Messages from the European Movement UK and Stay European:
This bad deal for Britain – read it in full here with a Q&A here – leaves us in a worse position than we held as a member of the EU. Now that more detail is available we already know that:
- This is a bad deal for our economy. It largely ignores the services industry. This means that we are still in the dark about the long-term implications of Brexit for the service sector that makes up 80% of our economy. One thing is for certain, we have less market access for services.
- This is a bad deal for UK businesses that trade in goods, which will now face more red tape, more bureaucracy and more blockages at our borders.
- This is a bad deal for British food and farming, with customs checks creating extra hoops for our British farmers to jump through, just to make ends meet.
- This is a bad deal for British people. We have lost access to programmes ranging from Erasmus to development funding. We can no longer travel freely in Europe and we have been denied a voice in European bodies that will make decisions that affect our daily lives.
Boris Johnson has chosen to begin the next phase of the UK’s relationship with the EU as a weaker, poorer nation. This is the first trade deal in modern history to implement more barriers to trade.
But far from being defeated by the Government’s disastrous deal, we need to pull together and fight for our future relationship with the EU. There is so much still to fight for, so much to do to protect our future. But right now, nothing is more important than standing up and saying loud and clear: Johnson’s Brexit deal is a bad deal for Britain!
Please take just two minutes to make your voice heard and add your name to our urgent statement.
Thank you for standing up for our relationship with our European friends and neighbours.
Season’s greetings,
Anna Bird
CEO of the European Movement
P.S. Once you’ve signed, please help us make our collective voice as loud as possible – share the statement with all your friends, family, and colleagues. Click below to share on:
| The Brexiteers think they have won – but they have won nothing. For all the bluster, their wafer-thin deal ensures nothing but slow economic decline and a thousand small barriers between Britain and the EU. No one benefits from Brexit. But, though many of us feel down at this moment, this rushed deal will not last. This is the beginning of Britain’s journey back towards Europe. Britain now has the biggest active pro-European movement of any country, while the anti-EU campaigns are winding down. Young people still overwhelmingly support EU membership. Our future remains European.Our campaign, Stay European, founded to campaign for individual EU citizenship, will continue to raise that issue alongside others. We have three key campaign priorities for 2021: ★ Regain our rights★ Resist Brexit’s effects★ Rejoin the EU While we don’t expect rejoining to happen overnight, we believe it is possible much sooner than most pundits predict. Our ‘regain, resist, rejoin’ agenda is designed to combine tackling the short-term problems and losses caused by Brexit with laying the groundwork for a rejoin movement. As part of that, we will be working alongside others committed to building towards rejoin, and those efforts will help to push those who currently argue it is ‘too soon’ to even mention our desire to return to the EU. While it will clearly take more than a year to get to the point of rejoining, we believe 2021 must be the start of the campaign.If we can take one lesson (only one!) from the Eurosceptics, let it be this. Back when their campaign was a dozen people in a musty room feeling despondent, they did not give up. We are starting from a much stronger position. We must never let supposedly ‘clever’ tactics get in the way of fighting for what we really believe in: Britain back in Europe. We will be in touch again soon about next steps for 2021 and beyond. For now, Merry Christmas, Joyeux Noël, Frohe Weihnachten and Feliz Navidad. |
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The European Movement in Scotland is committed to promoting the essential European value of free speech. Consequently, we regularly publish articles by leading academics, journalists and others discussing issues germane to Scotland’s place in Europe. Such articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Movement in Scotland.
