What next?

But why SHOULD they care about us? Apart from missing our financial contributions.
To them Brexit is just a thorn in the flesh, a waste of working hours.
They've all got their own problems anyway.

Sorry jura2. You are right but I was dashing out before!
But here it is:

“I’ve been wondering what the special place in Hell looks like for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out,” he said as he stood alongside a startled looking Leo Varadkar in Brussels today.

The incendiary comments grabbed a lot of attention, which presumably was precisely Mr Tusk’s intention.

But do the president of the European Council’s words help or hinder Theresa May in getting her Brexit deal across the line?

There was some help for the embattled Prime Minister. Mr Tusk threw those who hope for a second referendum or a volte face on Brexit under the bus.

“Today there’s no political path and no effective leadership for Remain. I say this without satisfaction but you can’t argue with the facts,” he said, decrying the pro-Brexit stance of Mrs May and Jeremy Corbyn.

The choice was now binary. It is, as Mrs May has always claimed, the Brexit deal or no deal at all.

Next came a warning for the Prime Minister and the Brexiteers desperate for changes to the Irish border backstop. It was not up for renegotiation, he said for the umpteenth time.

“We will not gamble with peace or put a sell-by date on reconciliation,” he said.

“The EU27 is not making any new offer. The Withdrawal Agreement is not open for renegotiation,” he said but he also called on Mrs May to make “a realistic suggestion on how to end the impasse”.

I agree with him.
He did not say that everyone who voted brexit deserves to go to hell. The point was that the chaos is entirely the fault of those who advocated brexit without planning and forward thinking.
I believe he is saying that the blame lies with the self-serving and the irresponsible politicians but ultimately not with the gullible voter!
No point in blaming him for saying what so many of us have thought all along!
I wish some of our politicians had had the guts to stand up and shout it out earlier.

So right mcem. I think voters on both sides of this fiasco would probably agree with him. I think his timing was deliberate, wanting to set the scene for TM. I still can't believe she hasn't got something up her sleeve because I understand she is intelligent, just haven't seen any signs yet.

By the way Tusk spoke it was clear that he was very reticence, he didn’t like say it, speaking his mind, he is clearly frustrated. TM has to get the message it’s the UKs
problem, there will be no more negotiating a better deal.

He was dead right about the Brexit leaders, there was no plan, they just thought they could bluster the EU into concessions ( and still do). All along it has been a very emotional line taken by the U.K. whereas the EU have been business like, just dealing with cold hard facts. JC is now at last coming up with some positive moves instead of sitting on the fence, maybe that will provide a breakthrough who knows.

Actually I agree with you ladies. Why should the EU help us out here? (Well apart from money & business deals which suit them as well as us).
In my opinion we negotiated this all wrong from the get go.
Theresa the Appeaser tried to be inclusive and please all the voters and ended up pleasing no one.
I don’t think she has a Plan B Nonnie, sadly. It’s her way or the highway.
We should have gone for an orderly, plannned Leave on WTO terms right at the start. We should have said to the EU you are welcome to come to London if you have any proposals you’d like to put forward in striking future deals and we’d be happy to discuss them.
Businesses, although not liking it, would have had the clarity they’ve been banging on about.
We should have had a couple of crack negotiators in the team along with civil servants to guide us through what was achievable etc.
But here we are.

Can’t wait to leave...The UK that is.
Have already ditched my UK driving licence, citizenship comes next then I can have my lovely new EU passport.

The sad fact is Tusk is right that Boris and Co. never had a plan. I do feel some sympathy for the leavers who are so blind to economic reality that they genuinely think if they wish for something hard enough, it will happen.

Que sera sera.

It’s not over yet folks.
We may yet have some leverage. Business is not the same as politics!

‘Meanwhile, the economic ramifications of a no-deal Brexit are weighing heavily on Italian business, particularly the food and drink sector, which sold €3.5 billion of goods to Britain last year.

