MARCH 29TH 2019 DATE SET FOR OUR EU EXIT
BRITAIN is on course to leave the European Union on March 29, 2019, after Downing Street yesterday confirmed Theresa May will formally start Brexit a week from tomorrow.
The Prime Minister will send a letter to top Eurocrat Donald Tusk next Wednesday demanding the triggering of the bloc’s Article 50 departure mechanism.
She will then make a statement to MPs to proclaim the 24-month exit process has begun. Yesterday’s announcement means it is expected that the UK’s first day as a fully independent and sovereign nation will be March 29, 2019. The exact changeover takes place when Parliament’s Big Ben bell strikes midnight the previous evening.
This will bring to an end 46 years of ties
to Brussels which began when the UK joined the European Economic Community on January 1, 1973.
Tory Cabinet minister David Davis, the EU Exit Secretary, said yesterday: “Last June, the people of the UK made the historic decision to leave the EU.
“Next Wednesday, the Government will deliver on that decision and formally start the process by triggering Article 50.
“We are on the threshold of the most important negotiation for this country for a generation.
“The Government is clear in its aims; a deal that works for every nation and region of the UK and indeed for all of Europe; a new, positive partnership between the UK and our friends and allies in the European Union.”
The Article 50 date was confirmed shortly after Sir Tim Barrow, the UK ambassador to Brussels, informed the office of European Council President Donald Tusk about the timetable yesterday morning.
Rejected
Announcing the date, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “Earlier this morning, the UK Permanent Representative to the EU informed the office of Donald Tusk that it is the UK’s intention to trigger Article 50 on March 29.
“There will be a letter. She will notify President Tusk in writing. The Prime Minister will give a statement to Parliament as well.
“We have always been clear that we will trigger by the end of March and we have met that timetable.”
Mrs May wanted Brexit negotiations to begin “promptly” after the formal notification next week.
The spokesman also said the Prime Minister has firmly rejected calls for an early general election.
Some Tory MPs are understood to have been pressing for an election to exploit Labour’s dismal state under hard-Left leader Jeremy Corbyn. But the spokesman yesterday said Mrs May has “no plans” to ask the Queen to trigger a poll by dissolving Parliament any sooner than the scheduled date of May 7, 2020.
He said: “There is no change in our position on an early general election, that there isn’t going to be one – it is not going to happen.”
The decision comes in spite of an ICM opinion poll giving the Tories a 45 per cent potential vote share, up one point from a previous ICM poll a fortnight ago. Labour fell two points to 26 per cent over the same period.
Following the Brexit announcement, Mr Tusk yesterday promised to respond within 48 hours of receiving the letter by publishing a framework for the negotiations for an exit deal.
The EU Council president said in a message on Twitter: “Within 48 hours of the UK triggering Article 50, I will present the draft Brexit guidelines to the EU27 member states.” Officials yesterday declined to discuss exactly when the UK will formally leave the EU while insisting the Prime Minister was determined to stick to the two-year timescale set out in Article 50.
Brexit campaigners now expect the changeover to take place at midnight on March 28, 2019, in keeping with that timetable. When Britain originally joined the EEC, a Union Flag was raised at midnight in Brussels to mark the moment.
Mrs May’s letter to Mr Tusk next week will mark the first time since the foundation of the European bloc 60 years ago that any member state has asked to leave.
Notification of the departure comes 279 days after the in-or-out referendum of June 23 last year delivered a 52 per cent – 48 per cent majority in favour of withdrawal.
International Development Secretary Priti Patel, a prominent Leave supporter, welcomed confirmation of the date. She said: “The important thing is that when we trigger Article 50 on March 29 we have a clear plan and we will be focused on ensuring that plan works for everyone across the UK.”
Procrastinating
Ukip leader Paul Nuttall said: “We welcome the long overdue announcement but regret its nine-month delay caused by political indecision, House of Lords betrayal and a number of legal challenges.
“It’s late and we don’t want to wait. Now let’s crack on with it and stop procrastinating. It’s time for Britain to go global.”
Belgian prime minister Charles Michel tweeted: “We hope UK will continue to be close partner of Belgium and EU.”
By coincidence, March 29 also marks the birthday of former prime minister and leading Brexit opponent Sir John Major.
