Brexit Carried - Endgame

[Frelga]

I wondered this, too. It seems possible for the UK to rebuilt some of the alliances which truly were favorable to her, without having to be subject to the decisions of the EU. Maybe? So perhaps not all that was EU-centric is lost?

What I'm getting from my reading is pretty much what Nin says - that Britain will have to negotiate terms that are compatible with the EU rules anyway , and the EU will not be inclined to play nice. How much of an impact that will have on the UK economy, and the rest of the world, remains to be seen.

More importantly, how have you BEEN?

[anthriel]

I have been well! I will weigh in on one of the social threads and try to catch up. I missed you guys!

[yovargas]

Anthydear, perhaps just make that long footnote as your sig so you won't feel the need to restate it anytime you offer something resembling an opinion or point of view.

As always, so very good to see you.

[Frelga]

This article from The Economist seems to be fairly factual. The Economist in general seems to think that leaving will be bad for Britain, which only counts as a bias if they are wrong.

What happens now that Britain has voted for Brexit

Mr Cameron has promised that Britain would immediately invoke article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, which sets a two-year timetable to agree the terms of departure. But uncertainty about his own position could raise questions about this. If he steps down and a Brexiteer takes over as leader of the Tory party and as prime minister, he or she is likely to argue that Article 50 is biased against the interests of a country leaving the EU. Under Article 50, the terms of Britain’s departure would be agreed by the other 27 EU countries, without a British vote. So Brexiteers would prefer to negotiate informally, without invoking Article 50. The other 27 countries are unlikely to go for this.

The kind of deal offered is a longer-term question, with neither main option very palatable. The first is to become like Norway, which is a member of the European Economic Area (EEA), in return for which it is required to contribute to the EU’s budget and allow the free movement of people. The second is to opt out entirely, trading with the EU under the rules of the World Trade Organisation like America, China or any other country.

[anthriel]

Anthydear, perhaps just make that long footnote as your sig so you won't feel the need to restate it anytime you offer something resembling an opinion or point of view.

As always, so very good to see you.

As always, you are brilliant. I think I will!

[yovargas]

[Túrin Turambar]

C_G, that is the explanation from the few people I know who voted "leave." That the short-term result might be chaotic, but in the long-term, it would be beneficial to the UK.

Because people are so GOOD at predicting long-term results of anything, or giving up immediate enjoyment for potential of future benefit such as survival.

See "global warming."

On the other hand, this basically amounts to an argument against voting for any change where there is any uncertainty in the long-term consequences. At some point you have to take a calculated risk.

ETA: There's now chaos in the Labour Party, with Jeremy Corbyn facing a vote of no confidence in his leadership and half the shadow cabinet threatening to resign. I have to wonder if this isn't simply a case of the parliamentary party never particularly accepting Corbyn and taking advantage of the Brexit vote to move against him.

[Nin]

Túrin, could you please check the 26.000 words on cabbage? This may seem trivial to you, but it's part of those myths about the EU which rise people against it.

From all researches I have done, it is a hoax.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35962999

The chaos around Jeremy Corbyn is IMHO just the start and this will start a wildfire in many other European countries and parties. Reforms of the EU are necessary, but now they will be done in a climate of fear and hurry, which is not a good base for a positive outcome. A narrow victory of Remain still would have been a strong signal for reforms without the fear and chaos factor.

Also, the other member states want to start the Brexit negotiations right ahead. I watched a lot of German news in the last two days, and the reporters among other things said that they had faced more anti-german sentiment and had been called more often Nazis (this happens to every German once in a while) during the last weeks of the campaign than in twenty for some forty years of life in the UK. It is a sad resurgence of nationalism in its worse form: not an inclusive party with differences but an exclusion of the other.

Also, with the age of voters against remain, there is a strong question about a malfunctioning of democracy in this aging society: you have people voting for a future they won't have to assume.

This is a very interesting article about this "Theft of future", not at all Brexit specific, but it's unfortunately in German: http://www.zeit.de/2016/23/generationen ... -sparzwang

[Voronwë the Faithful]

A petition calling for a second referendum has now received over 3 million signatures. Parliament is required to address any petition that receives at least 100,000. Amusingly, the petition was actually started by a "leave" voter before the vote, when it looked like "remain" was going to narrowly win. I doubt that there will actually be other vote, but who knows?

Another wrinkle that I read about on Facebook from some of my UK friends is that there is some talk that the exit would need to be approved by all of the member countries of the UK (Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, England). Any truth to that?

[axordil]

One thing I think needs to be recognized by all parties involved is that globalization--really the crux of all the non-racist Leave arguments--is by its nature politically problematic. Its benefits are incremental and diffuse, while its costs are sudden and concentrated. It's a sort of reverse lottery you have no choice but to play, in which everyone gets a few bucks a week, except for a relative handful of people who lose everything to pay for it. Then the relative handfuls add up...and vote.

