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Brexit


Devon Malcolm

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50 minutes ago, Brewster McCloud said:

Is it just me who feels a wee bit sorry for May? What a mess she inherited from that prick Cameron. 

She wears shoes with diamands in and thinks running through corn fields is mischievous. So no.

Plus, she put her self up to take the lead. He didn't leave and she was made to become PM, she chose it.

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Brexit could've been accomplished in a non-damaging, orderly, and humane way, but it's been handled as badly as possible. We've been members of the EU for 40 years, with so much of our economy, legislature, infrastructure, and politics intertwined, that leaving within just two years was never going to be possible, and to demand it was childish and asinine.

First thing they could've done to not balls this up would've been to approach this with goodwill instead of taking the position of treating the EU like a hostile entity. That it took so long to provide any kind of reassurance regarding the status of resident EU citizens in this country was disgusting, and emblematic of the xenophobia driving the Leave campaign. They should've straight away ring-fenced their rights of residence, on their own initiative, to show good faith, that they weren't going to use people's lives as a bargaining counter, and that they expected the same good-faith guarantees of Britons living abroad.

Second thing they could've done was delayed activating Article 50 until they had some fucking idea of what they wanted to take to the negotiating table. As I've mentioned earlier in this thread, the sheer cretinousness of the right-wing Brexiters has been astounding - they've been whinging about the EU for 40 years, and yet provided no case studies, white papers, research, or any kind of structured, researched proposals that they could've presented to cabinet and Parliament to vote on in the lead-up. They've literally been reactive, not pro-active about this.

Third thing is they could've stopped treating the referendum result like a fucking zero-sum game, in which the Brexiters get everything they want on the basis of a narrow victory, and recognised that there were almost as many people who didn't want Brexit because it would fuck their lives up, and try to find a way to come up with compensatory solutions that would address Remainers' concerns, instead of just telling them "you lost, get over it".

There's a load more, but that's plenty to start with.

Edited by Carbomb
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7 minutes ago, Brewster McCloud said:

Why, you could almost be Michael Heseltine, carbomb.... Great minds etc.

Well, no, because I'd want a Lexit. A big chunk of why the Tories want Brexit is that breaking free of the EU's Working Time Directive means they'll have free reign to roll back workers' rights, smash unions further, etc.

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2 hours ago, Carbomb said:

Well, no, because I'd want a Lexit. A big chunk of why the Tories want Brexit is that breaking free of the EU's Working Time Directive means they'll have free reign to roll back workers' rights, smash unions further, etc.

That's a big a reason why I'm still living in this country and haven't looked at emigrating elsewhere yet. Once that gets fucked off, it will only take the NHS crumbling to the ground before I'm forced out of this cesspit.

Despite knowing where I stand on the left-right scale, I'm not really a politically intelligent person (fuck, even that phrasing makes me sound like the real simpleton that I am).

However, I know that I'm extremely thankful for benefits such as the WTD and the NHS, and the National Minimum Wage, the 28 days paid holiday, sick pay and maternity pay. With Brexit looming over and all the chaos surrounding it, all my worries concern those amazing benefits being ripped away from us by the Torries, or other right-wing parties, no matter how irrational that fear may be.

To an upper-middle-lower class peasant like myself, this is an awfully dreadful time.

Edited by Accident Prone
See Carbomb's post below
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2 hours ago, Brewster McCloud said:

Heseltine. He knew what Boris and the others were doing - fucking up the country for selfish ends - and said so at the time. 

Ken Clarke? 

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2 hours ago, Chest Rockwell said:

Is there any good reason why they couldn't have approached Brexit as a cross party initiative? The referendum campaigns weren't divided along party lines anyway so it would have made more sense.

I can think of two reasons. One is that the referendum was called by Cameron when his bluff was called by the headbangers in his own party as the 2015 Tory GE manifesto promised one in an effort to stop UKIP taking votes off them. Cameron was gambling on having to go into coalition again probably with the Lib Dems and could have claimed to sacrifice the referendum pledge as a deal to form another such government. Because he won with a small majority the Euroscepitcs would have caused hell had he held off from calling a referendum sooner or later, so he called one, confident he'd win and be able to tell his anti-EU MPs to STFU for the foreseeable future. Ergo, the referendum was called by Cameron more as a response to try and tame dissent in the Conservative party more than actually to debate the wider issue of the UK and its place in the European Union. The result obviously backfired for Cameron and the rest doesn't need explaining.

Secondly, both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have been burned by their associations with the Tories over the last few years, Labour got almost wiped out in Scotland in 2015 after the fallout of the independence referendum, while the Lib Dems suffered the same to a lesser extent but was far more hurt by being a minor coalition partner. Neither party could be blamed for wanting to work with the Tories on Brexit based on recent experience.

Edited by PJ Power
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2 hours ago, Carbomb said:

First thing they could've done to not balls this up would've been to approach this with goodwill instead of taking the position of treating the EU like a hostile entity.

Thing is C-Bomb, this is a nasty, messy divorce. The EU aren't interested in non-damaging, orderly or humane, and rightly so. If other nations see us walk away from the EU in a pleasant, orderly fashion then why wouldn't they maybe want the same? Not every nation in the group is entirely convinced by the entity.

They aren't actively trying to cause damage to the process (certainly not as much as our own politicians are, that's for sure) but they have no interest in seeing the process go smoothly and Britain successfully walking away. In many ways this situation, regardless of how it played out, was always going to be an example to the rest.

The 'Tories have not had their problems to seek for sure, and are a shambles, but the other parties still playing politics is ridiculous as well. 

It's for this very reason that I always had doubts when people would say to me that we could effect change from within the EU. Not only is the organisation set up to actively discourage democratic change from the ground up, but our politicians aren't anywhere near capable of such a thing.

If the people charged with Governing our country, both EU and national government alike, weren't such power-hungry, careerist bastards we wouldn't be in this position.

For those of us who've been around for a few years this has always been on the cards. What we ended up with was what we actively sought out with how we vote and our priorities. It's populist politics, where personality and soundbites wins over all else. Has been for a while.

When the EU vote was announced I knew, as someone who's always argued against the EU and the road its going down from a left position, that the whole thing would be hijacked by cretins. On both sides.

It's like the US with trump, there's now no middle ground. There's two defined camps, and both sides only dig their heels in even more in the face of any type of discussion. Humanity in the UK is split into uneducated, angry, racist Brexit lowlifes and middle-class, sneer-down-their-nose types at the great unwashed who dare vote against the status quo.

In short, the whole thing is fucked. We leave the EU, one half of the nation will be pissed off and unhappy. We have a revote and the other half will be pissed off and unhappy. 

No one wins. Fuck the lot of it, it's time to burn it all to the ground and start again.

(I may or may not have had a few rum and cokes tonight 😁)

 

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