THE economy has failed to tank, the stockmarket has refused to crash. And yet still the propaganda on Brexit continues to be spewed as fast and as thick as dung from the back of a muckspreader. It isn’t just coming at us in news bulletins – it is being broadcast, too, amid footage of cute little lambs and glorious vistas of rural England.
Viewers of Countryfile, the BBC’s countryside magazine programme, on Sunday will have been seduced by images of Hoo Peninsula in Kent, an area of marshland and muddy creeks. They will have marvelled at the dedication of a group of volunteers restoring a crumbling, century-old barge who spend their weekends painstakingly raking out pitch from between the deckboards.
But that was just to soften us up for the main point of the programme: the assertion that British agriculture is in dire trouble thanks to Brexit. Half the 75,000 seasonal workers employed in agriculture are from abroad, presenter Tom Heap told us, and there are fears that without them “the horticultural industry could collapse”.
We were then shown a Polish girl tying up string in a greenhouse and other workers picking strawberries and removing rotten blueberries from a conveyor belt. The underlying message couldn’t have been clearer: our supply of fresh, Britishgrown fruit is at risk thanks to our foolish decision to vote for Brexit last June.
LOSING seasonal workers in the horticultural industry would be worrying if there was the remotest possibility that it will actually happen. But it won’t. Following Brexit, British farms will have just as much access to overseas labour when they need it as they have done at any point over the past 70 years.
Britain had a Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Scheme a decade before the EU even came into existence. It was started in 1948, when farmers realised they didn’t have access to sufficient British workers in the summer to help boost food production after the war. It was going strong in the late 1980s, when I was a student and used to spend some of the summer picking fruit on Kentish farms.
Half the people I worked with on one farm were Polish. The farm even had bilingual signs. That was when Poland still lay behind the Iron Curtain, when it was still very difficult for Poles to travel to the West – and yet British farmers were still able to employ the seasonal workers they needed.
The Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Scheme ended in 2013. Open migration had made it redundant: there was no need for a scheme to help Eastern Europeans to come here when they were free to come anyway.
Since last June’s referendum ministers have repeatedly said that, following Brexit, there will be a replacement scheme to make sure that British farms continue to have access to seasonal labour from abroad. Talks with the NFU in England began last September. In January immigration minister Robert Goodwill confirmed that there will be a new seasonal agricultural workers’ scheme.
So why is the BBC now trying to make out we face a future where farms are closing, fields and greenhouses are abandoned all for want of foreign workers? There is nothing about Brexit which means we have to turn away foreign workers in any industry. All it means is that in future we will regain control of our migration policy.
We will be able to ensure that foreign workers really do come here to work and are not eligible, as they are now under EU diktats, for unemployment benefits the second they arrive on British soil. The Government will be able to ask farms, factories and other workplaces to prove that they do have a need for workers from overseas – rather than doing as some do at present and turning their nose up at British workers.
It is not unreasonable to ask that, in return for having access to seasonal workers from abroad, employers at least advertise for British workers. Businesses benefit from greater efforts to employ British workers because it means the welfare bill is reduced and the tax burden can be lowered.
But, yes, when you have a successful industry such as fruit-growing, revived after decades of decline, it is widely accepted that there is some need for seasonal overseas workers – and Brexit will not stop that.
The irony is the BBC presenters used to disparage the very fruit industry which Countryfile sought on Sunday to claim was under threat.
In 2004 Monty Don, who was then the main presenter on Gardeners’ World, attacked what he called the “junk fruit” farm which had set up near his Herefordshire home. “The visual impact will be monstrous,” he wrote. “Life is made a misery for thousands of local people.”
AS FOR the Eastern European workers who had been hired to pick the fruit he described them as living in an “18-acre labour camp”. “Should food sold at a premium because it is ‘British’ be dependent upon huge gangs of impoverished migrant labour?” he asked.
It is funny how attitudes towards farming have changed now that we are leaving the EU. Where once it was regarded by a BBC presenter as a nasty, globalised business exploiting foreign workers, now farms employing people from overseas are lionised as champions of the UK economy.
It just shows how desperate anti-Brexit propaganda is. The BBC should stop using programmes to plug a false narrative that leaving the EU will cause the economy to collapse.
‘We don’t have to turn away foreign workers’