The Brexit promise is something nobody can deliver on. It was a lie, you cannot force the EU to accept an unfavorable trade deal. If only for the reason that it would set an exceptionally bad precedent and everybody would want their own deal, to pick and choose the parts of EU membership that are favorable to them, leading the EU to implode.
Somebody needs to own up to that lie and accept that a "no deal" outcome, which is clearly bad, is still the best thing brexiters can actually deliver. Instead, they are trying to camouflage that reality with a bad deal that keeps Britain shackled to the EU for a number of years while losing all of the (substantial) influence it had over the way EU works. That's an anti-Brexit, the exact opposite of the independence and prosperity promised by brexiters. It was a bad deal and it's good that it failed.
This should be a lesson for all voters across the world - think for a minute before voting. At least try to understand what you're voting on. We can blame all we want on the media, politicians etc etc, but in the end, we can't deny Brexit is the result of a properly, democratically conducted election - voters need to take at least some responsibility. No amount of "voters' remorse" is going to help now.
This is not the voter’s fault. In a functioning democracy, there is a system to approve a text by popular vote instead of the usual parlement. So the question at such a vote should always be: “do you approve the proposed text?”, then the text becomes law.
By organizing an abstract opinion poll, the government just prepared a shit show, there no way to make any significant chunk of the population happy, everybody had a different view of brexit.
Just today I voted about an energy act, a police act and a residence planning act. I admit that I didn't study the law texts carefully. Instead I read the neutral explanation of the government and both explanations of the pro and contra committees and decided whether the reasonings convinced me or not.
So even in Switzerland you could get the proverbial shit show if someone managed to convince the people with misleading arguments, and I am afraid this already happened a few times.
Meanwhile there have been several conservative speeches in Parliament about the direction they want:
They want May to come up with a better plan for a "No deal" Brexit. To take a much harder stance against the EU in negotiations. THAT's why they voted against her.
I feel like this is going in a VERY different direction than is being implied in the comments here.
And let's be honest here: it might work. In the EU, in all countries where I can understand the language: France, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands there are artikels on the front page of the main newspaper about companies lobbying to force their governments to simply break ranks with the EU in case of "No deal": to have a trade pact with the UK ready to go March 29. In theory, that's not legal, but there is precedent. If the UK can get trade deals with the US (which is not going to be a problem), Ireland, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, the damage of a no deal Brexit will be limited quite a bit. A "fuck the lot of you. No deal !" approach ... it's not out of the question that they actually make it work.
Plus, you know, it's clearly what the majority of the voters want and in theory both the UK and these European countries are democracies. On would think that would make it simple.
And then there's the question of what happens if Juncker gets called on his bluff. AFD, 5*, Lega Nord and FN will certainly see their hand strengthened quite a bit if the UK blows up their EU membership and actually gets away with it. Talk about worst possible outcome for everyone.
The EU should say "ok ... voters decided, sucks, but let's make this work. Let's give the UK a fair exit and a fair trade deal". That is in the interest of everyone in the EU AND everyone in the UK ... with the notable exception of the EU politicians themselves.
Ah, that's not how the EU works when it comes to trade.
You're in or you're out.
Non-EU countries make trade deals with the EU who is collectively acting on their member states behalf.
There will _NEVER_ be a "side" trade deal between Britain and an EU member state directly.
Don't feel too bad about not knowing this. The original Minister for Brexit David Davis (& embarrassingly enough a former Europe minister) also didn't know this.
> However one of the main basic features of the European Union is that EU countries cannot negotiate individual trade deals without side countries and instead do so as a bloc of 28.
They have broken rank before, they can break rank again.
For example, Switzerland has trade deals that explicitly exclude certain EU member states (notably but not exclusively Romania). France has oil trade deals with African countries and China. And so on and so forth.
And of course there's the Swiss, Denmark and Norwegian middle-ground situations.
> France has oil trade deals with African countries and China.
99% sure that is an impossibility but willing to take a look at any refs/articles you could link?
> Switzerland has trade deals that explicitly exclude certain EU member states
Similarly, pretty sure this is an impossibility. Any trade agreements are with and available to (all members of) the EU under the same set of conditions or they're not and they(Switzerland) would then trade under WTO rules.
Now you could say there's some excuse here. The oil in question technically never enters the EU, so it "doesn't have to" follow EU legislation (which prohibits dealing commercially with Iran). I'm sure if necessary something like that will be pointed out. Maybe it's also "not" Total selling the oil, but obviously they get part of the profit. And I'm sure there's some reason "Iran is not involved at all".
Also worth pointing out: the US has in the meantime successfully forced Total, over the LOUD protest of both French and German governments to abandon this deal.
You can see the rules about employing Romanian and Bulgarian citizens (which are EU citizens) in Switzerland are very different from employing, say, French or German citizens. Note that this is one of the things the UK now tells Britain is non-negotiable. Somehow in practice another (labour related) trade deal the EU ... has negotiated it.
Of course, there are historical reasons for this, but of course that's true for all trade deals.
re: 1) That article is about a French multinational oil company entering a commercial agreement with Iran. This doesn't relate to an EU member state doing a "side" trade treaty with a non-EU member.
Any other EU company could have done the same.
re: 2) Seems like that provision was in the agreement Switzerland made with the EU:
> Switzerland first activated such a safeguard clause – a controversial instrument of its complex dealings with the EU – in 2012, to limit the number of citizens arriving from certain new member countries who joined the EU in 2004..
You might want to read exactly on what point does the fight between the EU and UK is mostly fought ... Yep: labour and movement of people is one of the important points ...
> Let's give the UK a fair exit and a fair trade deal".
They are getting a fair exit and trade deal.
That's what is happening now. Britain seems to be slowly
realising that them being part of the EU was more beneficial to them (& the EU) than any other way.
She will "continue to work to deliver on the solemn promise to the people of this country to deliver on the result of the referendum and leave the European Union"
Having watched the video, it might be relevant to add the response was applause. It seems to me that when push comes to shove, the conservatives seem to be operating under the conviction that another "Exit EU" referendum would have the same result. Whilst I have no way to know if that's right or not, I would argue that they do represent the majority of the people of Britain and therefore know better than I do.
> I believe this exact issue was just voted on in the British parliament. I fear they disagree with you pretty damn conclusively:
As they are entitled to...Doesn't change anything really. Nobody wins with a hard Brexit but there's only so far the EU can go with concessions before it no longer makes sense. That point has been (roughly) hit.
Secondly, that deal being voted down doesn't mean everybody who voted it down thought there was a better deal out there. Labour and friends want to stay in the EU.
They wouldn't attend May's planning unless a hard brexit was taken off the table(British version of saying/not US version).
It's quite telling that both Remainers & Leavers viewed the vote failing as a success.
Most economists seem to agree that the EU could make a LOT more concessions with it still being a win compared to a hard Brexit.
So in effect consensus seems to be that the EU is risking a hard Brexit in the same way you do: threaten the British public with exactly what they voted they wanted, in hopes of achieving the opposite (no Brexit at all).
I think it's clear that I think this is dishonest, putting the interests of politicians ahead of those of the population, and to boot it's risky. The EU population does not want this at all, quite the reverse. They want trade with the UK to be as unaffected as possible, which of course means a trade deal that's as favorable to the UK as possible. Second the EU population certainly does not want to eat the economic hits that a hard Brexit would bring and expects their politicians to prevent this scenario.
I fear that if an election is called in the UK, which is the almost inevitable outcome of delaying or stopping Brexit, the end result will be a disorderly "fuck you" Brexit when conservatives gain another 10% of the vote with a promised firm hard Brexit negotiating stance. At that point Ireland, and perhaps France will suddenly find that the Euro is a serious impediment to their ability to react to limit the damage, and London will be able to adapt. This will further amplify the already anti-EU parties in France, Italy and Germany, and at this point it won't take much to force centrist parties in both countries to become anti-EU and propagate further.
An additional worry is that we're 10 years into the best economic situation we've seen in Europe in >50 years. This is the situation we're in, with essentially the best possible economic background. That at some point the economy will turn is inevitable, and it will further amplify anti-EU stances like it always does. If politicians find a way to combine both forces to hit at the same time, I don't even want to try to predict what could happen.
be careful with that "neutral explanation". in the last one we got told that private agents hired by social insurances may only observe clients in public spaces, while the law text actually says "public spaces and what's observable from there". i.e. pretty much any Swiss inhabitant can now be put under surveillance in their private homes without any judge order.
This would be considered abuse and such interpretation would likely get thrown out as justification for active surveillance. The law pertains to truly passive surveillance only.
And trying to use such evidence in court could be repealed then as obtained illegally. (Surveillance without a warrant.) The spirit of the law is to allow reasonably incidental recording only. A zoom camera pointed at your window is not covered, neither are directional microphones etc.
Law is not an algorithm. It is executed by judges and jurors.
(Note: not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc.)
That would depend on the wording and on legal precedent in the UK some civil service pensioners had changes to their pensions because the wording of the scheme of arrangement used a different three letter word than some other pensioners.
When it comes to surveillance I don't put any trust in the system other than what's strictly allowed / disallowed according to law text. Remember Fichen?
My issue is that people vote based on the fact that they become convinced by other parties instead of developing their own opinions by trying to understand the ramifications of a law. Not saying this is right or wrong, laws are written in a non friendly way so it is not easily understandable by most but I wish more people tried to do the research themselves.
I don't see how this could reasonably have been done in the Brexit case. You would have to spend years negotiating the terms of the withdrawal first, then ask the people for a yea or nay. That negotiation would go totally differently if the UK government couldn't credibly claim it had a mandate from the people for the withdrawal.
In a way they did just that. David Cameron negotated some changes to EU law (minor tweaks), and said to the British people: "I went to the EU and got these changes, shall we stay in or leave?"
Yes it is. Asked "do you want to fundamentally change status quo in some random yet to be decided way that most experts warn you will result in chaos" population should have voted "no".
Population would have voted "no" if just a few more young people cared enough to get their asses to the voting booths.
The lessons from Brexit are the same as the lessons from Trump in USA, Kaczyński in Poland, Orban in Hungary:
1. vote
2. don't vote populists.
3. don't disregard warnings of experts.
4. don't buy conspiracy theories.
5. don't engage in witch hunts against minorities and don't vote people who do so.
It's not a lot to expect of people. It's the bare minimum if democracy is to work at all.
Cameron is at fault too, of course. Shouldn't have played with the fire. But some politicians will play with fire if there's a profit to be made and power to get. It's the voters who have to stop them, not the other way.
I think the problem is that consensus (51.9%) was made at the 30k ft. / 9km view (leave the EU).
The details were left to be sorted out later and that's where all the trouble is.
If the details of Brexit were included in the referendum, there wouldn't be any trouble in implementing it.
But, you can bet that the ~half of voters that wanted Brexit aren't even in agreement on how to implement it, let alone trying to gain the support of all those that never wanted it to begin with.
In the end the referendum was more of an opinion poll than legislation that voters could analyze and make an informed decision.
I don't think you can fault the voters for answering the questions put to them. It's not like the ballot comes with a comment box: "I want independence from the EU, but I'm also concerned that you didn't think through how to implement it." They just vote Yes and expect politicians to do their job.
> Population would have voted "no" if just a few more young people cared enough to get their asses to the voting booths.
I don't understand the need to youth-bash here. Turnout for young people was pretty similar to that of older demographics. There was a generational gap in how people voted, but not so much in whether they voted or not. [1]
It stands to reason that the EU would not agree with the decision. If a "no deal" is the only way it can be done then that is what is done. That's what the people voted for.
Britain is the second largest net contributor to the EU next to Germany. Britain will be absolutely fine.
Eventually it probably will (brexiters seem to think in 25 / 50 years time, which is apparently a good price to pay for Brexit...).
However, the UK will lose the huge amount of influence it has at the moment on the world stage, will be pressured by bigger economies to accept unfavorable trade deals and deregulation (US food standards, VISAs, etc) and its manufacturing will be severely damaged; it could possibly collapse entirely. The irony is that this will likely create a wave of unemployment in the very regions that voted in favour of Brexit.
But regardless of the consequences, if you think people voted for a "no deal" when they voted Brexit, you are deluded. Let's illustrate my point with a few quotes:
"The free trade agreement that we will ahve to do with the European Union should be one of the easiest in human history" - Liam Fox - 2017
"Getting out of the EU can be quick and easy - the UK holds most of the cards in any negotiation" - John Redwood - 2016
"Within minutes of a vote for Brexit, CEO's would be knocking down Chancellor Merkel's door demanding access to the British market" - David Davis 2016
“It is also true that the single market is of considerable value to many UK companies and consumers, and that leaving would cause at least some business uncertainty, while embroiling the Government for several years in a fiddly process of negotiating new arrangements, so diverting energy from the real problems of this country – low skills, low social mobility, low investment etc – that have nothing to do with Europe.” - Boris Johnson 2016
As you can see, no deal is far from the position that was pushed to the people, even after the vote had occurred. Saying people voted for a "no deal" because they voted for Brexit is disingenuous. Long gone is the time of "Having our cake and eat it"
The UK doesn't have much to export in terms of natural resources (excepting Ireland), or hard-to-move industry. That leaves services, which can go away easily. So the situation was already bad in terms of overt influence, compared to, say, Germany.
Behind the scenes however, the British seem to stay important. The safekeeping of the Gladio operatives' names, Steele's involvement against Trump, the UK national who started the White Helmets, ... I have the vague feeling that les rosbifs seem to pop up a lot where the action is, just not too obviously.
> Saying people voted for a "no deal" because they voted for Brexit is disingenuous.
Not what I said. I said they voted to leave regardless of deal. So if EU doesn't want to make a deal then so be it. The no-deal hysteria seems entirely contrived by the remainers as far as I can tell.
A favourable deal from the EU was never going to happen prior to leaving. The negotiations BEGIN once Britain leaves and they explore their options - which appear to be considerable quite frankly. The EU is in trouble, not Britain.
People voted for leave on the basis there would be no downside. Just read the quotes from prominent Brexiteers posted in the other comments...
While some people were undoubtedly ok with a downside (especially if that cost was bourne by others, e.g. pensioners with guaranteed incomes and no jobs to lose), many leave voters accepted assurances "this would be the easiest negotiation ever". Remainers pointing out there was a downside were roundly condemned for "talking down Britain".
Negotiations for a trade deal take years and the country will greatly suffer in the mean time as it is not prepared for a no deal scenario. The recent events with the traffic jam simulation or the ferry company without ferries are great examples of that. And that’s assuming that the trade deal negotiated with the EU after the departure would be more favourable than the one proposed today; the four freedoms come together, and it’s unlikely to change.
I would be curious to know about why the EU is in trouble; in my opinion the UK is, and massively. Brexiters have sold leaving the EU as the solution to a wide range of issues (housing, health, immigration, etc) and when people will realise all of this was extraordinarily optimistic (not to say, a lie), there will be a certain uprising and it won’t be pretty. We could also mention that the union is also at risk, from the non respect of the Belfast agreement to the fact that Scotland and Northern Ireland did not vote for Brexit: independence desires could loom again, and it could become very real very soon.
Every sensible organisation in this country have warned against a no deal and the catastrophic effect it would have. -8% GDP according to the government’s analysis. But yeah bloody remainers, the source of all misery...
Have you read the EU's no deal plan? Ireland's no deal plan?
Their plan is this:
- Allow the UK to keep trading with the EU on WTO terms
- Do not halt trade with the UK. No need to, damages both.
- No border in Northern Ireland. They won't build it, we
won't build it, empty threat.
- Boats, Lorries, Ferries to continue as normal until
agreements made. Guess what, this is what real independent
nations do with eachother.
Ireland's agriculture industry sells 80% of its produce to the UK. It's in big trouble with no trade.
Germany sells lots of cars to the UK. It's in big trouble with no trade.
4 Million EU citizens live here, they are in big trouble with no reciprocal agreement.
French, German and Spanish fishermen rely on British waters to for fishing as they are rather lucrative - to great detriment of the British fishing industry. They are in trouble when we take them back.
Spain, France, Italy and Germany are all having economic issues the UK isn't particularly having right now. Look at jobs, youth unemployment etc.
18% of the EU's goods are exported to the UK. The whole EU is in trouble with no trade. The reverse figure is fake news thanks to the rotterdam effect.
That 8% GDP figure is ridiculous and proven to be wrong [https://capx.co/the-bank-of-englands-brexit-forecasts-arent-...]. The assumptions it makes are the worst possible and completely unrealistic. Those figures suggest that the effect on the UK economy would be worse than WW2 - a time where Europe was occupied by a hostile power and Britain was at war with trade convoys regularly being sunk.
Personally I'd be happy for Scotland to leave the Union. They are a net receiver of English taxes. Also, would never be granted EU membership thanks to our hypocritical friends in Spain and their own issue with certain parts of their country declaring independence.
The EU suits large corporations. It keeps wages for the least skilled in our society as low as possible, more workers means less pay.
All we are asking for is to be an independent nation state, just like more than 150 other countries.
I could return the question: what are you talking about?
I have never said countries from the EU would not be impacted economically by a 'no deal' scenario. It would be bad for the whole continent. I was commenting on the "the UK will be perfectly fine, the EU is the one in trouble". Nonetheless, the economy of the UK is hugely dependant on the EU (financial services, JIT manufacturing, etc.) and the UK will greatly suffer from a no-deal. Quoting a highly biased and very specific article from a man who has been pushing for Brexit from the very start will not change the facts; a man, by the way, who said that leaving the EU with no-deal was more important than respecting the Belfast agreement. By the way, he also said that the UK would be even around 2030 (and he is a rather optimistic individual when it comes to Brexit): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqTgF9QXQAADxR5.jpg (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/shortcuts/2018/jul/24/t...)
I also hope that I am wrong, but I can definitely feel a xenophobic underlying tone in your message. That's regrettable.
Taking the "they voted to leave regardless of deal" concept to the absurd: technically pointing all the british nukes at ourselves and literally wiping ourselves off the face of the earth would remove us from the EU. But no-one voted for that.
On the other end of the spectrum, leaving the EU, but remaining under all EU regulations, staying in the free trade / free movement / etc laws, being in a similar position as now, paying massive divorce bills and paying essentially membership fees / EU taxes with no return EU investment into the UK and with no voice or representation in the EU politics at all, the whole 'vassal state' thing, could be technically "leaving the EU" as well. But that's also not what anyone voting to leave meant either.
"Out at any price / In at any price" is as absurd a polarisation as the above examples.
People have been trying to paint this as a binary issue - ever since the referrendum put it in such a YES/NO terminology. But we're not binary creatures, life is messy and complex.
> Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell define populism as an ideology that "pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous 'others' who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity, and voice".
I don't have problems recognizing politicians propagating such views. Do you?
It is interesting how any movement in opposition to globalism is caused by Russia, and any opponent of the progressivism pushing for this is obviously an racist/sexist/bigot.
It is interesting how all the yellow jackets, the maga folks, and the brexiters are all brutes easily influenced by nepharious forces against their own good. Especially when others manipulate their sometimes violent primitive tendencies.
It is interesting that all opposition to the predominant narrative really should be better informed, and listen to the ones that know better.
It's not interesting at all. It's the the mundane politics of everyday normal foreign relations as countries try to get a leg up and interfere in each other's processes. Maybe the only thing that's interesting is that for the first time, it's happening to the rich western former colonial powers. The chickens have finally come home to roost.
I think the russian meddling stuff is largely a bs scapegoat and even I know the KGB was up to this stuff for the entire cold war. See the classic interview from KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov where he claims that the majority of KGB efforts were dedicated to "demoralization" not spying.
So do you think that nations don't intervene covertly in other nations? What about the US in Iran (1953) or Chile (60s)? And so why is it so improbable that Russia is doing it?
And recall the study by Prof. Igor Panarin (former KGB analyst) predicting that the US will fragment. Maybe it's more like a game plan.
You don't need to be a professor to know that sooner or later anything will fragment or "reshape" itself. Just learn the last 2000 years of history.
I think that what the OP is saying is that it's way too easy to always blame it on someone else when actually it's the voters' responsibility. We are definitely influenced by media, however, ultimately it's up to us to decide who to vote for, so it's our responsibility. Ignoring it doesn't make us less accountable.
Occam's Razor suggests that the people who voted for Brexit didn't think that they were receiving net benefits from the EU. I'm pretty sure the net financial transfer is Britain sends more money to the EU than they get back, so it is easy to see why a tax-paying voter might feel that way.
There is an argument that this view is too simplistic and that the trade situation is complicated; but it seems a lot more plausible than a Russian conspiracy to ... do something.
There is always some level of background interference by foreign nations (as an Australian I shudder to think how much influence the US must have over Australia's politics in practice) but typically it would be cheaper to buy off or otherwise influence entrenched politicians rather than try to influence popular votes. I expect the Russians can figure that out too.
I am just observing. It’s very impressive for Russia to be the essential force behind all major opposition movements that apparently are not rooted in legitimate concerns.
You are not "just observing", you are creating straw positions and then being extremely disingenuous about it, to the point of outright trolling.
Why don't you just say what you bloody well mean, so we can discuss it properly, instead of making these lofty implications that don't pin you down to anything?
The problem is if the people of England is correct in the assertion that it has given away too much Democratic power to unelected political bodies, and I am not the one to answer that. I am just saying dismissing their concerns seem a bit unproductive.
Well, the EU government isn't really "unelected". It's just indirectly elected. Before 1913, for example, US state legislatures elected their state's senators. As I understand it, the original goal was to insulate senators somewhat from populist influence.
But yes, I get that this was a concern for Brexit supporters. I'm just arguing that Russia exploited it.
> If your goal is sowing chaos, you gotta build from those legitimate concerns.
Since when is "Europe is gonna be islamized by refugees" a legitimate concern? It's not backed by facts in any way! The point is these "concerns" are fabricated outright or massively exaggerated by propaganda. Which is to a huge part a fault of Facebook as they failed to curb abuse.
Yeah but exaggerated rhetoric has existed for millenniums and is an inherent part of how human societies work. Also the rhetoric might be exaggerated but there are always some basis behind it, e.g. job loss and wage stagnation due to globalization etc. Sure we need to counter it in a civilized society, but pinning it all on Russia using such absolutist terms is just laughable.
And the US do much direct and violent interventions in lots of foreign countries. This is bread and butter for international politics. The western mainstream media now pretend to have an outcry now that such tactics are befalling themselves, which is really ironic.
> Yeah but exaggerated rhetoric has existed for millenniums and is an inherent part of how human societies work.
Sure. There was always a single village moron (in German: Dorftrottel, no idea how to translate it) but he was ignored by society. Now, however, all the village morons worldwide are connected - and can claim massive followings and reach capability on social media. This is the key difference.
> but there are always some basis behind it, e.g. job loss and wage stagnation due to globalization etc.
Back in ye olde times, people went off, went on strikes and went after the employers to gain their rights and higher wages. Thanks to the propaganda, now they go after migrants, Muslims, Jews, PoC, whatever - but the capitalist elites get left alone. Which coincides with the funding for many right-wing organizations coming from very wealthy individuals (e.g. Koch, Mercer, or in Germany August von Finck).
> And the US do much direct and violent interventions in lots of foreign countries.
Sure, but that's a bit of whataboutism. I don't really like many of the things that the US have done (especially historically), but that does not excuse the stuff that China and Russia do.
It isn't so impressive or surprising if you observe that a KGB man is in charge of Russia and the three letter agencies in America tasked with countering him have been tied up with other tasks since the the eleventh of september 2001 for some reason.
As I said elsewhere: Yes, the KGB defector Yuri [1] in 1984 said as much that there is manipulation. He describes a slow distruption they started of America by infiltrating the education system. This attacks the weakness of a democracy, which is the fact that it’s run by people for the behest of itself as a system and does not answer to an estate that would otherwise check its malfunctioning.
However, that doesn’t mean the movements of dissent is caused by this. They could be, or they could be a symptom of the problems not solved by a long term malfunctioning Democratic system. And the malfunctioning could be some other more major political ideology.
And not just a "KGB man". Much of Putin's family died in the siege of Leningrad. And, as his key assistant, he watched Yeltsin sink into alcoholism and depression, as the Soviet Union fell apart, and Russia was humiliated.
Nowadays it seems to lack some of the professionality of former times and sometimes looks more like hobby projects of Kremlin figures and Oligarchs to curry some favour.
Tradition, local competency, low cost and risk due to social platforms and online news make it a good fit for present day Russia.
> It is interesting how any movement in opposition to globalism is caused by Russia
I wouldn't say it's in opposition to globalism or always blamed on Russia. I'd rephrase it as, "It is interesting how any movement in opposition to [what the most vocal want] is caused by [election fraud] and [uninformed voters]." It's actually not that interesting though, it's an attempt to rationalize dissonance. Often based on facts with little evidence of effect. Such facts are uncovered, easily in most cases, by those searching to find them which is why the problems only appear to apply to the victors.
"The United Kingdom should be cut off from Europe.[9]"
"Ukraine should be annexed by Russia because "Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness, its certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics". Ukraine should not be allowed to remain independent, unless it is cordon sanitaire, which would be inadmissible.[9]"
"Russia needs to create "geopolitical shocks" within Turkey. These can be achieved by employing Kurds, Armenians and other minorities.[9]"
"Russia should manipulate Japanese politics by offering the Kuril Islands to Japan and provoking anti-Americanism.[9]"
"Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".[9]"
From "Foundations of Geopolitics" by Alexandr Dugin. Putin has repeatedly cited his works and the book is used as a textbook by the Russian military.
Yes, the KGB defector Yuri [1] said as much. He describes a slow distruption they started of America by infiltrating the education system. This attacks the weakness of a democracy, which is the fact that it’s run by people for the behest of itself as a system and does not answer to an estate that would otherwise check its malfunctioning.
However, that doesn’t mean the movements of dissent is caused by this. They could be, or they could be a symptom of the problems not solved by a long term malfunctioning Democratic system.
Yuri was a real KGB defector, and the interview is from 1984 which is way before the effects we see today. Watch the whole thing here [1], and read the sometimes a bit offensive book on it by a CIA case officer [2].
Then take both with a bit of a grain of salt, but think what it would mean if both that seem to support each other’s assertion just told partially the truth.
What else do you expect from Russia or any other country that tries to overpower the others? It's just like nature, when the lion takes over the group and he is constantly challenged.
Now, if someone challenges you and you are easily defeated, then it means you don't deserve to be the leader. If our leadership is failing, then so be it, they don't deserve to rule the world.
Blaming brexit on Russia is new to me, albeit not surprising.
Brexit was a timed event destined to happen for the simple reason that Germany France and Great Britain cannot rule at the same time. They never could and they never will.
And Great Britain for one reason or the other found itself behind, they were unable to do push their supremacy over Germany and France. Either you leave or you knee, or you fight. They were unable to force other powerful countries to make them do what they wished, as they had done in the last 6 centuries before.
That's not particularly productive thinking: should we test buildings by bombing them - if they fall over, they didn't deserve to tower so high?
The world would be a lot better if a country that detects weakness in another didn't immediately look to exploit this. We can say it's human nature but when we start to talk about 'deserving' an outcome, we start to talk about the world like it's dogfighting.
Ctrl-F "racis"/"sexis" yields no results. That didn't stop you from triggering the persecution complex and going "waa, can't even disagree, they'll call you a bigot".
Repudiation of the story that the leavers feel economically left behind [1]. Some Leavers certainly felt economically left behind, but many did not. Research has since shown that three groups were key to the Brexit vote:
- Left Behind Leavers, who were working-class, struggling financially, almost never had a degree, were in their forties or fifties and most of whom did not identify with the main parties or supported the UK Independence Party.
- Blue-Collar Pensioners, who were also working-class but retired, and so less likely to be struggling financially and tended to vote for Conservative.
- Affluent Eurosceptics, who were much less likely to identify as working-class, more affluent, more likely to have a degree and tended to vote Conservative.
While we hear much about the first two groups we have heard very little about the third, and only the first would support the predominant narrative to some degree.
Not sure what you're trying to say here. Sounds just like rehashing the what the mainstream western media have been drumming to tedium. If you genuinely believe that everything including Brexit and Donald trump is "caused" by Russia it's you that need to be much "better informed". If not then you're deliberately trying to deflect the focus just like what the Democrats and in general the mainstream media have been doing for all these years.
Also, the US have probably engaged in far more foreign inferences which are much more direct and violent than these events where Russia had a (shadowy) share. Ironic that now the western world are in uproar now that they are subject to some of their own classic tactics eh?
You need to pay more attention... he is being sarcastic. That's exactly his point - people are wrong to believe the media and blame everything on Russia.
> It is interesting how all the yellow jackets, the maga folks, and the brexiters are all brutes easily influenced by nepharious forces against their own good. Especially when others manipulate their sometimes violent primitive tendencies.
I totally agree, it is interesting! Here is some required reading on the subject: https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=5011321-Khus... It's the federal criminal complaint against Elena Khusyaynova[1] which details her activities at the Internet Research Agency and other Russian psyops sites:
> The Conspiracy has a strategic goal, which continues to this day, to sow division
and discord in the US. political system, including by creating social and political polarization, undermining faith in democratic institutions, and influencing US. elections, including the upcoming 2018 midterm election. The Conspiracy has sought to conduct What it called internally "information warfare against the United States of America" through fictitious U.S. personas on social media platforms and other Internet-based media.
> Members of the Conspiracy, posing as US. persons, operated fictitious social media personas, pages, and groups designed to attract U.S. audiences and to address divisive US. political and social issues or advocate for the election or electoral defeat of particular candidates. These personas, groups, and pages falsely claimed to be controlled by US. activists when, in fact, they were controlled by members of the Conspiracy.
---
> any opponent of the progressivism pushing for this is obviously an racist/sexist/bigot.
There's an interesting bit that relates to this:
> Members of the Conspiracy were directed to create political intensity through supporting radical groups, users dissatisfied with [the] social and economic situation and oppositional social movements. The Conspiracy also sought, in the words of one member of the Conspiracy, to "effectively aggravate the conflict between minorities and the rest of the population."
The document goes into great detail about the specific tactics employed. I strongly suggest you (and everyone else) read it in full.
Edit: One more interesting thing from the complaint is this bit:
> Conspiracy's effort to sow discord in the US political system, members of the Conspiracy used social media and other internet platforms to inflame passions on a wide variety of topics, including immigration, gun control and the Second Amendment, the Confederate flag, race relations, LGBT issues, the Women's March, and the NFL national anthem debate. Members of the Conspiracy took advantage of specific events in the United States to anchor their themes, including the shootings of church members in Charleston, South Carolina, and concert attendees in Las Vegas, Nevada; the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally and associated Violence; police shootings of African-American men; as well as the personnel and policy decisions of the current US. administration.
What I find especially interesting is how well this passage (in addition to other descriptions given throughout the complaint) seems to describe your own HN post history, almost to a T! I just read through your entire (relatively short) post history and as best as I can tell, you have exactly one post which neither directly relates to one of the above subjects nor is nakedly inflammatory political rhetoric. Specifically you seem to have particular affinities for:
How do you know that other more major political stories is not the real product of manipulation [1] and these opposition movements are a symptom of problems not solved by a malfunctioning Democratic system?
They could be, but there is a much lower threshold to manipulate people who are close-minded. Almost everyone I've encountered who repeats racially charged headlines is LESS likely to have much personal experience with the people they feel so strongly about, even to the point of avoiding encounters with those people.
Close minded means you are not open to new impulses.If they are close minded they by definition is bound by something old which should make them harder to manipulate.
A person that does the creative arts is generally very open minded.
My country was recently victim of a "hacker"-attack. Personal accounts of politicians were compromised. Everyone and their cats pointed their fingers at Russia.
In the end it was a younger pupil and far too many people used their surname as password.
I doubt that a significant part of the population are reiterating Kremlin-propaganda.
It seems to be a hysterical Red Scare 2.0, just from a different political side, that is just as opportunistic.
If you always see Putin in your dreams, I doubt you should point a finger on people and diagnose any form of manipulation.
There are certainly some bots, but I doubt Russia is represented disproportionally. Just the language barrier alone would lessen their numbers significantly. It often just serves as a convenient excuse for political defeat.
Putin is totalitarian dick. Why not just leave it at that instead of accusing people of asserting his will?
How do we know that we in the elites that have been given ideology instead of a classic humanities education, taught what to think instead of how, and to become practiced in ignoring what our mind as well as eyes tell us is not worse off?
In seeking to destabilize opponents, a key strategy is sowing domestic discontent. Everyone does it, to the best of their abilities. And in particular, it was a key part of the Cold War.
So the US managed to destabilize the Soviet Union. Threats from NATO and strategic nuclear weapons forced the Soviets to spend so much on defense that the civilian economy was destroyed. And yes, corruption and incompetence also played a huge role. Add saturation with VoA messages about the US consumer economy, and the Soviet Union collapsed. And more recently, they messed with Georgia, and finally engineered Ukraine independence. Not to mention Syria.
Russia has also sought to destabilize Western Europe and the US. For a long time, it was mainly messages about the communist paradise. And in the 60s, promoting protest against the Vietnam war, and pushing isolationism.
But then, in the late 80s, the message shifted to distrusting government, conspiracy theories, etc. I mean, look at RT! And more recently, basically the alt-right, with its overt racist overtones.
I don't know the UK situation well, but it's pretty clear that Russia promoted Brexit to destabilize the EU, and so NATO.
What if, instead of foreign influences, you just swap in poor economic management? I mean, China has moved from a position considerably weaker than Russia in its heyday to one that is probably stronger. So whatever mischief you think the US tried, obviously the Chinese have figured out how to deal with it. It seems to have involved a dose of freeish-markets.
> And in the 60s, promoting protest against the Vietnam war
This really takes the biscuit. Opposition to war is not evidence of a Russian plot, it is evidence of common sense. Without even considering if the Vietnam war made a lick of sense, any healthy democracy should at a minimum have some protests when it engages in a war of aggression.
> But then, in the late 80s, the message shifted to distrusting government, conspiracy theories, etc.
I don't think this affects your main point, but irony here is that "Russian Influence" is clearly a conspiracy theory. It might turn out true, as a number of conspiracy theories do, but still. Maybe the Russians have got to you :P
Re the Vietman War, of course opposition made perfect sense. It was a stupid, misguided adventure. It was driven by the "zero tolerance" standard for accepting communist development, even when in response to legitimate grievances. For Vietnam, that was long-term colonialist repression by the French.
So I'm not arguing that the Soviets created the antiwar opposition. But they clearly helped it develop. As I understand it, the main actors were domestic US communists, who were encouraged to join the movement, help train and organize, and so on. I was there, and I was part of it.
About Russian-influence conspiracy theory, have you actually watched RT very much? They've been trolling disgruntled Americans for almost 15 years. As subversive as VoA ever was, they've been total straight shooters compared with RT.
You're right of course, but I wonder how much it matters that only 45% of the voting population would have voted leave without interference as opposed to 52% (numbers pulled out of thin air). For interference (or a freak event, or weather, or anything really) to be able to push the results over the edge, the society as a whole has to be fairly close anyway.
This is also what I say to the Americans who insist Trump doesn't represent America because Clinton won the popular vote. Yeah, technically correct, but it doesn't really change how I view the American people.
Reading the history of American foreign policy, it’s difficult to see it otherwise. It’s one long list of screwing other countries to serve the interests of the American people. That list contains a lot of bungled operations so the goals weren’t achieved some of the time. America has had 0 issues propping up brutal, venal, self-serving dictators if it meant benefit to America. Examples include Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Chile, Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan. These are the ones I can name off hand.
At the same time, American leaders are quick to get on their high horse talking about the values of democracy. Talk is cheap though.
Even after all that, our view of America dropped precipitously with the election of Donald Trump. I think it’s safe to say that a democracy elects people who embody the electorate. You know what Trump is like. That’s how we think of you (as a whole) right now. However, as a great man once said “some, I assume, are good people”.
If you’d like to learn more about the misadventures of America in the Middle East in particular check out The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. The last few chapters cover the 20th and 21st centuries.
> Examples include Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Chile, Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan. These are the ones I can name off hand.
I think these are good examples. I agree. Though don't I don't agree with your overall assessment.
America elect representatives (not leaders) and it seems overwhelmingly to be the case that its representatives haven't been in control of its own government. The accountability structure broke and this has been going on for decades (probably since JFK) or perhaps even earlier.
America gives more foreign aid and has more immigration than all other countries combined. Its constitution is the longest standing foundational document in the world and genuinely (at least on paper) gives the people liberty and justice for all. America changes at a very rapid pace given its emphasis on liberty and immigration.
I think America is overwhelmingly a force for good in the world despite its rogue out of control agencies doing very bad things. Even so I deeply respect America as a nation. Given the age and the huge amount of power that has been consolidated its going through some inevitable problems. I think the American people are resilient and have the character to get through these times.
The American State is run by the American Government in accordance with the wishes of the American People. That's the definition of Democracy, which the American Government has trumpeted for at least 80 years, perhaps more.
The foreign policy of the American Government is chosen by American Leaders in a way that benefits the American People while also keeping the Leaders in power. If there is a conflict between the two goals, the latter goal takes precedence. Again, that is a feature of Democracy that America trumpets.
When that foreign policy goes to shit and causes misery to the rest of the world, the world blames the American Government and the American People, who represent the United States of America.
I'm familiar with the structure of a general outlook on a country's performance and the political structure behind it. What I'm unfamiliar with is what you as the source of the issues the US – and, presumably, its foreign policy specifically – has.
You, as a nation, have elected Trump. As long as he's in charge, in my opinion any further discussion of such matters would be pointless. That's my honest opinion, sorry if it hurts. You need to fix your own problems first ("America First") before it even makes sense to start discussing US foreign politics, for a current foreign politics doesn't really exist, it merely consists of sending contradictory signals, brown-nosing dictators, destroying international treaties and alliances, and estranging allies.
Oh, alright then. My apologies! You sounded like an American who wants to nitpick over US foreign policy, something which would be pointless at a time when no clear-cut foreign policy exists and the former foreign policies are well-documented.
Let's not split hairs over the difference between a Republic and a Democracy. It's clear what I meant when I said "America is a democracy" and "America supports/promotes democracy". Democracy, when I use this word is simply a system of government where leaders are chosen by people in periodic elections.
I'm really not interested in nitpicking beyond that. Talk to someone else or go elsewhere if you are.
You may mean something else by the word -- but words do have meanings. A republic is not a democracy, and a democracy is not a republic. They're different forms of government.
Many people do erroneously call the US a democracy, but that doesn't make it correct or irrelevant.
There is an important core difference that makes it meaningful to be clear: Republics give rise to career politicians, easy choke points for corruption. This is one of the often-discounted things behind Trump's election, he's an outsider who was vocal about this problem and cleaning it up.
You make it look like the 'stay' campaign is not funded externally[1]. Obama had openly asked Britishers to vote "stay"[2]. I am not sure about Britain(or the West). But in most of the sovereign nations, this would be considered as foreign interference.
You’ve linked to an article about Soros advocating a second referendum, not funding the Remain campaign. Meanwhile, the Leave.EU campaign is being investigated for receiving funding from “impermissible sources”.
I am tired of this whole blame the Russians for OUR stupidity and our faults. Unless the Russians sent armed thugs to the polling station to force you to vote for Brexit/Trump/<insert enemy here> at gunpoint, the fault lies with you and you alone.
Acknowledge that. Blaming the Russians to avoid having to face the uncomfortable truth is only going to hurt you in the long run. Avoid that while you still can.
