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Europe --- In or Out


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1 hour ago, Rayvin said:

I want to set out a bit of the 'how we got here' in terms of the disillusionment of Remainers - not with the intention necessarily of changing Quiff's view, but with the goal of demonstrating why I hold the view that I do.

 

1 - Farage and Johnson both claimed we would remain in the single market after Brexit. Johnson actually gave a speech the day after the vote claiming that nothing would change; he did this outside of his house as I recall, as the press swarmed him. He obviously had no idea what he was talking about (even at the time he looked shellshocked) but his vision of Brexit at that stage was within the SM. (Further point - 'hard left Corbyn' was actually the first person to call for us to leave after the vote, and wanted to leave immediately). Johnson continued to be telling his EU counterparts (while he was foreign secretary) that we would remain in the single market right up until the moment he left the post claiming that he couldn't support May's deal because it wasn't extreme enough.

 

2 - I recall making a post on here not complaining so much about leaving the EU, but about how pointless it was to leave the decision making setup and become a rule taker through a Norway style deal. I was frustrated with how ridiculous that was logically - but from what I remember, at that stage, no one was talking about ignoring the result. We were talking about what it would look like and how to find the least bad version of it. There was no serious expectation that we would be forced into a hard Brexit because it was even more ludicrous than a soft one, and because this was not a landslide referendum. It was a slight difference of a couple of percentage points.

 

3 - Theresa May had ample opportunity to reach cross party consensus on Brexit but refused to do so because she was more interested in avoiding schism within the Tory party than she was in the actual best interests of the country. Over the course of time, she was forced into a harder and harder Brexit because around 60-70 of her own MPs (enough to break her majority) on the hard right of the party, consistently voted down her deals. This was despite a sizeable contingent of the Remain wing voting with her, and the fact that Labour made clear they'd vote for her deal if she included protections for workers rights. These small compromises with Remain, had they been offered, would have seen her deal go through. I hated these compromises, but the fact remains that they were ignored by the only people who had the power to control what was happening. The Tories. We got the most right Brexit possible because of the Tories. No one else.

 

4 - Elections. The Brexit ultras went in hard on the idea that "80% of the country voted for a Brexit supporting party" in the 2017 elections and that this somehow proved that people wanted to get Brexit done. This was a fallacy because I knew many people who voted for Labour, none of whom wanted Brexit. However, it was very much believed that Labour's course on this could and would be changed because the membership was on the whole, opposed to the stance that Corbyn had at that point (i.e. that Brexit had to happen in whatever form as long as we could get protections for workers rights). This is of course what happened in the end, Labour was indeed compelled to take up a different position. Then we get to the 2019 election which you've indicated suggests that there was a landslide in favour of Johnson's Brexit deal. I mean yes, in terms of constituencies, there was. But in terms of actual voters, parties who were either offering a second referendum or a straight cancel of Brexit (i.e. Remain friendly parties) won an overall majority of voters. By 1.4m people (i.e. if you combined the votes between Greens, LD, SNP, SF and Labour it outdoes the total achieved by looking at the Tories, Brexit Party, DUP and UKIP). So we can see here that the MAJORITY of the electorate has been denied an outcome they voted for.

 

Tl;Dr - Remainers have been cut out of this process in absolute terms since day one because they were not Tory voters. That's the long and short of it. And while there was plenty of initial room for bridge building, none of these options were taken by May or Johnson, who preferred instead to railroad us into something we fundamentally didn't want, in its most extreme form, to consolidate their own personal power.

 

Why Quiff, seriously, should I ever, EVER get on board with that? It isn't leavers who have been hard done by in this, it's Remainers. It's them that need to 'win us over', not the other way around. I am so thoroughly disillusioned with this country and this system, that I don't have it in me to swallow all of the above and come out saying "ah well, let's try and find something to agree on for the good of the country". I just don't. I feel like all of us have been shafted by a bunch of rich, born to rule arseholes - and that some of us have our heads in the fucking sand about it.

 

I'd happily unify around "Johnson should be tried for treason" if that's of any interest?

