MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
The German Lady replies to PM May: “no negotiations based on cherry picking”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has stepped up pressure on Theresa May over Brexit by saying that the European Union must consider limiting UK access to the single market if it fails to accept free movement of EU citizens. The chancellor repeated her mantra that there must be no negotiations based on “cherry picking” of the Union’s four freedoms of movement for capital, goods, services and people. Read full article
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Disclaimer & comment rulesBye bye Europe!
Jan 11th, 2017 - 10:32 am - Link - Report abuse -2Many Brazilians are coming to the UK with forged Portuguese documentation, we should train translators to detect the difference in pronunciation and weed out the real Portuguese who at the moment can come to the UK.
Jan 11th, 2017 - 03:10 pm - Link - Report abuse -1I would have thought that the position of the Prime Minister is quite clear. As a citizen and a voter, I can say that she has a mandate for Britain to leave the EU and every one of its institutions. The democratic majority of Britons were asked and made a decision. We reject rule by Brussels. We reject the loss of sovereignty. We insist on allowing only those we want into our country. We insist on forging our own path. As we have done, successfully, for more than a thousand years.
Jan 11th, 2017 - 03:26 pm - Link - Report abuse +1And Merkel is hardly one to talk. When was she elected to govern the EU? And she cares so much for it that she has ridden roughshod over its agreements and laws. Why isn't Italy in front of the ECJ for breaching the Dublin Agreements? Same goes for France. Same goes for Germany.
The EU may well try to make things difficult for Britain. By my count, there are more countries interested in bilateral trade agreements with Britain, including some EU members, than there are members of the EU. And the number of potential consumers makes the EU's 435 million look paltry. Perhaps Britain will make things difficult for the EU!
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a tariff free Mercedes Benz?
Jan 11th, 2017 - 04:33 pm - Link - Report abuse +2My friends all drive tariff free Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So Lord, won't you buy me a tariff free Mercedes Benz?
....d'oh!
Golfcronie - the same thing is happening with Hispanoamericanos. The problem is that the immigration officers are quite incapable of discerning the different accents and the clear differences between indigenous south and central americans and, for example, Spaniards from, say, Cataluña or Andalusia.
Jan 11th, 2017 - 07:18 pm - Link - Report abuse 0@golfcronie & gordo1
Jan 11th, 2017 - 09:17 pm - Link - Report abuse +1It wouldn't help much if they could tell the accents apart. Just because someone has a Brazilian or American accent doesn't mean they don't have Portuguese or Spanish citizenship, just as having, say, a Jamaican accent does not prove someone is not a British citizen.
the British knew their choice, stopping all immigration at the cost of being 16% poorer as a nation. Or staying at their current GDP while having to accept migrants, they chose the former, that's fine. But they now should pay the 16% poverty rate. And the EU must surely follow through and take away the UK's banking passport and introduce 35% tariffs on all their products. The pound should also be made illegal currency to exchange within the EU nations, all such transactions should be made within the UK and have that country absorb the costs (since currency exchange at the retail level is a cost).
Jan 11th, 2017 - 11:38 pm - Link - Report abuse -1The immigration to the UK will go down naturally just by it becoming a poorer country, and the increasing view by immigrants that the country is xenophobic and racist.
Demon Tree. At least the immigration officers would take more care and looking in more detail at their forged papers.Did I not mention forged papers in my first post? We know that there are many forged papers in circulation, because many nationalities want to come to the UK to better there lives.
Jan 12th, 2017 - 12:22 am - Link - Report abuse 0@FC
Jan 12th, 2017 - 12:06 pm - Link - Report abuse 0I reckon most of the out voters didn't believe they'd have to pay that price. But whatever it turns out to be, we'll be paying it anyway.
Your other suggestions are absurd. The UK will be paying the same tariffs as any other country, such as Argentina. It would be illegal to charge us extra. And businesses only change currency when it can make them a profit. Banning currency exchange would mean tourists spending less money, a massive own goal.
@golfcronie
Maybe, but wouldn't it be better to train them to recognise forgeries? In any case, I'm not sure it's worth doing anything about. Immigration from Spain and Portugal to the UK is not that significant, and these fakers must be a small subset of that. There are a lot more British immigrants in Spain than vice versa.
Toby...some info I just read..
Jan 12th, 2017 - 05:07 pm - Link - Report abuse 0“One of the key principles of the WTO Agreements is non-discrimination in trade relations. This means that WTO members are not allowed, for example, to charge different tariffs on goods imported from different countries except in clearly defined and limited circumstances. Thus, following Brexit and assuming for the sake of argument that no trade agreement were reached between the UK and the r-EU, the r-EU would apply its standard external tariff rates to imports from the UK but would not be allowed to discriminate by charging higher rates to the UK than to other non-EU countries. Similarly, the UK would apply its standard external tariffs to imports from the r-EU. ”
Also The UK would be under no obligation to maintain its tariffs at the same level as it is currently obliged to impose under the EU customs union. In many cases EU tariffs are set at high levels in order to protect industries in other parts of the EU where the UK has little or no domestic industry to protect, such as textiles and clothing, shoes and many kinds of heavily protected agricultural produce. In these cases the UK receives no benefit but pays twice over for the privilege of protecting foreign industries from lower cost competition in the world market: our consumers pay higher prices than they need for the products concerned, and on top of that and to add insult to injury, we have to hand over the tariffs collected at our ports to the EU as part of its so-called “own resources”.
http://www.lawyersforbritain.org/int-trade.shtml
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