You can’t blame the voters for trump or for brexit. They voted their hearts as they should. It was the job of Hillary and the remain campaign to push their message and educate the people on what their choices could lead to. They failed. That’s not the fault of the voters. I doubt a single sole intentionally voted with malicious intent, and you can’t fault someone for voting what they honestly believe is best, even if they are misinformed.
Conservatives didn't elect Trump. They tried to elect everybody else but Trump, he was maybe their sixth choice out of the original group.
Independents and particularly white women elected Trump. They were the most important swing vote that determined the critical states that gave Trump the electoral college edge over Hillary's massive $2 billion political campaign. Hillary's failure to resonate with independent white women and minorities, particularly black voters, sank her campaign.
"failure to resonate" being "Fake facebook memes knocking Hillary posted from a partisan meme factory" made her demographic stay home from the polls (they didn't vote for T either)
"he was maybe their sixth choice out of the original group"
As soon as he won the nomination, they all fell in line. So clearly he was the "conservative peoples" choice, but not the "conservative establishment" choice. Once he was elected, republicans (even the establishment) further fell into line by continuing to support, condone and cover for his (and the GOP leadership's) corruption.
"Independents and particularly white women elected Trump"
Independents sure but white ... republican women voted for him too. Being a "white woman' does not automatically make you a liberal democrat.
"Hillary's massive $2 billion political campaign"
Cute. All presidential campaigns are massive on the $ scale.
"Hillary's failure to resonate with independent white women and minorities, particularly black voters, sank her campaign."
Lots of factors contributed to Hillary's loss, it was not just "white women and minorities" who failed her.
Anecdotally, the people who have admitted to me (they feel shame BTW) voting for Trump did so out of their own self-interest. They thought they were "shaking up the system".
Thanks! I did look but couldn’t find anything, probably because I was looking for fines for lying to voters rather than campaign finance problems, but yeah that’s not great.
The thing is, there was no talk of a deal before the referendum. The vote was simply Stay or Go, with the assumption being that we would simply fall back to WTO rules. All this talk of negotiating a deal came after the vote. In that sense, a No Deal Brexit is closer to what the people voted for than any deal. Contrary to "voters remorse", I know plenty of Brexit supporters who are celebrating the defeat of what they see as the governments attempt to undermine the terms of Brexit.
Mainly there was talk of how we could stay in the single market, and maintain all the good things about EU membership without having to pay any of the costs.
"There is a free trade zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey that all European nations have access to, regardless of whether they are in or out of the euro or EU. After we vote to leave we will stay in this zone. The suggestion that Bosnia, Serbia, Albania and the Ukraine would stay part of this free trade area - and Britain would be on the outside with just Belarus - is as credible as Jean-Claude Juncker joining UKIP."
So here you have one of the two most senior politicians in the Vote Leave campaign, in a flagship speech, saying that after we vote to leave we will continue to enjoy free trade with Europe. Not WTO rules, not even a negotiated deal. He says we'll just "stay in this zone" as if it was a default.
Just like the Geneva Convention is the default position when there is no peace treaty.
Nonetheless, having that be the only thing governing one state's relationships with another is so rare and unpleasant that unless that state of affairs is explicitly requested with a declaration of war it is natural to assume something else is intended.
If you broke apart what brexit might actually mean for the country into its constituent parts, I think most people would feel out of their depth voting on these potential amendments individually. It's interesting that when you package all the details up into a single ill-defined 'brexit' people feel happy to project their own vague meaning onto the term and confidently cast their vote.
This form of condescension is a major part of why remainers have utterly failed to make their case. Remainers clearly believe they are better than brexiters, but do not address the issues which matter (lack of control on political matters which affect the lives of average people: trade, standards, communications, intellectual property, immigration) to the people they are ostensibly trying to convince.
The Brexit referendum had among the highest turnouts of all British votes in history, there was a considerable amount of media produced to explain each side (and many more remain arguments and endorsements were aired on radio, television, and through social media advertising campaigns), and the opinion was nonetheless trending further toward Brexit on the eve of the vote. It is just about as democratic as it could possibly be.
I honestly don't know where this theme of regret is coming from, because among the people I know who supported Brexit, none of them have expressed anything other than ongoing support, and a desire to see the original intent of the referendum respected by the parliament (as it clearly wasn't respected by the Prime Minister).
The original intent? What original intent was that? Brexit was always light on detail, and that is coming home to roost. When pressed, most Brexit supporters I've spoken to show absolutely no interest in the dismal nitty gritty of politics, preferring to spout shallow platitudes like "why can't they just get on with it".
The silence from chief Brexiteers Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson has been profoundly deafening.
People were promised a pogrom against immigrants and Muslims, and are getting antsy that they haven’t been allowed to start deporting and disappearing people yet. That’s what they want to get on with - it seems to be the sole unifying factor between pro-brexit factions.
There was no need for detail, because the WTO already provides a framework for trade agreements. That was the assumed state people voted on - talk of a deal came afterwards, and was considered by many to be an attempt to do "Brexit in name only", causing a situation where we're still obligated to the EU but no longer have any MEPs.
I can't believe anyone would make such an assumption. I know some people who 1) voted leave 2) are perfectly aware that under WTO rules their businesses would literally have to close because they trade with EU and their European partners won't accept a ~20% hike on the price of British products due to non-EU custom duties. They all wanted out of EU because they don't like the immigrants, because they think Brussels has too much power, but they all wanted easy trade with the EU. WTO trade is not what they voted for.
Well of course, after all there are millions of them so I'm sure it's relatively easy to find people from any part of the "leaver" spectrum - from people who knew exactly what WTO is and are happy with it, to people who voted leave because they don't like the Polish shops on their street.
There isn't a single one reason why people voted leave.
The argument about lack of control is not true: Uk has had very significant influence over a lot of the decision process in the EU. They have democratically elected representatives and career civil servants, like for local and national institutions in the UK. A British voter doesn’t control EU any less than they control the UK.
Thirty years ago, maybe. It's now got extensive co-decision powers and is a serious body in its own right.
In fact, there's an argument that the in-built government majority in the Commons makes that far more of a powerless rubber-stamping body in normal times (recent events notwithstanding!)
A serious body that is inhabited by Front National, AFD, Die Partei (they switch their parliamentary representative every 3 month, so that 4 people get a salary of ~30000 a year) and other reprehensible or joke parties.
I don't think this is actually a bug; I think small fringe parties deserve representation, and it's an inescapable consequence of being serious about proportional representation.
Arguably Farage has been a "shadow" party leader in the UK for years. I wonder how differently things would have gone under a PR system where there were a few UKIP MPs off in one corner. As it was, they had no influence right up to the point where they "flipped" a large section of the Tory party into being pro-Brexit.
I also think that Farage shows that having a safe seat in the media is far more important than in Parliament for small parties; the national media have consistently given him far more coverage than comparable small or regional parties, because he's "good entertainment".
Except that the the UK the goverment is formed from the elected members of the house. In the EU the only body with real power, the commision, is appointed by a process in which the "elected" president of the commision is the only candidate.
Absolutely not trying to be condescending, apologies if I came across that way.
Personally, I am just pained that voters who live in countries where democracy still works, do not take it seriously - that includes not spending time and effort to educate themselves with at least the basics of the issues they are voting on.
Imagine living in countries like Russia, Zimbabwe, Turkey etc - where elections are a farce. Now compare it with UK - British people had a real chance to vote to stay in the EU, they just threw that chance away.
I am not being snarky or condescending - I am just frustrated that voters don't spend a bit of effort to educate themselves before voting. Democracy only works if the voters make it work.
> I am not being snarky or condescending - I am just frustrated that voters don't spend a bit of effort to educate themselves before voting.
Maybe many do and you're just wrong about whether they educated themselves? Maybe many of them are more educated about the issue than you are yet don't feel as required to shout how dumb the other side is from the rooftops. That you assume ignorance of those you don't understand and then say they should educate themselves as though there is an objective right answer is both snarky and condescending.
Sure, probably on both sides. But to assume that everyone on one side of an issue, or even most, are dupes is a very dangerous assumption. Not every election outcome has to be rationalized, but in the attempt to do so people build excuses out of easy-to-find-when-digging election issues prevalent in all elections. Then they blindly say that must be the reason or that it only affects one side or that voters are dupes or whatever makes them feel better instead of considering that there is reasonable disagreement. It happens with most election results these days that don't favor the boisterous.
Brexiteers keep saying the Remain camp put out lies, but whenever pressed for facts they can't really come up with anything substantial. In contrast to the lies the Leave camp has spouted, which are documented. The pioneers of the Leave camp actually got the hell out of politics when they succeeded. How does that inspire confidence..
So, please, show me how the Remain camp has lied in order to influence the referendum.
I said "probably" because I don't know (I do see plenty of comments suggestion fear mongering about things that wre supposed to have happened by now like recessions, loss of food, loss of medicine, etc). My comment is about foolishly getting hung up on the rhetoric (and assuming voters are too stupid to see through it) instead of the real issues both sides have. Sadly, the response was back to getting hung up on the rhetoric more or less proving my point.
Whichever way one voted, we were sold a pup. Both sides lied. Which makes the case and result, either way, rather academic.
Farage admitted the morning after the result that the £350m a week to the NHS was a lie. A promise that undoubtedly had considerable impact with the current austerity NHS funding crisis.
> Farage admitted the morning after the result that the £350m a week to the NHS was a lie
The bus was part of the official Vote Leave campaign not Farage’s Leave.EU, so that particular lie is not for Farage to defend. Many others are though.
We knew what we were getting, but that is not what the campaign sold. Both sides ran overwhelmingly negative campaigns.
Ironic that remain was labelled Project Fear as the most direct lies were on the leave side - the £350m that is nowhere near and never has been, and the claims of mass Turkish immigration when Turkey isn't even in the EU stand out as easily memorable.
Remain were less blatant, but gave numerous predictions and estimates of the consequence of leaving. Some were reasonable, from good sources. Others appear to have been back of an envelope escalating wildness like that house prices would fall 10%, then 20, then 25% and more. Often very poor credibility sources but still repeated as though just as credible as the Treasury or BoE etc. Which just gave easy ammunition for the Mail etc.
Except the bus never actually said we'd be giving £350m per week to the NHS. It said "We send the EU £350m a week - let's fund our NHS instead." Nobody in their right mind would assume that means we'd just divert all that money to the NHS, nor is that a decision that the Leave campaigners can make - it's simply a statement that the NHS is grossly underfunded while we send billions of pounds a year across the channel.
>This should be a lesson for all voters across the world - think for a minute before voting. At least try to understand what you're voting on. We can blame all we want on the media, politicians etc etc, but in the end, we can't deny Brexit is the result of a properly, democratically conducted election
It's a shitshow for sure, but at least it's a democratic shitshow. Democracy isn't always a bed of roses, sometimes it's chaos, but it is what it is.
The EU council could have offered some reasonable concessions in order to remain, both before and after the referendum, but nada. What really helped the leave vote was not so much shadowy influences but the attitude of the EU council. You can't ignore the elephant in the room.
> The EU council could have offered some reasonable concessions in order to remain, both before and after the referendum, but nada.
The essential problem with the Brexit movement is that it's based not on what the EU is but on the distorted view on what the EU is. When you start tackling the specific complaints that people had, it often turns out that it was the British government who had the power to alter the policies, not the EU. (For example, Britain deciding to let in Polish migrant workers after Poland joined the EU in 2004, unlike every other major country in the EU). The EU even conceded that Britain had a perpetual right to opt out of "ever-closer union."
So what could the EU have conceded that would have convinced the die-hard Brexiteers to opt for Remain?
- Nobody in the UK ever voted for an external, supra-national government to have increasing control over numerous and increasing aspects of British life: farming, fishing, immigration, subsidies, etc. etc.
- The EU is openly talking about a unified army, implementation of a law requiring all members to join the Euro and 'tax harmonisation': the removal of sovereign countries to set their own tax policies.
- Oh I know you'll tell me elected chambers that elect councils that distribute swords allocating a table of 7 presidents who nominate a head hobbit but the EU is patently undemocratic: noone knows who's in it, what they do or how they got there. Turnout for EU elections runs around 25% in the UK: it's hardly a mandate from the people is it?
- The EU is very expensive to the UK which makes a net contribution of £9 billion / year. This is money that could be spent on hospitals, teachers, police, etc.
- I know you like the EU because you see it as some hippy, huggy federation of nations but the EU is increasingly right-wing and neo-liberal - you need only look at their criminal treatment of Greece to see that.
- farming and fishing policies were central parts of the EU (EEC) when we joined, and voted to stay.
-'The EU' might be talking about them, they probably talk about a lot of things that aren't going to happen. And some are probably more reasonable than you are making out.
- I don't agree it's undemocratic, but yes there is poor engagement. I think that's a reason why we voted to leave, rather than a reason to leave in and of itself.
- That's less than 1% of govt spending. That is cheap. Brexit will cut growth, this money may plug the gap, we aren't going to be economically better off after leaving though.
- The EU reflects its citizens, you only have to look at Britain itself to see the same thing happening.
It is undemocratic by design (the role of the parliament is roughly that of the role of the parliament in Bismarck's Germany, they can't introduce laws and can only veto or amend laws they don't like. They don't appoint the commission etc.) and tries to replace the national laws and constitutions democratic nations have given to them. Luckily they didn't manage to institute a EU constitution, but some of their other reforms like Bologna have done enough damage as is. Their science funding is extremely ineffective and wasteful compared to the funding schemes of the national organizations like the Max Planck and Helmholtz society, but unfortunately practically mandatory now.
I get that it is a "right wing, populist" thing to oppose the EU, but there are plenty of reasons not to like it.
The commission is selected by the European council that is made up of people selected by national governments.
It's like saying that the UK isn't democratic because the house of lords isn't elected, and neither is our head of state (which is even worse, because democratically elected representatives get absolutely no say in that).
In most democracies in Europe the head of government is chosen by parliament, not by some third party. The current setup is precisely how things were in the Kaiserreich. I did not get to elect most people in the European council, right now the guy representing Germany is someone that does not even speak proper English and was send off to Brussels because he failed as [Minister President](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnther_Oettinger).
> Nobody in the UK ever voted for an external, supra-national government to have increasing control over numerous and increasing aspects of British life: farming, fishing, immigration, subsidies, etc. etc.
Most of that stuff was in the EEC that the British did vote for. The EU did guarantee that Britain could further opt out of "ever closer union" if it wanted to.
> The EU is openly talking about a unified army, implementation of a law requiring all members to join the Euro and 'tax harmonisation': the removal of sovereign countries to set their own tax policies.
Britain also had a guaranteed opt-out of the Euro. Since Britain and France are the only EU countries with any military capabilities worth speaking out, Britain has an effective veto over any unified military policy.
> The EU is very expensive to the UK which makes a net contribution of £9 billion / year. This is money that could be spent on hospitals, teachers, police, etc.
You do know that the Leave campaign basically said the day after the referendum "oops, this part of our plank was a big, fat, steaming lie"?
> Oh I know you'll tell me elected chambers that elect councils that distribute swords allocating a table of 7 presidents who nominate a head hobbit but the EU is patently undemocratic: noone knows who's in it, what they do or how they got there. Turnout for EU elections runs around 25% in the UK: it's hardly a mandate from the people is it?
I'll grant you that the EU has a hard time trying to overcome apathy in its democratic institutions. But apathy doesn't make it less democratic.
> I know you like the EU because you see it as some hippy, huggy federation of nations
Also, we're mostly a representative democracy. That means we vote for representatives whose job it is to.. represent us. Make decisions on our behalf. etc.
I have just completed a European Law module for my Graduate Diploma in Law, and this answer is a really concise and organised version of what I've been trying to say to people since the first few weeks of the course.
I have studied the European Union as an undergraduate politics student and now as a postgraduate law student, and I would totally agree with you that one of the primary issues of the European Union is its perception among citizens. Another commenter here mentioned how low the European Parliament Election turnout is in Britain, I think it was about 34% last time round, and this vote is often used as a 'protest' vote.
The public are not aware of how the European Union is constructed, and they are not aware of how the balance of power is determined. Much of the dialogue before the referendum in the UK was about 'unelected' and 'undemocratic' power in the EU, and this was usually directed towards the commission - a body that has no lawmaking power, and is selected by directly elected bodies(at the EU and Member State levels).
I really think the EU needs to speak louder and more directly to European Citizens about the role it plays and how it functions. Perhaps it does already, but I have not come across much outreach.
Full disclosure: I am an ardent remainer, and believe that whilst the EU is not perfect, we are much better off inside with influence than outside without.
This is a truly excellent link and one that should be shared as widely as possible on this topic. I read his entire comment and came away much more confident in my understanding of what the EU really is and how it works. Thanks for sharing.
A Member of the European Parliament, working in one of the parliamentary committees, draws up a report on a proposal for a ‘legislative text’ presented by the European Commission, the only institution empowered to initiate legislation....
The European Parliament may approve or reject a legislative proposal, or propose amendments to it. The Council is not legally obliged to take account of Parliament’s opinion but in line with the case-law of the Court of Justice, it must not take a decision without having received it.
The commissioners are chosen from the governments of the member states and then go through a complicated vetting and election process. To achieve such an indirect representative structure was actually one of the major goals of the UK together with other countries, in order to limit the power the EU has over individual governments.
Hence, this appointment system, which is additionally kept in check by the European Parliament whose members are elected directly by the voters from all member states.
You could complain that it's too representative, but not that it's not democratic. The alternative of giving the European Parliament more power and let it constitute a "European Government" directly has not been found appealing by the governments of its member states, particularly not by the UK, since they do not want to give away so much of their sovereignty.
Complaining about lack of democracy in the EU while at the same time complaining about lack of national sovereignty is perhaps the most hypocritical and intentionally misleading part of the current populist agenda.
Keep in mind the European Commission is chosen largely by the heads of state of the various EU countries, and must be approved (and can be dismissed by) the european parliment. The EU parliment has most of the power and is democratically elected.
Turnout for EU elections runs less than 30% in the UK: nobody here knows who's in it, what they do or how they got there.
Oh I know you'll tell me of the ignorance and stupidity of the racist, little England British voter and how they need to be 're-educated' but this is hardly a mandate from the people is it?
When there was a five way debate on who would be next leader of the commission, millions around Europe watched. In the UK? We put it on BBC parliament and it was not advertised.
Our media are at least partly to blame, tolerating "opinions" on matters of fact and minimising our real exposure to actual things the EU does.
The UK already had so many opt-outs and rebates compared to all other members, there really wasn't that much room for more concessions, certainly not of the type that the UK "leavers" wanted.
Some "leavers" just want to trade with the rest of the world with flexibility and not be bound to the EU. It's a hard argument to make that the EU is better when "leavers" compare the economic growth of the EU, which employs protectionism to prevent easy trading with outside of the EU when comparing the potential trade deals with the rest of world outside of the EU, without the need for VAT etc.
Do you know about specific kinds of trade that the UK would want different deals for than the EU? You might be able to optimize that somewhat, but I doubt it would weigh up against the leverage you have as (part of) the huge EU trading bloc, plus the loss of access to the internal market.
"Flexibility" - the EU has more free trade deals than the UK will ever negotiate on its own. Not to mention the immense value of the single market itself.
Protectionism is what we like to think of as standards. It improves lives in Europe.
> the EU has more free trade deals than the UK will ever negotiate on its own.
It doesn't really matter how many trade deals or what the trade deals are when VAT, import fees are applied in such a way to equalize the costs of external trade, to the point there isn't much benefit of trading with outside the EU unless they're some how able to significantly reduce costs or pioneer an industry that doesn't exist in the EU.
Even with just the UK utiliziling only the WTO (which the UK has no control over in the EU), the UK could stand to get better trading with the rest of the world than it can within the EU. But, this is not just because it can set the WTO rates.
The UK is not obligated to apply VAT and other fees after it leaves the EU on any imports and it doesn't have to be concerned about applying protectionism in industries that don't even exist in the UK.
> Protectionism is what we like to think of as standards. It improves lives in Europe.
I'm not really sure about which standards you're talking about, but I'll take a couple of the earliest and longest implemented standards that the EU requires, something that Greenland left over in the beginning.
The standards of the common agriculture policy and the common fisheries policies that the UK farming and fishing industires have been lobbying to fix for multiple decades has only lead to the destruction of environments, forcing farmers on quotas who then can't sell their products being forced to then depend on EU subsidies and grants to operate, it has lead to the destruction of much of the industry in the UK which in turn has made in particular, numerous farming and fishing towns become welfare dependent... It's been over 20 years of consistent failing to address these issues.
The worst part of this all is that these issues were completely avoidable, the EU and UK could have actually solved these problems and not let the situation deteriorate to the point that people have become that unhappy that they just want out. I am interested though to hear an opposing view how this improved lives in Europe.
The idea that the UK might somehow abolish VAT on leaving the EU sounds like wishful thinking to me. Where's the money for that hole in the budget going to come from?
The CFP is a mess, but without something to replace it I suspect fish stocks would simply have been extracted below replacement level.
CFP would have been well loved if it had been set up in such a way as to designate quotas to small fishers etc. As it stands most of the quotas are owned by a few huge players. That's the real reason why there's so much consternation among fishers - because of the people who have accrued fishing rights to squeeze out small producers.
"Flexibility" such as small negotiating position of weakness and having to negotiate trade and tariffs with every important trade partner directly from such position.
More a case of UK politicians not doing their job.
What do I expect them to do? Act solely in the interests of their pay packet and party. What should they do? Act in the interests of the nation. That was once supposed to be the point.
They could have sought concessions or adjustments from the EU as precursor to a second referendum. The few times another EU nation has rejected a treaty or some aspect of the Union there's been something of a renegotiation and a second referendum.
Since the ridiculous Fixed Parliaments Act there needs to be a super-majority to call a UK election early. Why not with a referendum for a change of such consequence?
Were the EU not such a divisive issue, for the whole 40 years of our EU membership, within the Tory party, they might have approached the issue with a little more honesty. It could all have SO easily been avoided.
Look at how quickly Cameron resigned after the vote. He wasn’t truly interested in finding a good deal, he was relying on the fact that people would vote remain regardless. I’m guessing due to the remain result in the Scottish independence referendum not long before.
Indeed - and in my opinion he'd completely misinterpreted that as a great success rather than what it was, a very narrow victory that burned a lot of political capital.
Or he resigned because he believed the leave decision could better be implemented by a leave campaigner, who would approach the matter more earnestly and enthusiastically.
Or more specifically, leave EU is a political and economic disaster and mess he wanted to not take part in. Even if you succeed you will be covered in dirt.
Just look at May now and imagine Cameron in her shoes. No politician wants this.
Allowing the referendum was an interesting but silly motion already, a gross miscalculation.
The UK has lots of power if they don't desperately beg.
They should expect a plain exit. With that done, a good deal with the USA is possible. The threat of that could instead get them a great deal with the EU, and they may even do well with both.
Desperate begging is the current plan though... that won't end well.
In 2016, a Pew poll showed that more French had a negative impression of the EU (61%) than British (48%). A large fraction of French polled (33%) want to leave.
The OP is mistaken and like many people think the EU is some kind of antagonistic entity that was forced upon their country, whereas in reality the EU has been funded by its member states as a voluntary union of members states - by unanimous votes, in all important matters. Every feature of the EU is the result of careful, decade long discussion between the governments of members states from all kinds of political sides.
The reason why the EU is perceived so bad in some countries (like the UK) are partly historic and partly because it the EU is the perfect scapegoat for local politicians who have messed things up. In the UK, scapegoating the EU for your own mistakes was particularly common.
Add to this the facts that the Leave campaign lied about practically everything - or at least intentionally distorted the facts - and that many voters don't know much about the structure of the EU, and the Brexit became reality.
It is unlikely that a similar decision will be made in any of the remaining 27 countries, for lack of popular support and because people there are more aware of the benefits of the EU. Never say no, though, fuelled with money from outside the EU, currently right-wing populists are pretty good at exploiting the fact that the divide between the rich and the poor is ever increasing very cleverly, and since poverty will increase in all EU countries, irrational and populist recipes for "the simple man on the street" can continue to gain in popularity. Radical left wing parties have largely the same agenda, so these are interchangeable.
So it's possible that one or two countries might attempt to exit the EU after some populist party has won an election. It's unlikely, though, because the EU offers overall way more benefits than disadvantages. It's budget is ridiculously cheap in terms of percentage of GDP and you get a lot of bang for the bucks out of the trade union alone. Moreover, future generations are fairly pro-EU in most member countries (though there are some outliers).
The UK was always a special-case member of the EU, always demanding it's own uniqueness and pushing neoliberal garbage at every corner. The EU council should never have bent over so far backwards for the UK in the first place and it would have been absurd for them to bend even further. UK exceptionalism can go enjoy it's lonely island time.
Maybe? If you think that most of the people are actually looking at or arguing about the implementation of any specific policy (I'd suspect this is the minority).
It seems more likely people are just arguing about which tribe they're a part of. In that case nobody cares about what the best outcome is or what the truth is. If you can get a brexit deal passed that still allows the UK to 'brexit' in name only, but otherwise retains all of the actual agreements of being in the EU it could be a win-win. People get to pretend they left, but it doesn't actually change anything.
Without this there isn't a good outcome here short of just ignoring the referendum. I think owning the lie is a good idea, but not sure if it would work politically since someone like Nigel Farage can just come back and loudly call you a liar that can't deliver on a 'true brexit'.
Maybe? I get what you're saying, but the confusion of the past 2 years of negotiations and the magnitude of this vote's failure is a pretty strong indication that it'll not be possible to 'Brexit in name only'. The nationalist side will (correctly) point out that if you're still subject to the same regulations & trade deals, you haven't actually changed anything. The EU might go for it, but would probably be like "If you're going to say that you're not part of the EU, we can't realistically give you a voice in shaping EU policy", thus leaving Britain in a worse negotiating position with respect to those trade deals. I thought that was the grandparent's point.
I don't think what you are saying is correct. Rhetoric aside, I think there are 2 main reasons for leaving: 1. greater autonomy in deciding on laws (especially wrt things like immigration policy), 2. withdrawal of the financial contribution to Europe.
Many "remain" people specifically oppose these 2 reasons. They want the European oversight on laws. One of the main reasons for a European Union is to ensure that these kinds of laws are harmonised across Europe. Also, "remain" people feel that the UK actually receives more value than they pay for their European contributions. Specifically, the cost of bureaucracy is necessary to ensure that the UK has a voice in European decision making. They feel that in a "no deal" situation, Europe (being bigger and stronger) will simply dictate the conditions of every agreement.
I do remote work for a UK company, though I live in Japan, so I can see this from a slightly removed position (though, please note that I've been hurt economically from the weak pound since Brexit, so I still have a vested interest!) I sympathise with the "leave" goals, but I think the "remain" camp has it right. Brexit is going to cost the UK a lot IMHO and there is no way to have a "pretend leave" that satisfies the "leave" side. The UK may have some extra autonomy after leaving, but the cost will be that they will be tossed around by Europe on virtually every front with no power to respond. Economically, it will also be extremely expensive -- something the market seems to agree with me on, given the state of the pound since the referendum.
> 1. greater autonomy in deciding on laws (especially wrt things like immigration policy)
Which turned out to have been possible all along, Theresa May simply didn't implement the EU rules which have already existed when she was home secretary. Immigration can never be solved by leaving the EU because it was already solved.
> They want the European oversight on laws.
If the last two years have shown us, the UK doesn't have the technical ability to run itself, the government can't even organise leaving let alone the mammoth task of re-implementing the 500-odd trade deals they will lose.
Some might say that a good outcome is one where the people can freely make their own choices and accept the consequences. The plight of the British might serve as a cautionary tale informing the decisions of some other country, that's certainly a good thing in some sense.
Democracy is not guaranteed to deliver prosperity or lead only to the correct decisions, yet it's the best system we have.
Overtly political discussions do pop up on HN occasionally - the ones that don't descend into slanging matches (such as this one) are usually of good quality and seem to be tolerated by the mods.
After brexit the people became a transcendent idea. An idea that nationalists want to have presidence over everything, including the democratic process and the rule of law. And at this point the people is just a proxy for the righteous authority of the nation.
I often hear the refrain that, "democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried". But how many forms have actually been tried? As far as I know, every country is either a democracy or an autocracy.
Maybe it could be better phrased as, "Democracy is better than autocracy, and we think it's crazy to try anything else".
What else is there? The only systems I'm aware of are variants of either democracy or autocracy. Control is either dispersed among many (democratic) or centralized among a few (autocratic). Or there's no control and you have anarchy, I guess.
There is certainly in a lot of room for improvement in how we elect leaders and what powers we give them. But, I think the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that dispersed power is better than centralized power. Remember that humanity has in fact tried a lot of variations of democracy and government throughout history. None of us actually lives in a direct democracy today a la ancient Anthens, we live in republics.
To reiterate, my main objection to asserting "democracy is the best" is that it discourages thought about other possibilities.
I don't know what work better. But I do think there are other possibilities. I'm using a somewhat stricter definition of democracy and autocracy. For our purposes, lets say a democracy allows nearly everyone to vote for a person or party that will have complete or nearly complete control over the government. We'll allow exceptions for felons and young people not voting. Lets call countries where one person has full power an autocracy.
I'm not going to give an example of a perfect form of government. But I'll give some bad or half-baked ideas just to illustrate it's possible.
As you mentioned, there's anarchy. Not far from there, you could have rule by corporations, where corporations hire their own internal police force to protect their employees, enforce their rules, and make up for the lack of national government. I know, scary. I said these weren't good ideas.
You could have rule by experts. Technocracy, or something similar. Only economists would vote on economic policy, medical professionals would vote on healthcare policy, etc.
We could say all new laws must be in pursuit of some mandate, such as increasing standard of living for the lowest 30% of the population. Laws that don't work towards this goal could be challenged and struck down in courts. Maybe laws could be proposed by anyone and the most upvoted ones would be considered by the courts.
Maybe direct democracy should be revisited now that we have the internet.
We could allow more departments to operate independently, much like the Federal Reserve Bank does now.
Maybe it's totally impossible to improve on the democracy we have now. I'd still rather not discourage thinking about it.
There are dozens if not hundreds of different types of democracy, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and many forms of democracy that have not yet been tried. Most of them would be disastrous, for example "direct democracy" as opposed to representative, parliamentary democracy could not possibly work outside of a small village.
But it's odd to look at this as trying something out. As far as I know, no political system has ever been tried out. Okay, maybe you could count the genocide in Cambodia by the Red Khmer as trying out, but even they didn't really have the intention of just "trying out" this new, accelerated path to communism.
Political systems are put in place by emerging elites after a disruptive event (e.g. revolution, war, cataclysm, mass exodus) has taken place.
I don't have anything specific in mind, and obviously it's virtually impossible to just "try out" different systems in an established country.
My objection to refrains along the lines of "democracy is the best system" is that it tends to shut down thought about other possibilities. We were taught from the time we're young that democracy is the best. But in reality, there's been very little experimentation. I'd rather encourage people to think on how we can continue to evolve our forms of government, not just in the details, but all the way up to how we choose our leadership.
I don't know how we'd test them. Computer models? Trial runs in small communities?
I don't know if anyone will come up with anything better. But there are possibilities other than "everyone votes for a leader" or, "one leader has power for life".
Democracy can be damn scary sometimes. The Nazi party was democratically elected. Who's to say that in 20 years, the majority of Americans couldn't be bigoted against some minority?
Then that's what we get. There's no guarantee of a good outcome: if the majority of people want to do stupid things, a democracy will let them.
In such a case we'd probably be fucked regardless of what form of government we had. A dictatorship, monarchy, or oligarchy lets a minority of people do stupid things, and if you have a majority, it's fairly likely there is a powerful minority contained within them.
You're thinking of a direct democracy. One major advantage of electing representatives is that they can prevent slim majorities from enacting huge mistakes.
Note that there won't be a democratic vote on any particular Brexit deal, which is likely to be less popular than the abstract idea of a Brexit. So if a Brexit deal is brokered, there's a good chance it won't be what a majority of people want to do.
Democracy doesn’t have to mean that 50% + 1 gets whatever they want. There can be higher bars to clear for more drastic changes, and pretty much every democratic government has some.
The majority of EU citizens did not vote in the Brexit referendum. They shouldn't have to suffer the consequences [edit to clarify] of a war resulting from this vote.
"The majority of EU citizens did not vote in the Brexit referendum"
The overwhelming majority of EU citizens did not vote to join the EU, nor did they vote in favour of the Treaty of Lisbon upon which the authority of the EU currently resides.
Nor do any of the citizens of the EU get to vote for the EU executive, or anyone who has any material influence over legislation (their MEP's can't introduce legislation).
In fact, majorities of several EU nations voted against the Treaty of Lisbon after which it was 'passed anyways' (I'm looking at you France), and after which the other referendums were cancelled because the elites knew it would would fail.
And of course UK citizens never voted to join the EU, they voted to join the EEC.
Most EU citizens want something like the EEC, with some nice freedom of movement. They don't want a hard or ideological political union.
Have a look at Pew historical polling, it's interesting [1] - it shows the majority of even very large EU nations actually wary of the EU - up until the 'Brexit scare'. After Brexit, this will continue to languish downward.
The EU has so many existential issues that it's facing, and it doesn't seem to want to suggest anything other than 'more political union' as an answer, which is clearly not it. (See the recent 'twinning' agreement signed by Macron and Merkel last week as an example of trying to get some political momentum going on the pro-EU side).
The EU needs to reform, but it can't unfortunately for a variety of reasons, and I don't see any meaningful path forward.
"Representative democracy". The power to accept or deny things like the treaty of lisbon lies with the members of parliament that represent the people, not with the people itself. Why should it be different for things like the treaty of lisbon than for things like taxation?
"representatives" cannot arbitrarily change the constitution, create new forms of government and devolve national powers without real consent.
For the same reason Scotland cannot leave the UK without a referendum, for the same reason Quebec cannot leave Canada.
The Treaty of Lisbon represented enough change that it was to be ratified by referendum. But guess what? It was voted down too often among the first to hold referendums, so the elite just kiboshed the whole thing. And skipped the referendums knowing they would lose.
Now consider that the French population roundly rejected the treaty [1], and then their government simply changed a few items and passed it anyhow, without again deferring to the people.
Is the 5th Republic even legally legitimate now?
The French Government, acted directly against the will of the the people to devolve signifiant sovereign powers.
It's an appalling and brutal transgression of democracy, and there should be consequences.
Members of the EEA have to accept EU legislation and make payments to the EU and the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Not full emmbership fees. Also they're part of the decision process shaping EEA policies.
Another option is EFTA and bilateral agreements like Switzerland. However, the May government decided not to pursue EFTA membership and Norway isn't that keen since thay're afraid it would impact future EFTA/EU negotiations and they could use some of their current rights.
Others have responded abstractly with why this isn't a useful distinction, but I'll do you one better and give you a history lesson.
In 1649 Charles I of England was executed by order of Parliament. Parliament drew a distinction between the Crown and the person wearing it. Their loyalty was to the Crown. Having killed the King they decided to try being a republic.
Parliament is sovereign. But elected Heads of State are trouble - parliament eventually figured this out and got a new King instead.
They haven't really been subjects since the UK became a constitutional monarchy (defined as when a monarch is "a sovereign who reigns but does not rule" -- Vernon Bogdanor, ref wikipedia). So, not for the last few hundreds of years at least.
They can be subjects, nationals, and/or citizens. Those are all distinct and all still valid, and it is possible to qualify for more than one at the same time. Including those of us who don't qualify for any of them, there are 8 possibilities.
The UK has a web site that attempts to help people figure out what they are and what they could transition to. It's insanely complicated.
They are de-facto citizens, and the UK Monarchy has effectively no power, ergo your comment is moot, and deflects from a very real and tangible issue of democratic deficit in the EU.
The EU is far more democratic than the UK. In fact I happen to think that FPTP is one of the contributing factors to Brexit. For decades people have been living in areas where their votes didn't matter at all.
+ The UK (like other European nations) has a fairly vibrant democracy, with representatives who make legislation.
+ People know who their reps are, and vote on the basis of party ideals.
+ Governments live and die (i.e. they fall) on votes made by reps.
+ Governments are hugely responsive on many issues, and have no choice but to bend given popular demand.
+ There are popular plebiscites on major issues such as Scottish independence and Brexit.
Contrast that with the EU:
+ Nobody related to creating legislation, or providing strategic or material guidance is elected. Nobody speaking on behalf of the EU is elected.
+ MEP's cannot introduce or amend legislation.
+ Pragmatically, there are very low voter turnouts, and people have generally little knowledge as to who their MPs are, or what the platforms are.
+ There are no popular plebiscites, but worse, due to the above, the EU Executive is notoriously tone deaf to the will of the people. (They just don't care, because they think they are 'right' - which is a natural thing frankly in any body that doesn't have to worry about the status of their power)
+ The legal foundation of the EU, based on various treaties, most notably the Treaty of Lisbon, is on shaky ground. French voters literally voted against the Treaty, and it was enacted anyhow. This is not a 'trade agreement' - this is about devolution of major constitutional powers, so this is a problem. Referendums were cancelled in other nations because they would have been lost.
...
Summary: the UK, much like most other European nations, is considerably 'more democratic' than the EU.
If you're going to take a boldly contrarian stance, the onus is on you to provide the evidence.
It's funny how you only ever hear this (complete nonsense) meme applied to the UK, and never to say Canada or Australia. Even though it's the same queen...
The majority of EU citizens that voted whether to join the EU or not ... voted against doing that. Ditto with expansion of the EU, constitution of the EU.
The EU has a long history of ignoring democratic elections. That, to me, does not seem like a good thing at all, and yet it's becoming ever more clear that if you want the EU to exist at all, ignoring elections will be the cost: Both the current Greek and the current Italian government made promises of leaving the EU to get elected. Both have reneged, but of course other parties are springing up with more forceful leave rhetoric. Now French and German extreme-right parties promise to kill the EU if they get elected, and the more mainstream is forced to also take a more anti-EU stance in each country.
If either France or Germany decides to leave, then the EU experiment is over.
> Both the current Greek and the current Italian government made promises of leaving the EU
It's quite late for that, since unlike the Brits they also joined the EMU and thus ceded sovereignity to the EU. This is exactly what Margaret Tatcher warned against: a federal Europe by the back door. Also, organizing a referendum on the topic of exiting from the Eurozone is a violation of EU treaties.
Other EU exits could be less disastrous if coordinated. For instance if Greece and Italy would leave at the same time and negotiate together. For this they would first need to form an aliance like the Visegrad group. Regardless, everyone would have to suffer in such an event due to lack of credibility in the EU project, lack of confidence in national currencies and the Euro.
Then that's what we get. There's no guarantee of a good outcome: if the majority of people want to do stupid things, a democracy will let them.
In such a case we'd probably be fucked regardless of what form of government we had. A dictatorship, monarchy, or oligarchy lets a minority of people do stupid things, and if you have a majority, it's fairly likely there is a powerful minority contained within them.
If that’s the degree of freedom you need to be happy, you probably need to live somewhere that has ever claimed to offer it. If you’re just convinced of the incompetence and doom of the race then while I can certainly see your point of view and don’t dismiss it, I don’t know that such a perspective is useful in a public policy context as it offers no solutions or hope.
Not accepting that we’re fallible, that principle is subservient to outcomes, and that a 48%-52% split is not exactly a significant minority-majority split seems unhelpful. More, if you see doom around every corner then what’s the harm in another referendum with a better defined question, and better controls on lying, dirty money and foreign influence? Remember that we’re less than a century away from the last time Europe tried to tear itself apart and take the rest of the world with it, maybe some caution is warranted here.
