current institutional set-up of the European Union”, which aims at looking at the possibilities to improve the functioning of the European Union by a change of the Treaties. I have to acknowledge that these proposals are set-down in a so-called “own-initiative” report, and thus carry no legal weight at this stage. However, with the Brexit negotiations coming to a term, and given that the withdrawal of the United Kingdom, as one of the larger Member States, and as the largest non-euro-area member, affects the strength and the institutional balance of the Union, the European Union will have to revise its Treaties. This is where Mr. Verhofstadt’s report could serve as a basis for the revision.

In fact, in his report, Mr. Verhofstadt raises the idea of a type of “associate status”, which could be proposed “to those states in the periphery that only want to participate on the sideline, i.e. in some specific Union policies”, underlining that “this status should be accompanied by obligations corresponding to the associated rights”. This new type of “associate status” could thus be one of the possible outcomes of the negotiations about the future relationship between the EU and the UK. My proposed amendment could hence go hand in hand with Mr. Verhofstadt’s proposal and could be seen as a solution satisfying all UK citizens who wish to maintain a close relationship with the EU, whether they live in or outside the UK territory.

Of course, some might argue that the “associate EU citizenship” would grant UK citizens a privilege that EU citizens, who might have to quit their jobs in the UK, do not enjoy. Yet, we have considered this issue and therefore propose that the associate citizens pay an annual membership fee directly into the EU budget as an own resource of the Union, following the reciprocal principle of ‘no taxation without representation’.

Citizens, who, against their will, are being stripped of their European identity, are likely to tumble into situations, which may entail personal tragedies. Some of those concerned might even never have lived in the UK and yet be forced to move to a country that they might only know through visiting their relatives or spending their holidays. Imagine a UK national living abroad for decades but never staying long enough in one country to be eligible for citizenship in this host country. This is actually the case for some, as I have witnessed through your emails. An EU that praises mobility and thus makes it possible for all its citizens to travel throughout the continent without borders should become active when this great achievement is at stake.

Finally yet importantly, I want to point out that I am perfectly aware that all of the above is far easier said than done.

Currently the Treaties specify that European citizenship stems directly from the national citizenship of its Member States. However, it also specifies that citizenship of the Union is additional to and does not replace national citizenship. Creating an individual citizenship to the Union would thus require treaty change, not in the least to specify its rights and duties, but it would not infringe upon national citizenship.

My proposal is first of all a political impulse to push the boundaries, on different levels. In fact, at a first stage, the coming six weeks are going to be decisive when the Committee for Constitutional Affairs is going to vote on the report and my amendment on 21 November and later, in December, when Parliament as a whole will be called to pronounce its opinion at plenary level. In the meantime, I will have to gather the required majority in this house to pass this amendment by convincing my colleagues of the necessity to make a statement.

At a later stage, when it comes to the negotiations on the future relationship between the EU and the UK, my idea could also serve as a means to convince the UK government to accept freedom of movement of people along with the other three freedoms, which the European Single Market seeks to guarantee.

In all the cases mentioned above and in particular in the eventual case of treaty change, political determination will be of utmost importance and I will definitely not content myself by truckling to those who consider my proposal unfeasible. I am determined to bring this idea as far as I possibly can on the European level. Indeed, history proves me right when we look at the achievements, which European citizens enjoy nowadays. Who thought, for instance, that one day, EU citizenship would give every EU citizen the right to vote for and stand as a candidate in municipal and European Parliament elections in whichever EU country the citizen resides, under the same conditions as nationals. This is reality today and yes, it needed a tremendous effort and, above all, the political determination to get this far. Why not exert ourselves for this cause and make the “associate EU citizenship” happen?

P.S. What can YOU do? A great number of UK MEPs have already expressed their support for the “associate EU citizenship”. Make sure that they are going to persuade their colleagues in their respective political groups to back this proposal, too.

Please note that similar initiatives are currently under way. Feel free to support those, too.

Yours,

Charles Goerens

This story screamed out to me like a million watt PA system when I saw it. Apparently, the EU Parliament is considering allowing individual Britons to opt-in to EU citizenship.

Let me make it clear right now – if it wasn’t already apparent. I consider myself European and I am ashamed of Britain and those antiquated troglodytes who consider themselves British who voted to leave the EU. I am equally ashamed of our so-called government, who couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery, let alone manage Brexit in a way which is likely to avert complete ruin for this country.

If I could opt-in to EU citizenship, I’d do it now. Immediately.

Unfortunately, the extremely small majority who voted us out of the EU was effectively swung by a crowd of juvenile retards who are trying to carve out a career for themselves, probably having graduated (or, in most cases, who are currently in the process of graduating and thus meddling in things they don’t understand) in soft subjects which have no value in the real world.

