Brexit of Champignons
What will you do if the British referendum on European Community membership votes for exit?
Me, I'm looking up my eligibility for an Irish passport and dual nationality; not just for my own continued access to the EU, but for my non-European spouse.
I know that some of you are brushing up on your German; I know of three or four of you who have upped stakes and gone.
Some of you are working scientists, and much of your department's work is jointly funded - and all of it depends on cross-border collaboration.
I work in an industry that has a small domestic business and a massive London office that exists here as a good location for the European business; an extreme case, but most of you in the commercial sector work in businesses that stand to lose a lot - and will contract sharply - when our terms of trade are changed from 'in the club' to 'subject to agreement among members who will place their collective interests before that of an unpopular outsider'.
Some of you have direct reasons to be glad of European Human rights law - and we *will* exit the separate ECHR institutions if we exit the EC - and all of us benefit indirectly; it's difficult to see the worth of a preventitive or an inhibitory effect, but that doesn't make it any less real.
Some of us have friends and relatives who have done very well out of the Anglo-Irish agreements, which were settled on the assumed presence and permanence of external guarantees on human rights provided by the European courts.
So: what are your contingency plans?
This is a copy of my post here, on Dreamwidth, which has
comments. OpenID will allow you to comment there from your LiveJournal session: contact me if you have problems.
Me, I'm looking up my eligibility for an Irish passport and dual nationality; not just for my own continued access to the EU, but for my non-European spouse.
I know that some of you are brushing up on your German; I know of three or four of you who have upped stakes and gone.
Some of you are working scientists, and much of your department's work is jointly funded - and all of it depends on cross-border collaboration.
I work in an industry that has a small domestic business and a massive London office that exists here as a good location for the European business; an extreme case, but most of you in the commercial sector work in businesses that stand to lose a lot - and will contract sharply - when our terms of trade are changed from 'in the club' to 'subject to agreement among members who will place their collective interests before that of an unpopular outsider'.
Some of you have direct reasons to be glad of European Human rights law - and we *will* exit the separate ECHR institutions if we exit the EC - and all of us benefit indirectly; it's difficult to see the worth of a preventitive or an inhibitory effect, but that doesn't make it any less real.
Some of us have friends and relatives who have done very well out of the Anglo-Irish agreements, which were settled on the assumed presence and permanence of external guarantees on human rights provided by the European courts.
So: what are your contingency plans?
This is a copy of my post here, on Dreamwidth, which has
comments. OpenID will allow you to comment there from your LiveJournal session: contact me if you have problems.