Workingman wrote:There are quite a few "feelings" within the various Brexiteer camps that the EU wants to "punish" the UK for daring to leave. This "message" is constantly pushed by the pro Brexit press - Mail, Express, Sun and Telegraph - as part of Project Absolution. They can never quote any such Ministers from any official speeches nor point to any EU policy document(s) because none exist.
What they do instead, and to lend weight to the "message", is quote "sources" speaking "off the record". Who the sources are and what connection they have to the EU negotiators and negotiations is neither here nor there - the "message" is the main thing.
Brexit, good: everything else, bad.
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This is one of those times that you wish you had more time to keep all those links you read as the subject has a way of vanishing.
It was mainly Scandinavian Ministers who called out the EU actions as Punishment. There is plenty of evidence that EU ministers threatened to make the UK "pay" if we dared to leave... What else is that but Punishment??
The EU has been at great pains to threaten all the other members with the pain they intend to heap on the UK, should they even think about leaving and who else could bear the cost?? France? Maybe? Germany, certainly, nobody else.
The EU never intended to negotiate with the UK over Brexit. It was acting like a woman scorned just for the vote being called.
The EEC was never supposed to end in the USE. Not until the Maastrich treaty and the UK, via Maggie, refused to ratify it. It was only that weakling Major who set us on that route..
I won't say that we were tricked, per se, with the last referendum, but, certainly enough people of the right age decided to fix a bad mistake last year.
For me the EU has no intention of negotiating, so we should not even try until they realise that we are going to exit as we entered.
Only then, when the EU realises that stonewalling is going to be the worst possible result for them, will it be worth trying again to get a deal. If they have lost all their time to agree with the 27 member states, that is hardly our problem...