One such person – not young, but still a vicious little xenophobe who can’t see past her prejudices by the sounds of her – is Jayne Adye, director (sic) of the Get Britain Out campaign (an organisation which seems to be a combination of UKIP and the Nazi Party).

Charles Goerens, an MEP from Luxembourg, has proposed Article 882, which would give provision of…

…European associate citizenship for those who feel and wish to be part of the European project but are nationals of a former Member State; offers these associate citizens the rights of freedom of movement and to reside on its territory as well as being represented in the Parliament through a vote in the European elections on the European lists.

Adye has described this as…

…divisive and said it was “totally unacceptable” for British people to retain the advantages of EU membership.

“This is an outrage. The EU is now attempting to divide the Great British Public at the exact moment we need unity. 17.4 million people voted to ‘Leave’ the EU on June 23rd and as a result the UK as a whole will get Brexit”.

This stupid Essex woman absolutely does not speak for me. She makes me even more ashamed to be British, though she unfortunately represents what Britain has become.

If Brexit goes ahead – and I pray that something comes along which means that it doesn’t – then I sincerely hope that the amendment is ratified. I definitely want in.

…an even worse disaster than Brexit.

Theresa May – who has quickly learned that the only purpose of her job is to look after Theresa May – has announced that she will trigger Article 50 by the end of March 2017. This would mean the UK is no longer part of the EU by the middle of 2019.

Actually, she hasn’t really said anything we didn’t already suspect. But even so, one piece of advice I would give her before she gets too wound up in her ego is that she remembers that the slightly-less-than 52% who voted to leave the EU were not all Tory voters in the first place, and once the inevitable downturn in the economy kicks in, even less of them will be. In effect, Brexit will cost her her job – just as it did David Cameron before her.

Cameron f–ked up the country by allowing the Referendum in the first place. May is simply f—king up the still-twitching corpse he left behind.

Theresa May still has time to see sense and stop Brexit, but I don’t think she will because she is simply playing a political game which she believes is to her own advantage. She is incapable of seeing that it is not to anyone else’s advantage beyond being seen to comply with some ridiculous definition of the word “democracy”.

I still live in hope that someone else will come up with a way of preventing Brexit happening. If it goes ahead, I can say with absolute certainty that it has effectively screwed up the rest of my life. I can also be quite sure that it has damaged or screwed up the lives of this generation’s children, and probably those of at least another two or three generations beyond that. And that assumes that the world remains as it is today, and that some insane despot doesn’t appear on the horizon.

Leaving the EU is the WRONG DECISION. Holding a referendum was the WRONG DECISION. Everyone with even the smallest amount of intelligence – including Theresa May, who was against Brexit – knows it.

At close of play on Friday, GBP stood at $1.297 – that’s 12.6% below what it was before the Referendum. It is only about 0.5% higher than its lowest post-Referendum price, and 3.5% below the highest it has been post-Referendum.

Somewhere in my posts about the disastrous decision to leave the EU I mentioned that it wouldn’t be long before some prat started going on about bringing back Imperial units of measure. Well, although I said it over 3 months ago, here’s confirmation that I was right.

The leading jackass for the movement, Warwick Cairns, claims:

…imperial measurements are not only easily understandable but inherently popular.

“There is something about feet and inches that feel part of our identity and culture,” he says. “They make sense on a human scale, they make sense on a cultural scale. It is part of us.”

Complete bullshit. Imperial measurements are only “easier” for people who are not likely to need to worry about using them for many more years – because they won’t be around. The main protagonists in all this are old fossils who hate Johnny Foreigners, and who were brought up using the Imperial system. They represent the past, not the future. The woman in the picture below is the archetypal anti-metric idiot (apologies for the stereotyping, but some people make it just too easy).

I can assure you that, having been in the first generation involved when the switch to metric was made, doing maths using an antiquated multi-base system – and one where the bases were variously 4, 8, 12, 14, 16, 20, etc. – was no fun at all. Doing maths in base 10 was much easier, and it meant that instead of pissing about with over-complicated fundamentals, you could start learning serious stuff.

Why have a system where there are 12 inches to a foot, and three feet to a yard, and where the basic unit of the inch was split into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds, and so? You had thous, inches, feet, yards, chains, furlongs, miles, leagues, fathoms, cables, nautical miles, links, and rods.

Having a metre consisting of 100 centimetres makes much more sense. And splitting each centimetre into tenths (1 millimetre), hundredths, thousandths, and so on makes calculations using the metric units inherently easier. And it extends naturally to volume and area.

It was the same with pounds (weight). The basic pound, or lb, consisted of 16 ounces (oz). But there were 14lbs to a stone (st). Then you had the hundredweight (cwt) – which is 112lbs or 8st in the UK, but 100lb in the US (so the names “short hundredweight” and “long hundredweight” have to be employed). The US doesn’t use stones. But the different cwt weights then mean that there are both long- and short-tons, since a ton in the UK is 2240lb, but in the US it’s 2000lb. And right down the bottom end you had grains and drachms. A grain was 1/7000th of a lb, a drachm was 1/256th lb, an ounce (oz) was 1/16th lb, there were 14lbs to a st, 28lbs to a quarter, 112lbs in a cwt, and then the ton.