Not necessarily "large scale", but it's hard to leave the EU customs union without introducing a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and specifically not having a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland was part of the peace agreement that ended the Troubles.
I disagree. The Single Market is what is very hard to get out of without a hard border on the Irish border. Customs documentation can be addressed away from the border and is potentially fixed with technology, but the necessity of physical checks for standards conformance that cannot be fudged is the real problem.
One of the main pillars of Brexit voters was immigration control.
So, we're going to ruin the entire country to get immigration controls (and destroy trade, and cut ourselves off politically, socially, and from the scientific communities, and...) then just leave the border open?
That's like burning down your luxury rental accommodation because you don't like that exact shade of wallpaper, then moving in to a hovel with graffiti on the walls.
A border will do nothing against illegal EU immigration. I doubt any brexit scenario will result in EU nationals requiring a visa to enter the UK (for short term stays). A border is not what will prevent them from overstaying.
Well, nothing is stopping the Republic of Ireland from following the UK. The EU can't even really do anything about it without starting a war, so a sudden surprise exit is entirely possible. This would solve the border issue.
Things would have been much less messy if Brexit had been implemented as a split of the EU, with the UK and Republic of Ireland running their own little 2-member EU government. Scotland could then be allowed to do their split from the UK while remaining in the mini-EU.
Ireland doesn't want to leave the EU. It's entire economy is based on EU membership. And they fought a war of independence in the 1920s specifically to avoid being in a 'mini union' with the UK. This kind of 'it would be easier if everyone did our bidding' thinking is one of the reasons exit negotiations with the EU have gone so badly.
The 'war', if it happens, would be a restart of the intractable civil kind among the various NI groups, not EU vs us.
I think Republic of Ireland not wanting to leave is "stopping them". They're much more integrated into Europe than the UK too. Have the euro for example.
Neither the UK or Ireland will ever ever be the ones the enforce the hard border.
It would have to be the EU enforcing it, if that is what their trade deals demanded. And I sincerely doubt that the EU would be happy with the consequences of them stationing troops on that border.
Both the UK and Ireland have stated that they will not be enforcing a hard border.
I thought immigration was one of the issues that was driving Brexit. How can they control immigration from the EU if they don't have border enforcement? There is something I'm missing here.
Make people fill out proof-of-right-to-work-in-the-country paperwork when they get employed and proof-of-right-to-live-in-the-country paperwork when they rent or buy housing. That's essentially what most countries do. Border security is definitely helpful--especially if you want to deter outright criminals from trafficking drugs and human beings--but it's not sufficient, because if you enter the country on a time-limited visa and your visa expires, you still need a mechanism for that.
Literally not enforcing the Irish border and relying on everyone having their paperwork in order when they deliver truckloads of goods or apply for jobs or whatever isn't a completely insane idea. There's a moderate risk of UK tariffs and trade barriers being circumvented by people smuggling Czech stereo systems across the Irish border in an unmarked van and selling them on the streets of Liverpool, but maybe that's okay.
On the end both sides want control over what's entering their country.
If the EU started allowing shady companies to export whatever tainted foodstuff they happen to have into the UK, we'd see English soldiers at the border real quick.
I was the OP - my thinking is that things are trending poorly.
The west and what it stands for is threatened both directly (Russian involvement in attacking elections both in the US, in the UK with brexit, and elsewhere) and indirectly (rise of authoritarian power/censorship in China). This is ignoring smaller, but still violent direct threats like ISIS.
With the remaining powerful moderates in Europe struggling (Merkel, Macron) and extremists waiting at the sidelines to be elected, increased nationalism and division from brexit could lead to more instability creating a situation where a large scale conflict is more likely or a west that isn't as united and can't respond as well to aggression from Russia.
It'll be 'war' within individual nations, leading to increased chaos within the entire EU system. Which is what is taking place in France right now in limited form. Take a look at GDP per capita growth since 2007:
The sole positive result? Germany, a mere 6-7% GDP per capita growth over a decade. In non-inflation adjusted terms, since 2007. Inflation adjusted those other nations have seen that much larger of a contraction.
That's a recipe for disaster in Europe.
How long can most of Western Europe continue to contract economically while social demands increase with aging demographics? It's fundamentally why France is rioting for these past two months, they're being smashed between high taxes, negative growth, and negative quality of life progress.
The UK's GDP per capita has contracted by 20% since 2007 just in nominal terms. Throw a tiny bit of inflation onto that, and you're looking at the UK losing 1/3 of its economy in dollar terms over ~11 years or so. Continue that process for another decade and the result is predictable: people will freak out in increasingly dramatic ways.
But war will not cause any economic expansion, nor would breaking of the EU, quite the opposite. If you can show how lack of EU would lead to better results, do provide a good and credible analysis, maybe something can be used and salvaged.
Each and every country would face the same problem, separately and with interesting various plans bbut no negotiation position compared to China or Russia or US. Even Germany or France alone would have serious problems negotiating with these economic powers.
Positive action like promoting internal market, good trade deals, subsidizing and making it easier to run manufacturing again, rebalancing from pure services. Pooling resources.
It is what EU all offers much better than any individual country could... even then it it's just not enough.
You cannot outmaneuver 3/4 of the planetary manpower ever without a serious technological gap, and that is closing or already has closed. Even with Russian force and resources they will ultimately fail to dominate. US with their remaining tech lead is already failing...
What exactly does "the West" stand for, in your view? Your hyperbolic framing of Russia's "involvement" in 2016 aside (you make it sound like it was large scale cyberwar, which it wasn't), Russia would now start a global war in Europe that would very likely go nuclear because ... the West isn't "standing up to it"?
>a large scale conflict is more likely or a west that isn't as united and can't respond as well to aggression from Russia.
The default foreign policy consensus appears to be that anything Russia does is "bad" and should be opposed, perhaps militarily. This is nonsense, and really is a "Cold War mindset" that is not applicable in a post-9/11 environment.
> What exactly does "the West" stand for, in your view?
Freedom of expression/speech, free press, representative democracy, independent court system, individual (women/minority) rights. There are other things like not being a religious theocracy, but I think the first few cover the most general important pieces.
> you make it sound like it was large scale cyberwar, which it wasn't
Evidence suggests it was large scale and directed by Putin through the Russian IRA [1], though it was likely more effective than even they expected (and more of a disinformation campaign than a cyber war).
"But it quickly became clear that the Russians had used a different model for their influence campaign: posting inflammatory messages and relying on free, viral spread. Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential election."
> Russia would now start a global war in Europe that would very likely go nuclear because ... the West isn't "standing up to it"?
I'm not suggesting they'd start a global war, but they're targeting NATO allied countries by influencing elections towards instability. Maybe it's just to free up access to their funds by trying to get rid of the Magnitsky Act [2], but if they wanted to more aggressively take over Ukraine or do something else hostile increased global instability might lead to something larger.
Obviously these things are hard to predict, but only a couple years prior to WWI people said the connected world economy made large scale conflict impossible. [3]
"A 1910 best-selling book, The Great Illusion, used economic arguments to demonstrate that territorial conquest had become unprofitable, and therefore global capitalism had removed the risk of major wars. This view, broadly analogous to the modern factoid that there has never been a war between two countries with a MacDonald’s outlet, became so well established that, less than a year before the Great War broke out, the Economist reassured its readers with an editorial titled “War Becomes Impossible in Civilized World.”"
> This is nonsense, and really is a "Cold War mindset"
It's not that anything they do is bad, but if you read about the people in power there from those that have interacted with them like Bill Browder, Gary Kasparov, and others - (in addition to the Russian government's current behavior) it suggests that they're not a government interested in rule of law.
>"A 1910 best-selling book, The Great Illusion, used economic arguments to demonstrate that territorial conquest had become unprofitable, and therefore global capitalism had removed the risk of major wars. This view, broadly analogous to the modern factoid that there has never been a war between two countries with a MacDonald’s outlet, became so well established that, less than a year before the Great War broke out, the Economist reassured its readers with an editorial titled “War Becomes Impossible in Civilized World.”"
It's worth noting that both Serbia and Ukraine had McDonalds. Hell, even Panama had a few when the USA invaded them.
Quite a bit. The UK is a nuclear power of sorts, has always been seen as a major player in NATO and is one of the more powerful countries in the EU from a military point of view.
Well, what if? You're essentially arguing that if our benevolent overlords decide that the democratic process might result in something unfavorable that they should do the wise thing and ignore the will of the people.
"the will of the people" sounds very grand and final.
"the will of 52% of the people" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
I'm not claiming that I don't understand the concept of referendum by simple majority - merely that there's a certain duplicity in the sanctimonious language being used to describe the result.
Yeah 52% of those who could be bothered to vote. The non voters polled about 60-40 remain so you could argue the will of the people including the lazy was remain.
Though of course there isn't really a single will of the people, just a lot of people with differing opinions.
Citizens of other EU member states, living in Britain, were not eligible to vote (with a few exceptions), and nor were British citizens who had been living in other EU member states for "too long". Moreover, 16 and 17 year olds were disenfranchised too, despite that age group being allowed to vote in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.
>> You can't possibly advocate letting non UK citizens decide for UK matters.
I don't see why not.
I have lived in UK for 8 years, and pay my taxes here. I'm a productive member of the society, I consider Theresa May as much my prime minister as any British person would. The result of the referendum affects me hugely, and yet I couldn't vote because my passport does not say "Great Britain" on it.
And like the other commenter has said - there was plenty of non-British citizens who were allowed to vote.
In fact non UK citizens do vote. Any citizeon of Ireland or of a Commonwealth nation, resident in the UK, is entitled to vote in every UK general election.
16 and 17 year olds do not vote in UK general elections, but I think that a referendum about the UK leaving the EU is more comparable to the referendum about Scotland leaving the UK.
The effects of such a change can last for generations and be hard to reverse, and potentially affect younger people for longer than older people. For those reasons, I think it is better to err on the side of greater franchise than less.
I agree, a change like this probably should be 2/3 - and the significant amount of people like 30÷ didnt vote at all. I still doubt Brexit will happen. It just doesnt seem to make much sense in the grand scheme of things...
I'm arguing in favor of representative government where elected people decide on what makes the most sense for complex issues. Relying on advice from experts, but ultimately making the call that's in the country's best interest.
It's true it's not as bad as some predicted and I imagine with a no deal brexit we'd muddle through but it still wouldn't be great.
For reference here's some prediction from back then:
>The Treasury's "cautious" economic forecasts of the two years following a vote to leave - which assumes a bilateral trade agreement with the EU would have been negotiated - predicts Gross Domestic Product would grow by 3.6% less than currently predicted.
>In such a scenario, it suggests sterling would fall by 12%, unemployment would rise by 520,000, average wages would fall by 2.8% and house prices would be hit by 10%.
Which was pessimistic. Sterling certainly fell, about 20%, but unemployment's doing fine so far.
That's an interesting description. Last year UK growth beat Germany, France and Italy in Q3 (don't know q4 figures yet I believe). It looks like the eurozone may be heading for recession given falling industrial output in Germany.
It bothers me immensely how quickly the truth gets discarded the moment it conflicts with EU ideology. The UK has shown excellent economics relative to the rest of Europe since the vote despite its people being told "uncertainty" would trigger a massive recession and employment bloodbath. Yet here you are, saying it's turning into the sick man of Europe!
That's a helpful article, but I don't know of any examples of organisations other than the Treasury that predicted a deep and severe recession occurring before the UK had even left the EU.
One has to admit that there is something of a conflict of interest when it comes to the Chancellor of the Exchequer producing a document to analyse the negative consequences of a scenario which his own prime minister was campaigning against.
The entire global establishment of "experts" united together and made a series of predictions that weren't just wrong by a percentage, they were wrong in the wrong direction. There are NO organisations that I remember who predicted the outcome correctly. There were though, quite a lot of vox pops with the man on the street who said words to the effect of, "it'll be fine, we'll manage".
The brutal reality is that people who put their faith in the notion of expert understanding of politics or economics have been made to look very foolish, and worse, many of them don't seem to have accepted the uselessness or bias levels of the people the media present as experts. They are still being upheld not only as important, but actually as people who should be given vast new powers to run government! It's quite concerning.
Thank you for going to the trouble to find that. I wasn't sure how to search for predictions about how the Brexit vote itself would affect the economy, rather than the effects of actually leaving.
The article starts "Leaving the EU would hit British living standards" and only talks about recession (occurring in 2017) in the context of the "adverse scenario" they modelled.
"[The adverse scenario] was predicated on the UK’s EU negotiations collapsing and the UK eventually crashing out of the bloc without a trade deal."
which hasn't happened (yet).
So I think the lessons to be learnt are that journalists can be guilty of over-simplifying economic analyses (presenting conditional scenarios as certain outcomes) and that government analyses can be self-serving (if they are published before a vote in which the government is campaigning for one side).
LaGarde is obviously going to claim she was right when she was actually wrong, there's no incentive for her to change course at all. But look at the guardian article. The IMF says under "long negotiations" the UK would be in recession in 2017, in fact growth was awesome that year. I'm no fan of either the guardian or the Indy, but in this case I don't think the issue is the journalists. The scenarios the IMF presented for the situation the UK is in were just wrong.
Of course for people who still believe, economics is unfalsifiable because these predictions are often of the form "x.y% less than it would have been" but there's no way to tell what any given stat "would have been" unless you accept the premise that these people can predict the economy ... which they clearly can't.
Presumably you are either confusing the referendum on the EU constitution with the Lisbon treaty, or trying to suggest that they are one and the same? They are not of course, the Lisbon treaty was drafted specifically to address the concerns with the EU constitution. "The electorate rejected version 1, so we redrafted until it was acceptable" sounds like a pretty good policy to me.
Well, I for one agree with the GP statement. The Lisbon treaty was specifically designed to override the will of voters, and is essentially identical to the EU constitution. This is a view, I feel, that's shared by the entire Western European press.
Needless to say, this has now been repeated, again, and again:
And of course, one might say that the EU treated the election results in Greece, Italy, France and Germany with utter contempt. Greece most of all, of course, but the others aren't far behind.
It wasn't redrafted until it was acceptable. It was passed as is, but as a massive series of "amendments" that effectively rewrote the entire previous document into the new one.
French referendum was the exact opposite of Brexit referendum.
The question asked was « Do we accept this constitution ? »
As you can imagine, barely anyone read it, so on the end most of voters choosed their response on this question : « Do I like my actual government ? »
But my point is, for the Brexit the question was simple, and could have been summarized as « Leave or stay ? » which is very easy to have an opinion on (even if the consequences were not that clear and, as many have stated in other comments here, an elaborated exit treaty should have been thought before asking).
So one one side, a complex question (due to the complexity of the text), and on the other a simple one.
The lack of a complex text doesn’t make the Brexit question simpler. It really makes it far more complex: a massively complex agreement is implied as part of Leave, but at the time of the vote nobody knew just what it would say! It’s like asking, “Do you accept this constitution we’re going to write soon?”
> a massively complex agreement is implied as part of Leave, but at the time of the vote nobody knew just what it would say!
From being an outsider (I have never even visited UK yet), it seems to me from talking to people and reading the news it was more a vote about "do you like how the things are now and where they are headed, or would you like ... something else"? Something else could have been not necessarily Brexit, as long as it was drastic enough change from the status quo.
And I think a good number of people are just dissatisfied and thought this gamble for a drastic change would perhaps improve things.
Same deal in the US. A lot of Trump voters were really voting for “let’s fuck up the establishment.”
Doesn’t make sense to me. Seems analogous to getting fed up with shady mechanics, so the next time your car breaks down you drive it over a cliff in the hopes that the wreckage will be more reliable. But I guess people do strange things when they feel like they have no control.
> Seems analogous to getting fed up with shady mechanics, so the next time your car breaks down you drive it over a cliff in the hopes that the wreckage will be more reliable. But I guess people do strange things when they feel like they have no control.
Exactly. Desperate people who don't see anything in the future for them or see thing getting worse, don't usually act rationally. Poverty does that to people as well, for example, and that's visible daily. They resort to payday loans, food they buy might not be healthy for them in the long term and so on.
On the other side there are usually powerful forces willing to take advantage of that irrationality and desperation.
I didn’t meant that the problem was easy. What I tried to say is that for the French one, the question was too complex to be understood by most, so it ended simplified in their (our) heads.
So even if there had been a pre exit agreement to be vote for in the Brexit one, it might ended the same. Leave or stay. And I’m not sure UK people would have read it (but I may be completely wrong by projecting how we did in France)
I would argue that the campaign against the European Constitution in France was not completely unlike the campaign for Brexit.
Opponents (on the left side of French politics) to the European Constitution argued that rejecting it would allow France to open negotiations for a more social leaning EU that didn't try to be only a giant free trade zone, but would also care about the well-being of its citizens (social net, minimum wage, etc.). We've seen where that went: there never was a Constitution B. No-one ever agreed to even try to write one. In short: just like for the Brexit, there never was any concrete plan behind the "no".
Ironically UK managed to duck out of most of the Lisbon treaty obligations (like the Charter of Fundamental Rights, judicial harmonisation and co-operation, etc.), while it would have been much harder -if not impossible- to do with the European Constitution... Had we (the French) voted "yes", we may have ended up with a Brexit 10 years before Brexit!
I’m just saying that the Brexit question was ultimately the same: too complex to comprehend, so people understood it in a ludicrously simplified form. It’s just less obvious when the complexity isn’t even known yet.
I think your conclusion is right. Having an agreement worked out first probably wouldn’t have changed much.
The whole idea of a following the results of a non-binding referendum that 52% of the people that voted passed for such a major thing as leaving the EU seems quite strange to my American eyes. I would think something as major as joining the EU should have required a super-majority of people voting for it in and a super-majority to leave. Like a US constitutional amendment. I need to read more English history to understand how people think this is the way things should work.
Parliamentary Supremacy: Parliament has the last word on all constitutional matters, whether written or unwritten, and in any event can change any inconvenient aspects of the written constitution (e.g. historical bills and charters) with a simple majority.
Historically the House of Lords provided a check on populist sentiment in the House of Commons, but the powers of the House of Lords have slowly been diminished over the past century or two (albeit with their consent, more or less; but it's a one-way street), while also making membership more "democratic" and thus more likely to express populist sentiment.
> the powers of the House of Lords have slowly been diminished over the past century or two (albeit with their consent, more or less; but it's a one-way street)
In the most key point, decidedly less: “vote to strip your powers or the monarch will create enough new peers that will vote the right way that the measure will pass anyway” isn't real consent.
So total power, basically, but limited by custom and decorum. If Parliament says that the majority vote on a referendum with decide what they will do, then that can be the way it is. Parliament can also change its mind afterword and not do it, but that would be unlikely as it is not the expected way of behaving.
The details are specified in the specific Act of Parliament allowing the vote. The 1979 Scottish devolution referendum required a minimum 40% of the electorate vote Yes, so it failed, despite a 52% Yes vote, due to insufficient turnout.
>It seems more likely people are just arguing about which tribe they're a part of. In that case nobody cares about what the best outcome is or what the truth is.
Most of the people I see raging about it are either EU residents of the UK or people who work with EU residents of the UK. They're arguing about concrete impacts on their lives.
> If you can get a brexit deal passed that still allows the UK to 'brexit' in name only, but otherwise retains all of the actual agreements of being in the EU it could be a win-win. People get to pretend they left, but it doesn't actually change anything.
I don't think that would work. All it takes is the EU to pass a law saying "all speed limits must be in kmph", or "You're not allowed sell goods in imperial units". The UK would then have to do that change, and that'd drive the Brexiters mad.
Nigel Farage is a media-created bogey man, a hack to the system of “equal time”. He isn’t actually representative of anyone, even his own useless party, as polls and election results have consistently shown.
He was an MP, is still a MEP, and cofounded a party that once commanded "major party" status and nearly 20% of the vote in 2014. He's clearly representing some folks.
He's never been a MP, UKIP has never been considered a "major party" (how is this even defined?), there was no election in 2014, UKIP won 12.6% in 2015. He's clearly representing some people but your facts are way off.
That's very interesting about the official "major party status", thanks for sharing that. I was only considering General Elections, which are a fairer representation of a parties vote share (despite FPTP) as not all councils vote in local elections each year.
Worth remembering the dirty tricks employed against him:
'The election of a Conservative MP could have been declared void if he had filed accurate returns that showed he had overspent on his campaign to beat Nigel Farage, a court has heard.
Craig Mackinlay, an accountant, stands accused along with his election agent and a party official of deliberately submitting “woefully inaccurate” expenditure returns.'
As an electoral force, UKIP were very successful in European elections. It is reasonable to say that they were a major consideration in deciding to call the referendum.
It's been very easy to dismiss UKIP's parliamentary holding only because the UK is first past the post, had it been more representative these last few decades, we probably wouldn't be in this mess.
Instead we've had two decades of Tory and Labour governments effectively sticking their fingers in their ears and going "lalalalalaaaa, we can't hear you, growth is king" when anyone mentioned the word immigration. Or talking about lower immigration targets, while at the same time the treasury was producing budget forecasts based on mass immigration continuing.
I have to agree that it is bizarre that the two main parties were talking all about growth while failing to acknowledge the role immigration was playing in that growth, and especially to the demographics of the workforce.
Perhaps if they had been more upfront, discussing how (in a country where we are not so far away from having more retired people than workers), letting more young workers in is playing an important role in the economy.
Then you hear that Teresa May herself suppressed reports that stated that the average immigrant was contributing more in terms of taxation (net) than the average Brit (for the demographic reasons above). This suggests that they were not just 'sticking their fingers in their ears', they were actively promoting an anti-immigrant agenda.
Well, I find that's obviously a very biased type of report based on a flawed premise. An economic migrant will eventually have kids and grow old, so in 40 years time the 'average' migrant won't be contributing more. It's just that they are right now. Or, perhaps worse, they'll take a large proportion of their total earnings out of the UK in a decade and move back home.
Anyway, putting aside that, they knew they couldn't release reports like that because they had to pretend to be anti-immigration.
So rather than having the conversation which was vitally necessary to reduce anti-immigration feelings, they were secretly pro-immigration, and even saw it as a necessity, so they just suppressed it all.
> Because that's obviously a very biased type of report based on a flawed premise.
Why must it have been? Could it not have been a reasoned report by a renowned expert in demographics? Your statement that anything pro-immigration is automatically propaganda is ridiculous, and reminds me of Gove's "we have all had enough of experts" guff.
> An economic migrant will eventually have kids
Who will join the workforce...in fact this is the only group who have an increasing birth rate in Britain.
> Or, perhaps worse, they'll take a large proportion of their total earnings out of the UK in a decade and move back home.
Its kind of hard to take the tax you paid and the profits you earned your employer back home.
Because it obviously isn't reasoned. I actually really hate Gove, but if you look at his whole quote rather than just cherry pick the first half, he was bang on. The actual whole quote was roughly "have had enough of experts who say they know what is best, but get it consistently wrong". Economic experts predicted a recession in the UK immediately after a leave Brexit vote, and they were completely wrong. The experts usually quoted are institutionally biased to be pro-EU, pro-immigration, pro-free market capitalism.
And also, the British people have decided they want smaller families, that the world needs less people, not more. Politicians are allowing mass immigration in direct defiance of a desire for a smaller population, and smaller families.
If birth rate is so important, why not do a national campaign to have more babies, rather than get migrants to move here? Because, as educated, liberal people, we know there are too many people in the world and growth above all else is bad. So why should we be ok with allowing population growth through the back door?
In fact, right now the UK government is penalizing people on benefits with more than 2 children, rather than celebrating the birth of a new future worker! They are cutting tax breaks for families, reducing financial incentives to have children.
Government actions never seem to match the reasons given for immigration. For example, we've known for decades we need more nurses, but instead of encouraging people to take up the profession we are now charging them tuition fees. Shouldn't we be giving student nurses grants instead?
Honestly, it's insane. None of it makes sense.
Finally, if you spent 10 seconds thinking about it, if someone takes 20-40% of their lifetime earnings out of the UK, it means they're not paying the VAT they'd have paid on all that money if they'd spent it in the UK.
So, yes, ultimately they paid less tax than a native, plus lose the UK wealth when the transfer it, which you can almost certainly predict is conveniently left out of those reports.
> If only for the reason that it would set an exceptionally bad precedent and everybody would want their own deal, to pick and choose the parts of EU membership that are favorable to them, leading the EU to implode.
The UK already picked and chose the parts of EU membership they wanted. They opted out of the Euro, they opted out of Schengen, they opted out of the Charter of Fundamental Rights--all of this, and more, on the threat of leaving the EU.
To be fair, they didn't really opt out of the Euro. It is completely unfeasible at the time. Originally they were going to go with the Euro and to start the transition they linked the pound to the deutsche mark. However, the German economy was crushing the British economy and this pushed interest rates in the UK to over 10% (Fun fact: I was getting 12% interest in my savings account in the UK). Mortgage rates were about 18% IIRC and this sparked a bursting of the real estate bubble in London. Prices fell 25% in 1992 as banks foreclosed on under water properties. The Japanese bought up a lot of properties, which buoyed the market somewhat, but it wasn't until the pound delinked from the deutsche mark that the market could recover properly. I remember that day well as I lost half the value in my UK bank account (so much for 12% interest ;-) ).
Everybody knew that the UK couldn't adopt the euro which is why they "opted out".
Part of the reason the Eurozone's in the mess it is right now is that, for the most part, the EU didn't let the fact that the Euro was completely infeasible for particular countries get in the way of converting them over to it anyway. The UK wasn't the only country with similar problems, but others like Italy didn't opt out and are in a fine state now as a result. In that sense the British opt-out worked well for us.
By that logic the US shouldn't have a single currency, either.
I get that a single currency is problematic. Arguably it is problematic even in the US, after all this time. But it doesn't necessarily follow that a single currency is fundamentally infeasible. The US isn't crippled because of it.
By contrast, the poster gave a very concrete explanation why adoption of the Euro by the UK was [then] infeasible.
> By that logic the US shouldn't have a single currency, either.
The US is at least somewhat willing to tax money made in California and spend the takings in Michigan. Greece or Italy gets the worst of both worlds: they can't devalue their currency to make their industries competitive with Germany, but they don't receive much share of German taxes either.
The US and the EU really aren't comparable, as much as people like to model them as analogous.
In Europe you have tens of countries that speak different languages and have cultures that go back 1000-2000 years. That, along with a bunch of political baggage and that each nation has its own fiscal policy, and the starting points between EU and US are very very different.
I would instead extend your concession that given the single currency already exhibits creaks in the US, imagine how hard it would be to manage in the EU.
Europe also has a history that goes back 1000-2000 years of disparate countries unifying.
Germany, for example, is the descendant of the 19th century North German Confederation, a Prussian-dominated customs union between north German states, which in itself was an effort to recreate the earlier German Confederation without involving those pesky Habsburgs.
The Holy Roman Empire was a unified confederation of German, Italian, Swiss, and Bohemian states that allowed large amounts of autonomy and sovereignty within its borders. In fact, our modern conception of sovereignty dates from the Peace of Westphalia, which ended a thirty-year-long war (imaginatively named the Thirty Years War) fought largely over the authority of, once again, those pesky Habsburgs to tell HRE member states what their state religion should be.
Britain was formed by the unification of England and Scotland, both of which are still legally considered separate countries under British law. Italy was formed as a union of Italian states, largely from an effort to overthrow Habsburg rule. Spain was formed as a union of Iberian kingdoms (that eventually fell under a branch of the Habsburg dynasty which went extinct due to inbreeding, leading to a war of succession.) Poland and Lithuania had varying degrees of unification from 1385 until 1795, when the then-unified country was torn into pieces and partitioned off into their surrounding empires, including Habsburg Austria.
So really, given European history, it seems like most European countries don't really have a problem joining together into larger unions, so long as those unions aren't ruled by Habsburgs. The closest the EU ever got to that was when Otto and Karl were Members of the European Parliament up until 1999, so hopefully we're fine.
Sure, it's harder in the EU and more problematic in the EU. But so what? It's one thing to argue soberly that it's not working well for such-and-such country. It's another to exclaim, as is most often done, that it's a complete and utter disaster when it's plainly obvious it's not. As monetary systems go most nations would love to be in the EU, even with all the very real and substantial downsides.
The EU is a complex institution and the single currency is only part of it. An integral part, to be sure, but IMO we (the political chatter class) put far too much emphasis on monetary policy, both as our source of problems and a source of solutions. Often it's a distraction or excuse for more substantive issues, like political and fiscal ineptitude. Take Greece for example--when push came to shove most observers, as well, as Greeks themselves, decided that leaving the Euro was not the answer. When forced to soberly assess the situation it turns out that the Euro wasn't the most pressing problem and that on balance they were better off enduring.
Regarding comparison with the United States, let's not forget that political battles over a national bank dominated national politics for almost the first 50 years. Similar to issues over tariffs, what benefited the north was often to the detriment of the south, and vice-versa. And this was at a time when there were virtually no direct federal wealth transfers, and federal revenue came predominately from tariffs, which pitted not only the north (net importers) against the south (net exporters), but both against the federal government (tariffs were placed on both imports and exports). If the interplay between monetary policy and trade competitiveness was understood at the time and today's Euro critics were teleported back in time, who knows what might have happened!
I have to say that I actually agree with makomk. It was a good idea to opt out of the Euro. It was good for the UK and it was good for the EU. The issue I was originally trying to address was the impression that the UK had some special negotiating power to opt out of things they didn't want. In this case, I think it was mutually beneficial.
The point about other European countries is well taken and I believe there have been talks to get some countries out of the Euro zone. In part this is a big deal because countries like Germany don't want to prop up countries that are in financial difficulty. They have no controls for dealing with these problems and the result is that you need cash infusions from the EU to keep it all swimming.
But that's really the point, isn't it? How much of a "Union" do you want? It even gets to the heart of why some people want Briton to leave the EU.
On paper at least, the UK and Denmark do have special opt-outs from the Euro while all the other EU states are legally bound to join it. In reality it's likely that several of the non-Eurozone states will simply never join it and there's nothing to ensure that they ever do.
I think UK had some serious negotiating leeway for simply being the UK. EU countries really want the UK inside the Union because it makes for a better union: it's a G8 country, a nuclear power and permanent member in the Security council, an economic behemoth with a large international clout, post-colonial ties and strong industrial and technological heritage. It has a massive internal market and rich consumers.
So it was always accepted that the UK can get more concessions than the average country, simply because they bring more to the table. But there's a limit to that, not even the UK can get what Brexiteers promised: unfettered access to the internal market coupled with full sovereignty to set any tariffs and enter any trade deals. That would effectively be the end of the EU.
Yes, very good point. They already were treated special and in many ways most many didnt really consider them being part of Europe - so the Brexit just reflects that.
Jokingly I said many years ago that the UK is more like the 51st state, rather then a member of the European community
British Euroskepticism has been a political force for decades and the risk of a Brexit has always been an implicit source of negotiating leverage for the UK.
Yes, but now the UK is out over its skis. It has much less leverage now than its MPs seem to realize. The clock is ticking — they are headed for a hard Brexit in 10 weeks and everyone knows they’ve not planned for it.
I think people undersell this - I can't find the really good analysis I recall reading about this right now, but what it said was polling over the last couple of decades shows there has actually been majority support (often over 60%!) to at least reduce participation in the EU for the last 20 years.
According to this other polling [1], the appetite to do a full exit has not been as high, but still close to 50/50. I think in general people are doing a massive disservice to their own understanding when they try and take a minority "fringe racist" view and try to say that is the reason for all voters of Brexit, when reality is more complex and long-term.
(I say this not really having a horse in this race, never having even been to the UK and only having been to Europe a few times).
The Brexit promise was to leave the EU and open better trading options with the rest of the world. Outside of the EU, there is no issue reducing VAT, customs fees etc. In fact, WTO rules even allow more competitive options between countries if the UK chooses to lower associated fees in the WTO. Additional the UK is able to negotiate trade deals for it's own interests rather than concerns about protectionism for the EU. None of this can be done by the UK in the EU.
Think of 27 people negotiating, all with very different agendas, versus one person with a clear agenda.
Why do you believe that the EU would be in a better position? It's like a rat king when it comes to negotiating, 27 countries pulling in different directions all with different desires.
It also has a lot wider range of industries to protect, so if the UK would be happy in scrapping food subsidies to let African food be competitive in our markets, but other countries like France want to retain subsidies for protectionism of their farmers, it's no dice.
That scenario is exactly what happened in the Doha Development Round.
> One would think that the EU would be in a better position to get better deals than a single country.
The EU has a history of being really slow at negotiating trade deals unfortunately.
Further, the EU enforces VAT fees and implements protectionism with these methods to favour EU-based businesses, even when no EU competitors exist. These fees have a trendency to reduce economic activity within the EU and prevent cheaper alterantives from outside of the EU being effective as they end up becoming a similar prices or more expensive when the customs fees are applied (despite trying to pass on the savings from signficantly lower production/service costs with less gross income than an EU company which results in a similarly priced product that the customer sees).
Even with a worse trade deal than the EU, the UK can stand to benefit because it won't be required to tack expensive fees on top for the purposes of protectionism of industries that may not even be in the UK to begin with.
When I said "reduced economic activity in the EU", I mean as a whole. This is an over simplfiication, but imagine a situation where everything is 20% more expensive than the normal asking price, this leads to less purchases being made as a whole. It doesn't matter if you're purchasing from outside the EU too, because it's still 20% more expensive. The overall economic activity in such an area is simply reduced.
The trade numbers simply are the way they are because importing doesn't really reduce the costs either. It should also be noted that exporting products outside of the EU has additional fees that make us less competitive than the alternatives outside of the EU too, so our exports are impacted too.
You mean the European Union negotiates to advantage the Union? Did you know that Scotland doesn't like England having a say in what happens there?
The UK had the benefit of memebership of the EU (the freedoms of goods/services/people) without the hindrance of the Euro on its own monetary policy.
Now people that can't even remember what it was like to be at the end of the British empire think that there was some magical period to go back to. It's pathetic.
One of the biggest exports from the UK is financial services. One of the reasons for that is the EU "passport" given to financial services firms to trade.
The UK is losing that export market. Really really dumb.
> One would think that the EU would be in a better position to get better deals than a single country.
One would think, but the EU has been trying and failing to secure any kind of a trade deal with the US, largely due to Europe's instinctive love of protectionism.
The Brexit promise was that there would be no downsides, that there would still be frictionless trade with the EU (which so much of the UK economy relies on), that nonUK EU citizens in the UK would have to leave, but UK citizens in the EU27 would be able to stay there.
Except that the UK is a small island off the side of the third largest trading bloc in the world. Why would anyone want to negotiate only with the UK?
Why would Japanese companies want to continue to manufacture vehicles in the UK when it will only support its local market?
The UK is a relatively small market, its only advantages were stability (now lost), having the City (a tax haven, with branches in British off-shore locations), and access to the EU.
You've still got the City, but EU finance will move to other capitals.
That's because brexiter politicians are not looking for a good outcome. They are looking for power. Brexit is a good vehicle for that: make a brand of being a "Brexiter" and sell it as an utopia. Demand it be delivered then point politicians' incompetence when they fail despite trying. Then use your reputation as a "serious" brexiter to gain power and show them "how it is done".
> they are trying to camouflage that reality with a bad deal
They're not, May is, and May is not a Brexiter. The Brexiters generally are pushing to leave on WTO terms, not so much as a preferred end state but in recognition of the fact that only a genuine commitment to doing so has any chance of convincing the EU to agree to sensible terms such as Canada+. If the EU can keep the UK under its thumb forever then of course it will, and it would be unreasonable to expect it to do otherwise.
There is no Canada+ on the table and there never was, it's just "Canada" without the "+": a set of trade liberalization measures that cover some physical goods and very few services. It's a bad match for Britain's needs:
It's hard to understand why Germany or France, who stand to gain from excluding the powerful UK service sector from the EU financial markets, would think that adding the "plus" to a Canada type deal is a "sensible" thing. It's sensible only for the brexiteers who peddled Canada+ as a real thing.
Never-mind the fact that, in order to export to the EU market, UK still needs to respect the EU regulations, like any other trade partner of the EU. Only now, they no longer have any say over those regulations.
There's also the "small" problem of the NI border, which would require customs checks in a Canada-style deal, since you'd be leaving the customs union.
Consumers of services for the most part couldn't care less whether the back end of their trades is carried out by the London, Paris or Frankfurt offices of HSBC or Deutsche Bank.
On the other hand, it's a nice little boost to French or German politicians to be able to talk about financial services industry growth and have a bit more tax revenue to play with.
Donald Tusk has repeatedly offered "Canada +++" to Great Britain. (Not to the United Kingdom, as part of their "we're going to annex Northern Ireland as a punishment beating" approach.)
> UK still needs to respect the EU regulations
WHEN EXPORTING TO THE EU, yes. The ~90% of UK businesses that don't do any trade with the EU do not. Those trading with the rest of the world outside the EU - a majority of the UK's trade, and rising steadily - do not.
EU's idea of Canada +++ is not the Brexiteers' Canada+++. EU's version just means no tariffs and some security co-operation, but nothing like as much access on services as EU membership. Sorry to be a bore but I don't think the Tusk tweet is something to go wild over
So, just to clarify, you're arguing that Donald Tusk has offered exactly what you want (except - in the absence of viable alternative solutions - to Northern Ireland in order to honour existing bilateral agreements implying no new customs borders there).
Do you think this offer is more or less likely to still exist if the UK insists that it doesn't need the EU's stinking trade, defaults on its financial obligations to the EU and enrages an Irish government with veto power over any hypothetical future deal by re-erecting customs borders with the north?
(Even before considering the UK's ill-preparedness to attempt such a gambit means the direct short term consequences would hurt the country)
Most industries which have any significant exports will aim to have their products comply with all requirements in all markets they are exporting to. Generally there is less to be gained by setting up seperate production for each market, even if some of them have more lax requirements, than there is by having one system which can address all markets (this breaks down if there are mutually exclusive requirements, which can cause a lot of pain).
The gains that Germany and France will make in EU oriented financials services will pale in comparison to the loss of a major trading partner.
Remember that the EU is becoming less and less important over time as a financial services market, even the UK's financial services sector has become less dependant on it over time.
The juicier fruit is in the rest of the world.
There's quite a lot of real trade between the EU-UK and that will hurt.
The EU obviously stands to benefit from a pretty strong deal with it's closest 'non EU' partner.
The reason we don't see it playing out so obviously I believe boils down to the other geopolitical factors at play - obviously there's a lot at play.
In other words, if the UK were just now approaching the EU for some kind of participation, without the baggage of the current 'leave' environment, I think we'd see a Canada++ type deal develop.
"Remember that the EU is becoming less and less important over time as a financial services market, even the UK's financial services sector has become less dependant on it over time."
Ah, no?
"The juicier fruit is in the rest of the world."
The world is limited.
a) USA. Very little taxes in trade with the EU already. Little to gain with FTA.
b) Canada? Okay, but the UK has this Free trade agreement (FTA) already via the EU.
c) Mersocur? FTA to be signed with the EU soon. Maybe Chile or Colombia could be a play.
d) Japan und Korea? Have FTAs with EU
e) India? Very demanding. Also want easier immigration to the UK in a FTA. Prediction: Will fail.
f) Australia? Ok, easy to get. Point for the UK
g) China? Possible. But only goods, since China loves to export goods. Financial services? Forget about it. Also, trust me, the Chinese have not forgotten the Opium war. Also the recent Ship of the Royal Navy in disputed waters did not help.
h) Africa. Many (economically) small countries. Not all countries have ties to the UK.
i) Russia/CIS. This the UK could get but this they don't want.
