Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/10/idiot-posh-boys.html
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Don’t leave out George Fucking Osborne or the shitweasels that simpered in the background.
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I’ve been saying for years that at least a partial reason was austerity, the demonstration of what the EU did to Greece when it had problems, and the memory of what happened to the UK during the late 70’s and early 80’s deindustrialization would have been at least a partial driver to the Brexit vote.
Honestly any nation who did to one of their states what the EU did to Greece deserves to die. I know someone is going to come along and point out that Greece lied and cheated, but I don’t care: stripping a state of it’s assets and selling them off to your cronies at pennies on the dollar and eliminating pensions for people who have retired and forcing them to go back to work is wrong; and anyone who says otherwise is a fink.
The UK had enough austerity to show that the EU would cut them to ribbons like it did to Greece if it was in Germany’s best interest.
I like the concept of the EU. They need to grow up, actually put on their big boy panties and realize that they ARE a nation in every sense of the word, get a representative form of government based on people, and care more about people than finances.
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Duh! Pretty much anyone with half a brain and any awareness of UK politics since the crisis of 2008 and later Tory election victory knows that much of the Brexit vote was a kick against the estabishment for the austerity ravages the country suffered under the Cameron/Osborne fuckwit austerity.
(That and the immigration issue, but the perceived negatives of immigration were exaggerated by loss of jobs due to austerity: ‘they’re taking our jobs’ … no, Osborne’s fuckwittery is taking your jobs!)
Torn between ‘didn’t need any study to tell me that’ and ‘nice to see it confirmed by some academic study’
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Those that believe austerity works would probably also say that you can’t fix things by throwing maney at it. To which Molly Ivins would have replied: How do you know? No one has ever tried it!
I didn’t really need more evidence that Leave voters were short-sighted fools and/or racists, but I’ll take it anyhow.
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Yes.
For more information please reread the above.
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What happened to Greece was a very good argument against the common currency. Britain rather notably is not part of the eurozone.
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Um, you know we vote for MEPs right? It’s at least as representative as the UK’s government, arguably maybe a bit more (proportional representation in the voting, and no House of Lords).
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There is a pre-print available, though.
I appreciate your feelings but a lot of what you are saying is plain wrong I’m afraid:
“what happened to the UK during the late 70’s and early 80’s deindustrialization” - this was driven by cheap coal from countries outside the EU and cheap steel from China. And Thatcher’s antipathy towards the unions who she felt had too much power within those industries. Our car industry plain sucked…
“what the EU did to Greece deserves to die” - the outcome was awful but the cause came from the Greek government of the day, who worked to bend the figures to meet the EU’s economic criteria used to evaluate the strength of a candidate economy.
“The UK had enough austerity to show that the EU would cut them to ribbons like it did to Greece if it was in Germany’s best interest.” - During the last 3 years in the UK I have not read a single article or spoken to a single person for whom that was a concern. This was our own self-immolation, most ironically from a position of relative economic strength.
“I like the concept of the EU. They need to grow up” - Oh dear, this is the worst: compared to our politicians, the EU sound like the most reasonable grown-ups you have ever met!
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My understanding is that each country gets exactly 2 MEPs, regardless of size. So Luxumburg gets two votes, Germany gets two votes, and the UK gets two votes. (At the very least, England, Scottland, and Wales need to get two votes each, and Ireland… ah, that’s a hard question- is Northern Ireland it’s own country; should it get two votes and Ireland two votes, or should Ireland get a vote and Northern Ireland get a vote? And I suspect that there would be some strange bedfellows in that discussion…)
They need a bicameral legislature of some kind with a lower chamber where the representation is based on the number of people in the country, preferably tied back to districts.
From this side of the Atlantic (so remember; while I watch TLDRNews, it’s not like I get more than the highlights) it sounds like only the economic aspects of regulations are considered; it feels like the bankers and economists run the show with an outsize concern for economic and business matters. It feels like the EU still thinks of itself as a trade federation most of the time even though they are functioning as a national government.
ETA: This is an area that I am a bit less sure of. I’m describing my understanding in case I’m wrong, so you understand where my opinions are coming from. If I am wrong, let me know, so I can adjust my opinions. 
I don’t think it came out like I meant it to.
No. there are 751 MEPs, of which 73 are from the UK.
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Great! They’ve already implemented my suggestion! 
lol
I shall update my opinions accordingly!
This sounds a lot like the kind of thing UKIP and the Brexiteers have been saying for years, so you might want to re-think your media consumption, especially if they made you think that we only get two MEPs per country.
That said, if anyone can explain to me the reason for the allocation of seats per country, I’m all ears. It seems to be based on population, but not quite?
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Could you recommend a few good news sites? I try to pay attention to BBC, but I suspect that on this one issue it may be a little more colored than I’d like, given the government’s stance on Brexit. (Normally it seems very centered and apolitical, but then again, hard to tell from so far away…)
A combination of the BBC, RT, and Al-Jazeera, is probably a good start. They all have their own biases, but generally different ones.
I like google news as well, for the way it just throws all kinds of articles in front of you, from outlets you’ve never even heard of.
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It has never been unbiased and apolitical (centrism is a bias of it’s own, and not one that the BBC leans towards). From before Brexit was a thing:
And the BBC study that the article was based on, which found a right wing bias.
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Note that the BBC management is now near exclusively hardline Tories… The BBC of now is a pale fraction of what it was just 10 years ago, gone from my primary news site to one i won’t even bother looking at…
Whilst they don’t often outright lie, the omission of many things that make the Tory party look bad is a serious problem…
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