BREXIT: Planning for No Deal.

POGS, as has been stated on this forum any number of times, it was the Labour party conference that set the present policy on Brexit. That was (amongst other things) that the party should campaign for a general election as first priority. Failing that, a second referendum should be sought as an alternative.

Therefore, should a general election come about, a recall party conference is to be held to discuss and agree the manifesto, and that would include the policy on Brexit.

However, the labour party National executive is now in discussion with the conference standing orders committee in regards to holding a one day recall party conference in the very near future to "update" the policy on Brexit

That stated, a poll in the last few days demonstrated that many Labour voters in its heartland constituencies are stating they would not support the party in the future if it sets its policy towards having a second referendum.

That is the dilemma that Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party and this country faces as a whole.

I still don't think they will agree to another vote, not for ideological reasons but because each MP will be frightened to choose which way to campaign. They will all be too worried about what their constituents think or whether they won't get the next ministerial job. Cynical me? Too right.

I am confused as to Labours position and even more so after watching Keir Starmer on Andrew Marr this morning.

An example would be Labour are still hoping for a General Election but he would not / could not / cannot say if Labour would be a Remain / Leave Party.

At one time he said he thinks there would be a need for an '
' Irish Backstop ' yet he has castigated May for her Deal for having a ' Backstop '.

He spent most of his time repeating the Labour Mantra and dismissing Theresa May but said nothing about Labours position.

How can the UK hold a Snap General Election when our Parliamentarians are posturing and asking the public to vote on no more information now than in 2017 where their parties stand?

At least in 2017 we had manifestos but they proved to be a load of crap as they seem to think the public haven't noticed they have been a bunch of hypocrites who have disregarded them.

Why should the voting public believe any of them when only a few stick to the manifesto pledges they stood on?

The car industry is having a major overhaul totally irrespective of Brexit.

The majority of the job losses are due to a slow down in the Chinese market and the switch from “dirty diesel” cars to electric and hybrid vehicles.

" varian he is only an expert.. what does he know? "
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"what do you as a "no deal" leader say to the tens of thousands who will undoubtedly lose their jobs in the vehicle manufacturing industry."
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I have just finished watching Sunday Politics Midlands and I found this interesting.

Obviously Theresa Mays Deal came up and the how the 2 MP's speaking on the programme voted.

Labour MP Jess Phillips voted ' AGAINST ' Mays Deal.

Tory MP Mike Wood who is associated with the ERG Group voted ' FOR ' Mays Deal.

Jess Phillips at one point used Jaguar Land Rover jobs to give a reason why she voted ' AGAINST ' the deal.

Mike Wood MP made a valid point about using the car industry jobs as a reason to vote ' AGAINST ' Mays Deal as he said something along the lines of if Jaguar Land Rover jobs were at the forefront on the mind of MP's who voted ' AGAINST ' Mays Deal why did they ignore the letter sent to them from the Chief Executive of Jaguar Land Rover , RALF SPETH . asking them to vote ' ' FOR ' Mays Deal.

Happy to be corrected .

It doesn’t seem likely the andycameron69 will get his “no deal” utopia, there is a majority in parliament against that, so at least MPs are marginally more intelligent than the man in the street.
Eventually there will be a deal, a lot of Brexiteers won’t like it, tough, we will still be in the customs union regulated be EU rules without any say, and paying for the privelege too, a great achievement!

I voted for an MEP to represent me in the EU parliament. That is democratic. andycameron do you have a brother called Dave ???

Thanks for that varian he put it very well and easy to understand. Unfortunately I doubt that the people who still need to understand will listen. You only have to listen to the opening words on World at One from Sunderland the other day to realise that there are people who have no idea. He said something along the lines of - we had a vote and I thought we would leave a few days later! 18 minutes into the programme a business owner said he didn't realise all the implications when he voted leave and that it would be terrible if Nissan was affected. He imported most of the parts for his business so recognised he would be affected but he would still vote leave because somehow we would get over it. I've paraphrased based on my memory of the interview but I think this is a fair representation of what was said. Should we really leave with a vague idea that we will get over it? Would you buy any unsuitable product and hope it would work? No, so why vote, whichever way, without giving serious thought to the implications.

andycameron69, and what do you as a "no deal" leader say to the tens of thousands who will undoubtedly lose their jobs in the vehicle manufacturing industry.