They earth is limited. They are leaving the biggest market in the world in hopes of greener pastures. Good luck!
Your comments assume 'FTA' is the key ingredient in the equation - it is not.
The UK is growing financial services exports in almost all of the markets you mentioned, so I don't really see what your point is there. [1]
Third - the UK is not 'leaving' European markets, they are changing the terms of trade. Goods and services will continue to flow.
(Thankfully, 'services' don't face the fundamental challenges that 'goods' do at the border outside of a customs union)
The UK already exports as much financial services to the US as it does to the entire EU [2] and the underlying impetus is fundamentally in the rest of the world.
Similar to your comment about Japan - the UK already exports quite a lot in financial services (3 billion pounds/year and growing).
" Also, trust me, the Chinese have not forgotten the Opium war" No, I don't trust you.
"The UK is growing financial services exports in almost all of the markets you mentioned, so I don't really see what your point is there."
For serious financial services you need even more than a FTA. Something like passporting rights for the EU, that the UK will lose. And regarding to "financial services" China is very very closed.
By chance I read today that China and Germany want to increase trade in "financial services". This really surprised me since China is playing so hard ball against opening this market.
"(Thankfully, 'services' don't face the fundamental challenges that 'goods' do at the border outside of a customs union)"
Yes. Right. Something like passporting rights, clearance allowance etc, you can just do this without a permit or reliance on another country. Good luck with the Brexit.
The rest of the world has moved on. Australia and other former colonies have no interest in an FTA where the UK gets the better end of the deal. New Zealand already has a comprehensive FTA with China. What do they need the UK for?
Between two countries of equal power, sure, but smaller countries are essentially looking for cheaper export access to larger markets and big countries like the USA do naturally take advantage of that.
It's a political union, with an unelected Executive body, and a very powerful Supreme Court (Court of Justice), and so much more - that almost no European citizen ever voted for.
Everyone is for trade, most are for open borders, very few for deep political integration.
To the extent the elites push against the underlying sentiment - there will be problems. Such problems are clearly on the rise all over the EU in various incarnations, it'd be nice if the EU took this time of crisis to re-evaluate it's existence and reconsider a bunch of things.
Simply not true - the executive body is chosen by people that you can directly vote for, so the same as oh I don't know....the prime minister of the UK for instance?
>> and a very powerful Supreme Court (Court of Justice),
Nothing to do with EU. ECJ is a separate institution that UK will be still part of even after Brexit.
>>and so much more - that almost no European citizen ever voted for.
Remind me, when was the vote to elect Theresa May to power? Or the members of the House of Lords? Or the Queen for that matter?
>>Everyone is for trade, most are for open borders, very few for deep political integration.
I'd definitely contest the "very few" part of that sentence. I'd definitely be up for creating a United States of Europe with one federal government and full financial and political union.
In France, the EU is viewed with even wider skepticism than in the UK.
Just before Brexit - the majority of France, Germany, UK and Spain had negative views of the EU [1]
Popular sentiment towards the EU has been declining steadily until Brexit, during which it's shot up somewhat, as EU-wide press does their best to inject fear into the situation - but without this existential angst, the trend-line is clearly going down.
This is also obvious from recent Eurosceptic political trends.
Consider that just this week, the far right AfD in Germany, has just announced they would like to move Germany out of the EU as a material policy. They have about 15% of the vote. They've always been sceptic, but there has never been discussion in Germany about exit before.
But it is of course nuanced:
+ Wether or not citizens want to 'leave' is a different question.
+ Wether or not people would opt to 'join' were they not members otherwise, is also a different question.
+ Wether or not they can separate the notion of 'EU' and 'Europe' is another question. For example, Italy, Europe's 3rd largest economy has just elected a Eurosceptic party, but they have no real inclination to leave. For Italians, to 'leave the EU' is to 'leave Europe' and because they see themselves as European, they may not chose to leave the EU. (I see that as a false equivalence, that the EU is not Europe, just a body politic and set of treaties.)
+ Nations that have the most direct battles with the EU, for example Poland, have the highest rating!
Make no mistake - though material 'exit' may be stronger in the UK than elsewhere, anti-EU sentiment is strong across Europe, and the overall trend-line is bad news.
Aside from political issues, there are serious economic concerns about the Euro, and that it's a 'trap' for peripheral nations unless there is deeper political integration (there won't be), and even if there was, they would never agree on how to print money anyhow.
And finally - even issues for which the EU can't fairly be blamed ... they will take the heat for in many cases.
The kind of populism you see in France right now with the Gilets Jaunes which is leaderless, has no ideology, there's nobody to negotiate with, nobody to appease, nobody really knows for sure why it's happening, it's just 'angst' ... this is going to spill over into Bruxelles. You'll see arbitrary movements like this.
That most of Europe's current elite are fairly pro-EU, and that the current political bodies are fairly 'on the same page' should not be interpreted as populist favour overall for the EU.
To anyone who thinks that Euroscepticism is a marginal issue, have a look at the Wikipedia entry, it's enlightening, and also gives some insight into all of the different nuances of it.
Ok, You've made reasoned arguments and been downvoted, and for that I'm sorry.
I'm going to attack the core of your argument, but please understand that I'm not attacking you personally.
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The EU has an executive body that is not directly elected, they are, however, elected.
They're elected by the representatives that you and I directly elect.
This is a stark contrast to the house of lords, who are truly unelected by any elected representative or even the public directly.
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EU popularity is a bit stronger in central europe, even more so with brexit looming.
The thing is: the EU doesn't have PR of any sort, they're a transparent organisation but that makes it opaque for many people since the content isn't distilled- we rely on media to distill it for us.
The good news is that the information is always available and you're able to rebuff the media quite easily. That's why brexit lies are easy to debunk but impossible to get a platform for in the UK. (unless you're the guardian, but that is preaching to the choir as guardian readers tend to be pro-EU)
If the EU did have a PR campaign, it would be easy for the UK media to cry about how the EU is propagandizing using our tax money. And that would be true. So they're in a catch-22.
The _good_ thing about brexit for the rest of the EU, is that outside of the UK the media are picking up on _our_ media lies and spreading them. I live in Sweden so I get it fairly full blast. The benefits of being in the EU are incredibly evident from the outside.
I can't imagine the appetite for euroskepticism is at an all time high.
--
PS; the Yellow Jacket movement was about the rising cost of living and high taxation on things like fuel.
EU excise duties for member states is 3.5% on unleaded petrol.
FR excise duties for unleaded petrol is 64%.
UK excise duties for unleaded petrol is 55% (57.95p/l).
So, are frances problems the EU, or it's own government?
I ask the same question about the UK, we all know Rupert Murdoch owns most of the newspapers and routinely courts the UK Govt.
A lot of people in the US bitch about the "Feds" and talk about "states rights". Same in Canada, same in Australia.
That doesn't mean that secession is feasible for any of those states.
The EU is only 50-60 years old (depending on where you draw the line). It's the result of the worst war in human history. That war also resulted in the decolonization by European states of areas outside Europe.
The UK lost its independence when it won the war. The EU is the best result of that war and now the UK believes it can refight the issues of the post-war world.
"How do you have a single market without common rules and hence political integration?"
Rules and regulations regarding trade can be negotiated just like any other treaty - but they can be held as that, i.e. treaties - there is utterly no need to devolve national power in order to have frictionless trade and even relatively free movement of labour.
North America has something approaching a customs union, and it's very nearly a common market - but there isn't any remote hint of political integration.
Norway and Switzerland are effectively part of the single market without having political integration, though they have less influence, there's no reason a system couldn't be had wherein they did actually participate.
The real sticking point might come down to commercial courts and arbitration, and for that there can be binding mechanisms put in place, without any need for a Court of Justice which effectively has supremacy in all judicial matters in Europe.
Economic impetus is really easy to argue for and it would be fundamentally easier to arrange for something like this than it would be for political integration.
The EEC is really based on this anyhow.
It's the common market and trade that is really the bedrock of the EU, the political stuff is secondary to the point that were there no economic integration, there wouldn't even be any discussion of political integration.
The UK already has a "Canada++" deal. They have carve outs on all sorts of EU regulations, they're not part of the Euro-zone, they have the natural barrier of the Channel (aside from inflatable rafts) against illegal immigration...
Plus the UK currently has a say in all other EU regulation.
Brexit was a stupid idea by rah-rah Tories that think the UK is still an Empire. Cameron was a mindless twat that thought he could kill off half his party with a dumb referendum.
It stretches credulity beyond breaking point to suggest that the UK reneging on all its existing commitments to the EU in a fit of jingoistic pique whilst suffering the consequences of not having properly prepared for that outcome is a situation likely to lead to the EU offering more favourable trading terms.
What does that even mean now though? May was not originally sold on Brexit. Since becoming PM, what evidence do you have that she is not absolutely committed to Brexit? She may not be a True Believer, but she's a human apparently 100% intent on Brexit.
>The Brexit promise is something nobody can deliver on..
I would - respectfully - point out that's not the situation.
It is (was?) a promise in the sense that the government is there to enact the will of the people. The majority of people who voted, voted to leave (personally I was in the minority).
So now (in engineering terms) it's pretty simple. If everyone sits on their hands, the UK will leave the UK as scheduled in March (and so fulfil the wish of the people).
The actuality is the unedifying spectacle of lots of shuffling, muddying of the waters and lining of pockets as anyone with skin in the game scrabbles for whatever they feel is to their own advantage.
Brexit itself can of course be delivered, but the larger promise sold to voters - that the country would be able to negotiate favorable trade deals, that it would directly result in increased NHS funding, that it would lead to reduced immigration without affecting free movement for workers, that customs and border control would be seamless, that European court of justice would stop having jurisdiction in UK affairs etc. - was the lie.
Indeed; a lot of people subscribe to the view that the vote delivered the 'incorrect' result because one side was more effective at lying than the other side.
Very difficult to know where to draw a line; my feeling is that even if history shows the people were wrong the government should not be allowed to (directly or indirectly) do something other than what they were elected to do - i.e. serve the people (on a plate, it seems).
And I write this from the losing side (in the referendum); about the only way it could get worse if it turns I'm on the winning side in the end (cf. Boaty McBoatface; the people were asked to vote for the name of the vehicle, but the powers that be didn't like such a frivolous name so they reneged and called it the RRS Sir David Attenborough instead. The parallel should be obvious).
"Serving the people" can itself be interpreted both ways. Say there was a referendum and people voted to eliminate all taxes. Would they still have a duty to carry it out, knowing that it would most certainly lead to national collapse?
Yes. If people know that it could lead to national collapse, they'd more likely vote for actually sensible policies. If instead they think that "the politicians will figure something out" and that "my politicians are better than your politicians" you get the present political situation, when most votes (both referenda and elections) are less about policies and more about popularity, tribalism and virtue signaling.
> Very difficult to know where to draw a line; my feeling is that even if history shows the people were wrong the government should not be allowed to (directly or indirectly) do something other than what they were elected to do - i.e. serve the people (on a plate, it seems).
Governments do this all the time, though. Campaign promises are often just that.
And we see time and time again how ineffectual the population is at getting people into a majority position of power to see the pop proposals of the day enacted.
These direct democracy votes often turn out this way - the people vote on a topic differently than how they vote for representatives. But a large portion of why we don't practice direct democracy in most of the west is because you don't want a mob of opinions dictating national law.
It isn't undemocratic for democratically elected representatives to go against a referendum. They were elected to rule on behalf of their people, even if that is in contradiction to non-binding votes by said people. Its their reelection funeral if they go against popular opinion and turn out wrong, but its their job to do it if they think its right. Its why we have representatives in the first place!
The Brexit Proposal was defeated by an unholy alliance of Remainers and Brexit supporters. Both parties are happy today though the onus will be on the former if they wish to remain in that state. As described by a lawyer (of sufficient status to attract an overnight detailed rebuttal from the Prime Minister's office - followed though, by a similarly detailed overnight rebuttal of a rebuttal (Spectator, December Issues) writing that the Prime Minister May Proposal was "atrocious" - a betrayal of what the Brexit decision should have resulted in, irrespective of the opinions of either remainers or leavers. In other words, in factual terms, the Brexit Proposal was not Brexit as envisaged.
Nothing that May could have delivered would have been at all similar to Brexit as envisioned. That is because Brexit, as envisioned by it's supporters was largely a pack of fairy tales.
The problem here is that they went ahead and voted for it, without actually doing the hard work of drafting a concrete proposal for how Brexit will happen.
"Popular soverignty" has no place in British constitutional history, only in Scotland; the traditional settlement is based on Parliamentary soverignty.
All of that remains to be seen. There are two major causes to this particular outcome.
1. Article 50 is an exceptionally poor piece of legislation if your objective is to deliver a smooth and equitable separation from the Union.
2. The Irish border is very sensitive and prone to violence, and the Irish government has successfully ensured that their concerns addressed in the form that they have been, within the withdrawal agreement.
1. It is actually a pretty well written piece of law, the about only problem in it is short timeframes - it wasn't imagined in the spirit of complete political mess but more like an orderly exit option with previous long deliberation. Unfortunately British politicians love to stall and waste time, eventually invoking a fallback clause.
I don't think that was important to Brexit voters. It's an emotional vote, a rejection of something, and they didn't care about the consequences. The favorable deals are only a way to keep the debate going.
More importantly the government cannot deliver both "Brexit" and "business continuity", potentially including such things as "food and medical supplies". This is gradually dawning on even the dimmest Cabinet ministers.
That is not true in general. I accept that this government cannot. It is perfectly feasible to leave the European Union and remain within EEA, gaining control of laws that do not relate to maintenance of European standards and maintaining business continuity.
It was feasible, had the government started 2 years ago.
As for gaining control of laws, the primary complaint was the free movement of EU citizens, the UK wanted its cake (the right to move freely in the EU) and eat it (but control who came from the EU to the UK).
The equivalent stupidity would be for the Scottish devolved parliament to demand free movement of Scottish citizens in England while establishing immigration controls at the Scottish/English border.
The idea that the EU would blockade the transport of medical supplies is ludicrous; or if it's not ludicrous, it is further proof that leaving was the right choice.
It's the geopolitical equivalent of "maybe I shouldn't have divorced my husband, because despite the beatings, at least the insulin was mailed on time."
It's not going to blockade anything, it's just that throughout at Dover-Calais depends on not having any checks. Oh and cross recognition of driver and haulier licenses.
The idea that food and medical supplies will disappear is completely wrong and has already been debunked by, amongst other people, the head of the NHS.
This is especially true because being in the EU actually increases food costs due to the common external tariff. The only reason food imports would slow is if the government wanted them to, which it doesn't.
The illogical and ridiculous predictions that somehow the only thing keeping British people alive is huge payments to the EU, is not only factually false, but insulting to boot. The UK survived the rest of Europe trying to literally conquer it. Now there are people who seriously believe the country will be brought to its knees by trading on WTO terms.
I didn't read much into that story but from what I recall, the company in question has no ships yet because it's new, but can quickly obtain them and is run by shipping industry veterans.
Regardless, I don't really know why, because the heads of all the major ports in both the UK and France have said they expect minimal or no disruption. But maybe part of why they're saying that, is the preparations being done.
"Richard Christian, the port’s head of policy, said there would be “regular gridlock” in Kent in the event of a hard Brexit, and disruption to freight traffic on ferries and Eurotunnel services would have a profound impact on Britain’s economy. "
Trade in radiotherapy supplies is currently regulated under the Euratom treaty. When the UK leaves it is required to submit a System of Accountancy and Control for Nuclear Material to the IAEA to continue trading. The current status is "we expect them to be in place to meet international obligations when the UK leaves Euratom" which is perhaps not totally reassuring for cancer patients.
> The illogical and ridiculous predictions that somehow the only thing keeping British people alive is huge payments to the EU, is not only factually false, but insulting to boot
Of course it's false: it's a strawman. Payments to the EU to keep people "alive", really?
> Now there are people who seriously believe the country will be brought to its knees by trading on WTO terms
I am astounded by the number of WTO experts in this country of late. Yet nobody can explain the practicalities, they just say "trade on WTO terms" as the answer to everything. Weird
> The UK survived the rest of Europe trying to literally conquer it.
I don't think you understand the literal meaning of "literally".
The UK chose to join the EU. It has chosen to leave. That means it will have to comply with the rules the EU has for nations not part of the EU.
For some reason, the Brexiters seem to follow the "Fog in Channel, Continent cut off" idea that the UK has control over what the EU has to accept after it has left.
What do you think WW2 was exactly, if not a literal attempt to conquer it?
You're arguing with a straw man. Nobody claims the EU had to do anything, it can ban people who live there from buying British things if it wants. But the idea that this will cause food and medicine shortages is simply silly - the rest of the world manages to buy these things without being in the EU so why does this story keep being promoted?
The government is there to enact the will of the manifesto it proclaimed prior to an election. Representative government does not mean that the wishes of the majority outweight the rights of the minority.
There is no requirement of government that it allows the nation to commit political and economical suicide.
All of the modelling, by all sides, show that Brexit will cause economic damage to the UK (and the EU).
The only answer the Brexiters have is that they have an unfounded belief that somehow, the UK, a relatively small market, with under-developed non-EU export industries, has some sort of comparative advantage in trade negotiations that will somehow lead to greater economic benefits in the long term.
All of the promises during the referendum (not legally binding on Parliament) by the Leave campaign have proven to be completely and utterly false.
So the "Brexit promise" of the Leavers is definitely something that nobody can deliver on. The act of leaving the EU is possible, the promises of the results of that are not.
> a "no deal" outcome, which is clearly bad, is still the best thing brexiters can actually deliver
I don't see the logic here. The deal (let's call it D), is clearly worse than staying in the EU (let's call that option E). From that relation D < E it does not follow that no-deal (N) is better than a deal, i.e. D < N. It may well be that N < D < E. So I don't see how no-deal is the "best the brexiteers can delliver."
Because they can’t agree on D. So they end up with N.
Worse, some of them seem to be deluded into thinking they can get some sort of D+ or D* or D’, even though the EU has made it clear they will not renegotiate.
I believe one MP likened that scenario to the likelihood of Scarlet Johansen riding in on a unicorn.
It's the best deal they can deliever that's still meaningfully a Brexit (i.e. it achieves other political goals that were the reason for it in the first place).
I'm not sure I agree that a no-deal Brexit is such a good idea - given the (now exposed) lies of the Leave campaign, a second referendum seeems pretty reasonable.
At any rate - the idea that there is an alternative deal that someone can deliver on persists even now, which is insane. My favorite quote on this came from Michael Gove:
> “It’s a bit like a load of people in their mid-fifties at a swingers’ party holding out for Scarlett Johansson to arrive,” Mr Gove said.
> Amber Rudd, work and pensions secretary, added: “Or Pierce Brosnan.”
> Meanwhile David Gauke, justice secretary, claimed Labour’s Brexit policy was so fanciful it was “like hoping Scarlett Johansson is going to turn up on a unicorn”.
> A "no deal" outcome, which is clearly bad, is still the best thing brexiters can actually deliver.
It could go much much worse than just "bad".
The UK imports a lot of food from EU neighbors. In case of a hard Brexit, this will just ... stop. The question is whether all supermarkets can immediately redo their supply chains. That is not likely. Especially since the UK will loose all trade agreements with the non-EU countries as well. Because they had been made by the EU with the UK participating.
Our western societies are very efficient but also very fragile. If supermarkets can no longer fill up their shelves, people go hungry fast. If supermarkets can only fill 80% of shelves, people panic and start hoarding food. Those who are too late to the party go hungry. With enough people hungry for a few days, society collapses.
Like ... corpses in the streets.
We know what happened when the Soviet Union went down and shelves went empty. This scenario would end a lot worse for the UK. The Soviets had massive redundancies, inefficiencies and fallbacks that could be exploited. Such as people growing potatoes in their Dachas.
See the material by Dmitry Orlov on how the "soviet scenario" would play out in a western country:
What do you think "chaos at the border" means?
Everybody will try to get as much stuff over the border as possible. Everybody will work together. The EU, the UK, the US, everybody. With the best intentions. But this could still go very very bad.
Every truck, train and ship has to get the papers checked where they could just drive through before. But there are not enough qualified officers to actually check all the papers.
So goods will come in at a trickle.
Even with the best intentions.
This the UK governments own statement. Chaos at the border for six months:
> Britain’s government has revised its worst-case Brexit scenario estimates for chaos at the country’s borders, which it now expects to last for six months rather than six weeks, the political editor of The Sun newspaper said.
> The UK imports a lot of food from EU neighbors. In case of a hard Brexit, this will just ... stop.
A hard Brexit doesn't mean the EU will impose an embargo on the UK. The EU now happily exports food to WTO members outside the EU, and doesn't impose export tolls or restrictions on those that I'm aware of.
Of course the UK might impose its own tolls, quotas and other import restrictions after crashing out of the EU, but that'll be its own doing.
Edit (since OP updated): It seems implausible that the government would make that self-imposed process onerous enough to result in a literal famine. Which goes to the heart of what you've misunderstood here.
This "chaos at the border" refers to chaos for UK companies trying to export things due to customs requirements the EU has, whereas the UK's hypothetical inability to import something would be due to a purely self-imposed post-EU customs process.
In order to get their VAT back, exporters from the EU also need to get their papers checked against the actual goods and stamped. This takes hours for every truck.
That is irrespective of whether the importing country lifts all tariffs.
If enough trucks with TVs and car parts clog the borders, then the food-trucks (who might get some sort of special treatment) are also clogged. They will be clogged 50 miles before they reach the border.
But of course. I have also heard people seriously suggest that the UK will cease to uphold any human rights without the EU. As somebody who lives outside the EU and still somehow has human rights, I expect this is also an exaggeration...
While I am highly skeptical of the Brexit I don't think any kind of collapse will happen.
"Our western societies are very efficient but also very fragile. If supermarkets can no longer fill up their shelves, people go hungry fast. If supermarkets can only fill 80% of shelves, people panic and start hoarding food. Those who are too late to the party go hungry. With enough people hungry for a few days, society collapses."
This is still true. I think most people have no idea how fragile our societies are. Still remember as a child in Germany how people made fun of old people hoarding food. Really uncool to hoard food. You know what is more uncool than hording food? Having nothing to eat. African countries or even countries like Ukraine may be much less fragile to disruptions of supply chains. But in industrialized countries, a few weeks of supply chain disruptions can lead to melt down of societies. The single households in cities likely have food for 2 or 3 days.
The UK imports around 25% of food-related commodities from the EU. Even with no deal, these imports will continue (as the EU has to sell them to someone.) Even if the EU stopped, there would not be corpses in the street as there happens to be a very wealthy English-speaking country not too far away that happens to produce more food than any country on the planet and is more than willing to trade with the UK.
> The US is currently only the 10th largest exporter of food to the UK. “For the USA to replace the combined food imports from the other nine in the top 10 would require a vast food flotilla and logistics operation exceeding that of the 1940-45 Atlantic convoys.”
I think you missed the point. The point is that 1) overnight disruption of existing supply chains is very likely, and 2) in today's last-minute food supply infrastructure, it only takes a few days for shelves to empty. Empty shelves = hungry people = riots.
So it's not a question of whether the US will trade with the UK, in the long run. It's a question of whether, 2 days after a hard Brexit, everyone has been well-organized enough to keep food flowing across the border at the same rate as always, despite the massive customs upheaval.
Think this through. If there is a hard Brexit, the only hinderance to goods coming INTO the UK is the UK. Do you really think the UK will stop or hinder food imports to such an extent that there are "empty shelves" and "riots"?
The economic concern of a hard Brexit isn't the imports, but the exports. There might be significant economic disruption if the EU slows down trade of items coming INTO the EU and OUT OF the UK. But, the UK is solely in control of how smoothly goods coming INTO the UK and OUT OF the EU get distributed.
Have you worked with bureaucrats? They won't view it as stopping, but rules and paperwork need to be filed. If processes are followed stuff will flow, but there will be a flow stopping shockwave propagating backward at the rate of tps-1c.
The amount of food the UK imports from the EU is irrelevant, the relevant question is how much food does the UK import ?
This is because, as an EU member, the UK has trade agreements with many countries outside of the EU. After a no deal Brexit, it has none. This affects all UK imports and exports.
I think this is a ridiculous claim. Are you saying the UK is going to stop food coming across its border when it is to the clear benefit of it's citizens? That is ridiculous. The UK will suspend ALL customs operations before it does that. The bureaucratic state is kind of broken but not that broken.
Everybody will try to get as much food over the border as possible. Everybody will work together. The EU, the UK, the US, everybody. But this could still go very very bad.
What do you think "chaos at the border" means?
Every truck, train and ship has to get the papers checked where they could just drive through before. But there are not enough qualified officers to actually check all the papers.
So goods will come in at a trickle.
This is the UK governments own statement. Chaos at the border for six months:
> Britain’s government has revised its worst-case Brexit scenario estimates for chaos at the country’s borders, which it now expects to last for six months rather than six weeks, the political editor of The Sun newspaper said.
These comments read like some of the best Y2K and peak oil fanfic.
> What do you think “chaos at the border” means?
Probably not the UK self-imposing a famine on its people in favour of establishing a permit Raj. It sounds a lot more like government officials trying to get attention through hyperbole and extra funding for their departments than anything else. There’s nothing stopping the UK from declaring no duties on all imports and liberalizing incoming trade from Europe and elsewhere even more than it is now if it’s in their interests to do so. A lot of trade policy is unilateral when it comes down to it.
I hate when people use Y2K as some sort of evidence of trumped up claims.
Y2K could have been really bad. The reason it wasn’t as bad was because people took the threat seriously and spent nearly the last 5-10 years in the 90s spending billions of dollars, and many millions of man hours preventing the worst case scenarios.
That doesn’t change my point. Regardless of how serious of an issue Y2K actually was, the level of alarmism from armchair observers was still ridiculous, as was the notion that the problems wouldn’t get addressed.
OP literally predicted corpses on the street because of paperwork issues.
This isn't how things play out. The papers will stop being checked after the riots have started. But will continue to be checked when there are just long lines. Bureaucracies react to things that are actually occurring, not things that will occur.
What about the EUs export custom operations? Exporting to the UK is currently intra-EU. Exporting to the UK post-Brexit is ex-EU.
The rules on VAT alone will be enough to clog the ports. Are the trucks covered by insurance if they leave the EU? Are the drivers licenses valid? What about when the trucks return? Are they being re-imported?
It's not the concept of leaving that is the problem, it's all of the "etc".
None of what you are saying is true, and it is clear that you have no idea how trade works.
The EU and the UK already have a trade deal. It is called the World Trade Organization rules.
Yes, some taxes and tariffs might be higher, but it is a complete lie, born of either ignorance or maliciousness, to claim that a country would literally starve to death.
Once again, go look up the WTO trade rules. WTO trade rules cover most of the world.
> “The thing is, checks on non-EU trucks don’t take a couple of minutes,” Burnett told me. “They can take two or three hours.” Post-Brexit, British trucks would be non-EU. A team from London’s Imperial College subsequently estimated those queues could be 29 miles long at peak times on the British side, and there’s no reason to suppose it wouldn’t be the same on the French.
> Instead, they are trying to camouflage that reality with a bad deal that keeps Britain shackled to the EU for a number of years while losing all of the (substantial) influence it had over the way EU works. That's an anti-Brexit, the exact opposite of the independence and prosperity promised by brexiters. It was a bad deal and it's good that it failed.
It's a compromise, as all good deals are. Fundamentally it delivers what the democratic majority wants: continued free trade (which means alignment with EU technical regulations but not with general policy), but limited movement of people. It's not unfavourable to either side, it doesn't undermine the EU position (which already has an agreement with Turkey on very similar terms).
I hope that parliament can reconsider once it becomes clear that the alternative to this deal is a hard brexit. The deal was defeated only by an alliance of those who thought defeating it meant hard brexit and those who thought defeating it was somehow going to mean remain. At least one of those is wrong.
No. You seem very confused. Brexiters have not been doing any delivering. Brexiters want a WTO exit (aka "no deal"). The government are not brexiters - PM Theresa May is claiming her daft deal is brexit - she and a few of her supporters only - it is not what brexiters want.
The EU has been a deal with the devil; foreigners flooding in, fertility rates dropping, business owners having their businesses traded off for political favors, chunks of the lower classes of society abandoned, government debt. That list goes on and on.
And sure, you can make an arguement some of it existed before the EU but here's the key observation; It's difficult to make an argument the EU is beneficial to its member states because of the political manuvering that goes on behind closed doors is not documented or public and because of that, it's excessively easy to find statistics that blame them for a host of things which they may or may not have any part in.
And that in of itself will be the downfall of the EU. Not just the lack of transparency, but the lack of public involvement in dealmaking and the fact the EU has become one gigantic boot on the neck of the public. And also the kinds of deals made. When you trade your fishermen's business for a political favor, well, why the hell run a business? That act shows a fundemental disrespect for self-interest.
And the public mind you, can react two ways to that; the first is revolution in which, 19 of 20 times you don't get George Washigton. You generally get Pol Pot and Hitler, some group of society gets blamed for all its woes and eliminated, and the new boot takes over and often has a monopoly of force and buries the body count statistics. The second way is their concept of self-respect and dignity is destroyed, people end up with no interest in self-preservation, and without self-interest, they become dis-interested in self-investment. The kings often don't realize they're being drug into idiocracy with everyone else, and that in turn rots society from the inside out. Generally speaking, some foreign power steps in at that point and begins running things for their own profit.
Or they just wipe the whole society out and kill everyone. That happens too.
We've got a whole thread on this board going about Russian involvement. Keep in mind, if the Russians understand anything really well, its what happens when society collapses and what oppertunties that collapse presents.
The "unfavourable trade deal" would be of the kind that could command more support in Parliament, i.e. was more favourable to HMG's position (presumably with the Irish backstop removed, for one).
By definition that would mean the EU giving more in the negotiation, i.e. it would be less favourable to them.
The UK leaving with no deal would be the beginning of the end of the EU. There is already growing anti-EU sentiment in Italy (4th largest economy in the block), Hungary, Austria, Poland. The UK leaving could set off a chain reaction which would either end the EU project or drastically reduce its size.
The EU simply can't afford to have the UK leave completely, because any measure of success it might have as an independent nation will compel other members to take the idea seriously too.
This is ridiculous Brexiteer fantasy. The UK will have no measure of success in the short to medium term in a no deal scenario; it will be absolutely catastrophic.
It's meaningless to speculate what might happen in a fantasy scenario a decade or more later, but we know for a fact that the UK would be initially hurt much more badly by no deal than the EU.
If anything, no deal should convince Eurosceptics in other countries that they just cannot sell this fantasy to their constituents anymore.
Living in Germany, nobody here cares about Brexit. They don't show it in the news much. General opinion across my circles is that the UK should do whatever they want (leave or stay), but that they should stop wasting EU's politician's time with it.
So no, Germans at least are not worried about no deal. I don't think anyone talks much about Brexit in the EU, except for Britain. I don't think anyone is worried at all.
In all fairness, why would anyone outside of Britain even care ? Whether Britain wants to stay or leave the EU with or without a deal is entirely up to them. The rest of the EU or the world doesn't (and shouldn't have) any kind of say on that.
So put your money. Make some short positions on Euro.
And I would argue the opposite - the departure of the UK will leave the EU stronger. People will see what kind of clusterfuck it creates and they will learn that capital investors do not like such a mess.
While countries in the EU (especially Ireland - THE English speaking country successor in the EU) will enjoy the diverted cashflows into their economies.
If there is going to be any domino effect at all, it is going to be the resurrection of the Independence of Scotland which will most likely want to join EU at some point after that.
I would even argue that the EU will find happiness at least in a sense that they got rid of a member that enjoyed exclusive rights (no Euro, no Schendgen) which will make the path easier for the "United States of Europe" model.
Regarding the "afford" bit, the only party that can't afford that is the UK - the UK imports 55% of "stuff" from the EU, and exports 50% to the EU. The EU27 exports to the UK are 16% which puts it behind the US.
Finally, most of those anti-EU movements are a joke as they are tied with outsider parties partly funded by Russian money and some fake-news campaigns. Also, having Poland in that list is a mistake, Poland is one of the biggest benefitors from the membership, and there are no such movements at all. The only thing they are upset is the two-speed EU which is another topic altogether.
That sort of assumes that the UK is all hunky dory after it leaves. If it gets slammed with an immediate recession/raising unemployment/etc... then that's leverage the EU has to convince other members to stay.
Agreed, and frankly, the whole process has been such a calamity that if I were an EU country leader I wouldn't even attempt to exit without a very strong mandate for a detailed, specific and clear process of leaving.
That's certainly a possibility too, but do you think it's one that EU leaders are willing to bet the future of their superstate on?
The UK has a lot going for it. It might not be hunky-dory immediately after leaving, but there's plenty to suggest that the UK will do just fine in the medium to long term.
> That's certainly a possibility too, but do you think it's one that EU leaders are willing to bet the future of their superstate on?
The alternative is betting it on the idea that giving a departing UK additional special favors won't accelerate centrifugal movements elsewhere in the union. An easy exit is the last thing the EU wants to demonstrate.
> It might not be hunky-dory immediately after leaving, but there's plenty to suggest that the UK will do just fine in the medium to long term.
The immediate term is what has the greatest impact in terms of a rush for the exits, though.
That goes both ways. I'm visiting Estonia in March, before we leave, deliberately. After? There are plenty of other places in the world that I haven't seen and I would like to. If the EU continues to be awkward then my family and I will go elsewhere.
But surely the best move for the EU in that situation is to offer the worst deal possible, take it and you get fucked over, making staying in the union more attractive and you have a nice example to show anyone else who considers leaving? I don't get how you think that the EU would offer a sweeter deal to allow the UK to leave easier?
I think there are multiple issues that have led to the UK being in the situation it is in:
1) The UK wanting to negotiate an amicable parting, but the EU actually wanting to punish the UK and negotiated in bad faith
2) Not starting No Deal preparations immediately. Standard negotiating tactic is to have a "BATNA" - best alternative to a negotiated agreement. Not beginning No Deal preparations prevented that.
3) Having a UK civil service that is largely in favour of remaining in the EU
1) Not true, there were multiple good deals presented including this one which the Parliament voted against - provided Northern Ireland situation is solved in a satisfactory way.
This specific point was the keystone and why many early proposals failed.
2) There was no plan and no negotiations before incoming the article or trying the referendum.
If the were serious plans before, situation would be different.
3, 4) Yes, but apparently even having someone doing Leave is no good either. It is a mess.
The most vocal and radical proponents of it have left the scene.
The deal isn't satisfactory at all, as it offers no legally binding way for the UK to decide to leave without the EU's permission. The EU could string out border and trade discussions for years and the EU would be defacto in the EU but without a vote.
David Cameron tried to discuss reform with the EU before the referendum, but was rebuffed.
> The Brexit promise is something nobody can deliver on. It was a lie, you cannot force the EU to accept an unfavorable trade deal. If only for the reason that it would set an exceptionally bad precedent and everybody would want their own deal, to pick and choose the parts of EU membership that are favorable to them, leading the EU to implode.
The EU is not being asked to accept any trade deal at all (hence no deal). A no-deal outcome is actually just fine, under the standard rules, the cost of food and other commodities is likely to decrease for consumers, and the EU is not going to blockade the UK. The UK hosts a considerable number of financial institutions which are crucial to the EU, so if they know what's good for them, they won't mess around with that too much either.
Altogether it seems that the downsides are acceptable, and the upsides are the same as they were when it was called to a vote. I don't really see what the problem is. The UK is going to do just fine, and so are the EU member states (whether they're in or out). I don't get why people have to make it out to be a catastrophe.
Your comment is highly misleading to the point that it is possibly the 'lie' you mean to make us wary of.
The evidence against your comment is in plain sight: a 'deal' is on the table right now, which some on 'both sides' just happen to not want for various reasons, but it could very well have passed.
The notion that there is only 'hard Brexit' or 'full EU' participation plainly not true, to even the most casual spectator, to imply such is an ugly, ideological misrepresentation of the facts, tantamount to the lie you're ostensibly loathing.
The 'deal' in place, which you suggest is 'the worst of both worlds' is plainly not. That the UK would be subject to EU rules during a period of negotiation is actually not very onerous. The UK was only one voice of a couple of dozen, to mostly lose that voice for 1-3 years is not a nation 'saddled with the EU' for any degree of time.
If the deal were to have been passed in Parliament - then some kind of trade negotiation would be worked out over the coming years, and then there'd be a fairly orderly Brexit: no UK in the EU, but some kind of 'decent trade deal' as some would want.
The EU has made things difficult in purpose, because they definitely don't want people thinking of leaving their club on purpose.
There is ample evidence of this, but I can point to one suitable clause in the current 'deal' in the table, which is that that the UK would not be able to exit the EU without permission of the EU itself, which is utterly unacceptable. It's a small but important clause, that should not be there.
This small clause has been enough to throw some Brexit Tories against the deal.
This small issue - in addition to the weirdly intractable problem of the 'Irish Border' and it's related backstop, is enough to make it 'hard'.
Without that clause, and without the Ireland border weirdness ... the deal in place would probably have passed.
I voted leave, and would be quite happy with no deal - and the gangsterism of the EU in the negotiations has only stiffened my resolve, and I gather there are plenty of others that feel similarly; this is one of the reasons that some remainers are scared of a second referendum - their is a chance the leave vote might actually increase, and then they'll really be up the spout because any further shenanigans on their part will make it transparently obvious that they don't give a fig about democracy.
The EU's plan from the start has been to make the process so painful as to dissuade anyone else from trying. Martin Selmayr was boasting that he has managed to trap the UK.
Because they have other more important goals like not compromising their core values and undoing 50 years of history of the EU for the benefit of a single country that doesn't even care about the EU.
Uh? What? As a citizen of the EU, I would be extremely disturbed if the EU cared much about non-EU countries. The EU should care as much about Russia and (soon) the UK as the USA cares about Canada and Mexico.
Oh of course, Brexit in particular is for the British and the British alone. But perhaps if you seed similar movements to other EU partners then you could benefit Europe as a whole. That would follow the logic of the above post.
That's not the reason that the EU has made the process so difficult.
They made it so difficult and so scary to warn the other states to not even try to think about an exit.
How is that democratic?
If the EU is so convinced that the only way is the EU way they should have made it easy for the UK to leave, then watch it as it burned to the ground and groveled to try to buy its way back into the EU then maybe the other states would have thought: Gee, it did not work for the EU but at least now we know and we won't try!
Instead, the EU is trying to make an example of the Uk as a show of force to the other states. The EU is ruling with fear and acting like a bully!
And that's forgetting the fact the EU leaders could have seen Brexit as a wake-up call and maybe changed the course of action and reform the EU from within to give people what they fucking promised when this thing was made in the first place: prosperity, safety, so on and so forth.
Instead, they march forward with more integration, more federalism, more Europe, as if the nations don't count anymore. Free trade is the new God in town and it doesn't take prisoners.
Lets forget the fact the economic growth for the EU is one of the weakest in the world for the last 15 years, that the youth unemployment rate is roughly 25% and that because the wages are so low due to the enormous amount of tax being paid by the companies and citizens, they have resorted to importing people from 3rd world countries in order to fill job vacancies that only exists because nobody can actually afford to work for such a low wage.
A new age of slavery built on top of migrant workers.
Ain't the EU pretty?
God forbid you are against them! 30 years ago if you showed any sign of reservation towards unregulated capitalism you were labeled a communist and shamed by the major political parties, nowadays if you are against the EU, you are labeled as backward, illiterate and racist/fascist/populist.
