Exit before Brexit [CNN Article on foreigners leaving UK]

Great Debates
61

Oh, it’s all someone else’s fault? Well, I see, that’s OK then.

It’s not the fault of Remain voters - you know, the people who voted against the bigots - that Leave voters voted with the bigots. It’s not the fault of the Germans. Those poor Leave voters had a choice about whether they “compromised” with the bigots, racists and xenophobes. They chose to do it with their eyes open. “A big boy did it and ran away” is no excuse.

And anyway, what compromise? Compromise is when two sides both give something up. What have the racists surrendered? They’ve been let off the leash, the government’s pandering to them and they’re getting more than they could have hoped for. Compromise. Leave voters needed a longer spoon.

And as for this “respect the democratic mandate” nonsense: the only thing on the ballot was whether the UK should leave the EU. Nothing else. There is no mandate there for radically reducing student numbers. There’s no mandate there for making firms report on how many foreign workers they employ. There’s no mandate there jailing landlords for not knowing what a fake passport looks like. There’s no mandate for sending foreign doctors home.

You could almost forgive the government though. The Leave campaign was so explicitly anti-immigrant that they’re assuming everyone who voted for it was voting for anti-immigrant policies. They can’t imagine anyone would vote for that campaign who didn’t want foreigners out. And if Leave voters don’t like people assuming they’re anti-immigrant just because they voted for a nakedly anti-immigrant campaign the people they need to take it up with are their government.

62

The Telegraph is reporting that all EU migrants will be allowed to stay.

63

How dare you decide how I must use my vote, you Remain folk are so completely arrogant. In some ways, its partly the lofty disdainful attitudes of the Remains and the Euros that actually makes me want to kick you right up your complacent backsides

I voted for my reasons in the way I chose and you do not have the right to accuse me of anything merely because of my choice.

In fact your own view is evidence of a bigoted view of those with a different opinion to yourself, I would check out your own ethics and morals before you condemn others just because they have a different choice to you.

You accuse me of siding with racists and bigots, merely because you don’t like the outcome, well hard cheese.

I can vote for people with nice hair, I can vote for people who dress well, I can vote for anyone who puts themselves up for any reason that I like.

You are really disgusting, you seem to think - there were some in the Brexit camp whose morals you do not like and that means that I should not make a choice, well clue yourself up, there were two options, vote one way or the other - there were no conditionals on either of the options.

You have the right to state that in your opinion, the vote is a bad thing, you can also claim I made a bad decision, you also have the right to campaign for a vote in the future to reverse that decision - after all, this is called democracy but ultimately it was my decision to make and not yours.

What you do not get a free pass on is to somehow use my choice to try paint me as a stereotypical racist and bigot, you have never had that right

You somehow imagine that you get to decide that I must take a different line because you do not particularly like the views of some other people, whom I have never met, but who do not meet up with your own self certified lofty standards.

There is another view, democracy means having the right to make choices, whether good or bad - I don’t care about your view, and the reason I don’t care is simple - all you do is accuse and condemn, why would I ever want to be associated with a person like that?

My reasons are my reasons, you do not have the corner on logic or rationality, and you do not have the magical device to allows you to see the future. I can see the past, I can see the present, I can see UK control over its affairs being usurped, I see plenty of flaws in the EU I can also see the we are paying for the party. If they will not actually take into account our concerns and if they decide to persist in the direction they are taking in a largely undemocratic manner, then we are better off without them.

The EU is notionally democratic, the mechanisms appear to be in place, but it isn’t.

64

casdave: not once, not ever, have I said that you are racist, or a bigot, or a xenophobe. What I have said, and what I will stand by, is that:

  1. You voted on the same side as the racists
  2. Your vote helped the racists win
  3. When you helped the racists win, you encouraged them to act on their racism

I know that’s uncomfortable to hear. But you’re an adult, and you can cope with the truth.