There is deep concern for the future export of some of Italy’s most iconic products, from Parmigiano cheese to Prosecco. The thirsty Brits are the number one export market for Prosecco and winemakers are concerned that the trade will be hit hard by new tariffs. Cheese makers are worried, too – €90 million worth of Grana Padana and Parmigiano Reggiano is sold to the UK each year.

“We risk losing access to the British market to a significant degree,” warned Massimiliano Giansanti, the president of Confagricoltura, a national farmers union.’

Urmston they will still have 27 countries to export to. I am more concerned with the EU has suggestion to the 70+ countries which the EU has trade deals with give the UK the same deal as them if we agree a deal with them. Why would they give us that?

We should have gone for an orderly, plannned Leave on WTO terms right at the start

I don't know how many times trade experts have to tell us that WTO is the worst possible deal for the penny to drop. WTO is what nations fall back onto if they have no better deals. That's why they try to get away from them as fast as they possibly can. You don't do 'deals' with WTO.

And WTO does not comprehensively cover services, which are our prime export.

You're right that we should have gone for an orderly planned leave, but there was no 'plan' and the tories have been fighting about it ever since. The leave campaigners had no plan because they couldn't articulate one, much less one that they all agreed on; they took a deliberate decision not to offer any sort of plan because fighting about the different ideas they had would dilute their message. So they concentrated on negatives, heightening fears and revving up hatred for the EU (as I said in an earlier post on this thread)

This is how one of our top Civil Servants, who had considerable experience of dealing with the EU (and who May pretty rapidly sacked because his advice was unpalatable to her) recently analysed the situation:

The Institute of Economic Affairs indeed offered a large prize, once David Cameron’s Bloomberg speech had dangled the realistic prospect of a referendum to decide whether to stay or leave, to help define an agreed destination and exit path. Because they could see the looming crisis over what on earth Brexiteers could ever coalesce around both as the destination and the path to reach it.

But the winner’s model was quietly, rapidly – and, I might add, sensibly, given that it obviously did not work – buried.

And the most thoughtful sceptic attempts to map an exit route – embodied, I think, in a lengthy tome called Flexcit, which is a genuine, serious attempt at least to grapple with what insider experts knew were inordinately complex issues - were spurned by the mainstream Brexiteers, despite some brief dabbling by the likes of Owen Paterson
.
Why? I am afraid that is simple.

Because as soon as you have to define what you really DO want post Brexit, as opposed to what you don’t want, and as soon as you have to map out a genuinely viable very complex path to exiting an organisation you have been part of for 45 years, and which has inserted itself in every domain of UK life – which is exactly what you most object to about it - the unity completely fragments, and small differences about where we actually want to go become large ones

Dominic Cummings, when chairing Vote Leave, shrewdly deliberately avoided proposing any plan and focussed the entire campaign on what it didn’t want, and ensuring that resonated with the maximum number of voters who might find Brexit appealing, but would have radically different ideas of what it would deliver for them.

The last thing he, or the political leaders of the campaign, wished to do was to set out a proposed destination, and a route map to reach it.

That would have completely torn the fragile coalition apart. And it would have exposed the desirability of the destination, in comparison with a status quo with which much of the public had very good reasons to feel unhappy, to close scrutiny.

It would have been unwise to disappoint people who were prepared to vote, for very different reasons, for Brexit -and I am not disparaging either the reasons or the people, I am just saying the reasons were often mutually contradictory - by specifying a clear destination which opponents could then have dismantled. Far better to keep the destination vague and to focus the assault on that people can see they do not like about the ancien regime.

Now, you either put your trust in the knowledge and expertise of civil servants, and their professional objectivity, or you, like many Leavers I have encountered on social media, scoff at them on the grounds that they are all Remainers and disbelieve everything they say.

It's a bit rich, really, to hear a Leaver suggest that expert negotiators and top civil service advice was what was needed from the start when the Leave leaders having been shouting for the last two years that they are all traitorous Remainers.

I suggest, yet again that people read the whole lecture themselves.

www.ucl.ac.uk/european-institute/sites/european-institute/files/sir_ivan_rogers_lecture_ucl_22012019.pdf

Also, Italy has a nice new market to export their cheese and prosecco to with the deals recently made with Canada and Japan. They won't need us if they're canny about their marketing.