The words have changed, the technics are the same.
Please excuse me if this comes as overly harsh, but this sounds a lot like a complete misunderstanding of how the world works, if I'm being frank.
Let's try this with a simpler example. Let's assume that the UK and the EU are two people in a monogamous marriage and the UK wants to divorce the EU.
EU: "Sure, we can divorce, but we can still be friends."
UK: "No, I want to break up and still have sex with you, but also with others and I want you to cuddle me at night when I want to, but with no commitments from me."
EU: "No. We can either be friends or we can be married, but you can't have all the benefits with no drawbacks."
How exactly is the EU a gangster for this? It's basically like any other relationship in the world, be it economic, political, emotional. The two sides have to agree. The UK is free to go out without a deal at any time.
Brexit wasn't supposed to include sex. Theresa May wants sex, not the Brexiters. She wants sex, because she wants to keep the door open to move back in. She is not a Brexiter, but she's got the job of executing Brexit, so she's pretending to.
That's not quite right. What was promised in the beginning was a pretty friendly break-up, i.e. a "soft Brexit". The chunk of population that wants Brexit at all costs is very small.
> They made it so difficult and so scary to warn the other states to not even try to think about an exit.
How is it difficult? You trigger article 50 and in two years time you're out, no questions asked.
Whether it's scary depends only on whether you're scared by the prospect of not having the advantages of membership anymore. If all the things you're saying about the EU are true, then leaving the EU should not be scary at all.
Hm, what's the definition of gangsterism then? It seems to me that the EU put up no fight about the UK leaving, the UK simply wanted in on the single market and customs union and also be outside of the regulations that are the single market and customs union, which is the exact definition of a contradiction.
The EU will carry on with a melancholic resignation if the UK does a no deal exit. It'll be just as painful for the EU to do all those border checks, Belfast will tense up again, the queue at Gibraltar will get longer, crossing at Dover and Calais will be simply silly long and all the unmentioned things are even more complicated by default. The EU has rules how to handle them and does it rutinely, the UK can probably dig up a few old rulebooks and then they'll throw them away and will probably start with the EU rules anyway, as those are relevant, contemporary, up to date, known, tested, tried and used already.
And the problem with slowly drifting away from the EU is that the EU ingress points won't know which rules the UK changed, or which new rules the UK forgot to adopt, so checks will have to be performed. Every port, airport, other ingress point will have to treat anybody and anything from the UK as outside EU. Full stop.
If the UK wants to avoid that it has to offer something to the EU to get that special treatment. (It always had special treatment, it had right to selectively implement directives and regulations, but it hadn't utilized that right except in a few important cases, like they opted out of the Eurozone, Schengen area, etc.)
So, all in all, the burden of treating the UK as an important close-to-EU-but-not-EU entity has to worth something to the UK, right? May and co. basically offered nothing except that we'll figure it out later.
All of the problems that the last 2 years of brexit negotiations wanted to "solve" are solved by an 'even closer cooperation'.
As they rightly should! I voted remain and would do so again in a heartbeat but if you have an exclusive members only club what use is it if leaving has no consequences? The UK most certainly should be punished if it leaves the EU. Otherwise you undermine the entire organisation.
You would obviously lose the advantages, but why should it be difficult to leave, or punishable? Next you'll be suggesting job resignations should include a fine.
The issue with the referendum since the beginning was leave was such a nebulous cloud for the entire range of Brexit from barely-there-Brexit to Britian-stands-alone(-get-those-people-out)-Brexit while remain had a very definite meaning. Because of that everyone could pour all their displeasure at anything wrong into leave and think the deal would take care of it. That's why I'm always annoyed at the 'another referendum would tarnish democracy' line, it wouldn't be another nebulous question it would be a direct vote on an actual deal giving people the chance to make an actual choice on the future of the UK.
> Instead, they are trying to camouflage that reality with a bad deal that keeps Britain shackled to the EU for a number of years while losing any say it had over the way EU works.
I don't think Brexit as it was formulated was ever possible if the EU was wanting to be extremely generous because one of the main gripes was all the regulations on products coming from the EU parliament. Ultimately if the UK was going to have access to the EU market at all pretty much all of those regulations would still apply because to sell into that market they'd have to comply with the regulations of the EU market!
> That's why I'm always annoyed at the 'another referendum would tarnish democracy' line
I'm annoyed for another reason: first, in 1975, [1], there was a referendum that asked the British people if they would want to join the EEC. Then, in 2016, there was a referendum that asked them if they would want to leave the EU. So if there can be a second, then why can't there be a third?
The other precedent is the ratification of the Maastricht treaty, where it was rejected by referendum in Denmark for example 50.7% vs 40.93% - so again very close - amended, and then passed - by a second referendum.
The failure by both Corbyn and May to acknowledge the need for a second referendum, imho, should raise the question of whether the UK is really a democracy any more.
> The other precedent is the ratification of the Maastricht treaty, where it was rejected by referendum in Denmark for example 50.7% vs 40.93% - so again very close - amended, and then passed - by a second referendum.
You call it a precedent, I'd call it an example of how undemocratic the EU is. The same situation came up with the treaty of nice and then again with the treaty of Lisbon when Ireland rejected them, the EU love making people vote until the get the "right" answer.
That's why they generally avoid letting people vote on it's continued expansion.
Just after the original vote in 2016, Tusk admitted that the EU needed reform. Cameron (UK PM of the time) in 2015 went to the EU seeking reform, he was palmed of with some token concessions for the UK. 2016 we had a vote, since then it has been a cluster of chaos with every opportunity for personal limelight being sought over any sane approach.
May's deal wasn't a deal the UK was looking for on either side and in effect was a weaker form of what article 50 was and is. Yet also locked the UK into the EU with no say until a final trade deal that the EU approves was agreed. In short, a terrible deal as not only less say than as with article 50, but also given all the cards to the EU when it comes to making a deal. Sheer madness at any business level of thinking.
So what have we got, a divided kingdom instead of a united one. You can go down this side, that side avenue for eons, both sides did some epic flaws and lies.
SO how do we move on.
Firstly - cancel article 50, then reenact it again. That is within EU rules and avoids needing any yay or nay from EU.
Bit of a gaming the system, but at least resets the clock and allows time for second referendum. Equally it means going back to the start, but article 50 also allows early leaving.
Yes I agree now, a second referendum is needed; BUT it has to be done in a way that respects the first vote, otherwise you will still end up with a divided kingdom. You do this by combining the results of the first vote with the second vote. You allow again as with the first vote 16 year old to vote and have a say and the final result is what we do and that frankly has to be either.
1) Stay in the EU, but equally get fully behind it this time and fix what is wrong - start by a EU Health Service, that oversight has always irked many with the EU ethos to free access to basics, health being one. Curtly what the EU people want over a Army, least all those I know think so.
2) If we leave, we go WTO, plan for that and if the EU wants to sort a deal out, fine, we will run with a direction and anything else is good. Least can do trade deals with other countries and the whole focus upon the EU at the expense of ignoring those avenues is very blinkered.
But one aspect many overlook. The UK has on many votes in the EU history, singularly or instrumentally held the EU back from advancing, with financial services regulation and taxation being one area that stands out. This hampers how the EU has progressed and as it stands, and been detrimental. So putting the money aside what the UK pays in - has anybody really asked the question of the EU people - is the EU better of without the UK?
I would also add, that a second referendum should see all MP's remain neutral and they all focus on facts, over opinion. Also all avenues are equally explored from a worst to best case and presented to the public. The public love facts and a full picture, let them have that and vote without pontificating peer-pressure. Let it be fair.
> and fix what is wrong - start by a EU Health Service, that oversight has always irked many with the EU ethos to free access to basics
I don't understand this argument - "give me hard Brexit OR EU NHS"?
> a second referendum should see all MP's remain neutral and they all focus on facts, over opinion. Also all avenues are equally explored from a worst to best case and presented to the public. The public love facts and a full picture, let them have that and vote without pontificating peer-pressure. Let it be fair.
Pure cloud cookoo land. If they were capable of this level of honesty we wouldn't be in this mess. The public aren't too keen on facts either.
It was an example, not a one or the other argument, sorry you misinterpreted it, and I can only put that down to how I presented it. My bad, sorry.
As for MP's being neutral, well, it's not impossible, and would be refreshing and well needed change. Otherwise we will just repeat the same old mess with no central point of facts and impartiality to look at for contrast. Making the whole vote a futile mess that will only end up with the same divide, whatever the outcome.
If only the EU stepped back and said we are looking at reforming certain area's, offering up something new to vote upon, at least that would appease the sense of democracy. Otherwise it would be seen as some as another case of the EU not liking the result and being told to vote again. Which is how they will see it, more so as that is what they feared publicly before the referendum and got shot down by the other side for lies.
So to say it is complicated is an understatement. But some grounding is needed and the MP's being neutral and not taking sides, same with parties. Would only help.
But then, much in politics that is flawed and in need of reform. Yet we can't even agree upon a digital voting system, let alone the ability to use more than a single character.
Imagine if Twitter had a limit of one character and you could only post once every 5 years. Think of the level of debate and productivity that would be achieved with such limitations and that is what politics is too the people and we call that democracy.
Actually it is technically viable, going by the judgment. Though I'd still class that as gaming the system. I'm not seeing anything in the judgement that would prevent such an approach.
As far as I know, this was not a judgment but a "legal opinion".
Gaming the system is easier in a codified law system. The not in "good faith" is something from the common law system. I would not bet on it that your approach would work.
The aspect of a second referendum would be the good faith balance that would plicate the EU. Though politically such avenues would be along the lines of leaking that option, then asking for extension and face saved on both sides.
Bear in mind that the second of those referendums didn't happen until two decades after the EEC we'd originally signed up to was massively and fundamentally changed in nature. Now we're talking about having another referendum two and a half years after the previous one, before the result of the last referendum has even been implemented. That's quite a difference and it very strongly suggests that we're only seeing calls for another referendum now because the last one came to the "wrong" result.
(Also, we didn't actually get any referendum on joining the EEC. The 1975 referendum was on whether we'd stay in and came with very similar warnings about the perils of leaving to the more recent referendum. One has to wonder whether, if that'd ended in a leave vote, we'd have had a second referendum several decades sooner than we did.)
The second referendum featured a Leave campaign that effectively promised, among other things, continued access to European markets on pretty much as-member terms; indeed, immediately afterwards, David Davis, placed at the head of the negotiations, was promising a deal that secured "all the benefits of membership".
That deal was not available, and so the result of the second referendum cannot be implemented. If you want to claim a democratic mandate for the departure options that are available (May's deal, leaving you tied to the EU on disadvantageous terms, or no deal, and immediate, massive disruptions in cross-border commerce), you'll need another vote.
I wouldn't say it's because it's the "wrong" result but that only now you could make an informed decision because only now you can see what a Brexit looks like.
To be fair, it could be seen since 2016, but now it can no longer be honestly ignored.
I don't think we're seeing "what a Brexit looks like". We're seeing the fumbling of a government who gave the British people a vote in 2016 and whose bluff was called. They didn't want and, more importantly, didn't expect the result they got, and stupidly had done nothing to prepare for it. And for the last two years, they've petulantly gone through the motions of negotiating a deal that they would dearly love to fail. In light of all that, it's entirely unsurprising that the process has been a catastrophic mess. However, it doesn't give anyone the freedom to give up on what most definitely was a democratic decision.
I don't think they hoped it'd fail. There was no chance of anything better than the kind of deal Norway has - they pay, obey the rules and have no say - as opposed to what the UK now has - they pay, obey the rules and have a say.
A democratic decision on a poorly formulated question at best. Democracy assumes informed decisions by the people and this was anything but. The leave campaign made every misrepresentation they could in order to paint a rosy future we all knew would never be possible.
The second referendum was on the broad question of leave/stay, without the fine details. It is widely accepted that a lot of people voted without understanding the details.
Now there are specific options on the table. It seems only fair to allow people to vote on no-deal, the best deal they could get, or no Brexit at this point.
d) the fact that what was presented as "leave" was an impossible lie
(the cake-and-eat-it option)
e) even if you disregard the cake-and-eat-it faction, both "cake" and "eat it" were under the "leave" umbrella. Doesn't hurt to first settle whether you would prefer "cake" or "eat it" and then hold the referendum.
Oh and of course:
"In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way." Who said it? Yes, Nigel Farage.
The government spend £9.3 million pounds sending a pro-EU leaflet to every household in the country. That is more than the £7 million campaign spending cap. This is the leaflet in question: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
The leaflet doesn't even pretend to be neutral.
I think it is ridiculous to claim that leave overspent+cheated compared to remain. I think both parties played loose and fast with the rules. It just so happens remain is basically in control of the institutions and the bulk of media in the UK so you only really see one side of the story.
That's not a second referendum, it's a fundamentally different one because the EEC is not the EU. If there had been a vote to join the EU (and on the other changes since) then it would have a lot more legitimacy and this mess probably would not exist, one way or the other.
There's a different name to the organization and a different cohort of voters, and certainly there was a case for offering voters a chance to ratify or reject Maastricht and Lisbon treaties (which may or may not have reduced the mess). But the EU fundamentally is what the EEC set out to be in 1957, far more clearly than the current Brexit options resemble the various 2016 pledges about a post-Brexit UK's aims resemble the respective deal and no-deal options actually on the table.
Free movement of workers and capital, common policies in agriculture etc, a European Investment Bank and Social Fund redistributing member states' tax revenues, legislative oversight, a European Council, Commission and Parliament are all in the original Treaty of Rome. The EEC was smaller then, of course, but it didn't hide its intent to invite more countries to join. And the UK completely avoided participating novel EU projects like the Euro that voters clearly didn't want.
> That's why I'm always annoyed at the 'another referendum would tarnish democracy' line
I'm annoyed about the whole "referendum is true democracy" because no two referendums in the UK have been held under the same rules.
EU nationals resident in the UK are entitled to vote in Parliamentary elections. They voted in the Scottish independence referendum. They were not allowed to vote in this referendum, despite the fact that it would erode their rights and possibly force them out of the country.
Besides, democracy has been "tarnished" by widespread cheating in the referendum which had not been adequately prosecuted.
Not to mention that the U.K. is not a "popular sovereignty" country, we're a constitutional monarchy with an unelected upper house! The uncodified constition gets changed increasingly often in a haphazard way. We're practically making it up as we go along (see Bercow controversy).
As far as I understand it, the eligibility rules for the EU referendum were exactly the same as for Parliamentary elections: UK nationals in the EU were only eligible to vote if they'd been abroad for less than 15 years.
The Scottish independence referendum was the oddball one, largely at the request of the Scottish government from what I can tell. It required actual residence in Scotland but little else.
I'm actually not sure the nebulousness of the original Leave plan is the problem - if it was, I'd expect significant changes in where people stand on the issue, or fear of the No Deal option, which doesn't seem to be the case.
> Overall, 41% of people now think it was right for Britain to vote Leave, while 47% believe it was the wrong decision – but this does not necessarily translate into support for stopping the process.
> Asked what we should do next, 28% of people want to stop Brexit entirely, while 8% would hold a second referendum to decide matters.
---
> Some suggest Government had hoped the risk of No Deal would force support for the deal on the table. But while No Deal is an unpopular option, it doesn't necessarily seem as intimidating as expected.
> Part of this appears to be a lack of understanding - only 56% of people realize that "No Deal" means exactly that, leaving the European Union without any deal at all. Strangely, 26% think it that it actually includes a deal, to ensure a smooth transition or a formal transition period.
> While 49% say they would be worried by a No Deal Brexit, these are overwhelmingly Remain voters - 38% of the public as a whole, and 70% of Leave voters the idea doesn’t worry them.
> Three quarters (76%) of Leave voters think warnings of No Deal disruption are exaggerated or entirely invented. Put simply, Leave voters did not believe warnings about the damage Brexit could cause in 2016, and don't believe them now.
The original referendum was just wrong to begin with. There are some decisions you cannot give to the people. You end up with Boaty McBoatface situations.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_McBoatface
I don't see the contradiction here. Remain was what it says on the tin stay in the EU and any desired changes happen within the system of the EU. My whole point is the leave has gone from this huge nebula of different brexits to one, the one currently negotiated by PM May.
Ideally if it were possible the vote should have never been held until there was an actual deal or at least a concrete foundation. Without the actual details of a deal the referendum isn't much better than an opinion poll on the EU because there's no facts about what leave actually means before it's negotiated. Or a vote to initiate the process and another about the actual facts of the deal.
> Remain was what it says on the tin stay in the EU and any desired changes happen within the system of the EU.
That's simply not true. Both remain and leave campaigns were backed up by dubious or misleading claims about what the future would look like if the UK voted to leave the EU.
Those backing remain claimed Brexit would cause financial instability and require an emergency budget, that unemployment would rise, that NHS finances would be undermined, that families would be £4,300 worse off, that Scotland would immediately leave the UK, etc. David Cameron said he would stay on as Prime Minister in the event of a leave vote. None of these things happened.
I think it's too early to say that none of those bad outcomes have happened because the UK hasn't actually left yet. The actual policy though under remain was known, leave was just a cloud of displeasure at the EU with no idea what the actual policy would be. My point isn't about what either side claimed would happen it's that the policy each vote would result in was solid on the remain side and completely fluid on the leave side. Regardless of bad claims by either side that fact makes me open to a second referendum.
It was always clear the UK would never get a better deal than Norway. At no time an EU officer ever claimed anything different. The EU would never give the UK the Brexit as it was sold by the UKIP crowd because, if they complied, pretty much every country would want its own *xit deal and the EU would collapse as an empty balloon.
> all calls for a second referendum would be treated with utter contempt
Yes but it's symmetrical.
If result A then calls for second referendum greeted with derision by side B
If result B then calls for second referendum greeted with derision by side A
So no conclusion can be drawn by the fact that people are partisan. The question of whether a second referendum is a good idea is independent of the result of the first referendum.
> But since the underdog won, since leave won, it is now contestable.
As much as our friends in parliament sometimes make it out to be, it is not purely a match. There is no "underdog" in Brexit; there is one team, the UK, with two options: remain or leave. Choosing a bad option affects everyone equally (except a few career politicians).
With all the shouting and finger pointing it's easy to lose track of this fact: it is not a competition. We're in this together. We're a family, and we might be cutting off the nose to spite the face.
But it has morphed into an us-vs-them issue (brexiteers vs remainers, not even immigrants), and through the lens of competition we only see the finish line.
It sounds like your post is arguing without actually contradicting anything I said.
I mean, your post basically is: Why can't we all just get along.
While it's a noble feeling, the reality is society is fractious, and for complex and nuanced decisions such as brexit there are people who will net-net benefit and people who will net net see detriment. And 'leave option' was the underdog, you might not like to admit it but, the financial and betting markets saw it as such objectively. I'm not sure why you feel the need to try and deny this.
The point is that in the alternate scenario there wouldn't be half the establishment or more agitating to subvert the democratic will of the largest vote ever in British history, I guess..
There's something to be said for a bias towards the status quo. If it ain't broke don't fix it and all that. If the vote had been 60-40 leave I'd agree with you but it was close to 50/50 and based on some misinformation.
There's an argument that the bias towards the status quo weighs in the other direction. People are biased towards the status quo, if 50% of people are willing to go against the status quo they are more likely to be right than the 50% of people not willing to.
I actually find it really remarkable that 50% of voters were unhappy enough with the EU to go against the status quo.
There would be nobody in parliament or government talking about a second referendum if remain had won. In fact it'd have been taken as a mandate to immediately pass more powers to Brussels, see the PESCO.
> The question of a second referendum was raised by Mr Farage in an interview with the Mirror in which he said: "In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it."
> There would be nobody in parliament or government talking about a second referendum if remain had won
Before the results were fully counted, when it looked as if remain had won, leavers were already beginning work on their campaign for a second referendum.
Well, of course. Remain is the current, familiar situation.
A Remain victory wouldn't have come with a 25% drop in the pound, rampant inflation, the worst growth rate of G8 countries, stockpiling of food and drugs, and an increasing risk to see the world order that brought about the longest period of peace (70 years) in this corner of the world, being toppled.
A Remain victory would also have been obtained in spite of, not thanks to, Russian interference, fake news, and overspending by Vote Leave (as found by the Electoral Commission who referred them to the police)
So yes, somehow the idea of a second referendum makes more sense in one case than in the other. Dunno why...
> A Remain victory wouldn't have come with a 25% drop in the pound, rampant inflation, the worst growth rate of G8 countries
Why do people spout such provable nonsense?! Inflation is around the BoE target rate of 2% having just nudged down a touch (consensus forecast for Jan 2019 is 2.1%). Rampant inflation is what you see in Venezuela and Zimbabwe. A moment's thought should disabuse you of this opinion.
Back in late 2015, the UK's growth was around 2.9% based primarily on fundamentals that are largely unrelated to Brexit (IT and software). Those fundamentals haven't changed so there's a high likelihood that growth is dragging due to overall negative sentiment as a result of Brexit uncertainty.
Clear that fog, and growth should bounce back. The fastest way to clarity that honours the referendum result, though many don't want to hear it, is a no-deal departure with appropriate WTO exceptions based on national security assertions (de-risking essential supplies) during an FTA negotiation period coupled with the (already given) assertions on the EU citizens' right-to-remain in the UK.
How is having another vote, to establish a revised opinion based on new information and two long years of public debate and analysis of the original campaigns, undemocratic?
We could well be on path for a third general election in six years, a periodic vote to re-evaluate what we want as a country based on the current state of affairs.
Isn't being able to change your mind based on a changed context fundamental underpinning of a democratic system?
Forced into remaining by a second democratic referendum, held due to the uncovering of lies and nebulous accounting of the leave campaign that the full extent of hasn’t been fully uncovered?
1. The proven illegal overspend by Leave was enough, according to people who model these things, to sway around 800K voters. The margin was less than that.
2. This is not about FUD. This was egregious lies:
a) Daniel Hannan: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.”
b) David Davies: "There will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside."
c) Michael Gove: "The day after we vote to leave we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want."
d) Boris Johnson: "There will continue to be free trade, and access to the single market."
Never mind the £ 350m for the NHS per week on the bus.
That hypothetical isn't equivalent though. If remain had one the referendum then everything would have just continued as normal. If there had been calls for a second referendum in that case then it would definitely just be a case of calling a vote until you win.
This potential second referendum would be on voting for this actual "deal" or chance of hard Brexit. It would be voting on what May has so far been able to accomplish (or not accomplish). The first referendum was done with no idea on what was going to happen and now the British people can actually see through the lies the Brexiteers made and decide if this is what they actually want. It's much more democratic now that everyone is more aware.
If leave wins again then go right ahead with the hard Brexit, it's what people want. If remain wins then the people have decided against shooting themselves in the foot.
If the vote had gone the other way, the results of that would have been clear from the beginning. It would have been what the UK had. It would have been a reasonable result.
The Brexit result people voted for was an illusion (others call it lies).
So why not let the people vote on the actual results now?
The only reason I see is the fear of the Brexiters that they would fail in a spectacular way after all those failures they delivered since the vote went through.
How is "leave the EU" nebulous? There's nothing nebulous about it. The only thing that's nebulous, as Juncker said, is Theresa May with her faux-brexit deal.
It’s nebulous because “leave the EU,” means everything from remaining in the SM and CU, to having no formal relationship with the EU, and a number of positions in between.
People voted for the leave option without well defined idea of what that choice entailed. Remain, by contrast, was basically about keeping things as-is.
"no formal relationship with the EU" - anything else wouldn't really be leaving, would it? It would be partial leaving. The vote wasn't for partial leaving.
Then the leave vote wasn't actually leave because even leave didn't want to completely cut the UK off from the single market! That's been the paradox at the heart of brexit since the beginning, they complained about the amount of EU regulation but want to still sell and buy from the single market which requires that they conform to a large majority of the regulations they were complaining about.
I'll be the first to admit: I'm an American. I fundamentally do not understand Brexit.
I understand the following timeline:
1. A largely disseminated, nation-wide vote occurs, bolstered by nationalist sentiment, that the EU is bad for the UK. This vote results in a conclusion that UK should leave the EU.
2. This is controversial, due to the majority of the populace in general not desiring to leave the EU, but not voting as such individually. Some portions of the UK, itself a Union, are strongly aganst this voting result.
3. May, a woman of great importance in the UK government, chooses to try and make a deal with the EU for favorable leaving conditions for UK.
4. Nothing May is presenting is considered acceptable by anyone.
On its face, this makes no sense to me. Why is May being held responsible for this? Where are the people who initially brought in Brexit- why are they not supporting May? What is preventing the referendum from being declared stupid and that the UK gov't is not going to do it?
EDIT: Thank you all for your excellent responses. I'm now under the impression this is like when a significant portion of a dev team with (actual, hypotehtical) equal or flat hierarchy believe that code needs to be refactored to a serious degree, but no majority of devs can decide on what the refactored code will look like. (Extremely simplified!). If this is largely incorrect please let me know.
My view is that these people lied to the public about how awesome Brexit would be. Once it got to the hard work of making it happen they realized how awful the deal would be and how the economy would be harmed. Because they didn't want their name attached to it they resigned.
Some of them are hoping that May will resign and they can become Prime Minister instead.
> Once it got to the hard work of making it happen they realized how awful the deal would be and how the economy would be harmed. Because they didn't want their name attached to it they resigned.
One could argue that they didn't expect the vote to pass at all, and did it to gain favor with their constituency - to be able to say they "tried to leave the EU but alas." They knew their promises were untenable, yet they made them anyway, but there's no way to fulfill them once the vote passes, hence resignation.
The problem is that literally nobody wants May's job right now. Given the shit sandwich she has to work with she's doing the best she can, but the best they can do is make a terrible situation slightly less terrible.
I believe she can, and that is technically an option. The problem is that this could destabilize the country. Citizens voted and asked for a Brexit to happen. The government is trying to honor that request as it is a democratic country. If it just decided to ignore the vote and cancel any plans for Brexit, the British government would do irreparable harm to the idea of democracy in Britain.
In Switzerland it is not a problem to repeat a vote, either after about ten years or if there are new circumstances justifying a re-evaluation or if the proposition has been modified to appease the opponents. Some proposals needed several retries to be accepted by the Swiss. It takes time.
I seriously think that UK should stop the process and start again. This is not undemocratic because people now know better (new circumstances justifying a re-evaluation). The process would be like this:
1. The parliament decides to cancel the process
2. A Spanish judge made a proposal how to halt the Brexit
3. An emergency committee tries to find a temporary deal with the EU
4. After a year or so, the popular vote is repeated
> Once it got to the hard work of making it happen they realized
They aren't stupid. They knew all along it would be impossible. They didn't think the vote would go for brexit. They wanted to use it as political leverage and they underestimated the stupidity and malleability of the public and the powerful amplifying influence of social media.
May's deal permanently blocks the UK from ever fully leaving the EU without the EU's permission, meaning that anyone who wants to leave won't support it. It also removes almost all the benefits of remaining in the EU, meaning Remain supporters hate it too. Oh, and for bonus points it effectively makes Northern Ireland no longer fully part of the UK, meaning that the DUP (the Northern Ireland unionist party which the Tories have to ally with to get a majority) will never support it. There are other issues with it too, of course, but that's the general gist.
It simply requires that the UK ensure that no hard (customs) border is required in Ireland. A key component of the Good Friday Agreement which ended 3 decades of bloodshed on the island of Ireland was that physical border checks between the two states whould be phased out.
All it requires is that the UK accepts that EU customs checks are performed between Britain and Ireland rather than at the Irish border. This option is supported by the Irish government and has popular and business support in Northern Ireland.
I have no idea why the extreme brexiteers find this idea so objectionable? It's a popular in Ireland, North and South; it satisfies the EU (a sponsor of the peace deal) and it allows brexiteers COMPLETE freedom to negotiate any type of future trading relationship they want.
To be fair, "simply" introducing a hard border between parts of your country isn't quite... simply. Which country would do that? In addition, it's a pretty crappy symbol of "getting independence" if you "leave behind" a part of your country to get it, and that's how it's understandably perceived. And May's government relies on the DUP to achieve a majority in parliament, for which this is wholly unacceptable, since it stands for getting closer to the main land and not being one with Ireland. (of course she doesn't have a majority now, but the DUP might very well have broken away long ago if this had been a plan)
There was a custom's border inside France from 1815[0] to 2008, with different treatment for imports/exports from Switzerland to the small part of France beyond that custom's border.
According to that article, you can still buy cars w/o EU import duties in that part of France...
[0]: Yes, as a result of Napoleon's defeat and as part of Geneva joining Switzerland.
> I have no idea why the extreme brexiteers find this idea so objectionable?
Because it's a slippery slope that looks very much like ceding territory. It's not just border checks, but Northern Ireland would be effectively in the EU as far as customs rules and tariffs. Otherwise, you could circumvent the EU tariffs by importing in the UK, moving the goods "internally" to NE then loading them on a truck and unloading somewhere in the rest Ireland.
This differentiated regime would strengthen economic ties with Ireland and weaken those with Britain.
The alternative is a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which the UK specifically agreed not to do in the Good Friday Agreement.
A hard border, combined with the overwhelming preference of North Irish to remain in the EU, increases the chance of a successful North Irish referendum for unification with Ireland. If the UK allows such a referendum and Ireland unifies, then the UK is ceding territory anyway. So there's really a no-win scenario assuming that the UK leaves the EU customs union.
If the UK wanted to commit a further violation of the Good Friday Agreement and act to prevent an Irish reunification referendum, or ignore the results of one, the Troubles would very likely start all over again, and the UK would be in no position to negotiate any kind of cease-fire because they would have demonstrated twice over that they can't be trusted in such things.
"The alternative is a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which the UK specifically agreed not to do in the Good Friday Agreement."
I don't think that the Good Friday Agreement does say this, I would like a reference if you can provide one.
> The alternative isnfor the UK and ireland to simply refuse to enforcr a hard border
But that means Britain effectively has an open border with the EU (which Brexiters don't like, and probably some Remainers don't like in the context of Brexit though they are happy with it with UK a full member of the EU with a say in union policy), or has an internal border between NI and the rest of the UK (which pretty much no one in the UK likes.) The EU has a similar problem with Ireland where the UK has NI.
Which is why this issue is intractable; it internally has no good solution on either side, even before the difficulty of getting agreement between the sides. This is worse on the UK side, because of the interaction with the Good Friday Accords; it's not just abstract political displeasure, it's potentially undermining an internal peace agreement.
> But that means Britain effectively has an open border with the EU
The UK and Ireland do not want a hard border. That is a fact. They aren't going to enforce it.
It is irelevant to point out the consequences, because both sides have stated that they will never ever ever enforce a hard border.
The UK and Ireland would both be perfectly fine with not having a hard border. They have stated as such.
You can call it dumb or say that it undermines the purpose of brexit, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter. Both Ireland and the UK are willing to accept the consequences of not having a hard border no matter the consequences.
It's pretty relevant, because the UK government doesn't have Parliamentary support for either of the alternatives, given Brexit, to the the thing they say they won't do, and also seems (though surprises are possible) to be likely to prevent Brexit from being derailed even if they can't pass a Brexit deal. So it's quite likely that we’re heading to a Brexit with none of the choices regarding the Irish border being politically viable.
But there is a politically viable choice for the Irish border!
That political choice is "don't do anything about it, and leave it without a hard border". And this is the choice that both the UK and Ireland want to take.
There's lots of political precedent for having a status quo that no one explicitly supports, but no one explicitly supports any realistic alternative to.
For example, the US has, for years, refused to pass any kind of immigration reform, but until recently, also refused to comprehensively enforce the immigration laws already on the books because they were really awful and unfair in places. For another example, neither the People's Republic of China nor the Republic of China (effectively Taiwan) recognize each other, and yet Taiwanese businesses own tons of factories in mainland, PRC-controlled China.
This seems to be the "magic" solution for all the logical inconsistencies of the brexit position - ignore the problem and pretend it will magically solve itself. Know of any other land borders between different customs regimes which take this approach?
Do you object to the Good Friday Agreement? Because its fundamental principle is that the constitional status of Northern Ireland was a matter for the people of Northern Ireland alone.
If the vast majority of people in NI are happy to be part of the EU customs zone and allowing them their wish (in the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement) also allows brexiteers to turn the rest of the UK into a Singapore (Reece-Mogg) or a Venezuala (Corbyn) as they see fit without any encumberance from the EU, then what's the problem?
I just don't get it. A year ago, some of the leading voices of the Brexit movement were advocating special customs zones to be set up around the UK, once free for EU competition rules. There were news stories with brexiteers advocating a Tyneside Customs zone, for example. Why is it fine for Tyneside to be have a separate customs zone to the rest of the UK but not Northern Ireland?
> All it requires is that the UK accepts that EU customs checks are performed between Britain and Ireland ... I have no idea why the extreme brexiteers find this idea so objectionable?
Generally they don't. However the government is only in power with the support of the DUP[0] who see it as THE END OF THE WORLD, and it would be a complete anathema to Ulster loyalists[1], whose are (essentially) half of the Good Friday Agreement.
In short: if they accepted this, the British government would fall and armed conflict could well break out again in Northern Ireland.
Because the current government only have a majority due to a confidence and supply agreement with the DUP, who would break off that agreement if there was a border between Northern Ireland and RoUK as part of the deal.
Overall to Brexit supports in Britain it doesn’t really matter, it mainly matters politically for the current government. Without the DUP they would effectively be a minority government.
It's the opposite: of course they can leave, but they don't want to lose all the benefits they had before leaving. Unfortunately for them there's little benefit for the people they are leaving to really offer them anything.
At least in a divorce you tend to split things (I'll keep the bed and you can have the dresser). In this case it's someone walking out the door but saying "hey, could you let me still come by for dinner?"
If the UK signs the deal. Of course binding yourself by treaty to some future action does not negate your sovereignty. It's an expression of your sovereignty!
They are sovereign, as article 50 proves. Unfortunately, they want something from the EU. Actually a lot. And so they need to offer something in return.
That's the big joke of Brexit. Boris Johnson fantasizing about dozens of trade deals ready to be signed when the UK exits. How many are there now? Zero.
Because the UK isn't in a position as strong as Brexiteers fantasized. Ostensibly they are all for negotiating deals in the national interest, but when the other side has interests, too, that's somehow unfair and they should "go whistle".
Brexiteers are looking for handouts, not real negotiations.
> This is absurd. Given that you're a German you're obviously not following this very closely, so why on earth you're throwing uninformed comments around in public is inexplicable.
Could you please leave stuff like this out of comments? On Hacker News you just make your point without gratuitous antagonism.
Apparently the UK is able to leave at any time if only they're willing to accept unfavorable EU terms. If they want a better deal they need to negotiate.
It's a (slightly exaggerated) reference to the Irish backstop.
The UK, as a sovereign nation, is party to international agreements which it has signed in the past which commit it to doing various things, many of them intended to be permanent and many unrelated to the EU. One of those is with the Republic of Ireland, over peaceful relations in the UK territory of Northern Ireland. The Irish government and many Northern Irish people regard this agreement, broadly construed, as implying that no new barriers will be set up on the Irish border. Another international agreement, WTO rules, which the EU is signed up to (and the UK also intends to trade under) implies that if the UK and EU adopt different customs regimes they will also be required to actively monitor customs borders between the UK trading bloc and the EU trading bloc. The Irish government (and by an extension EU negotiators representing their interests) regards feasible customs border check regimes as violating the spirit of the Good Friday agreement over security barriers. Therefore unless and until some border solution in line with WTO regulations and acceptable to the Irish government or an adjudicating party is found (or the Republic of Ireland also chooses to leave the EU, which is highly unlikely) Northern Ireland must not become part of a different customs area from the Republic of Ireland and therefore must remain subject to some relevant EU laws.
Being a sovereign country means the possibility of reneging upon prior commitments, but it doesn't mean these agreements don't exist or that parties won't insist you honour [their interpretation of] them when offering new agreements
It a misrepresentation of what is referred to the "backstop" aspect of the Withdrawal Agreement (incorrectly called the "Brexit Deal" in the header above).
The "backstop" stipulates that any future trading relationship does not violate terms of the Irish peace agreement known as the Good Friday Agreement - specifically that there would be no physical checks at the border in Ireland.
Currently the border is virtually invisible because the UK and Ireland are EU members and in the same customs zone.
If, in the future, the UK decides it would prefer to leave the Customs Union (you can be in the customs union but not in the EU), then this would require a special arrangement for Ireland - probably requiring customs checking to be done between Northern Ireland and Britain instead of between north and south in Ireland.
For some people (and I don't know why - see my comment above), this is absolutely objectionable even though this arrangement would enjoy popular support in both parts of Ireland. If you're not prepared to accept this arrangement, then the UK would be stuck in the EU's customs union.
Of course if you want to leave the customs union (otherwise what's the point of brexit), then you have to accept the special arrangement for Northern Ireland or basically renege on the terms of Irish peace agreement.
Unionist hate it because it would set a precedent for one part of the UK to be treated differently to the other countries. If a hard border in the Irish Sea is ok for Northern Ireland, why not a border at Carlyle? Unionists stamp their feet and tout in indivisibleness of the UK, SNP/Plaid Cymru use the special treatment of NI to demonstrate how Westminster isn’t providing the best government for their countries.
The Unionists most relevant here are the Northern Irish ones, not the Scots or English. For most Brits, the idea of Northern Ireland having a special status is essentially baked into the idea of the integrity of UK anyway, and the government would have probably seen some quirky customs exceptions over there in a transition deal as an acceptable price to pay for having a Brexit agreement if they didn't depend on DUP votes to stay in power. But Irish unionists passionately hate the idea of an Irish Sea customs border for the same basic reason Irish republicans hate the idea of a customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland: it's a symbolic split from a nation they consider themselves to be part of and whose identity a lot of blood has been shed over in living memory.
Sure, customs checks at ferry and airports to the UK mainland would entail considerably fewer practical delays, smuggling opportunities and security issues than customs checks between a village and its nearest supermarket on the Irish border, but unionists can legitimately argue an Irish Sea border violates their understanding of the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement. Though it'd also be perfectly fair to ask their politicians who all backed Brexit what did you expect to happen?
They are of course able to do that, but that would go against the Good Friday Agreement which guarantees peace in Northern Ireland, and nobody has the balls to do that. Or else the Republic of Ireland would have to leave the EU common market for goods, which too is insane. So that realistically means that the UK cannot terminate the NI backstop solution on its own.
They are a sovereign country, but they are an island, not a ship, they cannot weigh anchor and set sails. They may wish for the US to be a closer partner than the EU but it will remain a long flight and 5 timezones away.
They can probably still leave as a sovereign entity, in the same way I can technically ignore my loans that I initially agreed to pay back. There will be consequences.
They can do it but it without any permission, but it would screw them. They want to undo 40+ years of integration in a few years because a small majority voted
The Good Friday Agreement, an international treaty between the UK & Ireland makes NI a slightly special place anyway. People born there can choose Irish or British citizenship. "Treating NI special" is part of the UK's treaty obligations.
> What is preventing the referendum from being declared stupid and that the UK gov't is not going to do it
Essentially, they want to honor the will of the people. The will of the people, by democratic vote, was to leave the EU.
With that in mind, they have no options that are in any way good:
1) Push ahead and exit with no-deal (economically disastrous)
2) Push ahead and exit with the proposed deal (economically bad while also not really exiting)
3) Declare it a bad idea and just don't do it (political suicide for everyone involved & creates distrust in democratic process)
4) Hold another referendum where it's going to have to be a decision between staying in or exiting with no deal (also political suicide & creates distrust).
