It’s almost like some of them kinda feel that Britain missed out on all the fun most of Europe had in the mid-1930ies, and now finally have a go at it.
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And someone really doesn’t know when to stay silent:
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Happening here right now too! British and Irish people in general failed to realise that fascism didn’t take hold of us in the 30s by pure historical accident. The likes of Mogg think it’s because the English are special and better. People like that are dangerous. See him congratulating England after the Bulgaria match, conveniently ignoring what was done to Raheem Sterling.
Though it has to be pointed out that the UK is, by some distance, the least terrible place to be black in Europe.
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Admittedly, you are in some kind of trouble if David Cameron thinks of you as a greased piglet.
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We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that, despite all his supposed regrets and criticisms of May and de Pfeffel, Cameron would be loyal to the Tories and eager to cash in on the post-Brexit kleptocracy they’re cooking up.
I get what you’re saying, and know you don’t want a hard Brexit, but “the worse the better” isn’t a good approach even in theory. I’d rather see a People’s Referendum clear this mess off the table entirely before British liberals and progressives turn their sights, in logical progression, to what I agree is the utterly broken political system that allowed the mess in the first place.
That said, I’m not optimistic that Corbyn is interested in repairing that system as much as he is working it to his advantage.
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I imagine the flow of goods would be very one-sided into the UK, or do you think the entire Kingdom could afford to pass up on customs in all their import, while having to pay when trying to export their haggis, or whatever they make that the world can’t get anywhere else.
How about this:
While the irregular border is really long, the distance between Lough Foyle and Carlingford Lough is just about 125 kilometers. The Zollgrenzbezirk (Customsborderzone) as Germany has it, is 30 km inland from the borders and the coastlines.
If Ireland instated a ‘customsbordezone’, by any name, of 70 km, it could enforce all of the customs on trade it cared to, while not respecting the border between nations, or impeding the freedom of travel of EU- or Northern Irish citizens.
To stop the so much feared “invasion” from all the continents, the reason for Brexit, is then still up to the UK. That North Channel is in the wrong place, and they just can’t figure out where to build their wall.
There’s been some analysis of that, apparently. And Welsh people voted Remain on the whole. It was English people who had moved to Wales that made the difference to Leave.
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Well from what I gather “boris’ deal” really pretty much is may’s deal (but made worse). The BBC reported this - they said that boris’ deal is about 90% the same as may’s deal. Yes that’s right the UK wants the best deal ever, after the best deal ever after the best deal ever (!).
But then neither of these things (may/boris deal) are a deal. They are a withdrawl agreement. The EU has been pretty clear all along on trade deals and a WA (withdrawl agreement) - you do the WA first and only when that is done you can talk about trade deals.
Mind you given the sheer hoplesness over here in the UK of our negociators and politicians it would take a very long time to get a trade deal with the EU. For a start there’s the transition peroid that runs until the end of 2020 so that’ll be the UK remaining in the EU for another year at a minimum - but this time having to take all the EU’s rules and having no say on them.
Weather or not bozo boris will get his worse-than-may’s WA through parliament tomorrow is anyone’s guess and the whole thing is on a knife-edge. Also there may be amendments attached although (I’m no expert) the ones which will eventuall get debated and voted on will first have to be chosen by speaker bercow.
Some news outlets are reporting that the whole thing might be delayed and that bozo boris will have to “get an extension” no matter what. But who knows what will happen.
As for the DUP they appear to be dead against this bozo boris’ WA.
Nobody knows what’ll happen next. Maybe boris and his cocophany of cretins in government will get the WA passed but then when it comes to passing legislation afterwards so as to make the WA work maybe he blocks it to ensure a crash out and blame the EU? Or maybe wait until after an election, invent some or other fake claptrap, blame the EU and then just pull the UK right out of the EU (“Oh, it’s that evil EU they went back on my great deal…”).
I really must admit I am hoping that this boris’ awful WA dosen’t pass and that we don’t get stuffed with a tory government. Boris has been pretty much reading a lot from the trump playbook in recent times and should he become an elected PM with a majority things really do not look good. I’m already looking at the minimum wage and wondering if it either just gets “excemptioned to death” or killed; what joy - back to the days when your employer could pay you £1.50/hr. And that’ll just be the start of it.
