Gerry557 wrote:Joining the EU single market! I'm not sure they will let us, well not without paying a (too) high price or going against the voters wishes.
The European single market isn't confined to the EU, it includes countries like Norway that aren't members of the EU. So it's nothing to do with the voters' wishes - out of the EU but in the Single Market was the second choice of ~70% of voters, it was the one option with enough of a majority support to be stable, and arguably staying in the Single Market was what was promised when people voted to Leave. See eg "Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market" (Dan Hannan, 12 May 2015), "Increasingly the Norway option looks the best for the UK" (Arron Banks, 30 Dec 2015) and so on.
As for whether "they will let us" - broadly they want us back, but they just can't be doing with the drama of us flip-flopping. I suspect it would be "Non" to full membership unless the principle was broadly accepted across all parties likely to form a government. The Tories may or may not be included in that grouping after the next election. If nothing else, it's going to be very hard for the ERG to make political capital out of immigration when the riposte will now be - "you were in power, you had your hardest of hard Brexits, and yet net immigration still went over 700k - what else are you going to do - send them to Mars or that big iceberg that's now heading for South Georgia?"
Gerry557 wrote:Maybe Putin will invade and make us I suppose.
Putin is currently failing to invade a country on his border, how is he going to invade the UK? And why would he make us rejoin, when peeling apart the UK and EU to the detriment of both is perhaps his greatest triumph of foreign policy?
88V8 wrote:It conveniently erodes our national debt and increases the tax take. Inflation around 4% is quite comfy in govt terms.
They can give us back odd dribs and drabs of our money whilst continuing to steal it wholesale.
It's worse than that, because of the election. I've seen this AS described as taking £20bn of extra tax that came from inflation and spending it on bread and circuses, whilst doing nothing to fund the extra £20bn of costs that arise from inflation which then becomes a landmine for the next Parliament.
To take one example - universities are in a really bad place at the moment as CPI has gone up nearly 40% since student fees were last increased in 2012. But after what happened to the Libdems, nobody in politics has the guts to touch fees, let alone in the run-up to an election. So higher education is really stuffed - you're already
seeing departments getting closed down and it could get worse.