For liquids, you have even greater differences between the UK and US measures. A UK pint is 34.7 cubic inches, but a US pint is 28.9 cubic inches. Therefore, a US gallon is 231.2 cubic inches, whereas the UK gallon is 277.4 cubic inches. Then you had gills, quarts, and pecks. And minims, scruples, and drachms, Let’s not even go into dry measures, with bushels.

Historically, many countries have used some or all of these units, but even in the UK the actual definition has changed several times. Indeed, many American definitions are older historical ones that would have applied in the UK at one time or another. It seems that just about every king we ever had filled up his favourite barrel and then decreed that it was the standard unit for something or other. Even when it was just about to be scrapped, the Imperial system had the Imperial pound, the a Avoirdupois pound, and the Troy pound. There were some others used by merchants, too.

Several Imperial measurements had various kinks and corrections that had to be applied somewhere (e.g. the fathom, which was regarded as being 6 feet, when it was in fact 1/1000 of a nautical mile – so actually 6.08 feet).

The Imperial system was – and still is – a God-awful mess and it’s place is on the scrapheap of history. It was nothing like the panacea being suggested by these out of date idiots.

The Brexit campaign has officially dumped its pre-referendum claim that leaving the EU would immediately free up £350,000,000 for the NHS. Irrespective of retrospective semantics, that’s what they were telling the monkey-with-the-vote on the run up.

Ironically – or perhaps not – this comes on the same day the NHS announced that it is at “tipping point” as far as funding goes.

Meanwhile, the GBP remains 10% down on its pre-referendum level (notwithstanding a handful of biased news reports announcing its “recovery” every time it goes up by a few tenths of a US cent, even though those are invariably followed by a similar fall).

You will recall (unless you were one of the prats taken in by it) that this £350m which was used to pay for our EU membership would immediately be freed up and channelled into the NHS instead if you voted Brexit. This, along with the implied promise of ritual bonfires containing millions of immigrants, was enough to secure your vote.

How cheaply that was bought in the end, eh? Both claims were totally wrong, and you fell for it.

This news report on the BBC website reports that he government is to “guarantee post-EU funds”. People shouldn’t get too excited, though that is naturally going to be very difficult for the average Brexiter, who will probably orgasm when they read it.

It turns out that the EU is funding somewhere close to £4.5bn per year in  the UK.

Now, just a reminder here, but apart from being able to set fire to anyone suspected of being an immigrant and ethnically cleansing the British Isles, the second major rallying call of the Brexit camp and its troglodyte supporters was that we would save £350m by not having to pay our annual membership subs to the EU. All of that money was allegedly going to go to the NHS.

This next part is completely beyond the understanding of any Brexiter, but £4.5bn is more than TEN TIMES BIGGER than £350m. And at no point did ANYONE (except me, who has mentioned it several times) even consider the loss of EU funding and its wider effects.

Since Brexit was unexpected, no contingency had been considered for the loss of funding, and it is only now that we come to it. The report says that the Treasury will cover all funding which has already been granted, and all agricultural funding up until 2020. Ironically, UK companies can still apply for EU funding while the UK is still a member, though any grants would not be covered by the Treasury if we subsequently left.

A few idiots – one of whom is the President of the Royal Society – have “welcomed” the plan, instead of opposing Brexit. Fortunately, Scotland is still playing with a full deck, and the Finance Secretary has said:

[the announcement]…”falls far short” of what is needed… A limited guarantee for some schemes for a few short years leaves Scotland hundreds of millions of pounds short of what we would receive as members of the EU.

Yes. And that applies to Northern Ireland, Wales, and England. Why can’t people see that unless we keep up the funding, it will be a disaster when it ends – and here’s another thing you heard from me first: when it ends, like it will have to, it may well be in the middle of a catastrophic recession borne out of Brexit.

Trying to pay grants and subsidies by pretending we’re still in the EU has a much better modus operandi – STAY IN THE EU FOR REAL.

While we’re on the subject, this is the closing GBP vs USD price this week.

We’re at $1.29 – almost a new low – and unless the report above is designed to hold it steady and it works, when the markets open again on Monday the trend is clearly downwards. All those minor rises since Brexit have occurred as a result of various attempts to hold the GBP steady, and all have only worked for a short time because the overwhelming force is down.

I think we’ll see a slight recovery on Monday as a result of this announcement. But how long for is anyone’s guess.

WE ARE BETTER OFF IN THE EU THAN OUT OF IT.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Where is this extra £4.5bn going to come from? Who will suffer as a result?