Many people over here in the UK are worried about what will happen to the NHS. Not withstanding all the nonsensical lies spouted about “big spending increases” by bozo for the NHS (not only are they not going to happen, where does the money come from) it is feared one of the things he’ll do post brexit is flog off the NHS to the US. It’s pretty much the only thing we have left to sell here in the UK; the rest has already been sold off and privatized.
One suggestion I saw in one video online to stop brexit runs like this although I am not sure if it would even work. Corbyn should stand up and say that he’ll vote for bozo’s WA but attach a final vote (referendum) as a condition. And since there’s only two options on the table - bozo’s WA or No brexit, most people will take no brexit over the worst deal ever.
IHMO the best thing to do? Just kill brexit. Leave things as they are and remain.
ljones
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Wales the place voted to stay. And those same not technically Welsh residents of Wales would have a voice in independence as well.
There’s also been plenty of checking that shows the majority of the whole shebang favored, and favors remain. But in actual voting more leave voters turned out. And there’s an identifiable portion of people who voted leave, but did not want leave. Because they wanted to register their displeasure but did not expect leave to do well enough for there to be a risk of it happening.
The entire vote was a shit show and likely doesn’t represent actual support levels on either side.
Which is a major reason why I think shifts in support for independence/reunification are an important metric to look at when your trying to figure out where things actually stand. Its a related concept with a much, much longer history of detailed polling. That should be able to tell you something the mess around Brexit can’t.
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OK, that’s a fair enough response. I wasn’t seriously proposing it as some sort of refutation of the whole notion really. It was more the interesting side-effect that research has allowed into voting patterns (the same sort of research that is busy refuting the notion that because a lot of Labour constituencies voted Leave, actual Labour voters therefore were strong Leave supporters.)
On the other hand, as someone who was part of groups that campaigned before the referendum itself to try and get national majority requirements onto the legislation (because if the UK is truly four countries then all of them need to support the result in the same way), I guess I am probably touchier about this particular aspect of the result. [We kept being “promised” that since a referendum in the UK can only ever be advisory, this wasn’t going to be necessary regardless of the result. And nobody ever seemed to have an answer to the theoretical case that was proposed which was, of course, that E&W would vote Leave but Scotland would vote Remain… Three years later and I think we’ve finally accepted that there never was an answer that could possibly work whilst still keeping the UK intact.]
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You probably should be. Nothing about the vote was really particularly thought out, or even gestured at giving a shit what member countries beyond England thought. To my memory pretty much no one even wanted the vote to happen, and it was thrown together in pretty dumb ass short order.
I just don’t quite see how something like a national majority requirement, which would have made a hell of a lot of sense, is gonna impact anything to do with non-ethnically Welsh residents of Wales or less long term residents. Those people are residents of Wales, wherever they come from. And they’re gonna vote in Wales, and should vote in Wales, on a whole host of things. I’m sure it’s not what you’re getting at but that whole angle just seems to strike close to predicating things on ethno-nationalist grounds.
I mean the only way you prevent something like ethnically or technically English residents of Wales impacting a vote that way is by making Welsh votes count for Wales wherever they live, and English votes count for England wherever they live. Essentially predicating voting on Ethnic grounds. Which is all sorts of fucked up when you carry it out.
And its the sort of thinking that drives Brexit in the first place. I mean “other people came here and don’t match us on X” is kinda the whole thing right? That the pro-Brexit side essentially thinks this way, is a large reason for a lot of the opening divides within the UK. And the inability of the government to get anything done on the subject. It hasn’t just been about the immigrants and foreign countries, but those really old internal differences of identity or class and who sits at the top of them.
Which again. Don’t think that’s where you going with that. Just seems like the sort of real world resentment that can rapidly curdle into something else.
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Oops… congratulations, bozo, your 100% failure record remains intact! Even though it looks like this stupid fucking withdrawal agreement is going to pass, one that strips out rights for workers and environmental protections and puts a border between the mainland and northern ireland. People who think passing this stupid fucking agreement means we can put this behind us are very very naively mistaken, that’ll just be the beginning of the beginning.