[Griffon64]

One thing I think needs to be recognized by all parties involved is that globalization--really the crux of all the non-racist Leave arguments--is by its nature politically problematic. Its benefits are incremental and diffuse, while its costs are sudden and concentrated. It's a sort of reverse lottery you have no choice but to play, in which everyone gets a few bucks a week, except for a relative handful of people who lose everything to pay for it. Then the relative handfuls add up...and vote.

Yep. That.

This is a truth that never seems to get addressed because the easy solution, the one that earns fist bumps in the echo chambers, is to give everyone who disagree with your point of view a quick whack with the racist stick.

There's plenty of policies that gain traction on the principle that it does good for many and hurts only a few - and those can get pushed through individually because the people hurt by them are too few each time to make a difference. But once you push through enough of those the critical mass builds up and you get an unforeseen explosion that you really should have foreseen.

It is easy to be baffled and claim racism, for example, around the rise of Donald Trump. Even though I don't believe he plans to, or can, improve this, he found the thing that a big bloc of voters had in common: diminished prospects, a feeling of having been left behind in their own country - and he stoked the flames. Of course a bunch of his supporters are terrible racists, but all of them have something in common with every single voter: a desire to better their own plight and provide for the futures of their families. We all differ on how to achieve that, but remember that that is the motivating factor for most people as they choose to live their lives.

There's a big block of people whose skills and ability to make a living have been outsourced to countries with lower labor costs. The proposed solution: get an education! have saddled a generation with a heap of debt right out the gate. But the uncomfortable truth is that we are not all STEM specialists or college material. What does this country, and all countries, have to offer those people? You cannot expect them to vote for your interests or to vote for a future that excludes them.

I think that is where the political and in some cases the intellectual elite falls flat: they see the world only from their perspective. They don't understand what life is like when you are not in an ivory tower, and when they see dissent, the prism they view the world through has no answer other than that those dissenters are somehow "base", or uneducated, or bigoted ... and an easy way to disparage a white person who is angry because their job was outsourced to a poorer country ( where the population is often predominantly non-white, because that is how our terrible world is skewed ) is to call them racist.

Mark my words: to stop this kind of thing before it turns really, really ugly, every policymaker and politician and business interest needs to take a good look at what they offer and who they offer it to. The rich and the upper middle class is thriving like never before, but the middle class and working class is having a tough time of it. Politicians and policymakers are mostly upper middle class. They need to stick their heads outside of the bubble for a minute and see how the voters are doing. There is a bunch of people who will never vote for Hillary not because they are racist, but because they don't see how a supporter of globalization* and war** will do their futures any good.

A random thought on jobs: a lot of those problems could be solved quickly and simply if the political will is there. In particular, imagine what we can do if we invested in America's infrastructure. That would create some pretty well-paying unskilled jobs, and you can't outsource local construction very easily. Repair bridges. Build new ones if needed. Repair roads. Build rail to move goods. Work on the electrical grid. Of course, this requires spending, and the majority of representatives with an R behind their names apparently break out in hives when there's talk of spending ( on anything other than war, war, war, it sometimes seems ). America's business runs on infrastructure. I just don't see why that knee-jerk opposition is valid in this case.

-------
* Hillary supported TPP and supported NAFTA as well, but she's coming around on the cost of it and her recent statements are encouraging - if she plans to follow through on them. However, the thing that still sticks in people's minds is that she supported NAFTA. So she'll have to do a hell of a better job getting her message out there if she wants to change that.

** War is a tricky one. You can't ignore the way the world is now, and you have to carry on what others have started. The US can't just drop the mess that a quarter century or so of war has made.

[yovargas]

That was a Good Post.

[Alatar]

Agreed.

[Primula Baggins]

Indeed. I hope to be back to say more later today--though not to dispute!

[LoremIspum]

I also think that Switzerland and Norway, two of Europe’s most successful countries, show that you can be integrated into Europe without being a member of the EU.

A divorce is not the same as not being married in the first place

So far we have no PM, nobody who wants to be PM, no opposition, no post referendum plan, the economy is tanking, Scotland and NI want to leave UK, there is a wave of hate crime against immigrants going across the UK and our leaders have gone hiding just waiting and buying time. This is what happens when you run your campaign on empty populist claims.

[anthriel]

Wow, Griff. Very well written, that.

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

C_G, that is the explanation from the few people I know who voted "leave." That the short-term result might be chaotic, but in the long-term, it would be beneficial to the UK.

Because people are so GOOD at predicting long-term results of anything, or giving up immediate enjoyment for potential of future benefit such as survival.

On the other hand, this basically amounts to an argument against voting for any change where there is any uncertainty in the long-term consequences. At some point you have to take a calculated risk.

There are those who would agree with that point of view, against voting. They believe the masses simply aren't qualified to make any decisions, that it should be left up to elected enlightened leadership. They are pointing to the Brexit vote as an example that people should lead political decisions to professional politicians.