There's no way for anyone to win here. I think the best option is for the PM to "take one for the team" (i.e. the country) and take option 3/4, knowing that it will be the end of her and her party.
> 4) Hold another referendum where it's going to have to be a decision between staying in or exiting with no deal (also political suicide & creates distrust).
I've never really understood this reasoning given how Leave as completely nebulous with no real details. Is it really such a betrayal to go back and say "alright here's what Leave actually means is this what you actually want vs Remain"? That's been my issue with the whole vote from the beginning, leave was so nebulous there was no actual consensus behind what it should have actually meant.
Granted it was kind of impossible to have the details before the actual vote because the actual deal had to be negotiated but I don't see how the situation hasn't changed enough for another referendum to be appropriate.
For US viewers, it's kind of like if the Republican party held a national referendum that said "repeal and replace Obamacare in two years", and the vote passed.
Then then they're on the hook to do the actual replacement part and realize that there never was a replacement but they have this hard deadline to get it done.
The fact that the vote was held at all is total madness. They were trying to call a bluff and it blew up in their face. The whole "post fact era" thing only works up until you the point where you need to actually implement policy.
Yeah, to me the initial referendum, because of the complete lack of information on what the actual deal would be, is about as useful as an opinion poll for actually informing the future of the UK re the EU.
There was a lot of information about what the deal would be. It would involve not sending millions of pounds to the EU, better healthcare, total control over immigration, etc...
Sure some of it was lies, but lies are a form of information. They had a bus and everything.
The anti-Brexit side was seemingly more vague, saying that it would be bad without really giving people anything to be excited about.
You misunderstand I'm talking about the actual policy remain is easy there's no negotiations to go through so the government's actions are known. Leave though involves 2 (or more if the UK pushes back the date somehow) of negotiation with the EU so it's impossible to know what was actually going to come out of it.
On top of that there's a whole spectrum of brexits people could have been voting for so even the government doesn't know what people actually want out of a leave vote!
To me it seems like that a revote would have to deal with the literal fear mongering the stay side has been pushing out. My personal favorite is the food shortages, while every other country outside of the EU manages to import food, apparently if you try to leave, you wont' be able to find the food you want on the shelves any more!
The EU would not blockade Britain, as many of these articles seem to imply (how else would you just run out of something simply because you have to import it from a 'foreign' country now?). Britain would have to pay any tariffs the EU imposes to others of course, but it would also be in their best interest to not set them so high that people in Britain stop buying their products at all. Any 'shortages' would be brought about by shear mismanagement.
The issue with the food is about the regulations on their import into the UK, having been in the EU for so long most of those rules are just the EU rules or really old out of date rules that were superseded by the EU food regulations. If there's a no deal Brexit all those EU rules go away and boom suddenly there's a big question about what food is legal to import.
I don't get how going back to the people is political suicide and creates distrust. I mean the first question was do you want to leave and the vote was yes. The second would be that now we know the facts were not entirely as advertised do you still want to go ahead? Not sure how that is betrayal, political suicide and the like - it seems fairly fair and sensible.
Think about practically any political issue, in the US or elsewhere. "Fair" and "sensible" are rarely anywhere near the primary considerations, are they?
I do think what you suggest would be fair and sensible. I do not believe the voters will see it so reasonably.
I'm from Ireland, where we had something similar happen. People still talk about how the govt will just hold multiple referendums till they get the answer they want on an issue. This is in reference to referendums that happened 10 and 20 years ago. It doesn't matter that these decisions have proven positive for the country - there's still resentment and bitterness, and this was an issue with far less emotional weight than brexit.
I remember these referendums and in at least one case there was no explanation of the the referendum was the first time around. We were just expected to rubber stamp it. Also on one or other of them concessions were gained on the second time round. So it wasn’t just like the ”keep voting til you get the right result” thing that you hear people spouting ... does anyone actually believe we’re that soft?
Well that's what I'm saying - this is what you hear people spouting, it doesn't matter that there were good reasons for everything, you just have the distrust of the democratic process left at the end of the day.
So, option 2 (May's deal) is off the table. It's not gonna happen. That was today's vote. Maybe if they stall for another couple months and vote on it again in February or early March it might force the issue, but I doubt it.
Option 4 (second referendum) isn't necessarily on the table, because the UK cannot hold a referendum in the time they have left until the Article 50 deadline in March. They would have to ask the EU for an extension, and there's no guarantee that they'll get one.
Option 3 (pass an Act of Parliament to revoke the Article 50 invocation) is possible, but just like May's deal, I don't think the current Parliament has the votes, and there isn't time for a general election before the deadline. It's also a relatively permanent option--the legal opinion seems to be that a country can revoke Article 50, but they can't just keep invoking and revoking Article 50 over and over again in bad faith, which would seem to preclude any sort of "let's revoke Article 50 and we can just re-invoke it later once we realize what we actually want out of this".
Option 1--No Deal Brexit--is just what is going to automatically happen absent some sort of uncertain intervention. You can't get a second referendum or even a new deal done in time for the Article 50 deadline, you can't revoke Article 50 unless you're actually committing to remaining in the EU, and the existing deal is dead in the water. And, in a certain sense, Option 1 is really just a manifestation of the idea that, in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.
That's not quite correct.
The EU has stated they would consider granting an extension "for the right reasons" (meaning of course, a second referendum).
They can invoke and revoke at will. The other side can just refuse to do any further negotiations because of bad faith, leaving staying in or hard exit as the only options.
It shouldn't be so hard to argue that steps of this magnitude should not be taken based on a single poll won with a 2% margin (which means that if only 1/100 of the voters had changed sides the result would have been opposite). It might take a bit of courage to declare it but it's a travesty that politicians are so afraid of their electorate as not daring to utter such an obvious truth.
'Leave' actually received 1,269,501 more votes than 'Remain', which is quite a huge number out of a UK population of about 66m. Pretty sure that means FOUR out of every hundred votes would've needed to swap sides to just get us to a 50/50 split. That's really not the close contest it's made out to be.
Sorry. I think we're both wrong. The referendum was won by leave with 51.9% of the votes. That means that if 2/100 had switched sides to remain (not 1/100 as I said before, but not 4/100 either) the result would have been in favour of remain (0.1% in favour). Agree?
Why would #3 and #4 be suicide? Maybe for PM May, but doubtful the Remain MPs and those who "found out how bad Leave was" would actually claim a political boost?
On the Conservative side - many of the remain MPs come from leave constituencies. Also, as a party, the Conservatives have a strong leave bias. If the leave does not happen, it is hard to see the Tories making it back to power for a considerable time.
The problem is, many people wanted Brexit for different reasons. It's easy to find a consensus to the question "should the UK leave the EU". "Brexit" is an abstract, but "single market" and "passports" and "trade deals" and "Ireland" and "Scotland" and "financial regulations" etc are all details that need to be sorted out, and many people feel very differently on them.
It's easy to find a consensus to the abstract question "should the UK leave the EU". It's much harder to find a consensus to the all of these questions when asked together. All the people who wanted Brexit are backing away from May's solution because she needs to answer all of those questions 100% correct for 51% of the population. Any disagreement and the deal is off.
> Where are the people who initially brought in Brexit
Former PM David Cameron put Leave/Remain to a vote, but publicly said he voted Remain. Resigned after the vote results. Theresa May took his place after some debate; she was vociferously pro-Brexit, and looked like the best option if Britain was to act tough when negotiating with the EU. A number of people dropped out of the succession race, gambling that the Brexit hassle wouldn't be worth it.
May survived a no-confidence vote in late 2018, but a number of members of her party have resigned because the deal on the table didn't sync with what's important to their constituents.
There are a number of factors, but May's insistence that net migration would fall to 5 figures was something people expected her to deliver. It's not going to happen.
Note that the number of Tory MPs which voted against her in the 2018 no confidence vote (which was an internal party thing) is almost exactly the same as the number of Tory MPs who voted against her deal. Even though she survived that no confidence vote it apparently presaged doom for this deal.
> Where are the people who initially brought in Brexit- why are they not supporting May?
Many had radically different aspirations for Brexit, no influence on the process and/or disliked May and her government on principle. Others were part of May's Cabinet, some even directly responsible for negotiations, but couldn't deliver anything which matched their initial promises, disliked the deal that was put on the table and decided eyecatching resignation was better than compromise. One or two, like Gove and Leadsom actually are still backing May, but fairly reluctantly. Everybody agrees the deal isn't fantastic, but few are prepared to admit their alternative aspirations were pure fantasy.
The flip side is that [nearly] all the Conservative MPs who voted down May's deal will vote confidence in her government very shortly because they value staying in power and loathe the opposition parties too. Which leads nicely on to the next point...
> What is preventing the referendum from being declared stupid and that the UK gov't is not going to do it?
The same forces that protect a President that has made Nixon's actions look like model of propriety and is quietly despised many of his own party's leading figures. A mixture of partisanship, terror of defying ones own voters and party members, fear of what political upheaval might happen next and doubts over whether they actually would manage to stop things if they tried.
> What's preventing the referendum from being declared stupid and that the UK gov't is not going to do it?
Nothing except politics. The referendum is advisory and not legally binding. The Leave campaign has been found guilty of criminal offences. But actually, the referendum result is the closest thing May has to a mandate, her party won a minority in the parliamentary elections.
Correct, in fact the only force that the referendum has at all is that David Cameron promised to enact the result. But even this is old news, a past Prime Minister can hardly bind the hands of a future one! In fact the idea that a government can't bind a future government is an important part of Britain's ("unwritten") constitution.
The subtly here is that usually a government commands an overall majority of Parliament, but weak/minority governments have to worry about government rebels.
That "woman of great importance in the UK government" is the Prime Minister. For the purpose of this discussion, and until she's voted out, she is the most important person in the United Kingdom.
10-4. Why is she being resoundedly disapproved upon by her own gov't? Presumably, the same gov't that put forth this vote? At least some significant margin of politicians must have wanted this vote knowing that 'yes' is on the table. Where are they?
Because she promised a submarine made of cheese, and delivered a submarine made of cheese, and the people who demanded a submarine made of cheese are mad that it doesn't taste good enough or dive deep enough.
There is no such thing as a favorable brexit deal. Britain is already in the most favorable position possible with regards to EU relations: they have all of the benefits of EU membership, but with a special deal that means they're exempted from some of the membership dues, and they can have their own immigration policy and their own money. Britain has a more beneficial position in the EU than any other country in the world, in or out.
There is absolutely no way that the EU is going to let them leave and keep most of the benefits of membership. The hardliners want to get everything and give nothing, and surprise surprise, the EU wasn't going to let them have everything in exchange for nothing, so the hardliners hate it, and everybody else hates it because it was a stupid idea in the first place.
The problem is that the politics are not partisan and instead divide the main parties.
It would be similar to half the republicans and half the democrats agreeing on a key policy & fundamentally disagreeing with the other half of their respective parties.
(it's actually even worse than that because there are at least 3 main positions [hard exit, soft exit, no exit] which divide the two main parties, meaning nothing really has a clear majority).
The way the UK government works is: from the majority party a government of ministers is formed from their group of MPs. By convention individual MPs in this government (called front-benchers) have a cohesive support for the overall government policy (if they disagree with the policy or vote against it then by convention they have to resign). Anyone from the ruling party NOT on the front-bench can (and often will) vote against the government.
Brexit has been insanely divisive. Internally, the ruling Convservative party have at least 4 different positions, including the official government one. Many front-benchers have resigned.
Fundamentally the problem is this; people voted for Brexit. But only just. So really nearly half the population doesn't want it. It was simple to answer a simple yes/no question. But exiting is a hugely complex question whereby it is nearly impossible to negotiate a compromise that works for everyone.
Also a rather large portion of the population didn't take the vote seriously. When it came out that it was a complete clusterfuck, those voters who either voted just to stick it to the man or didn't bother to vote are now rightly panicking that this train wreck that we can't look away from is like the asteroid that hit the Yucatan peninsula and killed off the dinosaurs and there's fuck all we can do about it.
> Why is she being resoundedly disapproved upon by her own gov't?
Because "Prime Minister" is not the head of state, so there's little respect for the position. Her position is equivalent to Speaker of The House in the US, only in a system where The House is also the Executive.
Actually, I believe the armed forces of the UK actually take an oath of allegiance to the ruling monarch rather than to the state/government - I did think this didn't mean very much but I have raised the point with a serving army officer and he was rather insistent that they take it seriously:
Dan Carlin has a series on his podcast discussing the background of the war in Asia in 1937-1945 (https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-supern...). One of his major points about the Japanese government at the time was that the military held allegiance to the emperor, who couldn't or didn't actually do anything, rather than the civilian government. As a result, the military could do essentially anything it wanted.
My local MP was kind enough to organise a visit of parliament. He mentioned an amusing annecdote. The tradition still is that when the Queen visits parliament, a senior MP is held hostage in Buckingham. He was chosen on one occurence and was waiting in a drawing room of the palace, in the company of a General. To make the conversation, he asked the general "what if something were to happen to her Majesty?". The general smiled and replied "don't worry, it will be very quick".
The Queen has immense theoretical powers, but it would trigger a major constitutional crisis if she were to exercise any of them without being asked by the PM.
At this point I'm not sure if UK can do much to avoid a major constitutional crisis one way or another. The deal would be seen as betrayal of Brexit by most its supporters, and remaining even more so. Hard exit would make a mess in Northern Ireland, for starters, and then you have Scotland, and not to forget that Remainers actually make the majority of the population in UK as a whole at this point.
The fun one is the right to shut down the entire house of commons, including the prime minister. That leaves her running the whole show pretty much, though oddly without the right to raise funds via taxes.
"A Man Called Intrepid" points out that this was a big deal in World War II. If England had fallen to the Nazis, the loyalty would have remained with the king, not with whatever puppet the Nazis had put in place.
May is prime minister. Practically this role is similar to president and majority leader combined. Essentially she is finally responsible for everything.
Unfortunately for her there are essentially three groups. (1) Brexit on WTO terms, (2) cancel Brexit and remain, and (3) those that largely support her deal. These groups are more certain what they don't want than what they do want. This means that 2/3 of the MPs oppose this deal. But 2/3 will oppose any option.
For many Pro-Brexit people they felt May's deal didn't really leave the EU. A very major sticking point is that provisions in the exit agreement, refereed to as the "backstop", that in theory and possibly in practice could legally trap the UK in a half completed transition deal forever with the UK always subject to EU rules. Overall the agreement May put forward is basically an agreement to start the next phase of negotiations to start discussions on a transition agreement which would maybe hopefully be finished by the year 2020 or 2021 or a day after never. Also paying 39 billion pounds and not knowing what the next phase of negotiations would deliver.
For Remainers(Anti-Brexit) the agreement was to start the process to leave the EU so of course those people didn't like the agreement either.
There can even be no extension of Article 50 for more than a few weeks, because we're electing the European Parliament in May. If the UK is still in the EU by then they need to elect MEPs, as well.
But their seats have already been agreed to be distributed to smaller countries who were underrepresented so far.
It would be a complete clusterfuck, including doubts whether any legislative action would survive court, if the UK isn't properly represented (either because they don't care anymore and don't hold elections, or they simply cannot organize elections on such short notice).
It's not people voting against May, it's just that nothing _could_ command a majority at this point other than a fanciful option that takes the best of EU (no economic shock) but strips out unchecked migration and European courts.
Our gradient descent has ended in a local minimum, and noone can agree enough to climb the hill.
Immigration is a very powerful topic (fear and loathing?) in the mind of voters and much of the 'debate' is not based on reason on either side. It's probably worth noting since the referendum was announced it's unclear whether one person in a country of 60 million has changed their mind on what they preconceptually had locked in at the start.
0. Former Prime Minister gambles on a referendum in order to crush rebellion in his own party and secure his leadership. He makes a pact of support and in return gives a referendum on Europe satisfying a small niche of party extremists.
Crucially the referendum isn’t binding which is where the problem occurs. The vote didn’t go the way people thought it would go. Maybe because of the fall out of banking crisis and rising inequality, maybe because the leave campaigns broke the law, maybe because of Russian involvement. So now you have a representative democracy that is broadly pro EU vs a popular vote which has voted “out” whatever that means. The referendum is non binding so should be advisory only to the elected officials.
Now the government is in a pickle. Because even though the vote was just advisory if they’re seen to ignore this, people will start wondering if their vote matters at all. It could be a path to chaos. This is complicated further by the split of the age of people voting leave. They tended to be older and these voters traditionally vote conservative (aka republican in US terms). So they’d be disenfranchising their base.
The government doesn’t even have a majority and is propped up by another tiny party of 10 members called the DUP. This is a little complicated but the outcome is a really weak government because it doesn’t have the numbers to push through legislation it would like.
On top of that the euro-sceptic extremists are bolstered by vote and lobbying hard for out by any means necessary. They’re effectively driving policy by threatening to terminate her fragile leadership.
All this would have been a doddle if a decent opposition was sat opposite in the commons. However in a perfect storm the opposition is absent. This is even more complicated to understand but the summary is that the hard left socialists have more in common with the hard right anti-EU lot than either of them would like to admit. It’s weird.
Mays deal satisfied no-one and it’s taken 2 years to get this far.
One interesting side effect is that more people now know what being in the EU means than ever before. It was virtually never discussed before.
May hasn't been held responsible for this, yet. She's survived an internal party vote of no confidence, and she is clearly confident that her government will survive tomorrow's parliamentary vote of no confidence.
Right now the PM (and the EU) gets to go back to the drawing board. And Parliament gets to try to force various things, such as a second referendum, or a delay to brexit (which the EU would have to acquiesce to). May can resist Parliament for a while, if she wants.
Obviously I won't try to predict the outcome of anything. I'm not in that business.
Many brexiteers would be happy with no-deal brexit. The EU will almost certainly negotiate something, if not now, then later. Of course they'll say that they won't renegotiate _now_.
You know how Trump promised to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it? Most people, regardless of political persuasion, knew a wall would be built, but that the USA would pay for it.
May promised a divorce which would be a "good deal brexit," or one that includes trade deals which benefited the UK, but without any of the "undesirable" EU requirements. Most people, regardless of political persuasion, divorce could happen, but knew that the Britain wasn't going to get a "good deal" brexit.
1. I don't think it had much to do with nationalist sentiment. EU historically had a bad press in the UK, and the greek debacle didn't help. At the same time immigration has been an increasing concern (not just in the UK, everywhere in Europe, and in the US too). The UK has seen a massive inflow (>1 million in 4 years) of eastern european nationals immigrating, which I think is the primary reason why leave won (rightly or wrongly). But none of this is UK specific. The EU is bracing itself for a rise of populist, eu-skeptic parties in the coming elections.
2. I am not sure how you can claim the majority of the populace is against leaving the EU. A national vote demonstrated the opposite. And it's not clear that another vote now wouldn't yield the same result (the recent polls are roughly where they were a few months before the first vote).
3. May is the prime minister. The head of state (the queen) being essentially an honorific title, she is in charge (she has control of the red button!). But parliament has more power in the UK than in the US and she answers to parliament.
4. The terms of trading between the EU and the UK, as agreed with the EU, requires the UK to abide to EU laws without having any say on them. Brexiters are against as they don't accept this loss of sovereignty (they typically would like a free trade deal with the EU but without loss of sovereignty). Remainers are against as they don't really want to leave the EU in the first place, and are trying to force a way out of Brexit.
I don't think you can call the result of referendum "stupid" and ignore it. That would seem very anti-democratic to me. I don't know how the whole thing will play out. Right now it seems that the potential outcomes are:
a. Brexit being postponed from March to June (unlikely to be later as this is when the new EU parliament starts after the spring elections, and unlikely to help in any way other than kicking the can down the road).
b. May being defeated at the vote on Wednesday, new general elections, whoever wins will have to deal with the same problem and likely with the same outcome (the EU is unlikely to concede much).
c. A new referendum (but May repeatedly ruled it out, and again nothing says it will yield another result)
d. The EU making significant enough concessions in the short term that could help PM agreeing to the deal. Germany hinted they would be open, while France ruled it out today.
e. Leaving the EU without a deal, resulting in short term trade disruptions and an adverse economic impact on the medium term.
f. Parliament cancelling Brexit. Many MPs would probably prefer that option, but this is ignoring the result of a referendum, which is a really worrying outcome for a democracy and would likely boost a populist vote down the line.
There aren't any obvious good solution, everything comes at a cost. Which is why the public opinion is terribly divided.
> 2. I am not sure how you can claim the majority of the populace is against leaving the EU. A national vote demonstrated the opposite. And it's not clear that another vote now wouldn't yield the same result
I'm not generally happy with the idea of assuming those people who didn't vote on the day would have voted in one direction or another; but given that EU citizens who've lived in the UK for many years were excluded from voting we can assume that a lot of those would have voted to remain had they been given the choice.
Unfortunately if we did have another vote the only outcome which would be decisive would be another leave result.
The leave campaign didn't define a vision of brexit beyond vacuous slogans. It left the door open to any dream of what brexit could mean. This is irrefutable in spite of their protests to the contrary.
In short, May has never taken a WTO ("no deal") exit seriously. Since she won't walk away she's had no leverage, so the EU predictably gave her the worst "deal" imaginable, to the extent that polls show Leave voters would prefer staying in the EU and Remain voters would prefer leaving with no deal. It's seriously awful.
> Where are the people who initially brought in Brexit- why are they not supporting May?
If you're talking about the various Leave-supporting ex-ministers like Boris Johnson and David Davis, they quit when it became clear that they were only there as window-dressing for consumption by domestic Leave voters, and had no influence at all in negotiations or planning. When May came up with her "Chequers" plan, she showed it to Angela Merkel before her own Cabinet; this in a political system that supposedly follows a principle of collective responsibility.
> What is preventing the referendum from being declared stupid and that the UK gov't is not going to do it?
As an American, what prevented the election of Trump being declared stupid and that the US gov't was not going to accept him? Because I suspect it's pretty much the same answer: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." You can't hold a referendum for tactical reasons and then welsh when it doesn't go your way without thoroughly destroying faith in the legitimacy of your political system.
> 2. This is controversial, due to the majority of the populace in general not desiring to leave the EU, but not voting as such individually.
Also an American, but from the outside I don't see how a majority desire can be so accurately determined beyond a vote.
> Some portions of the UK [...] are strongly aganst this voting result.
This I definitely see from the loudest. So strongly that the vote has been tarnished every which way (which, let's be honest, you can do with any vote you want due to all the malfeasance you can find by campaigners). It's becoming a pattern. The votes that the loudest in democracy don't like or can't understand are being challenged on several grounds, most boiling down to assuming ignorance and gullibility of the other side. Accepting results is becoming harder and harder for some to the point where the larger-yet-silent groups feel no recourse but to use the polls and the louder feel no recourse but to invalidate votes and/or prevent them from happening and/or try again.
On point 2, there's quite a complex answer. Firstly, the vote was basically "Leave or Remain". Remain meant stay in the EU on the current known terms. Leave meant... well: You could leave the EU but remain a part of the single market for trade (this was promised during the referendum), you could leave but have a custom arrangement with the EU like Switzerland which means you retain EU law but have no vote (this was also promised during the referendum), or you could leave all the EU institutions and then re-enter a random assortment of them like Euratom (this was also promised during the referendum) or you could leave the EU entirely and just start negotiating some free trade agreements like the EU's relationship with Canada (this was also promised in the referendum).
The key is that because the 'Leave' campaign weren't in government and weren't one single organised group and didn't actually hold power they could promise literally anything safe in the knowledge that they'd never have to actually deliver it. In fact after 'Leave' won the referendum the Prime Minister resigned and none of the key Leave campaigners actually mounted a serious campaign to replace him- someone who campaigned for remain was put in charge almost unchallenged.
So through all this murkiness you end up with one key fact: 48% of the country wanted to remain, 52% wanted some form of leaving but each of those options I listed above probably garner no more than 20% of the vote by themselves. So we're 52:48 in favour of leaving, and 80:20 against any specific way of leaving.
Mathemarically, a slim victory with a large percent of the population abstaining does not indicate “majority desire”.
Democrasy doesn’t measure majority desire, it measures electioneering. Majority desire is definitely an aspect of elections, but it’s not the thing that gets measured.
There are better ways to accurately measure majority desire, and they are not one person/one vote systems.
What the system purports to give us is not accuracy, but fairness. It’s acknowledged that no matter what system you put in place, its ideals will be perverted. The best we hope for is that multiple parties all have access to those same perversions. So the difference between the U.S. and Russia is that both Bush and Gore had a right to sue the state of Florida. Of course the outcome doesn’t represent the will of the people in any meaningful way, but we take comfort in knowing that both candidates had the same games open to them.
In Russia, Putin is playing a wholly different legal game than everyone else. That’s anti-liberal, and anti-democratic.
Much hand wringing is happening in the U.S. today because the American President is mostly above the legal system, as its executor, with only the Senate holding him in check. And it’s not clear our current Senate is committed to the rule of law. We will see when Mueller’s report comes out. And perhaps some governors can also hold him to account.
Again, none of this bears any direct relation to the “will of the people” except that there is a method to the madness and any citizen can volunteer for any aspect of the game.
>Also an American, but from the outside I don't see how a majority desire can be so objectively determined beyond a vote.
My personal opinion is "majority" wins isn't necessarily a proper majority. Given how our Congress votes party line on most things, and the ratio is more or less 50:50 Dm to Rep, a 66% majority seems minimal for passing any law unblemished with party bias.
With 72% of registered UK voter turnout, Brexit won with only 52%. That's not a mandate for anything except perhaps another vote after clarifying what it would actually mean and how it would actually happen.
In the United States we require super majorities to amend the Constitution. 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of the state legislatures.
Something as important as Brexit should require more than 50.1% to pass. But it was actually non-binding anyway so the government could just ignore it.
The referendum was enacted as part of an elected party's manifesto that promised to implement the result.
After the election, parties voted to enact Article 50.
After enacting Article 50, the parties that campaigned in the following general election on a promise to implement the decision to leave were overwhelmingly successful.
Ignoring the referendum would have been a poor decision.
If that applied, then major changes to the structure of the European Union such as Maastricht or the Lisbon treaty should also have required the >50% vote.
One of the effects of Brexit that is overlooked by people outside of the UK is the effect that it will have on the Union itself. In 2014 during the Scottish independence referendum those favouring remaining in the UK prevailed by about 11%. One of the strongest arguments made by those who favoured remaining was that an independent Scotland would not accede to the EU automatically, according to the EU itself, but would have to apply as a new member (in part the fear was that other regions of Europe such as Catalonia would follow Scotland's example). Now in 2019 the Scots who favoured remaining in the UK so as to maintain EU membership are being told they'll have a hard exit. If there's a replay of the 2014 referendum in the future there's no assurance that Scots will choose to remain, with Brexit increasing the possibility of a disintegration of the Union with only England, Wales and Northern Ireland remaining. Over the horizon it's even possible that Northern Ireland (given the appropriate demographic changes) will peel off and join up with the Irish Republic.
Northern Ireland definitely prefers very much to remain in the EU, whether they want to join the Irish Republic is a separate issue, but it's easy to see them splitting away within the next decade or so. "The United Kingdom of England and Wales" has quite the ring to it doesn't it?
Yes, the union of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom: England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The union between England and Wales dates back to 1536, Scotland became part of the Union in 1707 (Scotland, England and Wales comprising Great Britain), and Northern Ireland (1922). There was a union with all 32 counties of Ireland in 1801.
I voted remain but I spend a lot of time with group of people who voted leave. Some of them have realised the leave campaigners basically had no evidence to back up their claims and so feel lied to but, sadly, the others are just angry - and I mean really angry.
They want out at all costs because the “EU is telling us what to do”. Revoking article 50 would be a bad idea for civil stability but going through with it seems to me, to be economic suicide (ask any small business owner or retailer how it’s going at the moment and they’d say the process has already started). A bad deal (like this) really did seem the best of an awful situation to me - it reflected the vote, 48/52. Half the country (probably more since a million or so people have now become old enough to vote who couldnt before) didn’t want to do this so perhaps it should be an awkward compromise that gives both sides a bit of what they want.
> Revoking article 50 would be a bad idea for civil stability
What are they going to do? Lets be honest, the UK are the most impassioned people of all. They will not do anything. They aren't French, they aren't Spanish. Maybe they will have an extra cup of tea.
Especially when you consider it's the old that voted for Brexit. This stuff about riots is overplayed, if it was going to happen it would have started already.
If the pro brexit rallies are anything to go by the number of people who truly feel passionately for it are not bothered enough to take to the streets.
What proportion of 16 year olds are paying tax? My guess is <1%.
How many 16 year olds work enough to make above the minimum exemption? (£11,580) My guess is very few. Minimum wage for 16-18 year olds is £4.20/hr, but they'd need to make above £5.56 (11580/40/52) to have to pay income tax as they cannot work more than 40h a week.
I also assume the vast majority have no/negligible assets to earn income off.
So the only tax they would be paying is VAT, which everyone, including tourists, pay and shouldn't confer the right to representation.
Just as children are expected to pay maintenance for their parents when they are as adults in care homes, its reasonable to expect parents to pay maintenance for their children when they are getting educated. Its unrelated to being a adult. Besides that, you are right.
> Out of curiosity, how has "EU is telling us what to do" affected these people to make them so angry?
The one area that EU is failing behind is convincing it's own citizens that EU is well functioning democracy working for their common interest.
There are many reasons for this. EU institutions are transparent but due to complexity they are seen as opposite by many ordinary citizens. European Parliament elections attract usually significantly lower interest then national or local elections. Some EU institutional mechanisms have so many checks and balances that they seem to be completely beyond control of ordinary voters.
So it is easy to perceive EU as large Brussels-based, tax-distributing and self-serving bureaucracy conspiring to take away our freedoms and tax money. And many politicians capitalize on that.
Edit: Personally I am also not a fan of politicians like Jean-Claude Juncker or Donald Tusk. But I still prefer them over likes of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Comrade Eleven.
I wish I knew, I have asked and the best I can sumise is that their lives haven’t gone they way they hoped, the UK government has historically blamed stuff on the EU (a bit like someone blaming stuff on their manager to a customer) so they correlate the two “my life is not what I hoped because of the EU”, sprinkle on some patriotism (well I’m “British”) and the fear that 52/48 isn’t strong enough to see their “win” over the line and you get angry people. I could be way off but this is the best conclusion I have come to.
The general sense is that elected officials can be quite good at blaming others for their own failures (this tendency is by no means limited to British government). The EU is the convenient scapegoat in European politics, even if Britain has wide latitude to opt out of swathes of EU politics or even drive the EU itself as one of the largest members.
The other point you make is quite true: even Brexiteers didn't think they would win the referendum. And the problem is that, in unexpectedly winning, they wanted to lock their success in quickly, before anyone could discover the problems in their arguments. And when they themselves found the problems, well, see the point I made: it's not the Brexiteers' fault that they couldn't come up with a deal that the EU would like, it's the EU's fault that Britain is in this mess.
This is a complicated topic, but a short and overly basic version:
There are many people in the UK - as in the US, as in most of the West, actually - for whom neoliberalism has not been kind.
They see immigrants getting jobs and struggle to make ends meet and have been told via various right wing media outlets (in the UK, principally the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Sun, Telegraph and Times newspapers), that there are two causes: uncontrolled freedom of movement in Europe and the political classes that are taking their marching orders from an unelected European Commission.
This view misses out important details. Firstly, it's not accurate in the slightest. It also doesn't reflect the fact the sort of people who are the root cause are the rich globalists who don't pay tax, such as people who own the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Sun, Telegraph and Times newspapers, for example.
However, the view has been built up over entire lifetimes. There are sprinklings of truth about sovereignty (akin to the fact that States have limited powers in the US), inefficiencies in how the European Union does its business (c.f. the Strasbourg/Brussels move and split), and so on.
However the UK gets far more economic benefit than it spends, and the poorest of communities like South Wales have had far more spent on it in targeted social programmes by the EU than has ever been spent by Westminster.
Let me give you a direct example: Lincolnshire is a farming community that had seen declining populations for decades. A large number of farming labour jobs have been filled by people from Europe - particularly Eastern Europe - because they are prepared to do work locals are not, at a price that locals will not consider.
Lincolnshire is a hard Leave area. Boston is IIRC the highest Leave vote in the country. When you ask there people why, one of their favourite anecdotes is the strain the Europeans put on local services.
They sit in an A&E unit waiting hours to be seen, and are surrounded by Eastern Europeans. They think "all these people here are the reason my waiting time is so long, they're using services I pay for! If we got rid of them, I'd have been seen by now!"
The context they are missing is that multiple A&E units in that county were slated for closure. The reason they remain open is because of high demand - from Eastern Europeans.
If we block freedom of movement, they would not be seen quicker. The unit would not exist. It would be closed. But that's not how they see it.
The real culprit as to why waiting times are so high is not because of the Eastern Europeans waiting with them, but because the government has cut funding, because tax receipts are lower than they could be, because certain rich businessmen have lobbied for tax breaks and then told the editors of the papers they own to blame the foreigners...
So there is a huge amount of anger built out of lies and misdirection that will take generations to undo. And they are so convinced of these lies, they are prepared to cause chaos. One of them before the last referendum murdered an MP (a woman called Jo Cox), and that will be but the first of many.
For anyone outside the UK, it's worth taking a look at the European Commission's Euromyths page. Since 1992, the Commission has been producing regular bulletins to correct erroneous stories about the EU in the British press. The absurdity and quantity of these stories is quite staggering.
> However the UK gets far more economic benefit than it spends, and the poorest of communities like South Wales have had far more spent on it in targeted social programmes by the EU than has ever been spent by Westminster.
The UK contributes more to the EU budget than it receives back. Ceteris paribus, the UK could fund all the same programmes, and have huge buckets of cash left over.
> A large number of farming labour jobs have been filled by people from Europe - particularly Eastern Europe - because they are prepared to do work locals are not, at a price that locals will not consider.
If locals don't want to do the work for the going rate, and there aren't foreign nationals willing to undercut them, the going rate will rise.
"The UK contributes more to the EU budget than it receives back. Ceteris paribus, the UK could fund all the same programmes, and have huge buckets of cash left over."
Yeah. Right. Problem: They are going to lose the 1 trillion euro claring. Tax income from that was likely already higher than the UKs EU budget contributions.
> because they are prepared to do work locals are not, at a price that locals will not consider.
Fortunately, those locals are able to purchase their produce at a lower price, with the benefits they claim which is being paid for by the migrant's taxes.
Thanks for the summary. The root cause of the problem is not so far from what is happening in the US. Many in the hinterland have tried to attribute their misfortune to various forces like immigration or other countries(China, Canada, Mexico).
Truth is that it's an unforseen confluence of factors. In the US the reasons for current upheaval against neoliberalism include(but not restricted to):
1. The nature of the electoral college and legislatures causes equal weight to all areas irrespective of population and wealth.
2. Patchy labor mobility due to affordability and labor evolution[2]
3. Rise of more efficient manufacturing outside the US(sometimes helped with stolen technology).[0]
4. Trying to solve difficult problems with simple ideas[1]
I always wondered if the right path in the future was to create legislation that has a built in "retrospect" clause and "behavior" component in it.
The deal was the worst of all worlds and deliberately designed to fail. The whole project since the referendum has been to work towards the palatable introduction of a second referendum whilst spending the intervening time demonstrating the impossibility of a good deal and the awfulness of no deal.
We will now proceed to run down the clock towards the no deal 'cliff edge' and as the precipice looms go to the EU asking for an extension. The EU will say you can only have an extension for a second referendum, which we will hold and remain will win.
Absolutely this. The day brexit was being voted, I said I would eat my socks if brexit goes thru. The voters did vote for "leave" and my colleagues were wondering if I would really eat my socks. However, I told them this would never get passed thru the parliament. They will dilly dally, drag it along and dump it in the end saying it's too complicated.
To solve any equation, just follow the money. Big business stand to lose a lot of money; therefore brexit won't happen.
Big money is already losing some money, AFAIK. I'm in Amsterdam and there's news every other week of a big company or organization moving to Amsterdam _already_, just in case brexit goes through.
I read your post as quite confident, but a lot of people were equally confident that the original referendum would be a strong Remain victory. What are you basing these predictions on?
1) It was quite an embarrassment for all those young people who did not vote and will suffer now
2) the actual results of a Brexit are known now while the bus-advertisement that was supposed to be the benefits of a Brexit are gone and have not been replaced by anything
Also all those news about businesses reorienting towards Europe and away from UK, Ireland, people applying for EU countries citizenship and so on.
The real results became real while the people who are still for a Brexit have shown their ugly faces.
I'm pretty optimistic about the results of a second referendum. That's why the Brexiteers will never allow it.
There is of course no rule in the EU obliging countries to accept non-EU immigrants. It's the "allow Poles into your country" that some Brits are unwilling to accept.
That's not what people were told though. This is an incredible wedge issue and the fact that people seem to be surprised about it suggests that they aren't paying attention. It's no coincidence that the stories about "economic refugees" were all over the place before the referendum. I mean obviously people were leaving Syria because they just wanted to take your job, there's no other reason.
None of those articles constitutes evidence, they are just opinions of people wanting to push that line. In reality people voted brexit for very many reasons, seeking to dismiss it all as racism is just a lazy way to feel superior.
Mrs May who is mostly responsible for the deal is not a fan of a second referendum. She also wasn't a fan of parliament being involved and would have just forced the deal through if she could have. If you prioritise controlling immigration which has been May's thing for a while, and keep the Good Friday Agreement then May's deal is what you get.
I guess one thing that many people are missing is why the "leave" vote won in the first place.
If Europe is so great why did some people had the desire to leave it?
Surely they were not all brainwashed or lobotomized?
The EU is now trying to make the UK pay an extraordinary price in order to warn the other countries that leaving the EU is not a choice to be taken lightly.
This kind of technique is known as bullying and that's as simple as it gets.
If the EU leaders were smart they would have used this opportunity to try to reform the EU and make it into what they promised their citizens.
There was a time when politicians said that the EU was going to bring prosperity, safety and so on and so forth?
Where are all those promises now?
The EU has had low economic growth for the last 15 years, high unemployment, flooded by migrants, non-stop terrorist attack, an ever smaller middle class, and ever-increasing taxes that are used to pay the salaries of technocrats like Juncker who was one of the guys who organized fiscal evasion on a scale never imagined.
Who is this guy by the way? He is not even fucking elected yet somehow he represents Europe?
Europe is not the democratic utopia that was sold to the people.
It certainly has not delivered on its promises and now it faces a backlash from its citizens.
I hope Brexit happens because if it succeeds it will show that another way is possible.
> The EU is now trying to make the UK pay an extraordinary price in order to warn the other countries that leaving the EU is not a choice to be taken lightly.
No, the EU is showing the UK that it can't cherry pick all the advantages without shouldering any of the responsibilities.
> It certainly has not delivered on its promises and now it faces a backlash from its citizens.
It absolutely delivered on a great amount of promises and did an excellent job of unifying the bargaining power of its individual states on a world scale. Not saying that there aren't any issues, but we'd be so much worse off without the union. Using some parts that didn't work out well as a reason to shun the EU is like shooting yourself in the foot because your toe hurts.
thats quite a stance. Like it or not, there is a huge influx of migrants into the EU. Acknowledging this does not make one a xenophobe and labelling someone with that opinion causes all sorts of divisions and further issues. In fact, your rhetoric is actually one of the main drivers spurring vote leave. People with valid opinions being labelled as racist only further entrenches their beliefs that they are not being listened to
So, what’s your objection to migrants then? Is it the fallacy that they take jobs by having a strong work ethic, or is it the fallacy that they sponge off the state because they’re lazy? Or is it just because they’re different?
