Europe must rediscover 'its own identity, its own unity', says Pope Francis

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A customs Union probably means the Union is preserved. A Hard Brexit means Sturgeon will win another independence referendum handily.

Without the backstop, whatever path NI takes will mean a flaring up of violence. The haters of the EU here and elsewhere seem to be completely unaware or entirely indifferent to what a Hard Brexit will mean. It’s a triumph of empty ideology over rationality and fact.

And we haven’t even talked about the effects of a hard border on British agriculture, industry and commerce. The loss of the City’s frictionless access to European markets alone will be devastating, and will diminish the UK as one of the world’s major financial centers.
 
But it’s fine because apparently the EU was mean to Poland after it weakened the judiciary.
 
So, you’re saying that Norway and Switzerland are just as subject to EU central authority as anyone else, but are just not formal members?
 
Yes, ultimately they are. To gain the easy access to the common market, they have to abide by a considerable number of EU laws and regulations. The reason Hard Brexiteers don’t want Norway++ is because it effectively means Britain still has to abide by most of the rules.
 
So the hard brexiters want to participate in the common market but not abide by its regulations?
 
By the way, Norway is a member of the Schengen Area so reviled by Hard Brexiteers.
 
Are you saying that if, say, the EU decided to ban, e.g., kitchen knives beyond a certain length, Norway would have to obey it too?
 
I can’t imagine such a dictate (so I’m going to call this an argumentum ad absurdum), but yes, for access to the common market, they have to abide by EU market rules. And it contributes financially to the EU as well.

Here’s a basic breakdown of the Norway model:

www.bbc.com

Brexit: What is the Norway model?

The UK prime minister is in Norway and Brexit is bound to come up.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
 
In order to avoid paying the tariffs non-EU are subject to, Norway has to pay a tax to the EU? Maybe that tax is less than the tariffs would be?

And it sounds like Norway’s freedom of action is curtailed in most things, as it is subject to EU legislation in all but a few things.

Switzerland, it sounds like, has individual agreements with member EU states.

And all of this, it appears, is to avoid barriers to trade. If you want few or no barriers to your trade, you have to accept whatever people the EU wants you to take in, as well as laws relating to abortion, homosexual marriage and that sort of thing, it appears. Right now, the EU selection of your population includes a lot of people from the Middle EAst and North Africa, some of whom are a hazard to the indigenous population.

Seems like a stiff price to me. But as Poland and Italy seem to have decided, it’s worth it to them.
 
Do you think that’s the only reason why some Europeans don’t like the influx? Perhaps it is even for most, but I think the violence and the effect on wages would be a significant part of it.

We in the U.S. have a major influx of illegal immigrants, probably almost none of whom are Muslims. But many don’t like being told they have to compete with them for jobs or that they have to put up with MS-13 next door.
 
niceatheist said:
And we haven’t even talked about the effects of a hard border on British agriculture, industry and commerce
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They obviously don’t care about any of this though, or how it affects the poorest Brits.

All that matters to them is that a wafer thin margin on behalf of an undeliverable agenda in a non-binding referendum that broke electoral financing laws and was achieved by fraud and wanton disinformation, is railroaded through in a manner that breaks everything voters were promised and decimates the British economy without voters having the right to decide if they still want to pursue this now that we know what it does and doesn’t mean, because all that matters is Britain becoming an independent, sovereign nation free from the tyranny of Brussels bureacrats with their paperclips and filing cabinets keeping us in chains.

It’s fiercest advocates - who claimed that their campaign was about British parliamentary sovereignty against Brussels executive fiat - are now calling for UK parliamentary democracy to be suspended so that this project of creative self-destruction and delusion can be unilaterally enforced, thus resulting in Britain’s first period of executive rule without parliament since the civil war.

It’s a huge, humiliating, wasteful, dangerous mess that is now set to upend and subvert the UK constitution and fan the flames of separatism within our country, and nothing anyone says to the contrary on this forum changes that in the least.

There are absolutely no tangible benefits to be derived from Brexit, only variable degrees of damage limitation. Even one of its most trenchant supporters, Brexit Party MEP Anne Widdecombe, has said that a no-deal Brexit “wouldn’t be as bad as WW2” in terms of what the public will have to endure to reach those sunny uplands of kipperdom.
 
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Nah, we are still every bit as entitled as we always have been to our proud heritage of being the unhealthiest country in Europe.
 
Abortion legalization is not mandated by the EU.

It’s becoming abundantly clear you know very little about the EU.
 
Even though I am American as you know my family origins are Irish and I’ve long suspected the lack of garlic or any seasoning other than salt or pepper on our family table growing up derived from that Inherited Irishness.
 
Ridgerunner said:
as well as laws relating to abortion, homosexual marriage and that sort of thing, it appears.
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The EU has no competence in family law, as I’ve told you so many times before.

Passing legislation on abortion or same-sex marriage is not within it’s remit but is reserved to national determination, and differs widely across the EU accordingly.
 
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Frankly the American “eurosceptics” here know little about Europe, and have constructed a strawman version to battle the American culture war.
 
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It’s insane how often I’ve found myself reiterating this banal but irrefutable element of European Union law, and tedious in the extreme how often it is blithely ignored.

These are not issues that the EU may legislate on.

https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/kslreuropeanlawblog/?p=292#.XPhub5Ao-yU
Abortion is clearly a matter of national competence and it is not a right defined within the context of Union law. Thus, it falls within the margin of appreciation of the Member States and it should be concluded that the EU has no competence in this area either under the previous Treaty provisions or the current amendments introduced by the Lisbon Treaty.
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As for gay marriage, the drafters of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights shared the same view. In the Explanations Relating to the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the article providing the right to marry (Article 9) “neither prohibits nor imposes the granting of the status of marriage to unions between people of the same sex”.

There is no debate about this, it’s crystal clear legally.

I cannot even attribute it to ignorance at this point given my ridiculous, mantra-like restatement of the facts.
 
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It’s powers are clearly demarcated and limited constitutionally, and every power it has reserved has been accorded to it by the member states through treaty reform over the decades.

It didn’t aggregate these powers by itself. The member states simply decided, by unanimity, that xyz needed to be dealt with at the supranational rather than national level of competence.
 
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It’s my view that this group of Americans don’t really care what the EU is, how it makes laws, what it’s areas of competence are. It’s useful in right wing invective as a line of attack on American Liberals; as in “oh so-and-so wants to make America like that evil EU!”

To have a debate with someone here about the merits of the EU, and for them to ask questions that indicate they know absolutely nothing about the EU is both sad and frightening.
 
Unfortunately for those doing the repeating, the act of repeating the claim often enough cannot change its undeniable falsity.
 
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