[Primula Baggins]

There are those who would agree with that point of view, against voting. They believe the masses simply aren't qualified to make any decisions, that it should be left up to elected enlightened leadership. They are pointing to the Brexit vote as an example that people should lead political decisions to professional politicians.

Who exactly would agree? The commentary I'm reading says that this is what happens when "enlightened leadership" manipulates the information "the masses" receive. And that's the cause of the disaster. If voters understood the issues and the implications, many would have voted differently.

In other words, it's not that the "masses" (I prefer calling them voters) don't understand; it's that they were lied to. As has happened in our country, too.

There is nothing wrong with voting for change, if change is what people want. But they need true information on which to base their votes.

[LoremIspum]

There are those who would agree with that point of view, against voting. They believe the masses simply aren't qualified to make any decisions, that it should be left up to elected enlightened leadership. They are pointing to the Brexit vote as an example that people should lead political decisions to professional politicians.

Who exactly would agree? The commentary I'm reading says that this is what happens when "enlightened leadership" manipulates the information "the masses" receive. And that's the cause of the disaster. If voters understood the issues and the implications, many would have voted differently.

In other words, it's not that the "masses" (I prefer calling them voters) don't understand; it's that they were lied to. As has happened in our country, too.

There is nothing wrong with voting for change, if change is what people want. But they need true information on which to base their votes.

The vast majority of people vote based on emotions, not reason, that's the truth - reason never won elections, even reasonable people have to invoke an strong emotional response to get elected. The thing is - it's so much easier when there is a convenient scapegoat around and a lot of angry people.

Reason is boring and unemotional.

When you have a multicultural society and a lot of income inequality and people with free time on their hands due to either unemployment or stagnation, all the primitive 'defend my tribe' instincts start to kick in. Politicians in a mature democracy should know better, how many times does history need to repeat itself?

[Túrin Turambar]

Túrin, could you please check the 26.000 words on cabbage? This may seem trivial to you, but it's part of those myths about the EU which rise people against it.

From all researches I have done, it is a hoax.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35962999

Fair call that the cabbage example is a hoax. However, it doesn’t change the fundamental problem that, within the EU, a significant number of regulations have been made by undemocratic and not-particularly transparent political institutions. This why I think (contra Ax, as I’ll explain more below) the fundamental issue that drove the Leave case was power and accountability. If you’re a British voter, and you don’t like the policies of the British Government, you know that sometime within the next five years you’ll have the chance to go to a polling place and vote for a candidate in your constituency who better represents your views. The problem with the EU is that its institutions are largely-inaccessible to ordinary Europeans. You get to vote for a parliament, but it can’t initiate legislation or do many of the other things that legislatures typically do. Regardless of whether the issue is immigration, or trade, or sovereignty, or economic policy, or fiscal policy, if you don’t like the EU’s position on something there’s very little that you can do. It’s difficult even to understand how the institutions which set these policies function.

One thing I think needs to be recognized by all parties involved is that globalization--really the crux of all the non-racist Leave arguments--is by its nature politically problematic. Its benefits are incremental and diffuse, while its costs are sudden and concentrated. It's a sort of reverse lottery you have no choice but to play, in which everyone gets a few bucks a week, except for a relative handful of people who lose everything to pay for it. Then the relative handfuls add up...and vote.

I don’t think that this is entirely correct. Not everyone within the Leave side is anti-globalisation. A significant number are free-trade libertarian types, like (to an extent) Johnson and Gove. The Brexit Movie, which played a major part in drumming up support for the Leave case, argued that Britain was at its greatest in the late nineteenth century during a time of absolute free trade, and that the EU was hampering British access to foreign markets and visa-versa. There certainly are protectionists and anti-globalists on the Leave side, on both the left and the right of politics. But what united the Leave case was, as I said above, an appeal to Britain being able to set its own trade policy via an elected parliament.

There are those who would agree with that point of view, against voting. They believe the masses simply aren't qualified to make any decisions, that it should be left up to elected enlightened leadership. They are pointing to the Brexit vote as an example that people should lead political decisions to professional politicians.

Who exactly would agree? The commentary I'm reading says that this is what happens when "enlightened leadership" manipulates the information "the masses" receive. And that's the cause of the disaster. If voters understood the issues and the implications, many would have voted differently.

In other words, it's not that the "masses" (I prefer calling them voters) don't understand; it's that they were lied to. As has happened in our country, too.

There is nothing wrong with voting for change, if change is what people want. But they need true information on which to base their votes.

The problem with this argument is that the people who voted Leave did so against the directions of the leadership of the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democratic and Scottish Nationalist Parties, most large corporations, most newspapers and media outlets, and a sizeable number of public commentators. So they were hardly conned by their leaders, if they were conned. You can make the argument that they were manipulated by Johnson and Farage, and didn’t understand the implications of what they were doing, but you can make that argument about the result of any election which you (generic you) find unfavourable. For example, American conservatives in 2008, who argued that Obama had charmed the electorate into voting for him or won their support based on symbolism.