 

Good post, I agree fully. The thing you missed out though was that Scotland and Northern Ireland, which are separate countries, voted against Brexit which has caused a constitutional crisis in both countries. And as we know NI is now an unsolvable problem because of the nature of the chosen Brexit. I will never get behind a Brexit that will ultimately split the UK. Give me my FoM back and get us in the SM and I am relatively happy, otherwise the government can get fucked. 

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Another thing that pisses me off about the referendum was that the people who would be affected most by Brexit didn't have a say on it. That's EU nationals living in the UK (and contributing taxes), UK immigrants living in Europe, and young people coming up to University age (possibly eligible for Erasmus). Well done Brexiteers for fucking their lives up, several people I know just gave up on the UK and moved back home. Were talking highly professional people here who can't be easily replaced. But yeah, we just need to get behind it. 

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As long as I live I’ll say it’s the biggest con ever pulled on this country’s people. 
 

Well, maybe up until the Tory Fascist Party do away with democracy…

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24 minutes ago, TheGingerQuiff said:

That's the thing about polarised politics. Everything the other side does is dishonest, fake news etc. And the result is democracy not being respected

 

The problem with that statement though is it gives cover to the side that are worst by implying that both sides are the same. Yes, there is spin and dishonesty on all sides of most political arguments, but we're talking 90% on one side here. There's a reason all the professors, scientists and experts lined up on one side of the argument around Brexit - not because they all had vested interests in the outcomes, but because they spend their lives analysing data dispassionately and using it to form evidence based conclusions. Quite how we got to the point where these people's opinions on their specialist subjects should be weighed the same as people who can only be described as dangerously uninformed... I mean I'm not completely certain, but I think it's at least partially from statements like the one you've just made.

 

So the problem then becomes that you have one side that is mostly truthful being compared to a side that is almost always lying. And because people who support the liars aren't idiots, and can see that their side is lying, they feel like they have to assume that "everyone in politics is lying" in order to continue to justify their positions. Not everyone was lying about Brexit - a lot of what Remain said wasn't fake news and we can see that now because it's actually happening. Hardly anyone on 'our side' is lying about the pandemic. Or vaccines.

 

I read plenty of right wing news sources and I can see the areas where the left is disingenuous, but this isn't a left right issue as has been said before. It's a common sense versus wilful ignorance issue.

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Added to that, part of the reason for the ongoing lack of acceptance of the referendum result is how close it was, because that makes it all the easier to believe that specific lies in the run-up to the referendum made the difference. If it had been 65-35, well, okay, a sober analysis could still easily attribute that to a deliberate drip-feed of misinformation over a longer period of time, but it wouldn't feel quite as much like daylight robbery. But when it's 51.9-48.1, it's not hard to think that a "TURKEY (population 76 million) IS JOINING THE EU" leaflet on every doormat and a "Britain's new border is with SYRIA and IRAQ" advert on every Facebook feed were enough to tip the scales, and I'll never not be at least a little bit angry about that.

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1 hour ago, TheGingerQuiff said:

Renton and those that stormed Capitol Hill, standing shoulder to shoulder 

You’re shit at this btw 

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I mean, IMO on this you're wrong. Renton is exercising free speech to voice an opinion on a political event. The Capitol Hill insurrectionists forced their way into a government building to (ridiculously) attempt to force a coup d'etat.

 

You'll be right once Renton storms Parliament :lol:

 

How is it the same?

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1 hour ago, TheGingerQuiff said:

Two groups not respecting a democratic vote. Tell me I'm wrong

Come on, why can’t you just gracefully accept to be conned. That’s how fraud works, no need to be angry about it.

An understanding of democracy as one of just sticking to unchangeable majority decisions is rather flawed tbh.

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1 minute ago, Isegrim said:

Come on, why can’t you just gracefully accept to be conned. That’s how fraud works, no need to be angry about it.

An understanding of democracy as one of just sticking to unchangeable majority decisions is rather flawed tbh.

They weren't conned. 

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