And one more thing: if you want to get angry at people who think your vote means you’re a racist, you need to be getting angry at the government. They are the ones claiming that the Leave vote means we need to get rid of foreign workers, they are the ones claiming the Leave vote means they have a mandate to cut down on foreign students, they are the ones claiming the Leave vote means they have a mandate to turn employers and landlords into border police. Did you vote for them to do these things? They say you did. They say you want the foreigners out.

Get angry at them.

65

Let me explain things to you: it’s YOUR fault. The words and actions of people like you are part of why Leave won.

Lots of people had lots of different reasons for voting the ways they did. On both sides there were good and bad reasons. These people coalesced into two groups: Leave and Remain. There were many people with good reasons to vote Leave, people who could have joined Remain had their issues been addressed. Instead, Remain lumped them in with the people with bad reasons and insulted them and berated them, as you continue to do. This pissed them off. So they voted to Leave when they might have voted Remain. It also pissed off people weakly associated with Remain who saw the dark side of Remain and decided that they did not want to be part of that sort of EU and so switched to Leave.

As I’ve said before, I expected a solid Remain victory. I was wrong. But it’s no use crying over the result. If you dislike the result so much, I’ll remind you that you still have the right of residence in other EU countries, and I’m sure you’ll be able to apply for citizenship in due course. Of course, your new fellow citizens may make other decisions you dislike; what will you do then?

66

Stanislaus, you won’t forget to respond to this: How do Remain voters sleep at night knowing people are drowning in the Mediterranean because of their implicit encouragement …

67

And if the Leave voters had done something to reign in the bigots on your side, you might have avoided turning your country into a toxic swamp of racist violence and discrimination. But you not only didn’t push back against them, you let them run the entire campaign.

And don’t give me that, "I only voted with the racists because the other side kept pointing out how racist they were. Sorry you got your feelings hurt, but that doesn’t give you a pass on standing with Nigel Farage.

68

My side? I respect rather than like the Leave vote. That’s what you do in a democracy when the vote goes against you. And then you work democratically to change it. I have no truck with the likes of the National Front, the BNP, and other idiotic racists.

69

LOL. Brilliant :smiley:

Hell hath no fury like a liberal on their imaginary high ground.

70

Sorry, I didn’t realise you thought you were making a point worth pursuing. But as you insist on claiming some sort of analogy between one aspect of EU policy and an explictly racist referendum campaign:

  1. Backing the current, actively pursued EU policy of rescuing asylum seekers;
  2. Acknowledging that even if the EU were sending gunboats to blow asylum seekers out of the water, conditions in the Middle East and North Africa are sufficently horrific that there would still be people risking their lives to come here
  3. Regretting that the UK no longer has any position in the EU from which to fight for a better solution.
  4. Supporting charities and pressure groups fighting for change.

Imagine if the millions of non-racist leave voters were stepping up now and sending a clear signal to the government that they’ve got no business interpreting their vote as a mandate to make the UK unattractive to foreign workers.

But look - in the other thread you were quite clear that you were happy to ally with racists and give them what they want in return for what you want. So that’s fine. All I’ve been asking is that Leave voters acknowledge the bargain they made. Racists are attacking and abusing foreigners on our streets in growing numbers, our government is demonising foreigners in response - some people might think that was a bad outcome that we should try to do something about. But you don’t, you think it’s price worth paying.

There’s not much to add to that really.

71

“Imaginary?” Based on that quote Stanislaus fished up, and the 42% spike in hate crimes that’s a direct result of the referendum you supported, it would appear my high ground is as solid as the Rock of Gibralter.

