AtomicBettyB

The vote for Brexit was advisory. The 2017 notification of withdrawal act also didn’t decide to leave the EU. The PM decided when she sent the letter of notification. The Supreme Court said Parliament had to authorise Article 50 because leaving would change domestic law and remove rights. Parliament passed a one-line Act empowering the PM to notify, but did that amount to the constitutionally valid decision to withdraw required by Article 50(1)? This is an unresolved question: without a valid decision, the withdrawal process should be contestable as unlawful.

🆘 ⚠️ The foundations of the British economy are already shaking. House prices are falling. Mortgage approvals are collapsing. Small businesses are disappearing. Families face falling real incomes and energy bills they cannot control. The @bankofengland knows all this. Its own report records the weakening housing market, declining mortgage demand and tighter credit for SMEs. Yet it has arrived with a crane and swung a wrecking ball into the building. Higher rates mean larger mortgages, falling property values, more arrears and repossessions, weaker investment, business failures and greater pressure on renters. The Bank calls this “restrictive monetary policy”. In plain English, it is deliberate destruction: making people poorer until they can no longer afford their mortgage! The inflation is being driven principally by war and imported energy, not a British spending boom. Calling this a cure is dishonest. It is an aggressive monetary intervention whose destructive consequences are known in advance. When the foundations are shaking, responsible authorities reinforce the building. They do not attack it with a wrecking ball.

Brexit took Britain out of the world’s largest Single Market and created new barriers within our own UK market. Now @AndyBurnham’s Government is scrambling to rebuild access. Food checks, carbon markets, electricity, student fees and youth mobility are all part of the negotiations. Outside the Single Market, Britain has to bargain for each piece of access and align with rules we no longer help make. That is the sovereignty Brexit promised? Secure the SPS deal. Set out the costs and benefits of mobility. Protect universities from unfunded concessions. Then publish an honest comparison of the Single Market options and let the public decide. And restore full APR and BPR so British farms can survive to benefit from a better relationship with Europe.

British farmers operated under EU agricultural and food standards for decades AND with Britain helping write the rules. Brexit removed our vote, erected trade barriers and left farmers facing greater uncertainty. 🤦‍♀️ Now the people who championed Brexit are portraying the removal of those barriers as a threat to food security! The real threat is losing farms, farmers, livestock and productive capacity while pretending we can always import whatever we need. Britain needs to return to the Single Market, where we can influence the rules, not remain outside complaining about them. Food security is national security.

🇬🇧🇪🇺 Britain aligning food standards with the EU again. The ridiculous “Not for EU” labels may soon disappear and 👉 Britain can then begin to rebuild its food security 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 After years of arguing that Brexit meant escaping EU rules, Britain is now negotiating to align with them again to make trade easier, strengthen biosecurity and reconnect our food system with Europe. On 20 November, Britain and the EU are hoping to agree something genuinely significant. This could mean fewer physical border checks, the removal of costly veterinary export certificates and the beginning of dismantling the Brexit barriers we erected between ourselves and our largest, closest food market. The Government estimates the SPS deal could ultimately be worth up to £5.1 billion a year to the food and drink sector. Britain imports a substantial proportion of the food we eat. We cannot pretend our food system exists independently of Europe. And at a time of war, energy disruption, climate shocks and increasingly fragile global supply chains, putting barriers between Britain and the enormous food-producing region immediately beside us never made strategic sense. And EU alignment would mean Britain moving back towards European rules governing food safety, animal and plant health and imports from third countries. This matters when Britain has signed post-Brexit trade deals opening greater access to agricultural imports produced under different systems. Trade deals should not give anyone a legal right to sell unsafe food in Britain. But standards are only as good as the system that enforces them and since Brexit, we have had little control over imports.

💔 Brexit broke my heart, it still makes me cry 😭 often. I have felt incredibly sad and at times frightened about Brexit impact. For me, Europe was never principally about GDP, trade deals or regulations. Europe is about peace; countries that spent centuries fighting one another deciding that their futures were safer intertwined. And it is about protecting our shared European culture, our democracy and our security. And so many of the things I feared in 2016 have since happened. War has returned to Europe. Putin’s killing machine continues its assault on Ukraine. And Trump’s America has itself gone to war with Iran while its relationship with Europe is fractious. Do we continue looking across the Atlantic and hoping America will always guarantee our security and defend our interests? Or do we recognise the simple reality of our geography? We are European. Europe isn’t perfect, nothing is. But European unity was never based upon the proposition that European countries would be perfect, it was built upon the knowledge of what can happen when Europe is divided. The lesson of Suez wasn’t that Britain needed America more. Britain, France and our European neighbours need each other. Britain’s future and Europe’s future are inseparable. 🇬🇧🇪🇺

Farage looks increasingly rattled by the £5m standards investigation. Asked about it yesterday, he called the process a “farce” and sarcastically questioned the commissioner’s independence. Classic move when you’re worried about the verdict: attack the referee before he blows the whistle. If the verdict goes his way, will the commissioner suddenly become independent again? 🤔