Change comes from within, not from arrogant temper tantrums. EU is not going to be able to convince a country that leaves on a whim. For God's sake what is EU is the second most Google thing in the UK right now behind what's Brexit. It wasn't a very informed deliberate decision.
- A motion of no confidence has been tabled and will be debated and voted on tomorrow
- If the motion carries (i.e. the Government loses):
1. Theresa May must resign as Prime Minister
2. There can be a 14 day window in which a new government is formed, which must be approved by a motion of confidence. This is likely to be waived
3. There will be a general election. Theresa May will remain leader of the Tories. The Tories will lose
4. Corbyn will then seek a deal that retains customs union. This is likely to take time, so he will likely seek a delay from Parliament on Article 50 for such a deal to be agreed
5. We leave with a customs union probably in Autumn of 2019
- Most Tories know this, so will support the PM in a vote of no confidence, and the Government may win it. In that scenario:
1. Theresa May stays Prime Minister
2. She will go back to the EU and demand a new deal, likely with a hard time limit on the NI backstop, the main issue that caused tonight's defeat
3. At the same time, she will ask "senior Parliamentarians" what they would need if that were not possible
4. The only thing that will carry a vote in Parliament right now other than a customs union deal (which she has personally refused to engage with), is a second referendum
5. If the backstop isn't removed, it's therefore quite likely Article 50 is rescinded and a new referendum happens this Summer. It's likely such a referendum will have two questions: Do you wish to leave or remain?; and, in the event of a vote towards leave, would you accept the backstop or would you prefer "No Deal".
6. This will either result in a Remain vote and possibly a civil war (no, seriously), or a Leave vote that risks breaking up the UK with the NI needing to align with the Republic and, so, a civil war but contained to NI, or a Leave deal with support for "No Deal" and a default position of WTO rules
All outcomes have downsides. There is no winning here, and there is no situation in which we get to revoke Article 50 and the UK remains in the EU and all is well. It will leave 17m people in an absolute rage, and they have already murdered one MP. It'll get worse.
17m people might be in a rage, but the other 16m are equally in a rage, but I've not seen any civil war here yet. With respect, I think you are grossly over-reacting by mentioning civil war.
If it goes to a second referendum and remain win, then that is the "will of the people", not politicians/Westminster elite/EU telling people how to live their lives, it's the fellow man and woman on the street making the decisions just like it was the first time.
Resorting to violence is extremely unlikely. There are always nutbags around but I can't see this turning into anything more.
...and if it did I would remind those considering violence that the vast majority of the remain vote were young and healthy adults, while the leave vote was predominantly from those aged over 54 (1). Every year more and more leavers die, yet the remain ranks just get stronger and stronger as more kids turn 16. No amount of rose-tinted blitz spirit is going to help with those gammy-knees, dicky-tickers, and bad-backs if it comes to the rough stuff.
You ignore that individual humans will change their political opinion as they age: Every year more and more remainers become leavers. This isn't the sort of thing where you can just wait for the leavers to die and then you win.
Someday, you too will be old. Guess how you will vote. :-) Some young person, much like yourself today, will be thinking that your death would make the voting turn out better and will be eagerly awaiting it. Eventually, they too will be old... and so it continues on forever.
Not ageism - the facts are older people were more likely to have voted for Brexit.
As for how effective a 18 year old Vs a 65 year old would be (all other things being equal) in a fight I guess could be considered ageist, and for that I apologise.
> It will leave 17m people in an absolute rage, and they have already murdered one MP. It'll get worse.
So, the decision making is kept as hostage by 17m angry people who won't accept that their side winning was based on pretty much fraudulent arguments? Maybe, just maybe, it could be in the long run worth paying the price of their anger and show that the modern democratic society has some backbone against these kind of people?
I can see that. However, it's just not how we try and do things in the UK - major policy changes have been caused by rioting through history, and governments do what they can to minimise it.
Remember, we don't have a codified constitution. A system such as our requires trying to find middle ground consensus above all else.
The people who want to Leave are way, way, way angrier than those who want to Remain. It's easier to just let them discover the lie in their deathbeds in 20 years...
The EU has to agree to an Article 50 extension--the UK can't extend it unilaterally. And there isn't really even time for a general election and a new government by the Article 50 deadline anyway, let alone time to negotiate a new deal. Article 50 can be revoked, but it can't be revoked in bad faith just to unilaterally give yourself an extension before re-invoking it again. And why would the EU grant an extension when Parliament has already turned down the best deal they're going to get?
It's entirely outside of the UK's hands right now. The best option will have to be to let the no deal Brexit happen, allow a binding Irish unification referendum within the next five years, and let the British people learn from their own mistakes.
> There is no winning here, and there is no situation in which we get to revoke Article 50 and the UK remains in the EU and all is well.
The ECJ has said that the UK can just revoke article 50 and stay in the EU[1]. I understand how this might be political suicide for some in the UK, but there is the option of takesies backsies (although that would happen to e.g. the EMA is unclear).
So one option is to hold another referendum, and see if the "stay" votes carry it this time around. If they do they revoke article 50, if not it's back to square #1.
The ECJ is so hated by Leavers that taking their advice could see Parliament being burned to the ground.
It being legally possible is not the same as it being even remotely possible at this stage.
What needs to happen is the Leavers need to realise that No Deal isn't acceptable (they don't), and that more time is needed for a better deal or that it gets democratic backing.
Unfortunately, Parliament has already kind of voted no deal into law, and seem to have forgotten that, a fact the "European Research Group" - a bunch of Leavers in Parliament chaired by Jacob Rees-Mogg - is keen to remind them of that. Constantly.
> It's likely such a referendum will have two questions: Do you wish to leave or remain?; and, in the event of a vote towards leave, would you accept the backstop or would you prefer "No Deal"
That's interesting, as it also could have had one question, with three possible answers: What option do you prefer: Leave, No Deal Brexit, May's Deal Brexit?
I can very well imagine the presentation of these questions influencing the outcome (with Remain being more likely in my formulation), and I wonder how such things get considered when designing a referendum.
At that point you're basically discussion voting systems. Using first-past-the-post with three options, two of them being breixt, would heavily rig the vote towards remain.
Improving voting systems would be great (especially looking at the US, if you ever want more than two real parties), but doing it on the back of such an important decision would be problematic at best.
Plenty of good news! SNP voted together with hard brexiteer tories! Britain mostly united on a decision! Sure, it's doesn't lead to a clear next step, but that's perhaps what's most exciting - most remainers voted against the deal because this is the best chance we have for this whole farce to not happen!
"The people have voted to shoot themselves in the foot. Parliament rejects proposal to shoot themselves in the right foot, but proposal to shoot themselves in the left foot also seems destined for failure."
This is pretty much how the whole thing sounds to this American.
I clicked through to a NYT article that lays out the various things that could happen next in a decision tree. But every leaf node is unpopular, undersireable and still leaves a bunch of questions unanswered.
Article 50 exists. The UK can leave on WTO terms and the EU cannot stop it. The EU has some incentives (money) to give the UK some other deal than WTO terms, and it has some incentives (avoiding a rush to the exits) to give the UK nothing more than WTO terms. As it happens the UK is wealthier than other EU countries that might head for the exits if they thought they could get as good a deal as the UK, but no one thinks that Poland can get the same terms as the UK, so fear of a rush to exit is not a reason to give the UK nothing. It's not at all clear that May tried to get a better deal than the one she presented to Parliament -- the brexiteers in her previous cabinet were sidelined and ignored, and no attempt was made to make clear that the EU would not yield (if that was the problem).
Anybody that has made even the slightest attempt to follow events knows that May tried alternative attempts to get a deal (including a framework signed off by all the Brexiters in her Cabinet) and the EU repeatedly rejected them.
Anybody that has a solid grasp of the facts knows that the issue is not that the EU "offered the UK nothing" but that the Irish government will veto any agreement which implies the creation of a customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and May's critics are equally adamant that the UK, including NI, must have a different customs regime from the ROI. It's not an issue of give and take, it's a matter of mutually incompatible red lines.
If May wasn't in a coalition with the DUP then N Ireland could have remained in customs union with the EU as it is now and the mainland could have gone Canada+. Not really happening at the moment though.
Agree that the issue would have had a lot less salience if the government and media were largely free to ignore the DUP and Northern Ireland in general, though I imagine those ERG Brexiters who seem to want to find any excuse not to have a deal could have still made it a sticking point. And tbf, the unionists probably have as legitimate a point that a separate customs regime violates their idea of the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement as the republicans, though a customs border at [air]ports is obviously less disruptive than one between socially and economically integrated regions on the Irish mainland.
I had a look at wikipedia on the Good Friday Agreement and it doesn't seem to say much about trade and customs. Already NI has some different laws to the mainland (gay marriage) and some trade restrictions (cattle). If brexit just "violates their idea of the spirit of"... then I think we can maybe live with that.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the Irish border if the no-deal exit takes place. Will the EU demand a customs border, but Ireland resist it?
"WTO terms" aren't what you think they are. They aren't a fully-developed agreement between nations to trade.
They are basicslly just a framework. You still need to negotiate with each other.
For example, the other country will want papers with your goods. Which forms needs to be filled out? With which information? The WTO doesn't regulate that. You still need to agree on all the technicalities.
You only get some limit on tariffs for free, basically.
The WTO doesn't just limit tariffs, they also restrict what kinds of non-tariff barriers to trade are possible. In very broad terms, countries may still set their own standards for goods sold there (unlike in the EU), but they must enforce those standards fairly and equally against both local and foreign goods. There's some exemptions for stuff like sanitary and phytosanitary restrictions on animal, plant and food imports, and these will almost certainly cause major problems if Brexit happens, but the WTO certainly isn't just about tariffs.
This is one of the big problems I have with the reporting on Brexit, actually. The press not only left widespread misunderstandings like this about the WTO unchallenged, when a politician did finally push back against this all the publications that'd remained silent insisted he was the one pushing dangerous misinformation because people might misunderstand and think the WTO solved everything.
Honestly, I don't think "useless and incompetence" is a relevant criticism of those who were put in charge of the negotiations. Even a team 100 times more competent than May's would still run into the same hard issues.
But the current main issue isn't even strictly about money, but the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
It is not only an economic question, on which a compromise could probably be found, but one with hundreds of years of political, religious and cultural baggage.
The way May approached negotiations with the EU was from a position of weakness and was doomed to fail. I wonder how much of her approach was a result of political constraints or how much of it was a result of incompetence or deliberate sabotage by her or the bureaucracy.
1) She should have made deals or conditional deals with other trading partners before submitting Article 50. This way she would have had a good BATNA option in the case negotiation with the EU failed. The EU may have been more reasonable if they realised the UK had less to lose from a failed negotiation. Of course there were problems with this approach. Firstly, it might not have been politically possible for her to delay submitting Article 50. Secondly, if you are in the EU you are not meant to negotiate trade deals with other countries. However, there is no reason for the EU to find out and I guess more importantly the EU has no real way to credibly punish the UK for that action if the UK alternative was just to submit Article 50 straight away.
2) She should have tried to get assurances from other countries in the Council to negotiate good trading terms before submitting Article 50. Yes. This is not how the EU works and the Commission is probably more likely to act in a way that hurts EU citizens but benefits the EU as an institution and unfortunately they are the ones in control of the text of such agreements. But if there was strong pressure from the Council then the Commission would look bad if they scuttled a free trade deal that looked to benefit all parties.
Free trade is meant to be good for both parties [There seems to be strong consensus from economists on this point!]. So assuming both parties are acting in good faith with their citizens welfare as a priority then surely the outcome of negotiations should be a good trade deal.
It has been suggested that the conference speech where May (chasing a soundbite) said that the UK would not agree to a deal that involved the UK being subject to the ECJ
a) was never shared with her cabinet
b) May didn't realise at the time that this meant, by extension, leaving the Single Market and customs union.
In another era it would be hard to imagine policy being formed by pure accident...but I am beginning to believe that this may be true
It feels like the country is roughly divided into 3 equal bits:
* Leave EU quickly, at any cost
* Don’t really mind either way, as long as economy is stable
* Stay in EU
The one in the middle doesn’t trust either of the others. So nobody can get a majority, whether we have another referendum or a general election. So this shitstorm will just go on and on.
Of course, the only way to get the "economy is stable" result in the short term is to stay in the EU, or to make a deal that's effectively "stay in the EU, but also lose all political power in the EU".
The shitty deal is pragmatic for the EU, as it makes it obvious to all the countries involved that they can't get the benefits of the EU without being part of (and paying money into the governance of) the EU.
Clearly it wasn't that smart as it raises the chance of no deal, which would hurt the EU more than the UK. Barnier was certainly looking a bit frazzled today! Theresa May's mistake was to think she could negotiate with the EU in a civilised manner, when the only thing it understands is brutality.
To be honest this is just a repeat of two years ago, apart from now it's May not getting her way instead of Cameron. The whole thing is such a colossal failure that they need to just to give up and stop acting like this is the 'will of the people' - as if people don't change their mind when presented with the facts or something.
There's elsewhere in the thread where people discuss knowing Leave voters and just how strongly they feel about it. Some comments are even talking about civil war on the mainland if we back out of it.
I feel the British media have gone back to hiding significant swathes of the UK from being shown on screen or print/online, so us more liberal types are deluding ourselves that there's some sort of consensus about a 2nd referendum.
I still remember sitting there the day after the referendum and thinking "these people on TV are like they're from my home town. I've never seen people like this on TV before".
It’s almost comical (if it wasn’t so pathetically sad) how divided and polarised the country is.
My mother and her entire extended friend circles are aggressively pro-leave, even tofting sound-bites at me.
A little further south/east (mum lives in Coventry) in Kettering my friend is pro-leave, but not aggressively so, his soon-to-be wife is remain, but they tout their points and agree to disagree. Further south in London people are so pro-remain it’s unfathomable that anyone would leave, if you want to leave then you’re probably very stupid.
I’m pro-remain (although I started as pro-leave before I tried to look into arguments to support me and found - very clearly - that I was wrong) but the country is so passionately divided that I can’t help but think that there really is going to be some kind of rioting in the near future.
Not living in the UK, but I would guess that as stupid as Remainers might think Brexit is and Brexiters are, it‘s a whole other ballgame to assume that because they are stupid you are entitled to nullify a vote.
And because of that, even though a lot in the EU are rooting for it, I doubt a second referendum is going to take place.
Even die-hard remainers would ask themselves: Is being part of the EU, is being ecomically better off (or at least more stable in the near-term) worth to taint our democracy (or as you point out even go to riots and worse)?
But the second vote isn't about nullifying the first.
We accept the first vote: people want brexit. They don't know what deal the UK might get, and they think we can continue with no free movement, with full trade, and without being bound by EU law.
Now we know what brexit looks like it's perfectly fine to say "we're going to have to keep free movement, we won't have full trade, and we're going to have to maintain these EU laws if we want any trade at all: do you still want brexit?"
The irony that you're replying to my original premise that "these people are deliberately ignored to make it seem like they don't exist" is not lost on me.
Do you really think that 52% of the UK is just alleged to exist?
>stop acting like this is the 'will of the people'
Well, unlike how people like to complain about US politics where it's a representative democracy... Brexit was a real democracy, and you can remind me if you like how that vote worked out...
Sorry, but you don't get to wave away "will of the people" as nonsense when the majority did vote for it and majority system is what they used.
It's only your prerogative that now straight Democracy is bad because you don't agree with the result.
Given our current, "engagement maximizing" news media/social media architecture it doesn't matter who stands up and speaks the truth and how well they do it and how many clicks they get. They will fail.
In the arms race for the public's attention that has been setup, by this clicks/views/likes/retweets/upvote based architecture, the incentive for thousand other voices to drown out the truth, to pander, to distract, to mislead has never been higher. And its not hard work. It attracts and props up the most hard working yet unqualified people on the planet.
Until the architecture changes and incentives for these people change, just expect more and more Brexit and Trump like events wasting everyone's time and energy.
However, there might be a British politician brave enough to say "This is a bad idea, let's not do it", who, on the basis of saying that, might some time later become PM. They won't become PM this year, though.
It seems like things almost have to hit rock bottom before the locals realize that this deal is not going to be having cake and eating it too.
Hopefully after it finally hits that point the EU is smart enough to throw them a bone or two on a "deal" that makes it look like they got something form the EU... but still way short of total chaos.
At this point a no deal Brexit looks substantially different from the possible-Brexit that was voted upon. Shouldn't there be a new referendum of basically a new question of a no deal Brexit vs Remain? I know very little of British politics, is there some other dynamic at work that pushes to what seems like a strongly economically destructive no deal Brexit?
I can never understand why no-deal v remain appears to be a reasonable position. A normal response to a closely contested referendum carried out the way this one was would be to find some consensus within parliament for how brexit could be delivered, _then_ enact article 50 to withdraw.
The current prime minister not only kept all opposition parties away from deliberations on how to proceed, but kept her own ministers in the dark while formulating her own policy, which she pursued largely in secret.
So why should the electorate be cheated in this manner? Even now, forms of brexit based on remaining in the EEA have a great chance of having parliamentary support.
"Our UK friends need to say what they want, instead of asking us to say what we want, and so we would like within a few weeks our UK friends to set out their expectations for us, because this debate is sometimes nebulous and imprecise and I would like clarifications," - 14 December
If the UK will offer something new, such as staying in the single market, then the EU is willing to reopen negotiations, extend article 50 etc. If the UK just says "this isn't good, we want something better" - then the EU won't renegotiate.
She voted Remain, and decided that implementing Leave was the only way to be Prime Minister and it was worth it. Also, she has such a thin majority, the Brexiters will topple her unless she toes to their line (restricting immigration, avoiding ECJ etc).
> There is a parliamentary majority, and a majority within her own party, for an EEA-style solution.
But is there unanimous support among the remaining EU members? Because, I mean, every single UK politician (or citizen) could agree on an EEA-style solution, and it still wouldn't be a real option without that required support in the EU.
The problem is the possible need for an extension, and it is late. I believe that this would be given the time it needs. Nobody wants a crisis and even now, the UK is not an international pariah.
All it would take would be someone in government to suggest it, the position would have cross-party support. DUP would be irrelevant in this situation. Having said that, DUP are actually agnostic to the form of exit the UK takes. Their red line is that they will not be treated differently to the rest of the UK. People often forget that.
I actually think this is the most likely outcome right now.
Remember that EEA now requires a hasty renegotiation of the deal, including continuing ECJ jurisdiction and free movement. Someone has to tell the kippers that the Poles will stay.
True. The situation is very shit. ECJ jurisdiction is - strictly speaking (and I know I am fudging a little here) - over. EFTA-style court is what would rule instead, and that would cover a much smaller set of legislation than we currently enjoy from the EU.
As for kippers, there were 17 million votes for leave and a surprisingly large number don't have immigration as their major concern.
Also, if we take Switzerland as an example, free movement doesn't seem to have precisely the same implications for an EEA member outside the union, but there is a tradeoff as to the access you get if you try to restrict movement. This was something the Swiss experimented with a few years back. Not altogether happily, I seem to recall, but I am hazy.
> This was something the Swiss experimented with a few years back. Not altogether happily, I seem to recall, but I am hazy.
The people voted (constitutional amendment) to limit free movement. The EU said "hmm, no", so they basically fudged it.
There's a summary (in French) at https://www.eda.admin.ch/missions/mission-eu-brussels/fr/hom... which basically says the Swiss parliament passed a law that respected the requirements of that constitutional amendment while still meeting Switzerland's free-movement treaty obligations.
Hmm, that is a huge fudge; it's not been implemented at all as written, but there's some changes to make sure that Swiss jobseekers get first pick of the available jobs.
At least the Swiss are clear on what they're trying to achieve.
Cheating - no. May is simply the wrong politician to have put in charge at this time. She is secretive and seems not to understand the people making up her own party, let alone parliament.
Time is short, but if there were some move toward EEA-based , I bet means would be made for an extension. These deadlines are essentially artificial, after all, and it is not only the UK that will be badly damaged if a deal is not reached.
Perhaps now there will be a reckoning with the blatant illegality (in addition to the ordinary level of rampant political dishonesty) of the Leave campaign. A pragmatic recognition that the UK cannot haul anchor and sail off to some other latitude would not hurt either.
May now has to chat with the opposition, understand what it’d take to vote yes , take that to Europe, bring back a compromise ... vote again, get that accepted.
People’s vote is starting to look like the more likely outcome... had she lost by say 50 or 100 votes ... ok but 432 vs 202 ?! 230 votes to claw back somehow .
I wonder what it's like being her sometimes, where you have, and will continue to fail at everything you do for years on end, in the most public and embarrassing way possible. I can't quite figure out if she is driven by just really wanting brexit, or it's just a power grab.
I don't understand her endgame either. Or how she can handle the stress. Her predecessor basically ordered the biggest bowl of shit [1] in the recent history and then bailed out. Now May's job is to eat it all. Masochistic.
The EU already said there will be no renegotiation. That's why May put the current draft up for a vote in the first place, even tho she knew it would likely fail.
Don't fully understand UK government structure but is it possible for the labor party to take over leadership and revoke article 50 before the deadline?
It's possible Labor will take over if May loses her confidence vote. But Corbyn's current position has been that he'd pursue Brexit with unicorn promises, rather than cancel the whole thing like his constituents want him to do. So it's doubtful that Labor would revoke article 50.
Just spitballing here... Methinks May will win her confidence vote tomorrow. From there, the consensus seems to be to steer towards a peoples' vote -- aka a new referendum -- in spite of May being hostile to that idea. But don't rule out some back and forth with the EU. May has a long way to go to win a rerun of this vote, but if her premiership is anything to go by she's resilient, and the GBP lost around 10% against the USD and EUR within minutes of the Commons vote. (Edit: the GDP seems to have bounced back since.)
As an aside, I'm no fan of May, and the referendum campaign was full of lies and manipulation, but methinks May actually has merit in raising that a peoples' vote would not be good for the legitimacy of and trust in politicians and institutions. After all, what's the point of organizing a referendum and then electing representatives that don't deliver. And what's the point of organizing referendums if the powers that be will continue to ask the question again and again until constituents give the expected answer?
In the old days (pre 2011) the government would fall, and we'd be on the way to an election if Labour couldn't organise a minority government (and I seem to remember that was made subtly more difficult in the Act). See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18914244
(That thread should probably be merged with this one)
Governments are now 5 years, and surprisingly difficult to interrupt early thanks to the LibDem's Act during the coalition. Essentially the sitting party needs to commit suicide.
The Tory manifesto promised to abolish the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. Funny they don't seem to see that as a priority at the moment! :D
There's a confidence motion tomorrow evening at 7PM GMT. My understanding is, if the government loses a general election is triggered which takes a couple of months. So a new government could be in place before March 29th. However, I think if a general election was to happen then all sides would agree to ask for an extension to Article 50 and allow a few extra months for the new government to decide what to do. Another caveat to that: one manifest pledge in the election may be a 2nd referendum. If that party won then the 2nd ref would become the focus.
The betting odds show an 83% likelihood that the U.K. remains somehow after 3/29. There is a 40% chance of another general election this year (15% in 2020 and just 13% in 2021).
I’d say odds are the confidence vote fails tomorrow and a general election is called, with a motion to extend article 50 until the election is held giving the people a chance to speak, albeit not via a referendum.
Another referendum is not going to happen. Labour wants tories to hang themselves through the utter failure of Brexit. A referendum risks another Brexit approval or worse and gives the tories political cover for the whole mess.
The opposition is allowed to ask for up to 14 days to form a government. In this case, that's highly unlikely as it would require a broad referendum...
The existing government would have to lose the confidence of a majority of the members of the House of Commons. Then there could be an election, and if Labour won that election, they could then take over. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motions_of_no_confidence_in_th...)
So it's conceivable, but not without Labour managing to jump through a fair number of constitutional hoops first.
Problem is: many labour MPs are from hard-brexit districts. Same thing for conservative MPs.
In fact, the problem is that the electoral map of the UK is more hard-brexit than the popular vote, while the MPs from hard-brexit districts are mostly remainers. Remainer MPs from hard-brexit districts have contradictory and irreconcilable motivations: they want the UK to remain in the EU, but they want to remain MPs. If at the end of the day the UK does not exit the EU, those MPs will lose their seats -- that's a lose-lose for them. If the UK manages to exit the EU, those MPs have a fighting chance to be reelected.
So right now Parliament wants to rescind the Article 50 invocation, but can't bring itself to say so. The best they can do without massive upheaval in the next general election is to either order a second referendum, or request a delay in exiting. And those two options only if a) the Speaker allows them (he has been allowing remainer motions that the parliamentarian has ruled out of order, so the Speaker might indeed continue to do so), b) the PM accedes or c) Parliament impeaches her. (c) hasn't happened in centuries, and (b) might not happen (but I wouldn't hazard a prediction). A successful vote of no confidence would not work: first there would have to be a new general election and a new government, which might not yield a remain result (the electoral map is hard for brexit).
Hope that makes the situation clearer, but! I am not a subject of the crown, so take this with a lot of salt.
note that you say a potential election might not yield a remain result - in fact I would suggest that it will certainly not. Even if every remain voting constituency somehow formed a government (impossible with even just SNP and Labour tensions), it would not be close to enough seats to form a government.
And the district boundaries got redrawn, and the new districts are a bit more favorable to the tories, so I think the chances of a Labour win in the next GE are only good if the tories commit electoral suicide (which, of course, they might), even assuming SNP aligns with labour (which, as you say, is not a given).
The Labour party (at least it's leadership if not its MPs) are as pro-Brexit as the current government so even if we had another general election and Labour won (which seems unlikely) nothing would fundamentally change.
Isn't the labor party also against revoking article 50? Corbyn at least? I thought it was only the liberal party that has been consistent in arguing for revoking it.
Corbyn is anti-EU, Labour is pro-EU, Corbyn is on record as saying it's a party matter and he will back the consensus.
Which is why we have the hilarity of a pro-remain PM in charge of us leaving and a pro-leave opposition leader in charge of trying to get us to remain.
Like the conservatives, they are divided between remainers and brexiters. Which is why it is a political mess. Now the conservative party being in power, these divisions are showing wide open. But you have a similar division within Labour.
The best thing for Britain would be to just give up, accept that there will be no deal, and spend the remaining time making as many preparations as possible, and piecemeal deals on smaller subjects.
There's not much time left. Brexit happens March 29th. The EU countries are hiring more customs inspectors. Shippers are planning new shipping routes to avoid transit through the UK.
The UK's financial services sector takes a huge hit. UK financial services have already moved US$1 trillion in assets out of the UK, and that's picking up as the deadline approaches.
The City of London will be much less important soon.
The city is actually unlikely to be affected significantly. Large banks already have subsidiaries in the EU or are in the process of setting them up. They will move a limited number of people (as few as they can get away with). A lot of the 1 trillion number will be back-to-back to the UK.
The impact on trading goods I think will also be limited. Past the initial logistical disruption, EU tariffs aren't massive outside of a few products, and this is nothing that cannot be offset with a weaker pound.
I think where a hard Brexit will hurt the most is small service companies, which aren't large enough to have operations within the EU, and which won't be able to cover the EU from the UK.
The New York Times also had an article yesterday [1] looking at some of the regular pro-Brexit people who just plain do not believe any warnings about no-deal. One quote though really jumped out at me since it was related to one of the earliest projects I ever did, working on a small bit of the Y2K problem, and I think it really serves as an example of a fundamental difficulty when dealing with public facing threats:
>Mr. Ridley compared the anticipation mounting before the Brexit deadline to the run-up to forestall the Millennium Bug, also known as Y2K, in which companies worldwide scrambled to avert technical breakdowns when digital systems switched from 1999 to 2000.
>“It’ll be like Y2K,” he said. “Remember that one? They were like panic, panic, panic, the world’s going to end, the electric grid’s going to go down,” Mr. Ridley said. “None of it is going to happen.”
I knew that this was the impression left with the general public after that, but it's really unfortunate because in my recollection Y2K is quite possibly one of the most unified, successful responses to a serious tech problem our industry has ever managed to pull off. Yeah, it didn't amount to much... after hundreds of thousands to millions of man YEARS of work. I know people who had gone full time digging through ancient code bases back by 1998 or so, wouldn't be surprised if some had started in 97. Initial issues began bubbling up well before 00 after all, stuff like credit card expiration dates that were a few years in the future. Enormous amounts of resources were sunk into working on it, sometimes for clean fixes and sometimes for hacks [2], and overall it worked. But of course then we ended up with "well what was the point of all the hype or effort, everything was fine!" and the public taking literally the opposite lesson.
I can't remember if there is a technical term for this class of problem (beyond "life in ops"), where it's like air, the general "success" state is "nobody even thinks about it most of the time" but the failure state is catastrophic. It's an issue with security too of course. Ops and security are non-revenue generating, but their absence can certainly be revenue destroying. It's hard to get budget support there.
It seems like a really hard problem, particularly when future testing isn't available and results are irreversible.
2: Old systems are still in service that are still using 2-digit dates, but just were patches so that 00 to 30 were assumed to be 2000s while >30 were 1900s, so there is actually still lurking remnants of Y2K that will come up again if not dealt with by 2030 or so. And of course there is the 32-bit unix time issue for 2038, examples of which have also cropped up a few times already too.
The more proximal cause of "not believing warnings about no-deal" is that there were very similar warnings for the Brexit vote itself, and approximately none of them came true.
Personally, I just can't see any big issues. Obviously UK's not going to ban the workers it needs or the imports it needs. Obviously other countries will still want to sell to a rich country like the UK. Sure, there might be a year or two of worse economic prospects as businesses and laws adjust, but really it's the long-term prospects that matter; and maybe it's better that UK unshackles itself to the EU which doesn't seem capable of thinking long-term and solving it's most pressing problems (democracy deficit, current account imbalances, immigration)...
I’ve heard a lot of people make the point that it’d be political suicide if the government declares brexit a bad idea and then backtracks, ignoring the referendum and thus remain in the EU after all, that it’d feed into the hand of the nationalists – but I’ve got hard time understanding why? Doesn’t this assume that people are just dumb? That hey believe the government has been sitting on their hands in trying to get a deal done, and not really, I mean really tried?
Isn’t there an argument to be made that they did try, and here are the results, and because of that they’ve concluded that it’s a bad idea? Is it really so hard to believe that a majority of the UK voters wouldn’t accept this, when it was such a contested referendum result in the first place?
Especially so when the referendum question was only discussing leaving the EU, rather than promising any particular outcomes?
I’m having a hard time believing that a majority of people in the UK are so entrenched that they can’t possibly change their minds given the light of new facts, hat everyone will turn to nationalistic agendas, and that the referendum result of two and a half years ago is still a valid gauge of popular sentiment.
The electoral map of the UK is more hard-brexit than the popular vote. There are many seats where brexit won 60+% or even 70+%. That means that there are a lot of MPs who, though they may wish to Remain, also wish to remain as _MPs_, and that means they cannot be overtly Remain.
Is more or was more? The referendum was two and a half years ago and people now have more information at hand, which is my point – why is reneging on brexit automatically political suicide? Because it's not what the people want? Maybe it is today, given what we now know? Would love to see some data sources, if you have any links?
Except for a few, most Remainer tories in brexit districts aren't coming out in favor of a second referendum or abandoning brexit without even a second vote. That tells you what you need to know about what they think of popular opinion in their districts. Same for Remainer labour MPs in brexit districts.
The problem with referendums is you can't have just one.
The losers will always want another referendum, and they will always be able to point out problems with the previous one and/or argue that significant things have changed since it was held. The results of the previous referendum will never seem legitimate unless it was passed by an overwhelming majority of voters.
Just don't have referendums. They open a wound that will never heal.
The "best" solution to this problem is to cancel Brexit. Even that solution would cause a massive political blowback and only deepen the current divides that exist today.
The "fantasy" solution is that the government can somehow negotiate a better deal for Brexit. But this is pure fantasy. For starters, there is severe disagreement as to what kind of deal ought to be pursued among the people who dislike May's deal. Most of the Brexiteers want a "hard" Brexit, which means in practice that they want all the goodies of being in the EU without any pain whatsoever (this is kind of like expecting the Pope to appoint a Muslim imam to the College of Cardinals). This also runs into the problem that it is very risky to reopen strife in Northern Ireland, which was cooled in large part by the effective removal of a border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
The "crazy" solution is to bail out with no deal. Very few people actually want this--taken literally, it means things like "you can't fly between UK and Europe;" the hope is that by playing brinksmanship, none of the horribles actually happen.
So yes, it is a slow motion train wreck. There's no easy way out.
There's a serious chance that life will not go on for some in Northern Ireland. People might die there as a direct result of this. Jo Cox already died in England. This is not scaremongering.
> Most brexiters I know admit that a hard brexit would be bad economically.
They are doing it now, because they can't contradict obvious truth. Before they were hyping how good it would be, to brainwash the masses, knowing full well it won't be good.
Yes, but there was no chance of article 50 being revoked while May's deal was still on the table. Now it's a choice between revoking it and a hard Brexit. Which is the only way we'd ever get to a state where it might be revoked.
EU courts have, IIRC, ruled that Britain can unilaterally revoke article 50, so now it's all up to elected MPs to figure out a way forward. So the fate of the UK rests on the good judgment and sensibility of Jeremy Corbyn.
I'm just hoping Jeremy Corbyn is playing the long game of claiming to be one way but then acting another to fake out the prime minister. Same as he did with stating that he was not going to be appearing on the televised debates like may, until changing his mind at the last second, showing up anyway and showing her up.
What I don't understand (and I am very ignorant!) is why the initial vote can't just be looked at as a stage in the decision process. Time has gone on, and the public has become more educated as to what the true effects of Brexit will be. Even leaving aside the question of how dishonest the pro-Brexit arguments were. It just seems reasonable to have another vote.
It seems absolutely unreasonable to me. It's hard to measure how certain tactics influenced the vote on either side. The voting process needs to be done with confidence and we should not so easily assume our peers are misinformed and/or so easily swayed. The efforts put forth by legitimate actors to campaign for their cause goes for not, as does confidence in the democratic process, when the outcome is just thrown away.
The voting process does need to be done with confidence.
In the first vote Leave were referred to the police for illegality, and they still haven't provided a full account of their funding - at least some of which seems very likely to have come from foreign sources.
This is explicitly and very clearly not legal, because foreign money has no business trying to influence the vote in a sovereign British matter.
So a People's Vote would be the first honest vote.
And then, if this second voting yields a different result, shouldn't they hold a third referendum afterwards? And maybe a few more, as you can always say the last one was not the genuine one.
You speak as if the two questions being voted on are identical. They're not.
The first question was, should we Remain exactly as we are, or should we Leave in some totally unspecified fashion? The second question will be, should we Remain exactly as we are, or should we Leave in a no-deal hard exit, since that's the only possibility still on the table? It's no longer an abstract Leave, to which everyone can ascribe all their dreams and wishes; it's now a very specific Leave, with all the faults thereof. That may change the voting somewhat.
And, down the road, if there's another concrete Leave on the table, should the people have another referendum? Sure, why not? There probably won't be a need to vote on the negotiated Leave, though - losing by 230 votes in Parliament is probably enough. And there won't be any need to vote on a hard Brexit a second time, either - if it's voted on in a referendum, it will lose 65-35 or 70-30. (Or so I suspect, but what do I know? I'm not in the UK.)
If you can think of a good reason to do so, maybe. Two and a half years passing, having far more information about the process, and questions about the legality of the leave campaigns seem like perfectly legitimate reasons to hold a second vote before committing to such sweeping, largely-irreversible, constitutional change.
It's not best of 2 - it's a new vote. It supersedes the old one, and when you lose, you don't lose _permanently_ - in any functioning democracy, there's _always_ another vote.
> If there's always another vote, no vote needs to be implemented. What's the point of voting then?
Most democracies have regular periods where you vote. Are you suggesting that since there will be a new US Presidential election in 2020 that Trump is now no longer legitimate? How would that circumstance be any different that a referdendum?
Voting isn't wrong.
What is the implication of you trying to tie the institution of democracy to childhood antics? Are you suggesting that a vote is no different that chance? That the opinion's of people that change are no longer legitimate?
It's double jeopardy, there is a case for a fresh vote because new facts (May's deal/No Deal) are present. If there are new facts after this vote (for example a new A50 or similar) then there is the case for another one.
I think the issue is that once you have had a referendum with outright dishonest arguments and likely manipulated by foreign states and one side wins by a couple of perentage points, the outcome is ironclad will of the people and even if these dishonest arguments turn out to be to many people's surprise wrong, it will not change what is the will of the people. Vice versa, any notion of asking people what they like about the actual outcome is considered pretty much hostile against democracy. Or something like that. I really can't claim to understand the argument properly.
It was a non-binding referendum - they could have “carefully examined” the result for a week and then tossed it in the trash, politely declining the “advice” of the populace.
Assuming that a narrow result on a yes/no vote on a general concept means that the “will of your constituents” falls on one side of a complex policy issue irrespective of details of the concrete policies embedded in the available concrete realization of the broad concept that were not known at the time of the vote is quite ludicrous, even without the side that ultimately won using specific concrete descriptions as a sales pitch that conflict with that reality.
That's especially true when equally non-binding but current polling of your constituents on the same question shows that the opposite side quite likely leads now that the concrete options are known.
It's a well-established British Constitutional principal that a Parliament cannot bind a future Parliament. Why would one view the public will ant differently, even if it were fully informed?
Having a "do over" referendum and finding opinions have changed is entirely different than what the OP suggested which was ignoring the results of the referendum entirely.
> Democracy means accepting that the voting public has no idea what makes good policy, but that they should determine policy anyway.
Representative democracy means that they determine policy by choosing representatives. It's disingenuous for those representatives to turn around and blame their own policy choices on an explicitly non-binding referendum that they sent to the public. (Especially so for a leader of the party who choose to do that specifically as a means of minimizing the impact of the issue so referred on a general election so as to preserve their partisan majority.
Absolutely, I didn't mean to imply it's not possible, it just hurts your public image. They're looking for a solution that also lets them keep their jobs.
So presumbly if you keep trying to pass another referundum people will vote against it just out of spite. There is already pressure to not repeatedly do that, so its not a concern to argue slippery slope.
The British Parliament can do basically whatever it wants. The concepts of separation of powers and Constitutionally-mandated red tape are much less developed than in the United States.
So the answer to why anything happened in the UK, including holding a referendum, is basically just: because Parliament decided to.
Well, Congress doesn't choose to have them (separation of powers helps here; the Brexit referendum was very much about electoral strategy in a system where voting for a district legislator is also voting for a particular executive administration.)
> Certain states do, but not the country.
What many US states regularly have is binding referenda with Constitutional force and process; while these may sometimes be of legislative origin, they could do Brexit-style referenda (because of their general powers) but, again, separation of powers kind of eliminates the political use of them, or at least that of Brexit specifically, and a non-binding referenda on a non-profit proposal isn't something that makes a lot of sense outside of very particular political circumstances.
Depends on the country. In Slovenia you have to collect 40k supporter signatures or have ~1/3 of the parliament support it. And a referendum can only cancel already passed laws, it cannot pass a new law.
The one they had in UK was a non-binding one, which can usually only be brought to a vote by the parliament.
It can but no politician wants the right wing press to go all "WILL OF THE PEOPLE" on them.
It was a non-binding referendum, a glorified opinion poll and that was before we found out about the lying, the financial irregularities and external interference.
Shrugs, I'm resigned to whatever happens happening at this point.
A motion to suspend A50 will be tabled in the next week or so.