Almost all the leading car producing companies have stated that they will build all new models within the EU if tariffs and bureaucracy affect their operations in Britain. With that industry now in swift transition to producing electrically powered vehicles, the move to European production could now happen very quickly.

Other industries and professions could also be affected similarly to the above. So, what do you say to all those that work in those industries and facing the loss of their jobs andycameron69 or any other "no deal" leaver who cares to respond?

a no deal is the only way of us actually leaving horrid unelected EU. I will celebrate this as it is what the majority voted for, Democracy must respect the majority vote.

Could Bob the cabbie possibly be just a wee bit guillible? _(perhaps we should go to the guillible thread)

varian he is only an expert.. what does he know?

Bob the cabbie from Southend said on the street interview on TV that Britain was ok before so it'll be ok again!

Anand Menon is Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King's College London in the United Kingdom and was appointed in January 2014 as director of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative. He was a special adviser to the House of Lords EU committee. He was on last week's Question Time panel. He has since written-

"There are moments in life when your heart sinks. I had one last night, right at the start of my terrifying debut on Question Time. Isabel Oakeshott had just said we should leave the EU with no deal. And the audience cheered. Not a subdued, start-of-the-evening, not-quite-warmed-up cheer. But a roar. A loud one. Shit, I thought. Do I dare point out the problems with this? Because there are problems aplenty.

Metaphors matter. And Brexit has become a metaphorical cornucopia (if you see what I mean). Perhaps nowhere is this more true, and more damagingly and misleadingly so, than when it comes to the question of “no deal”.

It was never about Europe. Brexit is Britain’s reckoning with itself

When you hear the phrase, it’s natural to think of some kind of commercial exchange. So, for example, I’ve decided to trade my old car in. I take it to the garage to part-exchange it, and the person makes me an offer I can easily refuse. So I drive the old car home.

That’s a no deal, but it is absolutely not a good analogy for Brexit. In commerce, as a rule, the default outcome – the situation if no transaction takes place – is the status quo ante. No deal, no change. With Brexit, if we leave the European Union with no deal, we don’t simply carry on as before. Far from it.

What will happen instead is that a whole swathe of rules governing all manner of transactions with the EU – covering, among other things, travel, security cooperation and trade – will cease to apply. Losing chunks of law isn’t easy; pointing this out isn’t “Project Fear”. This will be disruptive, and there’s no point claiming otherwise. Thinking, “Sod it, it’s been almost three years, let’s just leave” is fair enough, but be aware of what it means.

And, yes, the government is trying to put in place plans to minimise disruption. But let’s be clear about these. The fact we’re planning to park lorries that previously would have been moving is not avoiding disruption, it’s managing it. And there is simply not enough time for the government to make all the preparations – infrastructure, hiring staff etc – it needs to.
Insofar as no deal is something that can be planned for, moreover, it’s not enough for us to do it alone. The EU member states have to do it, too. And, yes, the EU has put in place some contingency plans. But again, not only are these limited, but they are designed, not unreasonably, to minimise upheaval on the other side of the Channel. Plans to keep planes in the air make sense, but don’t be surprised that these don’t include provisions to allow British Airways the same rights as before. And the EU 27 have reserved the right to withdraw these measures at any time.

Which brings us to another, possibly more important, limitation of the deal metaphor. This is politics, not commerce. And politics is, sometimes, about more than the bottom line. Yes, no deal will hurt the EU, too. But not only do they know it will hurt us more, but they seem willing (not keen, just willing) to tolerate whatever harm it does them."

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/18/cheering-no-deal-question-time-brexit

Thank you for putting that article forward Nonnie from The Economist. It was very interesting.
Maybe the only way forward with this mess is to listen more & try to be better informed.

What Trading On WTO Rules Actually Means: An Expert's Alarming Explanation

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DIz9UTmMQk&t=264s

Thank you Nonnie. It is sometimes very helpful to post a complete article as many publications have a paywall. We can probably be pretty sure that the people who should read articles like this, and might learn a lot, are unlikely to bother, but at least you have given them the opportunity to understand another point of view.

This is what The Economist says. I've put the whole thing as you have to subscribe to read it online.

