Infacts has a good short article on why Farage is a fool to crow about the Dutch referendum on the EU-Ukraine association agreement.
No doubt he is trying the please Putin, whose regime has funded anti-immigrant / nationalistic / anti-EU parties.
The Dutch vote makes the point that getting all the EU states to agree to an association agreement with Britain, if we were to the Leave the EU, might be difficult and is certainly not guaranteed.
As Infacts rightly say:
Farage and his fellow Eurosceptics like to say that we won’t have a problem getting a post-Brexit deal with the EU. The UK runs a trade deficit with the bloc, they point out. Germans would want a deal so that they can continue to export their cars to us; the French would want to sell us fancy clothes, and so on. This argument is not compelling. But even if it were, it assumes that post-Brexit negotiations will be settled based on a hard-headed economic assessment. The Dutch case shows that these questions are not always decided on the merits.
Association agreements like the one between the EU and Ukraine require unanimous approval by all member countries. Britain would exit under different rules, so its deal might require approval from a qualified majority of the remaining EU countries. However, a decision to extend the 2-year time limit for negotiations – which seems likely to be needed – would have to be unanimous. So might the exit deal if it covered areas such as tax, foreign policy, and police cooperation. If the agreement covered areas where competence is shared between the EU and its member states, or the UK wanted Norway-type membership of the European Economic Area, that would also require ratification in all EU member states. A protest vote in the tiniest of EU countries could derail the process.
Farage should not be crowing about the Dutch referendum. To the contrary, it illustrates the unpredictability of a post-Brexit future.
* Antony Hook was #2 on the South East European list in 2014, is the English Party's representative on the Federal Executive and produces this sites EU Referendum Roundup.
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7 Comments
Where’s the evidence that Putin has funded any parties in the EU? If you have evidence of this in respect of any UK party you must report it to the Electoral Commission.
Let me google that for you:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/putin-s-far-right-ambition-think-tank-reveals-how-russian-president-is-wooing-and-funding-populist-9883052.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/12103602/America-to-investigate-Russian-meddling-in-EU.html
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/08/russia-europe-right-putin-front-national-eu
Despite this nonsense I am still going to steel myself and vote Remain.
To compare the tin pot, ramshackle, bankrupt mess the Nationalist mob created out of Ukraine with the buying power of the UK is beyond foolish.
I will vote to stick with the EU because that’s what my children say is best for them and it will be their world I’m voting for, not mine.
But to suggest that Germany would lose a huge export market if Malta said ‘No’ is pure sitcom. Greece is quite a big place, full of nice trusting people, until the EU (trading as Germany GmbH) stamped them into the ground.
Sorry Anthony, which UK party is receiving undeclared Russian funds?
They would not be undeclared. They would be declared as being from a third party, such as a company or a non-incorporated association. A major loophole in PPERA is that companies trading in the UK can donate. That includes companies whose beneficial owners would not be permissible donors in their own right; including companies owned by foreign states, political parties or individuals or who receive funds from such sources.
A diplomatic source told me that his government believes that Russian, Chinese, Indian and American individuals’ money has reached political parties in the UK and Ireland. It does not require the parties to even be aware, e.g. a company contacts a party wishing to make a donation. The party may not know that the company is giving funds that came to it from an outside source.
There is no effective mechanism in PPERA or other legislation to detect, disrupt or prevent this.
A starting point would be to require that all donations must be from UK electors and not from companies, etc. A further step would be to apply the Money Laundering Regulations, which apply to every UK business to significant political parties.
So we don’t know if any parties in the UK receive Kremiln (or Trump/CIA) funds but they might do?
Exactly, that is the problem.