And, the Flexcit plan which Rogers mentions was for a staged withdrawal over a decade via a Norway type agreement. Which would have involved accepting Free Movement (which I don't think, to their credit, it's authors were at all bothered about) and EU standards and regulations.

All the leave voters who thought that they could vote Leave one day and be out of the EU the next day would have hated it.

well said urmston. great post.

We will end up leaving on no deal and WTO and I am so excited.

Is the food riots you're looking forward to, andy?

Or not being able to get life saving medicines?

Maizie you forgot being poorer, prices going up and shortages of food, probably much more as well.

lyndiloo thanks a great post from you so true.

I so identify, we just leave, end of the story.

We will thrive and prosper, and the majority of voters voted leave, so in our democracy, we must leave totally, as you say.

I look forward to that very much, we are a democracy.

I'd love to have your confidence ac. I realise it's not all over til the fat (thin) lady sings, but I'd like to go to sleep and wake up when it's all over. I really do hope that we do not suffer shortage of vital things like medicines, medical treatments and some foodstuffs. Unfortunately, it's the poor in society, not the like of the Rees Moggs, or Johnsons who will suffer any deprivations, as we are not all in this together. One thing for sure, public services couldn't get much worse.......I hope.

There already appears to be a shortage of some medicines. But hey, who cares about that when we have this bright new future ahead of us.

yes you are right, a bright new future. so true.

majority voters out, so democracy will be carried out.

The U.K. is not Venezuela MaizieD and Nonnie
Food riots?
I don’t think so.
Us Leavers will put up with some shortages if we have to and eat something else. We shan’t starve you know!

The NHS has made contingency plans regarding medicines. We have to trust the government and the much lauded civil servants to keep us safe.

We must try not to worry or overthink.

There are intelligent people who are on the Leave side too - believe it or not - not all the brainy people voted Remain. We need to have some faith and grow a backbone. If this as going to be Armageddon (for real) do you honestly believe DC would even have been allowed to call his referendum?

From the latest polls ie U Gov Jan 2019, the Leavers are now in the minority. When asked In hindsight do you think Britain was in the right or wrong to vote to leave the EU. right was 41% wrong 47%. The rest were don't knows. In 2016 people didn't know the terms we would be leaving under when they voted. There are flaws in this so called democracy of ours.

You are so trusting, Urmstongran

Cameron didn't have a clue what he was doing except that he was trying to keep the tory party together. He never expected a Leave vote. He ratted as soon as he found out his mistake and left us all to deal with the sh*tshow.

do you honestly believe DC would even have been allowed to call his referendum?

And who, pray, was going to stop him? Do you think that there is some higher authority that will stop idiotic tory Prime Ministers doing deeply stupid things?

MPs did try to make it less of a potential disaster. They tried to ensure a supermajority but they were airily informed that it was only advisory and didn't need a supermajority. Then the stupid idiot went round saying that the result was final and would be implemented.

And the really, really annoying thing is that had it been an official mandatory referendum it could have been legally overturned because of the illegalities of the Leave campaigns. But it isn't and it can't.

And if you start telling me about faith and backbones I will stop being polite. I deal in cold fact, not hopes and wishes.

We have to trust the government and the much lauded civil servants to keep us safe.

WELL, YOU DIDN'T TRUST THEM WHEN THEY SAID THAT LEAVING THE EU WAS NOT A GOOD IDEA. WTF DO YOU SUDDENLY TRUST THEM NOW?

God, you've triggered me...

Sorry MaizieD
I really am. Let’s keep this nice if we can. I hate confrontation when it gets personal.
Maybe you’re right and I am too trusting. Only time will tell.

Why didn't you trust the government and the civil servants when they were telling you that leaving the EU was not a good idea?

That's what I'd really like to know.

There's no logic to this at all.

Hey Urmston no need for that about Venezuela and me, I never suggested such a thing. Up until now I have felt that you have been really understanding about our different views so I am disappointed.

I don't share you faith, what is it based on? Hope its not blind faith.