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Again, you are right. I really wasn’t trying to make some ethno-nationalist point (and I know you don’t really think I was!) and nor, I suspect, was the guy who did the research I cited. It just seemed mildly entertaining as an observation that confirmed all the suspicions of the ultraRemainers (that it was only the English that wanted to Leave), that’s all.
I mean, there was a Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014 (which also had scad-loads of constitutional problems but that one was lost so we dodged that one…!) which was confined to people living in Scotland - ex-pat Scots didn’t get the right to vote, and nor did the vote exclude folk who had only just moved there. And I don’t think that there was anything wrong with that, if only because the UK has been around for long enough that we don’t have distinctions in our citizenship, even if we still have national identities. So one couldn’t reasonably provide inclusions and exclusions like that.
And that’s leaving aside the oddities (the long-term status of Gibraltar, which voted massively for Remain, is still unclear, for example, although Spain’s current behaviour over Catalonia isn’t helping that one either.) [In passing, that Scottish referendum is also almost solely responsible for the reason why Labour will find it very hard ever to have a Westminster majority again and also a big factor in the calamitous Remain campaign itself. But that’s a whole different kettle-of-fish!]
But yes, I do agree that Brexit was a lot more about class and resentment about the Westminster Bubble. No matter how unfair that resentment actually is (yes, I will defend Parliament as an institution quite a lot actually, even as I think that most governments have been miserable failures. But if it doesn’t reform itself as a result of the Brexit debacle, then it deserves to crumble into insignificance.)
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To be fair, it’s not wholly 100%. They did manage to win a vote on transferring oversight of EU environmental rules from EU law to UK law. But on the other hand, that wasn’t actually a government policy as such, so it probably doesn’t count.
(I’m not at all convinced that it is going to pass now. It might have done if the flat vote was today, but every additional day that passes is another day that the complicated web of contradictory promises Johnson made has to survive. And it barely made it to today. It looks as though he has lost the DUP permanently, and he still needs to win about half of the former Tories back, not to mention keeping the ERG on board - and the DUP aren’t happy with them at all.)
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Yeah, the withdrawal bill needs a lot more scrutiny that it would have gotten if they’d had the vote on saturday. This guy simply cannot be trusted with anything, including following the law.
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If it does pass, an amendment will undoubtedly be surely be attached for a confirmatory vote - Johnson’s deal vs. Remain.
An amazing march yesterday. Easily a million or more and I’m a good judge at this stage. Been on enough of them and haven’t seen anything like it since the Iraq war. Always good to talk with people in real life whose opinions may differ from yours without the rancor of the internet. It was refreshing to see that people really listen, learn, and compromise to work together in solidarity for a common goal. People talk a lot about the futility of marching but you just can’t beat talking to people face to face.
(edit: a bit drunk now) .
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Ya think? From where i’m standing that seems to be slipping further and further away. Coming from a protest of that size (i’d like to see numbers) must feel amazingly positive, i saw some of the speeches and they were great, particularly from hilary benn. However, we’ve been down this route before with the iraq war protests and although i’d dearly love a confirmatory referendum with remain on the ballot i just don’t see enough MPs having the stomach to support it.
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Yep. The numbers add up. Labour, the LDs, SNP, PC and Greens (304 votes) + Ind Cons who voted against government yesterday = (318) vs. Conservative, + Ind Cons who voted for Johnson yesterday (306), take away the 6 Labour diehards and UVF likely to abstain, so around +8 likely to vote for a confirmatory vote.
There was easily a million or more people there. Cops weren’t letting anybody into the demo from the South, they told me the crush had led to several people fainting.
(edit: timelines)
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I’ll grant you LD, SNP, PC and Green but you’re assuming the labour party goes for it wholesale and i just don’t see that, they have a leader who is a life long euro-sceptic who has done the bare minimum to support remain. Anyway, they already had a round of indicative votes of which this was one and it was defeated. Also, the independent conservatives who were kicked out were saying they were voting for the deal, certainly ken clarke and nicholas soames were.
ETA: Although, the numbers are trending in that direction. To it passing i mean.
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