There are no circumstances whatsoever that the EU will give the UK a trade deal like Norway / Switzerland / Iceland / etc. without the UK paying for the EU budget and allowing free movement of people, for example. All the things that the UK population voted against are exactly what prevents them from getting a trade deal. Something will have to give.
If you want to go with the rationalist perspective you seem to be advocating, then the UK government will have to be anti-democratic and strike a deal explicitly against their citizen's declared interests.
(This vote is particularly vexing for me since I'm Irish (voted stay) and now will have to sell my house in order to leave. Quite upsetting, overall.)
People in the North are UK citizens already (and free to also get Irish citizenship). I believe they mean they're an Irish citizen living in the UK (maybe England itself) and they're worried that they might not be able to stay living there.
This is pure bullshit. Lot of the illegals cannot even read and write. They don't know the language. Most of them are also not refugees. They will be liabilities. The skilled labour from the Eastern-European countries is an asset on the other hand.
Actually robots will take away lots of jobs. Why do we need more unskilled people in our lands, when soon even the skilled labour will be automatized, and unemployment will grow further?
> Lots of the illegals cannot even read and write.
Except they can. Many Syrian refugees are proficient in English, and many even speak German. There was strong collaboration between German and Syrian universities historically.
(I'm not saying that everyone can read and write, but then again, Western societies have a surprising number of total and functional analphabets.)
And re the automation argument: Automation only takes away medium-skilled jobs. Jobs are for unskilled people because they don't require training, and that's also why they are a poor fit for robots. (Robots don't like irregular situations and need programming for new tasks, whereas you can easily explain a new task to a human worker in a few sentences.)
I always laugh at how people equate more people in a country with growing unemployment rates. If this really worried you, you would move to outlaw procreation, since procreation produces new workers to compete with you about 18 years from now.
> If this really worried you, you would move to outlaw procreation, since procreation produces new workers to compete with you about 18 years from now.
Only if the birth rate is above replacement which it isn't in any developed western country.
> The rest of Europe's countries does not have delusions of grandeur and feel disenfranchised by foreign workers making minimum wage.
There are many reasons to leave the EU, other than "delusions of grandeur" (the US seems to do pretty well..) and xenophoia. Perhaps the UK wanted to make choices without being slandered like this.
What choice? You can wish that the refugee crisis would not exist, but the choice has been made when deciding whether or not to be the 6th largest weapon exporter.
Acting like an overrun victim now is a bit schizophrenic and it's sad to see 52 percent small minded bigots pulling down a country in this way.
Riiiiiight. And in NATO, all NATO members are "equal" too, right? The US is just as important as Bulgaria, they're just "members"? Germany, where the ECB is, which is the most powerful economy in Europe, which basically controls the single European currency, is "just another country" in the EU, with an opinion that matters just as much as that of Portugal?
Yes. I am German and pro-European and I would happily take a deal that our GDP will be cut 20% if UK's GP is cut even 10% in return. Not to punish the UK, but to firmly establish the principle that leaving the EU is painful. While this might not be the optimum from an economics point of view, it serves to keep the European Union alive - which is much more important in the long run (no more war etc...).
I suspect you will find that your enjoyment of self harm is not shared by most Germans.
Not to punish the UK, but to firmly establish the principle that leaving the EU is painful
Do you realise how crazy you people sound? "There's no punishment for leaving the Mafia, you just have to understand the principle that it will be as painful as possible".
The EU has warped into an ideological disease that sees European people's turned against one another by an absolutist religion that sees diversity as a flaw to be fixed and believes its own hype about stopping wars.
The EU does nothing to stop war. If turning Europe into a single country could stop war, there'd be no civil wars, but today the only wars are civil wars.
It does not matter much if it is shared by most Germans - what matters is if it is shared by a small elite of German, French, and EU Commission/Parliament leaders. Do you really think the German population will rise up if you tell them "Hold up, discriminating against the UK in derivatives clearing rules will cost you 0.0x% of your GDP!" And to most people (outside of the UK), it is quite obvious anyway that contracts negotiated between friends cannot be transposed 1:1 into a relationship between entities who are not friends.
