Brexit - the end of the beginning - the negotiations begin

Who called you that?

I object to being called bigoted and brain dead! How rude! I want to be ruled by my own government not one I didn't vote for in Brussels! I have lived in a dozen other countries and value the U.K democracy. More people voted with me to Leave than Remain. Is that all you can offer? Name calling?

Sadly, we are as roadkill after Brexit, and the vultures are circling already.
Big business will offer us jobs but only if we use their regulations, and we will have no choice...no change, no jobs. . Workers rights will be taken apart, farms will be decimated and will become mega intensive farms.
But it's ok, we'll have blue passports back, and something called "sovereignty"
Which no one seems able to explain.....Sorry if I seem totally fed up, but really can't see this turning out well at all!

There was a cartoon I saw, can't remember where, with a man reading a list of how much it costs to leave the EU, and then saying '"Much like gym membership, then."

MargaretX
I hope I've never given the impression that I dislike Europe, especially Germany.
I have visited every country in Europe and Germany comes high on the list of favourite.
What I do dislike with a passion is the European Union.

Sad rather than furious - they have got used to our whining ways and will be missing that!

But we won't 'mention the war' as Basil Fawlty used to say.

Actually Germany made two terrible mistakes Margaret

That was the least of our worries about the EU.????????

This has been an interesting half an hour reading this thread especially as I live in Germany and don't recognise the country I live in (and now love) in some of the comments.

Some Brexiteers have a lot of anger showing in their posts
and some of the language is disgusting.
No doubt I shall get some thrown at me now.

All the contracts in the EU were signed by the Uk and a lot of it was thought out by the UK. It is quite simple:
The Uk can leave but has to fullfill the rules it signed up to. How can you expect a different method?
You can't just leave, just like you can't just get a divorce. The Uk's behaviour can not be at the expense of the other EU members.
Why should we pay for the administration of this difficult seperation?

As for Germany it always was a great nation, famous for its science and engineering and cultural life and it is so again and probably always will be. It made a terrible, unforgivable mistake but has done all it can to make reparations and still makes them and it costs millions. The present generations are not to blame.

Each German working,also pays from his salary or wages, money to the reconstruct the East. They have been paying for 20 years
understandably they don't want to pay for the UK to leave but think the UK should pay their own divorce bills.

As for this Greek man (I forget or can't spell his name) i saw him on talk shows here and he is a millionaire with a German wife who just likes to be in the spotlight and lives from that. So I am not surprised he has chimed in again- stirring up trouble like he did before.

The UKs independent factchecking charity. Is where I read the information. The other countries we export more too, are very small. it's all very tricky. Politicians can skew anything they say to the point of view they want to put across. So we can only go on stats, who we believe and life experience.

Apart from David Miliband...

Nobody ever really believed the bent bananas and cucumbers myth - did they?

By the way, bananas have nothing to do with the EU. Ask daphne.

They are not furious we are leaving. They are sad and sorry for us.
However, they will stand up for their own union and do things by the book.

Would someone.....anyone.....go and tell all the migrants who have come here, and risk life and limb to come here that we are "only a tiny island" and that after Brexit we shall all be in the suds and it is not worth their while coming.. please? At the same time could they tell our scientists in and around Cambridge who are doing wonderful things that they are an irrelevance. Also tell the commonwealth that we are very bad peoples and not to trade with us, ignoring the fact that one country which left has now applied to rejoin it. Why do you all look on the glass as half empty all the time? Give our people credit for what they have done and can do. Maybe we shall have farmers growing crops in fields to feed us instead of being paid set aside in order to protect the French farmer. Maybe bent cucumbers and bananas will no longer be thrown away, life is what you make it, if you look for doom and gloom you will find it. And a parting thought, if we are such a dead loss why are they so furious we are leaving?

Lyndie, it will hurt them but not as much as it will hurt us. Boris etc. worked on the basis that they wouldn't cut off their nose to spite their face. But I think he underestimated the terrible fear they have of other eurosceptic parties in EU countries being in a position to point to a leaver like us getting a good deal. What would it do for Le Pen, that 5Star clown in Italy, and all the others breathing down the necks of the Europhile parties, if they could say " look at the British. They left and have lost nothing other than control by the Eurocrats". Their currency would shoot through the roof in a heartbeat. Juncker & Co can't accept the political risks involved in giving us a good deal.
Having said that I still have some hopes. If all the elections go substantially in favour of EU friendly parties, maybe they J & co will get a little less paranoid.

Maizie, if May wins the election we may have the chance to find out how we can manage without the countries of the empire and the EU.

Oh, apologies, Lindie. Misread your post. But I'd like to see comparative figures. Have you a link.

And what about the other 6 EU countries which presumably we export more to than we import from?

Mazie, no, it was Britain's engineering and commercial genius that sparked the industrial revolution, and yes, the empire was a great market for the goods we produced.

Lyndie

We import from 27 other EU countries. Each country's 'share' of our total imports will be much smaller than the 44% we export to the EU. Loss of 1/27th share of exports to the UK isn't going to bother countries as much as our potential (as estimated by experts, I'm afraid) loss of 10 - 15% of our current EU exports.

We may have been the first country to industrialise, Fitzy, but that was, to a certain extent, because of the Empire. We had the raw materials and the market, so, how could we get goods made faster and more cheaply and make more profit... I think that had we been serving just the home market we would probably not have industrialised so fast.

But that doesn't invalidate my point that it was Empire that enabled us to punch far, far above our weight.

We import more from 21 EU countries than we export to them. I think that's a good bargaining tool.

Mazie the empire certainty helped but let's give ourselves some credit for being the first country to industrialise - and that was after being first to undergo an agrarian revolution. Britain was the workshop of the world - not just its empire - in the mid 19th Century.
Not sure what this has to do with the subject in hand, but I always enjoy a nice history break!

DJ I didn't say rich countries had not contributed to poverty through colonialism, or that there were still not a lot of people in terrible poverty. But of course you know I didn't. But here are a few links:
www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/10/04/world-bank-forecasts-global-poverty-to-fall-below-10-for-first-time-major-hurdles-remain-in-goal-to-end-poverty-by-2030
amp.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/17/aid-trade-reduce-acute-poverty

m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/6212494