Yvette Cooper (Lab) asked the Speaker about it - most likely as a way of tipping off the public - and the Speaker said that if a motion is tabled, he will allow a vote on it.
It's now very unlikely that the UK will be leaving the EU. Only a tiny minority of zealots in Parliament want No Deal. The most likely alternative is a People's Vote and a win for Remain.
bookies odds are at 83% for the uk to remain in the EU past march, and the pound is up following the annoucement. Add to this the fact that the SNP and most remain voting MPs voted against this deal, and I reckon theres a significant likelihood of at least something happening
> Just to be clear, article 50 hasn't been revoked, the UK will still leave the EU with no deal on March 30th.
I don't feel you clarified anything.
Do you mean if article 50 isn't revoked that the UK will leave the EU (true if nothing else happens) or that there are no circumstances under which the UK can remain in the EU?
The House of Commons need to vote to rescind Article 50 before March 30th otherwise the UK will automatically leave the EU with no deal.
There's currently no legislation, implied legislation, promises, or assurances from either the government or opposition to do so.
Essentially until Article 50 is withdrawn, the UK continues to march forward towards hard Brexit.
A successful vote today on Theresa May's deal would have assured a hard Brexit. The vote failing however hasn't resulted in "remain," it has simply placed the UK into an unknown state with automatic hard Brexit still lurking on the horizon.
Revoking article 50 means canceling brexit. They can still do it, but no major party currently supports it.
If they don't revoke it, they have to leave on March 30th. This can happen through some kind of deal with EU (a potential one was negotiated but shot down by todays vote) or without any deal.
Yes, the deal was likely scrapped for the retarded reason that half of its proponents figured the deal wasn’t brexit enough, and saw the opportunity to shoot it down with no care for what to do with the resulting mess.
You can be for or against Brexit. The saddest thing is the gulf between the governing class and Britons. The former cannot effectuate a strong existential roar from the people they represent.
That’s worse than this vote, and worse than the original vote for Brexit. (If you even think that was bad.)
Everyone has a plan right now in the UK parliament. Probably over half of parliament is hoping to push the UK into a 'cancel Brexit' scenario, despite claiming they respect the referendum result. Possibly a third of parliament have given up on the prospect of a reasonable deal with the EU and are holding out for a no-deal WTO exit. A minority are still seeking a last-minute deal that everyone can agree on.
It has always been my belief that a good trade deal between the UK and the EU is only possible if the UK is actually willing to go no-deal WTO first. Simply because the EU never concedes anything in good faith when it comes to negotiations.
This will kill the high end of the housing market in the U.K. as the cost of everything will go up. It will also help shore up some jobs that were exported to cheaper labor in the EU.
IMO the UK has very little negotiating leverage with the EU.
For its preservation, the EU leaders know they must make an example of the UK.
A new referendum will take time - if it ever happens.
And if it does, the country may remain as divided as ever.
They need to secure an extension from the EU. With no extension, a disruptive, hard Brexit will happen in just 10 weeks and the UK is not at all prepared.
I just don’t understand what the UK MPs are thinking, and I don’t understand why David Cameron opened this Pandora’s Box in the first place.
It bewilders me that people, including elected MPs, don't want to understand how electoral/representative democracies should work. The will of the People, yeah, right. It's like pub talk on a Friday. Grab a lukewarm ale and a bag of crisps, and cry about how great the empire once was. MPs should represent the best interest, not the lunatic dreams of their voters.
I see the headlines are trumpeting how sterling rose (0.05% !!) after the results (hinting that the result is good news), but this looks like a clear case of short-covering to me - short speculation earlier in the day (possibly anticipating a decline if the vote passed), covered when the actual results came out.
> The environment secretary, Michael Gove, was equally dramatic in a morning radio interview, warning lawmakers that “if we don’t vote for this deal tonight, in the words of Jon Snow, winter is coming,” a reference to “Game of Thrones.”
Err, that was Ned Stark who said that, not Jon Snow.
UK is staring at supply chain and financial disruptions post Brexit. In the multi polar world - UK is not a heavy weight any more. Without the collective bargaining power of EU - UK would have tough time rebuilding economy in an uber competitive global economic context.
Major recession, food and medicine shortage, 1 million british citizen deported back to the UK, 3 million EU citizen leaving the UK and civil war in Northern Ireland is what the most alarmist have predicted.
A more realistic but important to note still on the worse end of outcomes for a no deal would be something like:
Major recession, large queues on motorways for a while, slighty rising unemployment in the longer term.
The bank of england would probably manage to smooth over the worst of the effects, messing with the pound to insulate buisnesses trading internationally (note that right now their main problem is the pound being too high, so it might sort itself out naturally)
I’m cautiously optimistic. Brexit is about national sovereignty. You need look no further than the US to see that mega-states don’t work. The EU was supposed to be a trade confederacy, but is beginning to co-opt the sovereignty of the constituent states. That, as the US experience has shown, may lead to economic success, but also leads to people who feel disenfranchised and dissatisfied with a distant, ever-expanding government.
Mega-states can work as long as you have your priorities in order and understand the need for decentralized governance. But unfortunately, both parties in the US have been gunning for a bigger and bigger federal government for the past couple decades.
i m under the impression that the UK elites are in favor of brexit. Or rather that the elites are not in favor of remain, and they are not going to mobilize for that. The UK people, despite apparent polarization, does not expect major changes in their lives any way.
It was never a question in my mind, that May would sabotage the negotiations to the point that the skeptics of the exit, would proclaim 'I told you so'.
Never believed that she could perform her duty honestly.
What a stain she is, on the fabric of trust of the British people.
The thing is, the best way to understand Theresa May’s predicament is to imagine that 52 percent of Britain had voted that the government should build a submarine out of cheese.
Now, Theresa May was initially against building a submarine out of cheese, obviously. Because it’s a completely insane thing to do.
However, in order to become PM, she had to pretend that she thought building a submarine out of cheese was fine and could totally work.
"Cheese means cheese," she told us all, madly.
Then she actually built one.
It’s shit. Of course it is. For God’s sake, are you stupid? It’s a submarine built out of cheese.
So now, having built a shit cheese submarine, she has to put up with both Labour and Tory Brexiters insisting that a less shit cheese submarine could have been built.
They’re all lying, and they know it. So does everybody else. We've covered this already, I know, but it’s cheese and it’s a submarine. How good could it possibly be?
Only she can’t call them out on this. Because she has spent the past two years also lying, by pretending she really could build a decent submarine out of cheese.
No more insane an idea than the reality. Cameron called the referendum to put the right wing of the Tory party back in the box.
We were "supposed" to vote remain. Rees Mogg would have still have been an unknown on the lunatic fringe if we had.
Cameron's reaction to the result was priceless. As was the damage done to the country and our politics. I expect history to rank him down with Eden and Lord North.
>Theresa May was initially against building a submarine out of cheese, obviously. Because it’s a completely insane thing to do.
Leaving the EU is not a completely insane thing to do.
The UK (and many other countries) have legitimate grievances about some things the EU is foisting on them (immigration for example) and the EU is giving them the cold shoulder and fining them if they don't comply. Labelling people who are against that as "insane" isn't going to help anybody.
EU freedom of movement isn't unconditional. You can only move to a different EU country if you have a job or can support yourself.
You have three months to make it work, and then if you can't make it work, you can be asked to leave.
The UK deliberately opted out of this requirement. Until recently, the UK was one of the most generous and open states for EU immigration.
The UK also made the most noise about allowing the former Soviet Bloc countries to join the EU - coincidentally, the countries which have sourced a lot of supposedly objectionable immigration.
This is because the UK likes to play a game. First it imports cheap foreign labour to keep wages down. Then the same political group which quietly promotes this makes a big show of saying "Oh no! Look at all the immigrants! How terrible! We should do something!" in public.
And this reliably wins elections. It's been winning them for well over a century now.
You can be absolutely sure that if Brexit happens this game will be played again - most likely with cheap labour from the former commonwealth countries.
If you want access to the single market, you have to sign up to freedom of movement. The UK was never going to be able to have one without the other because it's a fundamental principle of the EU as an institution. It's a package deal.
> If you want access to the single market, you have to sign up to freedom of movement.
> ...
> It's a package deal.
how do you explain the existence of the EU-Canada deal where Canada has essentially complete tariff free access to the EU's Single Market without freedom of movement?
CETA is not a customs union- there are still customs controls between Canada and the EU. If you don't have EU regulations enforced in Canada, those controls do it at the border with the EU. That works. But if you want into the customs union (and therefore being allowed to just walk things across the border to the EU, no checks) you have to sign up to pretty much all the EU regulations. And that's the point that the four freedoms kick in, and you have to take freedom of movement.
If you have a Canada-style deal, you need customs controls, which could be built at Dover, but the sticking point is, and probably always will be, the Northern Ireland border. Put the checks on the border, and you're imperiling the peace process. Put them in the sea, and you're splitting the UK into two regulatory zones. It's an impossible problem.
this is correct, but not at all relevant to your original point:
> If you want access to the single market, you have to sign up to freedom of movement.
this statement is objectively not true, as is proven by the existence of CETA
> But if you want into the customs union (and therefore being allowed to just walk things across the border to the EU, no checks) you have to sign up to pretty much all the EU regulations. And that's the point that the four freedoms kick in, and you have to take freedom of movement.
this statement is also not true: Turkey forms a customs union with the EU: goods travel freely between the EU and Turkey without customs checks, and the EU does not have freedom of movement with Turkey
As a practical matter, the Turkey/EU border is not a frictionless one, because it's only free movement of goods, not (for instance) the actual trucks hauling the goods:
> The EU has agreed open-access road transport deals only with a handful of neighbouring countries. This includes members of the European Economic Area, which Britain has said it will not join, and Switzerland, which has a special bilateral agreement.
> Crucially, all the transport deals are premised on participation in the EU’s free movement of people area, which Britain also hopes to leave. In other words, even if Britain mirrors the EU rules on haulage, it may not be enough to secure free access for trucks to the EU market...
> The goal, said a Turkish official, was to complete as much paperwork as possible before actually reaching the border. On the other end, Bulgarian border officers examine each truck, going over the paperwork and doing random drug and migrant checks. Refrigerated trucks are x-rayed as are 5 per cent of other trucks, at random, according to Mr Ereke. “For the UK, I wish them good luck,” he said, pointing to the lines behind him. “It is not going to be easy.”
what other trade agreement asks for freedom of movement in addition to access to the common market? can you name one other deal on the planet which does this?
Does it matter? The EU chose to tie them together into the Single Market. Freedom of labor movement was meant to put give people the same rights as capital. Giving people fewer rights than capital seemed like a bad idea at the time, so it was all tied together.
Maybe those should be uncoupled, but the EU isn't about to do it to stop a member state from leaving.
> Leaving the EU is not a completely insane thing to do.
Leaving is not insane in itself. Leaving with a favorable deal with questionable leverage is irrational. Not sure if insane, but at least it's borderline fantasyland
If "insane" is not the right word then perhaps "immature" is a better fit. Part of being an adult is understanding that most choices in life are compromises.
On balance, the UK is better in Europe, despite its human-made failings. Trying to achieve some impossible ideal, without understanding or acknowledging the realities, might not be insane but it's not the way the world works.
Brexit is a real problem that the human race is faced with.
There can be no higher question than that of what rules people should be using to deal with each other. For most of human history the rules were imposed by force. You open your market because if you don't, I'll escalate from sending a strongly worded missive all the way up to sending my armies to pillage your countryside.
Recently we've moved to a more contract-based system because using force sucks and you only want to do it if you absolutely have to. But that brings with it its own set of problems. Getting everybody on the same page is hard. Politics largely deals with local perspectives, even when it has to aspire to "the will of the people" when it comes to things like entering into international treaties.
Brexit is history in the making. The EU is a phenomenally novel way of integrating sovereign nation-states into a singular political entity, that happened without war. It's aim is to make something as singularly powerful as the United States, without force. The US had to clear out the West by force in order to achieve its Manifest Destiny. Great that we have it now, but we can't just keep fighting wars to achieve political unity.
That without force part is the problem being solved. Whatever happens here will influence all future non-violent political integrations humanity has going forward.
Make no mistake, this matters. Moreso than just about anything we've done since WW2.
What? Serbia is an EU candidate, not an EU member. It is an outsider to this.
Five EU members don't recognize Kosovo as independent, meaning that Kosovo can't even apply for the EU membership. Serbia's making small steps, but won't enter any time soon.
This was a European problem (as in, the continent) that had nothing to do with the EU specifically.
This may yet lead to war. If the EU starts to disintegrate, I expect to see war in Europe as a result.
I do have some sympathy with the argument Brexit is a waste of resources, it matters of course but if people were sold lies that can never happen (good trade relations with a trade bloc you just left, low immigration and a strong economy, freedom of services and goods but not of people), that’s a waste of everyone’s time and money for years, it’s not a serious political argument, it’s a deadly pantomime which undermines representative democracy and encourages extremists and fascists. We’ve already seen one MP murdered by extremists (Jo Cox).
I’m not sure. I think we’ll leave or stay in the EU and it won’t make a tangible difference in the long run. Not in the way that say the internet, smartphones, antibiotics, nuclear weapons/power, quantum physics etc etc have made a difference to the world.
MAD means we probably won’t have a major war any time soon, so we’ll be trading with the EU regardless, it’s all semanitics and minor politics.
It may not make an identifiable difference, but it will make a material difference. I’m not sure what tangible means in this context.
What was the effect of Columbus sailing across the Atlantic? Maybe nothing! Maybe another sailor would have come 20 years later and American history would have played out just the same with different dates.
Or would two decades of Aztec rule made a difference? Two more decades of Nagualism before the Church started eradicating the libraries and the language? Could books have been copied and hidden? Would political bodies have had more time to adapt? Were there tipping points on the horizon?
Or was America in a steady state just waiting for Europe to come plunder it? Are forces at play which are so much bigger than individuals that nothing we do really matters?
Personally, I think it all matters very much. History does not repeat itself, it’s a story built on every word that came before it. Brexit will frame everything that comes after it, and if we had swapped this decade for a different decade in UK history, we would have a very different story.
>MAD means we probably won’t have a major war any time soon
Was the Korean war a major war in your book? To the Korean people it was.
In that war, the US's having nukes did not prevent North Korea from starting the war, did not prevent the Soviets from sending MIGs with Soviet pilots against the US army and air force and did not prevent China from sending a million soldiers.
From a euro centric perspective Korea is a proxy war. MAD blocks major conflict directly between two nuclear states or states with strong nuclear allies. It doesn’t prevent wars fought in other territories backed by nuclear states (eg Syria)
China sends a million soldiers over its border with Korea with the usual instructions to try to kills as many soldiers of the enemy (composed mostly of US soldiers) as possible, and your reply is that that is not a major conflict between the US and China?
Alternatively, do you claim that the fact that China at that time lacked nukes somehow emboldened China whereas if they had had nukes, they would have hesitated?
Conventional wars have been fought in the past between two nuclear states. On example is that of the Kargil War[1] which was a major conflict between India and Pakistan. This was not fought in a different territory.
> Brexit is history in the making. The EU is a phenomenally novel way of integrating sovereign nation-states into a singular political entity, that happened without war. It's aim is to make something as singularly powerful as the United States, without force.
The thing is, the people of the UK don't want to be part of that "United States of Europe". It is being forced upon them. The failure of pro-EU people to recognize that they are breeding unrest will lead to civil war, unless they allow the Brits to exit as they've voted to do.
I think that's a sweeping generalisation. I suspect, admittedly without numbers to back it up, that a significant minority of people in the UK - myself included - are happy to be part of a greater European state. I also suspect that there is a generational factor, and that this significant minority will grow over time to become a majority.
The problem with you rejecting my claim as a "sweeping generalization" is that you've done exactly the same in your counter argument.
Polls are not reliable (they didn't predict the vote, after all). The vote is the most reliable data we have on the positions of the people of the UK. It is the biggest sample set of any measurement performed, and 1.3M more people turned out to vote leave than to remain.
My assessment of today's youth is that they're rebellious, like any generation of youth. What they're rebelling against is pro-EU, pro-socialism that has been fed to them throughout their childhood. Conservatism is on the rise among the young.
Your claim that the vote is the most reliable data we have flatly contradicts your last paragraph: 61% of men and 80% of women aged 18-24 voted Remain. The Leave vote was very much carried through by the older generation. The polarity is such that if you
assume the same proportion of remain voters for those below 18 (and I don't see why not) then the tables turned last November.
Politics should be utterly boring, instead we get this endless theatrics. Politics should not be entertaining at all. Same goes for finance & banking. These jobs should be the most boring jobs in the world. Just get on with it, and forget about all the posturing and game-of-thrones crap.
In the UK the Civil Service used to perform this function. They would take the desires and direction of the the current Government and implement them. They used their skill to make them as most likely to succeed. This included cost, legislative timescales and their sole aim was to implement the desire of the leaders of that time.
This has been systematically dismantled and much of the responsibility now given to agencies. They don't necessarily share the same aims. Agencies are now major contributors to political parties and a dispassionate approach no longer exists.
A great quote - no one wants innovative bankers. The UK has made this a reality in the political sphere.
So they can "take back control" they never lost, to have an impotent government that's unable to get primary legislation through parliament, but unlikely to be voted out?
It's not clear to me nor am I convinced it is clear to those who voted for autonomy. One could argue that EU legislation since the vote only bolsters the arguments for independence. The only thing that's clear from my outsider perspective is that some campaigning was shady. How can it be clear it was a failed idea when the idea hasn't even come to fruition?
As far as I understand this vote wasn't intended to oppose brexit as a whole, it was intended to oppose brexit under recently negotiated terms. As in - they still want out, they just don't like that specific deal.
The main issue is that the majority of parliament are remainers and so don't really represent the 52 percent, further signyfing why the public feel parliament are out of touch with them. Britain is further teetering towards a no deal, meaning an even harder Brexit.
All I can think of is, why? I don't know what were the main points against the deal, but the only reason I can think of that the deal is rejected is that Corbin, or whoever else would come out of this kerfuffle victorious, wants to re-issue vote on leaving the EU in order to stay..?
This is insanely puzzling to me, and very much unexpected. Can someone ELI5..? Or maybe ELI15 would be enough.
Because Remainers don't want Brexit at all, and Leavers mostly don't want it on the terms of the available deal (split between those who want a better deal and would prefer remaining to leaving on the offered terms and those who would prefer no deal to the offered terms.)
> This is insanely puzzling to me, and very much unexpected.
That no one liked the deal May managed to negotiate has been clear for some time—it's why the vote was delayed for weeks of desperate effort to find some votes—though it being by far the biggest loss on any vote for a British Government pretty much ever is somewhat impressive. But it's also a sign that May wanted the loss on record—they had to have a whip count and known it would be a horrible defeat and yet went forward with it.
This is not an insane puzzle, it's very, very simple.
"Brexit" is possible, but it would be in all cases disastrous for Britain. This is obvious. But Brexiters don't want a real-world Brexit they want a fantasy land Brexit where they have every single benefit of being part of Europe and the EU but they want to be able to ignore any obligations "imposed" upon them by that very advantageous relationship. This is, of course, a childish and unreasonable position, nevertheless a great many people were convinced that it was really quite reasonable or that at least that voting for Brexit was a show of solidarity representing British Independence and Strength and yadda yadda yadda, etc. Unfortunately for them, a majority of voters were fooled into voting for Brexit, causing it to pass out of the fantasy realm where it was a meaningless signal of political beliefs into the realm of reality where it will be an unmitigated clusterfuck of epic proportions if it is carried off. Indeed, I suspect if a second referendum were held the following week after the Brexit vote, with the restriction that only those who voted in the first could vote in the second, it would have gone down in flames.
The complication here is that the current party in power, Theresa May's coalition, has a very tenuous hold on that power. They know that if there are new elections they are out. And May knows that if she doesn't kowtow to the Brexiter minority in parliament then her coalition will crash and burn. So she's trying to hold onto power (until 2022) by going through the motions and doing the best she can without any possible clue how to actually get through this mess.
Which comes back to the core problem again. The majority (now) do not want a Brexit. While the Brexiters want "Brexit, but good for Britain" which is an impossibility.
The deal is a compromise. The Brexit faction never woke up to the reality that they were asking for things that the EU was never going to give, and so they hate it. (In particular, they hate the fact that it admits that this stuff is really complicated and needs more than 2 years to discuss). Remain would rather just remain, and see the deal has second-best to that. So everyone hates it because being in opposition means they don't have to come up with a plausible compromise.
Everybody on both sides considers the deal a huge compromise and hope that by voting it down, their prefered solution will become viable.
I bet however that if this deal was put to a single ranked vote against all other options, everybody would put it as nr 2 and it would comfortably win.
> I bet however that if this deal was put to a single ranked vote against all other options, everybody would put it as nr 2 and it would comfortably win.
I don't think there is consensus on what all other options are. It's clear that options Constitutionally available to Parliament and within it's power (i.e., no external approval needed) include no Brexit, the deal they just rejected for a near-immediate Brexit, and no-deal near-immediate Brexit, as well as a snap second referendum (which isn't an outcome option, but it is a political option which differs from unilaterally choosing an outcome option.) But it's clear that there are parties that thing that a a better-deal Brexit and/or a delayed Brexit (or delayed decision on whether to have a Brexit) are acheivable options.
OTOH, I think there are probably plenty of people who rank no deal and no Brexit both ahead of the deal on offer.
> the only reason I can think of that the deal is rejected is that Corbin, or whoever else would come out of this kerfuffle victorious
For it to be defeated by such a margin, it had to receive cross-party rejection. 118 Conservatives voted against it (with 196 voting for), it was proposed by a Conservative Government.
Imagine if all the great minds thinking, discussing, reporting and debating brexit spent their time on solving real problems facing the human race instead.
Real problems like how to get people click more ads and how to create useless cryptocurrencies that lots of great (and arguably not so great) minds seem to be nowadays primarily occupied with?
Because democracy, whilst not perfect, is the best system we have for civilisation to continue.
As someone who voted remain, I have to say that we now have to leave the EU. If Brexit was to be stopped by Parliment, the damage to UK politics would last a generation. People would simply loose faith in the system, giving rise to more extreme political parties - and we all know where that leads to.
If I was in charge, I'd do a hard Brexit - use the ££ windfall from not paying into the EU as buffer until the economy recovers with new trade deals.
It's not going to be the apocalypse like some hardcore remainers describe
Why is it the best system, and how do you even measure that? I personally like living in a constitutional democracy but the past 100 years has shown us plenty of failed democracies and successful dictatorships (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore).
It seems to me that one of the downsides of democracy is promoting short term thinking. Another is that policies are only as good as the population is educated (US climate change, brexit)
It seems to me that brexit was for some people a populist movement which put national pride ahead of economic interests. (We don't need the EU to do trade agreements, the British Empire ruled the world back in the day!).
Out of interest (also a remainer here) what do you think to the argument that since every 5 years we get to change the government if we want to and if the Leave campaigners basically lied to the electorate, we should get a second vote?
There was definitely lying on both sides. I couldn't say who lied more - but I think the voting public are more intelligent than that, and could see through the messages written on the side of buses.
The idea of a 2nd vote is undemocratic if you ask me. Keep asking the question until you give us the answer we want! There was enough debate and arguing the first time around - let's just leave and move on with our lives.
Referendums are not democratic they are a tool employed by an incumbent to back up a position.
Democracy generally requires voting for representatives that serve your best interests on issues that matter to you. It’s not about choosing between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.
Apparently more than 51% of the UK's voters thought that the UK belonging to the EU was a real problem worth solving. What's your legitimacy to belittle this concern?
Approximately 99% of the people voting for or against brexit didn’t know what they were voting for. I would be surprised if even 1% of the UK population could accurately describe what the EU is, it’s structure and the implications of leaving the EU.
Doesn't that just highlight how undemocratic and unrepresentative the EU actually is?
Remain voter, just to be clear. I know it's got better over the last decade, but the real mistake of the EU was letting in a lot of countries without any say from the populace.
It was an ideological decision, with no democratic mandate, and it's ripping the union apart.
So why would they vote for something they neither understand or care about? It's all about perception.
People do things that are bad for them all the time (smoking, drinking, etc) but we still do these things because us humans like having a choice. it's up to us to decide our fate, and democracy gives us these choices - even if they are bad for us.
Of course it "failed". The government did everything it could to sabotage it and arrive at as unfavorable a set of exit conditions as possible. Even if she did want to get a good deal, May doesn't strike me as a cutthroat negotiator. Couple this with her unwillingness to abide by the will of the people (the size of the voting margin is somewhat irrelevant in a properly functioning democracy), and you get this. This was 100% predictable right from the start.
Like elections, referenda have consequences. You don't get a re-do just because you didn't like the outcome. To say otherwise opens you up to the same kind of bullshit when things turn out the way you like and the _other_ side doesn't like the result.
> the size of the voting margin is somewhat irrelevant in a properly functioning democracy
Literally, no. The size of the margin is a direct factor in many democratic processes and determines how resilient the decision is to subsequent challenge. Major, foundational changes are rarely decided by simple majorities in one event.
> You don't get a re-do just because you didn't like the outcome. To say otherwise opens you up to the same kind of bullshit
You just called some referendums "bullshit". Not very democratic of you. Follow-up referendums are totally valid democratic process, for example because sometimes you have widespread fraudulent claims that are later exposed to be lies. As the public becomes more educated, repolling to verify the public will is absolutely proper functioning and indeed and very essence of democracy.
I don't see any fallacy. I'm sure some elections in the UK are decided by a few votes as well, and they too are accepted. Why should a referendum be any different. The definition of a majority is 50% + 1 vote all over the world. The definition of majority vote is that majority decides the vote. And in this case nearly 1.3 _million_ more people voted to leave than to stay, not a few dozen.
You're saying the opposite though: you said some referendums are in fact "different", specifically "re-dos" are "bullshit". That is inconsistent with democratic principles that regularly subject major decisions to some additional levels of verification that it's what the people really want in the long run.
Democratic procedures often build in some protections against short-term passions, fraud, poor turnouts, etc. and these verifications are scaled to match the magnitude of the decision. As others have noted, the kinds of "few dozen vote" contests you're talking about in the U.S. are themselves re-voted upon every few years. Follow-up referendums are perfectly consistent with democratic principles and happen all the time in the U.S. and elsewhere. Bypassing these kinds of verifications of the public will usually require supermajorities -- a direct contradiction of your claim that "the size of the voting margin is somewhat irrelevant in a properly functioning democracy."
Also, nobody put words in your mouth. They are your direct quotes.
Some elections, ie, local elections on representation. Not major elections with constitutional implications.
There is a reason that it takes 2/3 of the Senate to ratify international agreements, and 3/4 of the states to change the constitution. Brexit is a constitutional change.
...Pending the next election -- which generally occurs 2-6 years later. (Or, in the case of passed referendums, some future election, depending on when the modifying referendum makes it on the ballot.) Leaving the EU is far less readily reversible.
Brexit has been sabotaged by a conspiracy by May? You seriously believe she is devious enough? This is tin-foil hat nonsense.
Brexit is and will be a failure by definition - simply because it was never specified exactly what it involved. There are 1000s of ways to NOT be a member of the EU. "Brexit" covers all of them so leave-supporting politicians have been arguing furiously on the basis that their particular version of "not being in the EU anymore" reflects the "will of the people".
The "Leave" movement consisted of many incompatible positions on the future relationship - this was made clear in the run up to the referendum. Many Brexit supporters advocated a Norway (EEA) type relationship, others wanted to stay in the Customs Union, others wanted a Canada free trade type of relationship, for other the European Court of Justice was the red line, for a significant number immigrants were the problem, etc.
Surprise, surprise, no matter what May presented was going to be objectionable to a majority particularly if you include the remain supporters. There is no conspiracy required to see that this circle is impossible to square.
What sort of "good deal" do you think May could realistically have extracted from the EU? Everything I've read has implied that the Brexit options ranged from "poor" to "apocalyptically bad".
Is that what they say on TV nowadays? Somehow Britain existed for 2 thousand years without the EU all the way until 1973, and now for it to exist without the EU (and presumably with stronger ties to the US) would be "apocalyptically" bad? This doesn't pass the sniff test, IMO.
I don't watch TV. This is from numerous print sources, but especially The Economist. And you yourself described the failed plan as "as unfavorable a set of exit conditions as possible", so I'm still waiting to hear what a favorable set of exit conditions would have looked like - one that actually stood a chance of getting both UK and EU approval.
> You don't get a re-do just because you didn't like the outcome.
Not asking for a "re-do," asking for a vote on the final terms of the agreement. There is a lot precedent for voting on the final deal, e.g. trade union negotiations.
> unwillingness to abide by the will of the people
"The will of the people" is her catch phrase, the brexit vote is the only mandate this shows.
This comment does not suggest a great level of familiarity with British politics or the Brexit process.
In 1997, Wales held a referendum on forming a National Assembly with devolved powers from Westminster. The result was 50.3% in favour of devolution. Theresa May and a large number of other Conservative MPs voted against the establishment of the Assembly, contrary to the result of the referendum. The Assembly was eventually established in 1998.
In 2005, the Conservative party manifesto included a pledge to call a second referendum on the Welsh assembly, with the option to abolish it.
The people who are saying that we should respect the result of this referendum have a proven track record of not respecting the results of other referendums.
The referendum was non-binding. It would be entirely legitimate for Parliament to say "We can't obtain a satisfactory outcome and have opted to remain in the EU as it's a superior economic option." You don't continue to take your sovereign nation over the cliff because of an unreasonable minority of citizens (whether or not they were a majority of those who voiced their opinions in said referendum).
This is really curious. Are there any systems that govern well that don’t recognize democratic principles?
I’m trying to figure out how the U.K. can make decisions given that very few will have a literal majority given that there are so many non-voters (eg, babies and comatose).
What is a better form of determining the will of the people than an election?
In the US there is a constitution so huge changes can’t be made by referendum. Would the U.K. adapt a system like that? And how could they if it required 50.1% of every soul in the U.K. to vote for it?
Define "govern well". Is that where the will of the people is aligned as closely as possible to public policy and government action? Is it where their quality of life is most improved regardless of their desires? It's a hard question to answer.
China governs very well as an autocracy, if I had to measure by the quality of life of its citizens. Yes, their will is not expressed through representation, but China has done more than any other nation or company to pull an enormous amount of humans out of poverty in a short amount of time. They have traded a reduction in representation and exerted will for a reduction in suffering.
It's a similar thought exercise to "What is success?" I cannot answer your question unfortunately.
I think I agree with your definition, but it’s pretty hard to know the true will of the people.
My ideal state is where the government executed the will of the people in spirit but not in letter. (Ie, people want heroin literally but happiness and freedom in spirit)
> This is really curious. Are there any systems that govern well that don’t recognize democratic principles?
The United States has two branches of Congress to insulate the country from the whims of the mob. Pure democracy has long been derided as an anti-pattern in government.
It was, nevertheless, the directly expressed will of the people. This is very much the social contract that holds the society together, and makes the government accountable to the people. Would you rather they just did as they please?
The real issue is that the people who voted "for Brexit" were all voting for different things, because it wasn't at all articulated what "Brexit" would look like. Now that that's better understood, there should absolutely be a second referendum, probably with three ranked options:
1. Stay
2. Soft leave (May's deal)
3. Hard leave (No deal)
With months and months of nonstop coverage, one could now say that there's broad understanding of what these precise options mean (though probably not their longer-term consequences, especially of option 3).
In any case, you don't have to be "ignoring the will of the people" to go back and ask again now that there's better information.
People voting in such a referendum should still have the option to say "given these two leave options (and not, say, the fantasy one presented by Boris Johnson), I've realised they both suck and I'd prefer to just remain after all."
Having it as a ranked ballot with runoff allows the further refinement of distinguishing between options like:
- I'd like a soft Brexit, and if I can't have that, I'd prefer a hard Brexit over remaining.
- I'd really like to remain, but if I can't have that I'd rather a soft Brexit.
- I'd really like to remain, and I have no second choice.
You're probably right, though that would be pretty funny, given that ranked voting would actually give the leave side a better chance since it would avoid them getting split.
Straw man. I say nothing that would suggest "keep asking". A single re-ask is justified by the change in available information. And in indeed, if the stay option was selected on this re-ask, but there was enough momentum for one of the leave options, that could merit another referendum in two, five, ten, whatever years— the key is to make certain that any future referendums on this subject are asking about clear, concrete options that are grounded in reality, and not fairy tales.
In any case, the point of a ranked ballot is you use runoff to reallocate the last place option votes, so you do get a clear majority in the end.
It's unclear (to me, at least) that "use runoff to reallocate the last place option votes" would be the best method here. And if such a three-option ballot were to take place, choosing (and explaining) the ranking/counting method to be used would be a crucial element.
In particular, "reallocate the last place votes" could lead to quickly rejecting an option that is hardly anybody's first choice, yet is everyone's second choice (or preferred fallback if they can't have their first choice). That doesn't seem like a desirable outcome.
Let me refine. The reason why I say “keep asking” is that what would happen if the 2nd referendum resulted in leave? It’s hard to tell if that would make me comfortable enough to not want another.
And what about the leavers? What justification would be sufficient for them to not call for a 3rd referendum.
I didn’t know that the UK used ranked ballots or how common they are.
My concern is largely that it’s hard for me to understand well given that all of these issues existed before the referendum and are not novel.
I agree that it's not the will of the people on face, however I think a re-do is okay in this situation. The UK is a representative democracy and their elected officials cannot arrive at a deal on something a majority of voters wanted, so what do you do then?
If you just default to force something through would violate the rights of those who voted for members who are voting "No" to the deal.
Polling has pretty consistently been anti-Brexit for awhile now, once the clear scope of what Brexit entails has actually been better understood. If another referendum were held today it would fail.
Why should a single non-binding vote taken at one point in time two years ago be considered forever irrevocable? Especially considering all of the pro-Brexit fake news and false promises at the time? Most of the promises made by the Brexiteers have turned out to be lies; the UK will not be better off, the NHS will not be better funded, etc. Given how so many underlying rationales for pro-Brexit votes have turned out to be false, of course it makes sense that a different result would be obtained today.
I tend to agree with your main point, but I'd be cautious about being so certain that the referendum would fail this time based on polling. The polls generally overestimated remain last time around (see Polls of Polls, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_Unit...)
As recent history shows, polling is unreliable in heavily politically charged issues like this one. Oversample here, undersample there, and you get "95% probability of winning" the night before the loss.
The UK already has the best possible deal with the EU of all countries on earth, in or out. They have all of the benefits of membership, and are exempted from some of the downsides: britain controls their own borders and their own currency. The status quo is the best the UK can ever hope to get, from that position, no matter what deal you make it'll be worse than where you are. That's not the "EU sticking it to the UK", that's just reality.
Yes, definitely. Override uneducated decisions that harm the republic, regardless of "the will of the people" [1] [2] [3] [4]. That is exactly why republics exist versus direct democracy.
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” -- Winston Churchill (edit: supposedly Churchill did not say this; I'm keeping it, as it helps express the idea)
But "the republic" is not a uniform mass. What's good for some is bad for others. It is far from certain for me at least that the huge influx of cheap labor from Eastern Europe does not harm the lower classes in Britain. I'm pretty certain, on the other hand, that this works extremely well for the upper classes.
Besides, given the quality and moral scruples of "decision makers" that governments are usually comprised of, why would you so completely trust them with the fate of the republic in the first place, especially if the populace does not have the benefit of either the first or the second amendment of US constitution?
This strikes me as a hypocritical position. I bet you'd say otherwise if e.g. the will of the people was to remain, but the government decided to exit, because in their estimation it'd be better for Britain. You can't pick and choose. If your position is that government knows best, you should be prepared that the government will make decisions you don't like, too.
> This strikes me as a hypocritical position. I bet you'd say otherwise if e.g. the will of the people was to remain, but the government decided to exit, because in their estimation it'd be better for Britain.
Your bet would be wrong. If the data showed exit was superior, I'd hope the government went for it. I am entirely comfortable with the government making decisions I don't like; I'm American and am used it it.
> Why not just leave major decisions to a committee
We do this in the US, but the committee is formed of three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. People vote for representatives. Representatives enact legislation or executive orders. Those legislation or executive orders can be challenged by our judicial branch and thrown out, regardless of the will of the people and their representatives (see: same sex marriage, abortion, asking people if they're citizens on our census, blocking immigration from countries based on religion, laws that bring about voter suppression). Works well, checks and balances and all that.
Referendums should be reserved to societal/moral issues (gay marriage, etc.). Otherwise, let's have a referendum asking the people if they want to keep paying taxes -- that should work well.
Quite extreme, I know. My point is that the government is elected to make decisions taking the economical and political consequences into account.
Expecting the general public opinion to be the end-all response to whatever decision is simply wrong.
> You don't get a re-do just because you didn't like the outcome. To say otherwise opens you up to the same kind of bullshit when things turn out the way you like and the _other_ side doesn't like the result.
Sure you do. Why not? And everyone is always vulnerable to revisions of their accomplishments: the fact that, in the US, the ACA was passed in 2010 doesn't mean that Republicans are banned from amending or changing it for all eternity.
Every two years, Americans get a re-do on voting for their representatives. And we... kind of get by.
I don't see why giving UK voters another vote is some terrible Stalinist undermining of democracy. It's split near 50/50 either way, and it seems silly to let whether it's raining or not, or Russian-sponsored media campaigns, determine an important policy matter like this. Voters in 2016 are not sacrosanct, brilliant policymakers whose decisions have to be respected for all eternity.
What I find curious through this whole affair is the silence on the topic by the U.S. For two countries that share a "Special Relationship" I had expected to hear the State Dept. say something. After all, major changes in governance by a close ally is bound to have secondary effects. And, please don't tell me that the Special Relationship is just a put-on show. It is set in numerous treaties between the U.S. and U.K. for centuries. There have been no announcements of rescinding any of those well-hidden treaties. Also consider that the U.S. has three of the most sophisticated econometric models of all other countries, probably better than the U.K.'s.
That leads me to believe this is a fait accompli and the U.S. may have actually suggested the referrendum as the best way forward. The brute fact is the the U.S. is going through it's own Brexit from earlier trade relationships that were set many years ago and which could be improved upon. You think I'm harbouring a conspiracy theory? Who told you that?
What is the point of a special relationship with a UK out of the EU? It conferred benefits for both sides whilst the UK was some mid-Atlantic bridge between the EU and US. I seem to remember the (ex?) US ambassador speaking quite strongly on the topic, as have the many UK diplomats who've resigned over the issue.
I'd be more inclined to believe the US ending up with a special relationship with another EU nation. FiveEyes will probably survive as a special relationship, but I would expect there to be a wish to add someone inside the EU for SIGINT purposes. Possibly as an entirely separate arrangement excluding that now insignificant island nation.
I think the US is trying to be quiet to get the UK a good deal with the EU. Suddenly lowering the EU's trade status is an example of more visible setup for what they want.. Special access to Europe through a corrupt merchant island.
I.e. how do you bypass EU regulations without a nice English speaking middle man country with near EU trade status to do a lot of dirty work?
IMO the UK will be a specialist in packaging and final assembly of US and Indian goods if they get a good deal from the EU.
Somebody needs to own up to that lie and accept that a "no deal" outcome, which is clearly bad, is still the best thing brexiters can actually deliver. Instead, they are trying to camouflage that reality with a bad deal that keeps Britain shackled to the EU for a number of years while losing all of the (substantial) influence it had over the way EU works. That's an anti-Brexit, the exact opposite of the independence and prosperity promised by brexiters. It was a bad deal and it's good that it failed.