Brexit wins: Britain votes to exit the European Union

I wasn’t saying that I believe that, just saying that’s what it sounded like the consensus was the thread.

I had forgotten till I read this just how much I loathe and detest Margaret Hodge.

She represents (appropriately) Barking and Dagenham, which are two of the most downmarket areas in the Southeast. Both have large numbers of pissed-off elderly white people who failed to adapt when the old mass production industries went; they are right-wing Labour (i.e. Trade Unionists of the closed shop mentality.) She doesn’t like Corbyn because she wants Labour to go UKIP on immigration, and he refuses. Her family company is a major tax avoider, and I suspect she’s much richer than Cameron or Osborne.

If the Labour Right get him out it will be a bad day for democracy - and leave the UK with no real opposition to right wing politics.

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I’m sure that there’s an American who will tell us that we should all be armed to the teeth so we can resist the theft of our EU citizenship by the government.

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Specifically the scene where the giant alien death ray blows up London.

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I really don’t know what to think about Corbyn.

I like that he is actually left-wing. But against that, he does appear to be utterly incompetent. Admittedly, it doesn’t help him that his parliamentary party can’t stand him.

But he was completely worthless during the referendum; almost certainly because if he wasn’t the Labour leader, he’d have been campaigning for Brexit.

I don’t know what to make of the Labour party right now. I don’t know who they represent. Is there a working class party these days? Is that UKIP? And if Labour is the party of the metropolitan liberal, why do we have them and the LibDems?

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I used to see their posters up and think, “Who is this Welsh band, PWEI?”

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A whole lot of posts for something that happened a day ago, what say we wait a year and then panic.
See you next year.

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Yes, if there is anything to be learned from this, then it is that a lack of interest in the politics of the world around you has never hurt anyone.

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Whoa! It’s not that bad. Let’s not give up yet. :slight_smile:

I didn’t know the Silly Party had taken over. Can we move them into the unofficial Very Silly Party and embed them in a slab of concrete?

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Sure, let’s wait a year to discuss. It’s not like there’s anything notable happening right now…


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I didn’t think you did, just adding the movie reference to the voting age conversation.

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Thanks for quoting one douchebag quoting a disaster sci fi movie.

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I don’t think they know any more. They have certainly lost touch with the needs and objectives of their traditional working-class base, and I’m not sure there are many within the party that have the necessary skills or character to speak to that demographic, at the moment. The working class themselves (generalising, of course) have been ideologically captured by the right-wing tabloids - who are offering bullshit solutions to their problems and worries - but at least talking about them, when many politicians seem to think that working-class fears are beyond the pale even to mention.

The left-wing agenda that Corbyn is offering might be a route back from the ivory-tower alienation between Labour MPs and their core voters - if the parliamentary party would actually go for it. Instead they have been half-hearted and muted in every major engagement since he was elected.

At least if there is a leadership challenge, he’d likely get straight back in.

He does have faults and I’m concerned that he may not be tractable on mitigating them. He is clearly someone who wishes that political success was built upon rational consideration of the arguments, by the electorate, and his considerable passion for progressive politics - obvious when you consider his career - doesn’t convert into the kind of inspirational rhetoric which we need to counter the base, rabble-rousing demagoguery that’s going on at the moment.

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This is something I find interesting about the age conversation- it’s the older people, close to or in retirement, whose investments are most immediately fucked. Younger people have more time to ride out crashes, if they even own stocks yet. Personally, I think the market is gyrating and panicking because of the uncertainty, and I think in 2-5 years when people know how it will play out and investors will have priced in all the new info it will all calm down to whatever new level it settles at. Then I think it would not be premature to say “look! The Markets are saying this was a Bad Thing!” (and, I might add, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to stock market gyrations in general anyways). But until then, the markets hardly know any better than we do how this will all play out.

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See here:

It’s not often that one decision can cripple your own economy, damage global investor confidence, imperil one of the most successful alliances in modern history, foster the rise of ultra-nationalists, precipitate the possible breakup of your own country, deeply divide your own party and cause a great schism between voters of every ideological stripe, but this is one of them.

Well done, David Cameron.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/24/opinions/brexit-a-very-british-fiasco-bergen/index.html

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I believe that on a good day he can make it through nearly 140 consecutive characters

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Oh yeah. Water. Kind of important. In order to compensate from possibly getting kicked off the Colorado river, we’d have to redirect more water to SoCal so they don’t die, but it is doable. We’d have to grow a little less alfalfa, but we could do it.

Sure, the markets are freaking out, but at some point will settle to a new normal that will still be terrible for the UK. It’s still notable when a currency falls that hard that quickly, though. There are many things that are notable today beyond just the market panic. There’s Cameron’s resignation. There’s Farange explaining that well, the two promises he’d said Brexit would bring, booting out the immigrants, and giving 350 million to the Health Service, were just lies. There’s the people cropping up explaining that they only voted for the thing to pass because they didn’t think it would happen. There’s the dawning reality of the sea of problems this will cause for millions of regular people, from smaller things like complications to travel/passports, to the problems this will cause for British people living and working in the EU facing the consequences, the lost job opportunities to the younger people who now have a far smaller job market, the probable lost opportunities to participate in the ESA and other European science programs, the various pending crises the NHS will face (hiring, funding, et al.), the collapsing pensions, the various foreign investors/job sources in the UK who’d explained they’d leave if Brexit passed now preparing to do so, the impending loss of EU funds to the most needy parts of the UK that haven’t any new sources, and so many other things besides. I was really just pointing out that there really are things to talk about today, and we needn’t wait a year to be permitted to discuss.

Brexit was a misguided attempt at an attack on a crap status quo that was clear from the start would turn out like so, and it’s perfectly fine to talk about that now rather than waiting.

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Wonder what it’ll do for her heating allowance?

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