Brexit, mother of all messes
Solving the crisis will need time—and a second referendum

Print edition | Leaders
Jan 17th 2019

No plan by any modern British government has been so soundly thrashed as the Brexit deal thrown out by Parliament on January 15th. The withdrawal agreement, the centrepiece of Theresa May’s premiership, which she has spent nearly two years hammering out with the European Union, was rejected after five days’ debate by 432 votes to 202. Her own Conservative bankbenchers voted against her by three to one.

The mother of parliaments is suffering the mother of all constitutional crises (see article). Three years ago, in the biggest poll in the country’s history, Britons voted in a referendum to leave the eu. Yet Parliament, freshly elected a year later by those same voters, has judged the terms of exit unacceptable. The eu shows little willingness to renegotiate. The prime minister ploughs obdurately on. And if this puzzle cannot be solved by March 29th, Britain will fall out with no deal at all.

To avoid that catastrophe, the priority must be to ask the eu for more time. But even with the clock on their side, mps seem unlikely to agree on a solution to Brexit’s great riddle: what exit terms, if any, truly satisfy the will of the people? With every week in which mps fail to answer this question, it becomes clearer that the people themselves must decide, in a second referendum.

The rout this week was the result of two years of political misjudgment. The referendum of 2016 was won by just 52% to 48%. Yet rather than consult the defeated side, Mrs May pursued a hardline Brexit, hurriedly drawn up with a handful of advisers and calibrated to please her Conservative Party. After she lost her majority in 2017 the need to build a consensus became clearer still, but she doubled down. Even after Parliament established its right to vote on the final deal, she didn’t budge, instead trying (and failing) to frustrate Parliament’s vote by running down the clock. The doggedness that has won her many admirers now looks like pig-headedness. The prime minister’s promise after this week’s crushing defeat to work with opposition mps comes two years too late.

But the crisis is not just about poor leadership. Brexit has exposed two deeper problems. One concerns the difficulties that will face any country that tries to “take back control”, as the Leave campaign put it, in a globalised, interconnected world. If you take back the right to set your own rules and standards, it will by definition become harder to do business with countries that use different ones. If you want to trade, you will probably end up following the rules of a more powerful partner—which for Britain means the eu or America—only without a say in setting them. Brexit thus amounts to taking back control in a literal sense, but losing control in a meaningful one. Leavers are right that the eu is an increasingly unappealing place, with its Italian populists, French gilets jaunes, stuttering German economy (see article) and doddery, claret-swilling uber-bureaucrats in Brussels. But they could not be more wrong in their judgment that the eu’s ominous direction of travel makes it wise for Britain to abandon its seat there.

The second essential problem Brexit has exposed concerns democracy. Britain has a long history of representative democracy, in which mps are elected by voters to take decisions on their behalf. The referendum of 2016 was a rarer dash of direct democracy, when the public decided on a matter of policy. Today’s crisis has been caused by the two butting up against each other. The referendum gave a clear and legitimate command to leave the eu. To ignore it would be to subvert the will of the people. Yet the people’s representatives in Parliament have made an equally clear and legitimate judgment that Mrs May’s Brexit deal is not in their constituents’ interests. To sideline mps, as Mrs May has all along tried to do, would be no less a perversion of democracy.

The prime minister has piled moral pressure on mps to back the deal anyway, arguing that even if they don’t much like it, it is what their constituents voted for. It is not so simple. Mrs May’s deal is not as bad as some of her critics make out, but it is far from what was promised in 2016. Ejection from the single market, the decline of industries ranging from finance to carmaking, the destabilisation of Northern Ireland and an exit bill of some $50bn: none of this was advertised in the campaign. Voters may be entirely happy with this outcome (opinion polls suggest otherwise). But there is nothing to say that the vote to leave must entail support for Mrs May’s particular version of leaving. That is why all sides can claim to represent the “real” will of the people. For mps to back a deal that they judge harmful out of respect for an earlier referendum which issued a vague instruction would be neither representative democracy nor direct democracy—it would be one doing a bad impression of the other.

The first step to getting out of this mess is to stop the clock. Because Mrs May’s deal is dead and a new one cannot be arranged in the ten remaining weeks, the priority should be to avoid falling out on March 29th with no deal, which would be bad for all of Europe and potentially disastrous for Britain. If Mrs May will not ask for an extension, Parliament should vote to give itself the power to do so. This desperate measure would up-end a long convention in which government business takes precedence over backbenchers’. But if the prime minister stays on the road to no deal, mps have a duty to seize the wheel.

