Category: Referendum

Article 50, Brexit, British Government, Referendum, Single Market, Theresa May

Après Honda, Le #Brexit Deluge?

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog
This blog was written on Feb 19, 2019
nissan_logo_leaflet
A section from a pro-brexit referendum leaflet – it has not aged well…

I suppose that the modern equivalent of the old phrase “O that mine enemy would write a book” would roughly translate as “Just let them go ahead and Tweet that”.

For, despite the “right to be forgotten,” our tweets have a habit of following us around. Even if you delete them, someone, somewhere has them. As Terry Benedict might have said in Ocean’s 11 “On Twitter, someone is always watching”.

Sure enough, Monday last, the day the news broke that Honda intends to shutter its Swindon plant with the loss of 3,500 direct jobs, and thousands of indirect jobs, someone dug up this old, 2015 Tweet from Daniel Hannan, one of the original Brexiteers:

That idea that car manufacturers might disinvest after we leave the EU? It’s a – what’s the word? – oh yes. Lie.

That doesn’t seem to have aged well. Nissan, Ford, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) have all announced production switches or cutbacks. Now Honda.

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Article 50, Brexit, Referendum

How do you ‘just get on with doing it’ when no one can agree what ‘it’ is?

Posted on by BEERG Brexit Blog
Ths blogpost was written on January 2nd 2019.

brexit-referendum-question

As Winston Churchill might have said, but didn’t as, in that quaint American way of describing death, he has long “passed over”, we begin 2019 with the dreary steeples of Brexit emerging once again.

What Churchill actually said in 1922 was: “The whole map of Europe has been changed… but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again.”

He might well have been talking about the Irish backstop.

Weeks away from March 29th, when the UK is scheduled to leave the EU, and no one can yet say with any certainty what will happen. What an incredible position for a country like the UK to be in. In the face of the biggest constitutional, political, and economic change the country is going to make in over forty years it appears to be deadlocked over what it should do.

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