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Brexit Officially Begun, Article 50 Just Invoked

posted by on Thursday March 30 2017, @07:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the Brexit-Means-Brexit dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-39431428

The UK Government has officially notified the EU that they are invoking Article 50. This begins the 2-year timer for the UK to leave the EU.

In a statement in the Commons, [Prime Minister Teresa] May said: "Today the government acts on the democratic will of the British people and it acts too on the clear and convincing position of this House."

She added: "The Article 50 process is now under way and in accordance with the wishes of the British people the United Kingdom is leaving the European Union.

"This is an historic moment from which there can be no turning back."

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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday March 30 2017, @02:48PM (2 children)

    by zocalo (302) on Thursday March 30 2017, @02:48PM (#486479)
    Damn it! You're absolutely correct - bad edit on my part; I was trying to compact an overly long sentence and managed to end up with it back to front. I originally had a bit in there about the EU also being the largest destination for the UK's exports that I dropped, so let's try again:

    The bulk of the UK's exports currently go to the EU.
    The UK imports more goods by value from the EU than it exports to it.

    The conclusion is still correct though; a default to WTO trade arrangements for UK-EU trade is going to hurt the UK a lot more than it is the EU, especially since the EU nations will still have an option to resell goods that might previously have been bound for the UK elsewhere in the EU without the WTO tariffs, additional border controls, etc.
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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday March 30 2017, @06:40PM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Thursday March 30 2017, @06:40PM (#486675) Homepage
    OK. Yeah, the UK dependence on the EU as a market to export too does seem to have been overlooked by the instigators of this mess. It's almost as if when you draw a random raw emanating from the UK, you've got a 80% chance of hitting EU territory - we're almost surrounded by it. Yes, it has the potential to hurt a lot to lose that market. On the assumption that it's gonna be a hard brexit, which is the only thing that makes proper masochistic sense.
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    • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday March 30 2017, @08:05PM

      by zocalo (302) on Thursday March 30 2017, @08:05PM (#486709)
      Yeah, I think the realities are starting to bite now that the £350m/wk figure has been totally kicked into the weeds and the rhetoric is pointing more and more towards either a hard exit or a no-deal and WTO defaults. Almost everyone in the UK that was relying on EU subsidies seems to be somehow expecting the government to be able to keep paying those subsidies post Brexit, which basically means a bail-out from the taxpayer's purse post-2019. Yep; let's raise taxes so those who don't have a viable business model can stay afloat rather than try and fix the broken business models and become competetive - so much for even trying to fund the NHS then, huh?

      Today's news had a piece on Welsh sheep farmers - many of whom voted "Leave", despite the EU being currently where more than 50% of their lambs get sold to - that pretty much summed that up to a T. Only one seemed to be actively thinking about new markets and business models; the rest were all doom and gloom if the subsidies were to stop, which is currently due to occur in 2020. Maybe that was a representative sample, maybe it wasn't, but it does indicate that at least some people are starting to question the implications of their decision now that a hard exit seems more likely - albeit probably too late to do much about it unless reality bites hard enough for enough people to make an Article 50 U-turn a non-suicidal option for the Conservatives, and given the number of Eurosceptics in the party, that's going to have to be an *awfully* hard bite.
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