So The Eu Want Our Vaccine Supply

The EU are showing themselves up to be the bureaucratic, thieving, ineffective, inefficient, useless, feckless, protectionist bastards that they really are. They are nothing more than a collection of has-beens, nobodies, rapacious, unelectable nobodies. Out of spite I hope we purchase more vaccine than we could possibly need just to frustrate these scumbags. Then we sell it to them on our terms. One should be customs paperwork, another equivalence for the City, then a solution for Northern Ireland and then some noisy, very public, totally humiliating and totally unnecessary token. We do this because they are our enemies. And this will be revenge.

 

Not keen on the EU then?

 

No doubt about it in my book, the people who run the EU are some of the worst spongeing, peevish twats in the world. I feel sorry for the ordinary people who want out but don't get a chance to vote on it.

 

Latest news.

The EU has surpassed all its previous stratospheric levels of stupidity and are now invoking Article 16 in Northern Ireland to stop the transport of EU vaccines (that they don’t have ) to the UK (which has loads - and a working factory).

Can someone please explain their logic?

 

And yet nobody said no when multimillion pounds worth of piers were built in remote area's in Schotland. Courtesy of the EU. Come off it.

 

I really appreciated the EU taking our money then spending a little of it on high profile initiatives in the UK and stamping ‘funded by the EU’ on them.

Opps sorry - wrong thread, I am certain there’s a more appropriate one for this

 

Leave aside questions about morals, important though they are. The EU as a quasi-government deserves to suffer the results of its own incompetence and arrogance. That means that it needs to be shown to its populace, on this occasion, to have failed. Only that way will the populace decide to do something - God only knows what - about it.

Separately, and even though various EU politicians seem to be trying to make the UK out as the bad guys in this mess of their own making, we should offer to help them out but demand a heavy price.

 

Every single step the Eu has taken in this self inflicted fiasco has got worse then worser.
Tonight’s events have been some of the most entertaining yet hideous in one of the longest months I can remember.
After all this is traditionally panto season and what a show it’s been.
Oh no it’s not!
Ok I’ll get me coat.

 

Not sure this is accurate, but it would be a scary thought if it were the career bureaucrats at the EU Commission that decided this bizarre course of action and not the democratically elected EU government?

Can you imagine a Civil Service unilaterally deciding international boarder/trade policy, whilst the politicians (annoying that they are) remained silent and unengaged.

The Commission needs putting on a leash and having its powers cut, so as to be directed solely by elected representatives and therefore being (sort of) accountable to the citizens.

 

I'm agreeing with that last statement. I don't know enough about the first part of it to intelligently comment.

 

Brexit was a wise decision by the British voters. I guess after this fiasco by the EU some other Countries will follow our lead, Polland first? is my guess.

 

Macron’s now stepped into the row,claiming the AstraZeneca vaccine isn’t as good as it’s supposed to be.
Macron is yet another Euro politician cruising for a bruising,maybe last nights events will be a wake up call for their oversized egos,but I doubt it.

 

Absolutely agree with (most of) your very wise and balanced view, @figwold .

Where I do differ is in the view that we should demand "a heavy price" for any assistance. The helping out should be a given but I think we need to set a REAL example and push for a quid pro quo rather than an implicitly 'heavy price'. We should be setting an example - particularly in a humanitarian response - that makes the politicians, the bureaucrats (PLENTY of those there) and, most importantly, the people of the EU realise that we are reasonable in our demands to be outside of the nonsense but willing to participate in some of the undoubted benefits of the nonsensical establishment. We should simply ask for easier, fairer and mutually beneficial trade mechanisms with the bloc and use the vaccine supply as a prime example. Simplistic? Yep, no doubt. But it COULD, perhaps, be a good starting point for negotiations rather than the approach currently taken by them?

 

Good points @Adie P. It would be important that the messaging behind such a generous gesture were as clear as as you described.

Somehow I’d expect a entirely different spin from the EU Commission and EU loyalist press which would be that they got it right and silly Britain caved in - a victory for them.

People are no longer shamed by releasing fake news - and others of a certain faction blindly and unquestioningly believe it.

 

Sadly, you're almost certainly right about the likely EU spin, and absolutely spot-on in that last sentence @Cyborgbot and I think it's, in part at least, a function of the 'social media' era in which we live. Abe Lincoln was right - "You can fool some of the people, etc............."

 

Also sadly,what has become increasingly obvious is that the Eu has displayed both jingoistic and nationalistic behaviour,born out of an envy derived frustration.
Last nights fiasco saw a new low in Eu shenanigans.

 

True enough. We just have to hope that this pandemic could bring about a dawning of realisation about the ridiculous mechanisms around the bloated, expensive, unwieldy and disjointed operation of the Commission and the Parliament!

I won't hold my breath on it, though.

 

@Adie P I agree with the principle - as I should in all the circumstances - but there are two problems:

1 The relative size of the EU (and its AZ order) mean that to make a measurable difference to the EU’s vaccine problem would take a heck of a lot of sacrifice of our AZ supply, and mean we would almost certainly miss our own target for vaccinating the seven “at risk” groups by some distance.

The politics over here of doing so would be interesting to say the least. Maybe many of us might feel magnanimous about it, but there would also be a heck of a lot of angst and fury. It would certainly be a great gesture, but it would come at the cost of lives over here, and would it actually be recognised properly by EU politicians?

2 I struggle to see what tangible benefits we could get in return. Gratitude yes, but not a lot else and in the world of fake news maybe not even a lot of that.

 

Reading today’s paper (The Times) I see that the EU is now starting negotiations to buy Novavax, having not bothered to place an order so far. This table shows how useless they have been:

 

Just a bunch of gobshite sponging criminals as we all knew. Well 51% of us did.