Tuesday, April 04, 2017

West Brexit

Occasional columnist in the Toronto Globe and Mail and Irish public sector pensioner Ray Bassett is interviewed by the Irish Times --

Bassett says that he advised that Ireland should strongly support the then British prime minister David Cameron’s attempts to negotiate a new relationship between the UK and the EU before the Brexit referendum. “And I was told that wasn’t it, we had to show we were 100 per cent behind the EU,” he says. “I thought it was madness what we did – row in with Juncker and all those people.”

David Cameron's EU "new settlement" negotiations were first and foremost with his fellow heads of state in the European Council of Ministers, and especially with the eastern European members who had a big stake in any deal on migration curbs. European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker had an important but hardly central role on those negotiations. But he was the UK tabloid hate figure in those negotiations and aftermath. It's thus revealing that Bassett goes straight to his name in giving his view of that period. 

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