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Brexit – ein trauriges Kapitel britischer Politik
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The Brexit referendum was four and a half years ago and, shortly before the end of the transition period, it has not yet been possible to reach an agreement with the British government on future relations. Today or on the weekend you want to be shot down. Either an agreement on an agreement or a hard Brexit.
The time for a timely agreement has already run out. It is practically impossible to seriously examine a possible agreement (at least 700 pages of legal contract text in English, a translation into the 24 national languages of the EU will no longer be produced this year) by December 31, 2020 and then to ratify it. The European Parliament actually needs at least two months to do this work before we can give our approval or rejection with a clear conscience. Nevertheless, there are parts of the EP that want to ratify it in a special EP meeting on December 29, 2020.
I will not take part in this disregard for Parliament and will abstain if the ratification is put to the vote this year. There are alternatives: if you want to avoid a temporary hard Brexit, you only need to extend the transition period for Brexit by two or three months. Boris Johnson is responsible for setting the short deadline by the end of the year. If he wants to avoid chaos for Great Britain, he only has to revise this decision made in the first half of the year.
The EU and Germany have done their homework and put the necessary laws together in case there is no agreement and thus a hard Brexit. Further emergency measures (so-called “contingency”) may become necessary. This applies in particular, as in the phase before the exit, the maintenance of connectivity (air, rail and road freight transport). The EU Commission has now published more than 80 so-called “Readiness Notices”, which show how exactly the EU is prepared for the hard Brexit.
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