72

I won’t argue with you that the Remain campaign was appalling. But neither they nor I put a gun to anyone’s head. According to you, people went into the voting booths and had the following thought process:

“On the one hand, if I vote Leave in the face of this plainly bigoted campaign, I’ll be allying with racists and giving my approval to a very ugly brand of politics. On the other, though, my feelings are a bit hurt. So…”

If people genuinely lined up with the people behind the Breaking Point poster because they were in a huff then they need to grow up sharpish. And there is so much they can do. Write to their MPs. Talk to their friends. Use social media, how easy is that? Because if their government is treating them like racists. Their government is twisting their vote into a mandate to ban foreign students and get rid of foreign workers. Their government watched them vote with the bigots and decided they were all bigoted.

I don’t know how they can stand that, but apparently they can.

73

Wrong again, people went into the voting booth to make their choice.

They made their choices for all sorts of reasons, my view is that you are anti-British, unpatriotic, and have no pride in the democratic process that Britain has done so much to develop.

You decided to vote for the frightened option, you decided it was too difficult to live in a world where we take responsibility for our own affairs, you voted for a nice safe fluffy Europe one that has been taking the financial piss out of Britain for decades.

Its that fear that Merkel and co tried to exploit when they sent David Cameron home with nothing more than a polite meeting under his belt. They gave us nothing, they expected us to be timorous wee beasties, kow-towing to the EU mantra. If they had actually thought about what they were doing, maybe they might have thought about British bloody mindedness, maybe they would have thought the perhaps we might just have a point, maybe they might have actually tried to negotiate in good faith with Cameron - but they didn’t.

And how has the Euro project helped Greece may I ask, or Ireland, or Spain? All those Eastern euros, why did they join, it certainly was not to pay into Europe, oh no, it was to take the piss out of the mugs who pay in.

All the while they take our right to run our own courts, they usurp our parliamentary system, and the turn our borders into porous zones over which we have no control.

Seems to me that the Remains lack the bottle to take their own decisions about running the UK, they have simply bottled it.

And now I am guilty in some nebulous way, guilty by association, you really are not very wise at all, in fact you are offensive.

I have the right to choose, simple as that, it turns out others have their own reasons, but how dare you suggest that my actions were somehow intended to be an enabler.

The Remain lot can’t handle it, poor babies.

74

The buyer’s remorse of certain Leave voters is really quite amusing.

“I’m not a massive racist, even although I voted the same way all the massive racists did.”

75

No buyer remorse, looks far more like losers sour grapes to me - deal

76

LOL. As I said elsewhere, rejecting the liberal framework of the Referendum being a binary choice of whether the UK was a compassionate nation, was and is intellectually coherent - for everyone from Tony Benn to Boris Johnson.

Save your happy-clappy, middle class, liberal wank for those angst ridden Waitrose-fuelled dinner parties.

Fwiw, this is largely what the referendum was about for me and an awful lot of others, though you wouldn’t hear it then and won’t now because we’re all xenophobic knuckleheads:

http://hurryupharry.org/2016/06/20/why-i-am-voting-leave-by-professor-alan-johnson/

77

We’ll see.

78

This is funny. It’s not the happy-clappy middle-class liberal wanks who’ll be hurt by the disruption to trade you voted for.

79

casdave, up the junction, you make excellent points about the wisdom of staying in the EU.

But really, you should find someone who’s arguing that there were no good reasons to leave the EU and make those points to them.

At the risk of repeating myself*, my argument is this:

Lots of non-racist Leave voters voted with the racists.
The racist nature of the Leave campaign made it patently obvious that racists would take a win as an endorsement for racism.
Knowing the first thing about how politicians’ minds work would have told Leave voters that a vote endorsing a flagrantly anti-immigrant campaign would result in a lurch towards anti-immigrant policies.
They won. That’s what they won. They won a more racist Britain. Now they have to deal.
*I have now repeated so many times that my argument is that non-bigoted Leave voters have encouraged and enabled racists by voting with them **without themselves being racist **that the next time I read words like “apparently we’re all xenophobic knuckle-heads” or “how dare you call me a racist” I will read them as “I either cannot or will not understand simple written English”.

80

Yeah, imagine being upset as your country backslides towards racism!

Then again, imagine not being.