thesweetcheat wrote:
This may effectively see the end of a no-deal outcome.
More likely the end of Brexit. I said I didn't think Brexit would happen, but I didn't know the mechanism by which it would stop... this is it... boring parliamentary proceduralism.
Hey, whatever does the job, right? :-)
It's not officially the end of Brexit, of course, but I suspect it's the beginning of the end.
The question now...
... what's next?
Britain has permanently damaged its stature internationally with this farce. The various EU opt-outs and rebates that Britain enjoys were always tolerated with a shrug by the rest of Europe; they will start to seriously rankle now. Britain's poisonous tabloid media and its lies about Europe have been broadcast across the continent during brexit and eyebrows have been raised.
By any objective measure, the UK gets a better deal out of the EU than any other single nation (procedurally at least; you can make a case for Germany enjoying the biggest economic benefit; but that's not at the UK's expense). And yet it's the nation that complains loudest, acts most put-upon (though it's now in good company with Hungary, Poland and Italy on that), and talks the most shit about the rest.
What Britain needs to do is elect a German-speaking Francophile Prime Minister who is willing to go to Brussels and apologise profusely for wasting everyone's time and money during the past two years when -- frankly -- Europe had better things to worry about.
In fact, the one thing in the UK's favour here is precisely the seriousness of the other crises that face us. It's more important that we pull together now to deal with far bigger problems than brexit... the rise of populism around the world (including some EU nations), the fragmentation of old power structures (which may have been bad in themselves, but leave a vacuum, and we don't yet know what will fill it), and the real biggie; Climate Change.
But yeah; great news today and a step towards the return of sanity to the UK. There'll be plenty of backlash from Leaver-Quitters though... so there's that to look forward to.