With more time, perhaps a deal might be found that both Parliament and the eu can agree on. Either a permanent customs union or a Norwegian-style model (which this newspaper endorsed a year ago as the least-bad version of Brexit) might squeak through. But both would demand compromises, such as Britain relinquishing the right to sign its own trade deals or maintaining free movement, that contradict some Leave campaign promises.

That is why the path to any deal, whether Mrs May’s or a revamped one, must involve the voters. The give and take that Brexit requires mean that no form of exit will resemble the prospectus the public were recklessly sold in 2016. It may be that voters will accept one of these trade-offs; it may be they will not. But the will of the people is too important to be merely guessed at by squabbling mps. Parliament’s inability to define and agree on what the rest of the country really wants makes it clearer than ever that the only practical and principled way out of the mess is to go back to the people, and ask.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline

POGS rude muchly!

Varian
Are you going to post the same thing every day or just Thursday and Friday?

Philip Hammond told business leaders that the “threat” of a no-deal Brexit could be taken “off the table” within days and potentially lead to Article 50 “rescinded”, a leaked recording of a conference call reveals.

The Chancellor set out how a backbench Bill could effectively be used to stop any prospect of no deal. He suggested that ministers may even back the plan when asked for an “assurance” by the head of Tesco that the Government would not oppose the motion.

He claimed next week’s Bill, which could force the Government to extend Article 50, was likely to win support and act as the “ultimate backstop” against a no-deal Brexit, as a “large majority in the Commons is opposed to no deal under any circumstances”.

A recording of the call, passed to The Daily Telegraph, recounts how the Chancellor, Greg Clark, the Business Secretary, and Stephen Barclay, the Brexit Secretary, spent nearly an hour talking to the leaders of 330 leading firms.

They included the heads of Siemens, Amazon, Scottish Power, Tesco and BP, all of whom warned against no deal.

premium.telegraph.co.uk/newsletter/article3/exclusive-philip-hammond-tells-business-chiefs-mps-will-stop-no-deal-brexit/?WT.mc_id=e_DM924391&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_Edi_New_Reg&utm_source=email&utm_medium=Edi_Edi_New_Reg_2019_01_18&utm_campaign=DM924391

If we cannot stop this madness , after Brexit the UK will need to renegotiate at least 759 treaties ...

Research by the Financial Times reveals that agreements with 168 countries must be redone just for Britain to stand still.

www.ft.com/content/f1435a8e-372b-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0fd2e

Either way, the no deal threat is still costing millions of pounds both here and in Europe, which I find disgraceful. I also think it would be more statesmanlike of Corbyn to actually speak to the PM rather than go round making demands.

Philip Hammond told business leaders that the “threat” of a no-deal Brexit could be taken “off the table” within days and potentially lead to Article 50 “rescinded”, a leaked recording of a conference call reveals.

The Chancellor set out how a backbench Bill could effectively be used to stop any prospect of no deal. He suggested that ministers may even back the plan when asked for an “assurance” by the head of Tesco that the Government would not oppose the motion.

He claimed next week’s Bill, which could force the Government to extend Article 50, was likely to win support and act as the “ultimate backstop” against a no-deal Brexit, as a “large majority in the Commons is opposed to no deal under any circumstances”.

premium.telegraph.co.uk/newsletter/article3/exclusive-philip-hammond-tells-business-chiefs-mps-will-stop-no-deal-brexit/?WT.mc_id=e_DM924391&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_Edi_New_Reg&utm_source=email&utm_medium=Edi_Edi_New_Reg_2019_01_17&utm_campaign=DM924391

David wanting a cake and eat it deal is childlike because it is not, and never will be, available. Those people said we could have it but have not admitted that it was all lies and, unfortunately, many people believed it and still do.

We need a media which examines all claims and tells us what is genuine and what is pie in the sky but we don't have that. They want to give equal weight to all arguments but I think they go too far in being 'fair' and not emphasizing which claims are true and which are plainly untrue.

No shortage of controversy on Gransnet either way only a fool wants “no deal”.
But there are plenty that want a cake and eat it deal, including Boris, JRM and the Brexit extremists.