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posted by janrinok on Tuesday September 06 2016, @03:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-want-a-pony-and-a-rainbow dept.

Japan's foreign ministry has taken the unusual step of publishing a very public Message to the United Kingdom and the European Union (PDF) in which it outlines how it wants Brexit to happen in order to protect the substantial investments its businesses have made in Europe and especially in the United Kingdom.

The document opens by stating that "Uncertainty is a major concern for an economy", before going on to explain that Japanese businesses that have chosen to make major investments in the UK are worried about what Brexit will mean.

"What Japanese businesses in Europe most wish to avoid is the situation in which that they are unable to discern clearly the way the Brexit negotiations are going, only grasping the whole picture at the last minute." The document therefore asks that the UK and the European Union negotiate transparently, provide lots of information about ongoing negotiations and offer decent advance warnings of any changes. Japan also hopes, fervently, that certain things don't change between Blighty and its continental pals.

High on that list is "maintaining the current level of information protection and the free transfer of data." [...] Japan also wants uniform intellectual property rights across the EU and UK and for Japanese businesses based in the UK to be able to employ Europeans. And vice-versa.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by zocalo on Tuesday September 06 2016, @05:32PM

    by zocalo (302) on Tuesday September 06 2016, @05:32PM (#398205)

    I suspect that the current PMs "plan" is still to try and find a Sir Humphrey doublethink solution where we leave without leaving (she's said "Brexit means Brexit" but she's a politician and her lips were moving).

    A lot of people on both sides are clearly starting to get impatient with "Brexit is Brexit" without even any clues as to where on the hard-to-soft exit spectrum the current train of thought lies to back it up other than some inconclusive statements about immigration, and while I do think that Theresa May actually intends to leave the EU in some as yet to be clarified form, I'm not totally convinced an end-run around it is entirely off the table either. The real issue they face, and one that has no solution, is that they cannot possibly hope to find *any* solution that is going to be acceptable to the majority of the population - in fact, the best possible result they are going to get on that score would in fact be to just drop the whole thing. Seriously.

    If you take a step back and think about the referendum question, because the Leave camp never really defined what BrExit would mean before the vote, the UK electorate was forced into a situation where many Leave voters were clearly voting for quite wildly differing and completely incompatible interpretations of what they hoped it would mean. Some undoubtedly want a hard exit with complete separation from the EU, others just wanted much more immigration control but access to the EEA (good luck with negotiating that!), others wanted an end to EU forcing legislation on the UK (technically they don't, but still), and so on. Regardless of what the end result of Article 50 might be, it's pretty much a given that in addition to those in the 48% that voted Remain and haven't changed their minds since the vote, a lot of the Leave voters are not going to like the result either; it's actually quite likely that an overwhelming proportion of the population are going to dislike some, most, or all, of the eventual deal. There's nothing new in that for the UK's electoral system; with two main and several minor political parties, it's extremely rare for the winning party to get more than 50% of the votes cast (~30% is more typical), but in terms of dissatisfaction with the result I think Brexit stands a very good chance of setting a new record.

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  • (Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday September 06 2016, @11:49PM

    by GungnirSniper (1671) on Tuesday September 06 2016, @11:49PM (#398382) Journal

    If the British people were given a democratic vote on the various pros and cons of the EU, they'd have kept everything but the invasion-by-immigration and culture-destroying open internal borders. That the EU will not accept the will of the British people is the best reason for Britain removing itself from a hostile union and restoring the rightful place of Parliament in the affairs of the realm.