
Britons could pay a fee to retain EU membership - anigbrowl
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/11/26/guy-verhofstadt-britons-could-pay-a-fee-to-keep-eu-citizenship-post-brexit/#797412e93e64
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tombone12
The argument from the parliament and the commission has always been that if
the UK wants the single market it gets the other bits too, with freedom of
movement being the biggest issue.

Obviously britons would still be able to get into the EU via some sort of visa
system, and it's profoundly unclear if that is what Guy has suggested or
exactly how many extra rights come with it. It is unlikely for instance that
this EU fee would affect things like the ease moving between benefits systems
because that would probably be handled by bilateral treaties.

~~~
internaut
Perhaps my sinister friends at HN will enjoy poetry:

    
    
        Turning and turning in the widening gyre
        The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
        Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
        Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
        The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
        The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
        The best lack all conviction, while the worst
        Are full of passionate intensity.
    
        Surely some revelation is at hand;
        Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
        The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
        When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
        Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
        A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
        A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
        Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
        Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    
        The darkness drops again but now I know
        That twenty centuries of stony sleep
        Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
        And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
        Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?                
    
    
    

With potential French and Italian exits coming up, 2016-2017 is going to get
interesting. I think possibly the Danes, definitely the Dutch and Austrians
are already lost.

Another factor is that although Trump probably won't abandon NATO, he could
force Germany onto the horns of an awkward dilemma. Pay for protection or pay
for a pan-European army. I think the migrant flows from North Africa and the
Middle East become fiscally untenable. Merkel is changing direction but
perhaps she is too late to the party, Bulgaria is already starting mass
deportations and I think the Northern Alliance is sure to storm the Rubicon.

Now attention swings to Turkey as their idiot demands escalate. This could get
quite ugly. Putin must be beside himself with glee! The Yanks must be staring
at those nuclear warheads like a hawk (eagle?) giving a rabbit a penetrating
glare.

tldr; 2017 = 2016++

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drivingmenuts
“It is totally unacceptable for certain citizens in the UK to subject
themselves to laws which are created by politicians who are not accountable
the British people as a whole.”

I found that to be slightly amusing. Any Briton who takes the option is not
being subjected to laws, as they would at home, but voluntarily opting into a
different set of additional laws. While they may have less government
protection from those laws, in theory, they aren't taking them up blindly.

