New EU Treaty - a good deal or not?

Goodness me. Such angst!

It will all be fine

We are here very fleetingly. The next generation will do their thing.

And I wanted to stay.

But we voted to leave

I accept this

We might like to think we're all hugely important but we're not

This is a moment in history.

It will be forgotten

No matter what a bunch of grans say!

It seems the Erasmus scheme actually gave U.K. a net gain - it paid students from a joint EU fund a bursary of €400 a month. It will be interesting to see what the new scheme will be and where the students will be able to study.

Sigh. I did not mean that we should return to the 1950s re universities. I meant that universities and students have exchanged throughout Europe (and beyond) long before the EU came about.

Well done Boris ???????? Really????? I despair.

Just listening to talk about a united Ireland on the BBC news. We won’t be bothered about Europe as we’ll have too much internal U.K. politics going on.

As I thought, he's waited until the last minute so that the Brits can have a happier Christmas than the one predicted. Throughout the land glasses will be raised to congratulate Johnson.

At least it's reasonable news for business. Rather better than WTO rules.

I don’t know anyone who will be raising a glass to a Johnson.

Well you do now Nezumi

It’s done now.
Unless you’re a fisherman or in the import/export business, what more is there to keep going on about?
Definitely time to move on.
I know some people could talk about brexit until their dying day, but hopefully on social media it will be talked about less & less. Absolutely no one I know talks about it in RL.

And here’s another one, second glass actually.?

Cheers LauraNorder ?

Andrew Bailey, the new Governor of the Bank of England, appointed by Johnson, told us that the damage which would be done to the UK economy by a no-deal brexit would be twice as bad as the damage done by the pandemic.

Hurrah!!!¬! We a have a deal- a very bad deal but better than no-deal, so perhaps we can expect the damage which will be inflicted on the UK economy might only be about one and a half times as much as the damage caused by covid.

Damage limitation - yes, but hardly a cause for celebration.

Sounds as though the fishermen still aren’t happy. And UKIP are talking about how they won the ‘war’. So not not much of a change there then.

I always thought we’d get a deal.
Many naysayers thought Boris didn’t even want one - so his mates could benefit.

We got one. Yay‼️
Well done BORIS and thank you for holding fast to your election promise. Your stonking majority was testament to the feeling of the majority who turned out to vote!

??????????????▶️ ✅ ????

Correction- the minority who turned out to vote

Maybe now someone can tell me how things will get better for the average man on the street.

MayBee70

Lucca

The joy and whooping remind me of a hunt in full cry!! Hilarious reaction.

It was embarrassing in comparison to the dignified speech given by Ursula Von der Leyan but I wouldn’t have expected gravity or dignity from the PM.

I meant on here !!

No-one could tell you that Nezumi65

Things will get worse for everyone except for a tiny number of billionaire currency speculators and the vultures of disaster capitalism.

Nezumi65
I did post @ 15.37 that I had opened a lovely bottle of English sparkling wine. Cheers ???

For people who love percentages and the people’s voice etc poll after poll recently has found that people think it would have been better to stay.

I guess if we get those sunlit uplands promised then that may swing back again. If not & Northern Ireland and Scotland pull away (both have already started their campaigns) then the numbers who think we should have stayed will grow.

We’ll see over the next few year.

From a purely information point of view -
Does anyone know what is happening with the City? Nothing seems to have been sorted about that and it’s pretty important for the U.K. GDP! I can’t work out whether it’s all still to be sorted.

In 2016 about 25% of the UK population voted for brexit. Since then, quite a lot have died and others have changed their minds, so this brexit nonsense is hardly supported by more that one in five of us.

Or maybe he waited to the last moment so there's no time to scrutinise it. Basically parliament agrees to Johnson's deal, barely seen, or we have no deal.

Damage limitation - but still an utter tragedy.

This, cut & paste, tonight in The a Telegraph by James Crisp who voted Remain:

“The clock is no longer ticking,” said Michel Barnier in Brussels, finally laying to rest a metaphor he never tired of deploying against Britain.

Despite that, and occasional cross words, there is a real sense of respect between Mr Barnier and David Frost.

The two men couldn’t look more different, or think more differently about global power politics, but they share a mental toughness and determination.

There are already those who are carping that the new Brexit trade deal is a poor replacement for EU membership.

This misses the point. From the moment the UK left the EU on January 31, a zero-tariff, zero-quota trade deal was a substantial improvement on the alternative of WTO terms.

It is true that Britain has made some major concessions, notably in fishing, and some sacrifices, such as the loss of the Erasmus + student exchange programme.

But it is also true, as I argue here, that the final shape of the deal is far closer to the Canada plus that Brexiteers wanted, than the vision pushed by the EU.

Britain will have control over access to its waters in five and a half years. The European Court of Justice will have no role in British affairs. Future governments will be able to diverge from EU rules if they accept the consequences on trade with its major trading partner.

This delivers on the promises of the General Election. The deal is not perfect but compromise is in the nature of any agreement.

David Frost made sovereignty the guiding principle of his negotiating strategy, and both sides will claim victory as they begin to sell the deal to their own sides. Both sides will know that with less than a week to no deal, things could have been much worse.”

?

The loss of the European Court of Justice is a terrible thing.

Humans Rights Act will be gone next. As someone with a son whose right to a family life was broken by NHS (not hyperbole - his case was used as an example by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights as an example of a learning disabled person having their rights breached) just another example of a huge step backwards.