Outnumbered they may be, but that is a weak excuse for not even turning up for an election that decides your very future. Young voters might have had a chance to change the outcome of the referendum had their turnout been particularly high. Instead the voter turnout in the youngest age bracket was the lowest of all.
Or the EU could entice the Brits with concessions. I never followed the story — were there sober thinkers pushing for Brexit, or was it mostly just the “unwashed masses”?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Forget it, Jake — it’s Pearlclutching Town. Click Find and pick any PCP post at random to get a glimpse of his mindset.
Forgiveness and humility, hunh? Oh, that really captures right-wing “thought” like PCP’s in a nutshell! :rolleyes:
Irrelevant. Parliament is the ultimate decider and if those younger voters now contact their local MP’s and tell them they support remain then that will have an influence and thats the way the system works. Any government that supports leave has to be aware that demographics mean that they will be on the losing side within a few years. Personally I’d want to be on the party that supports the voters of the future rather than those that are diminishing with every year.
More concessions? Most commenters consider that to be highly unlikely, because it would set a precedent for other nations. Conventional wisdom is that the 27 EU members have made all the concessions they are willing to make.
People who have a background that makes them appear qualified to accurately predict the consequences of Brexit have almost exclusively recommended to vote remain. So much so that leave campaigner Micael Gove famously claimed in a Sky interview that the “people in this country have had enough of experts”. Turns out he was right.
When you are calling my point irrelevant you mean that it is irrelevant to the politics of British decision makers in the coming years, right? That may be so. I still believe that the Brexit will happen. Politicians make decisions based on what will benefit them at the polls today, not in ten years.
If you intended to say that it is actually irrelevant whether you turn up for an election, then you and I have a very different idea of democracy. My point was that the younger generation of Britons who are now getting the short end of the deal at least partly have themselves to blame, because too many of them did not exercise their right to vote. Are young Americans paying attention? Their chance to be smarter than that will come in November. The outcome of the Brexit referendum should serve as a lesson there - and that is by no means irrelevant.
In two years time it will be political suicide to vote for brexit. The actual terms of the leaving agreement will be known then and when the UK parliament actually votes on leaving the EU it will fail. Note that the UK can change it’s mind at any time during the two year period of negotiations which is required by article 50.
How long is it going to take Cameron to get out? It can’t really be tenable for him or the party to dither until October can it? He and his government have no legitimacy whatsoever in a time when Britain needs a government. He’s a lame duck with no known successor, and that’s not fair to either Britain or the rump EU when there’s important business to attend to.
Do you even bother to look at what you cite?
Both 18 to 24 and 25 to 49 year old groups voted majority “remain” the younger by a huge margin. Your graphic demonstrates that those younger population groups outnumber those over 50.
That is not what I read in article 50. Once you invoke that article you are out after the negotiations are concluded or after two years, whatever comes sooner. The only way to extend the two year period is to make an agreement to that effect with the European Commission. Cite:
http://openeurope.org.uk/today/blog/the-mechanics-of-leaving-the-eu-explaining-article-50/
Where did you read that the UK could unilaterally retract the invocation of article 50?
“Fed up millennials” should have voted in bigger numbers. Old people will continue to decide the future as long as the young continue to not give a shit.
I notice that in this and the other thread you have a habit of making statements like this that are without basis as if they were settled matters of absolute fact, and failed to provide any evidence for them. It’s not an effective or persuasive argumentative strategy. Actually, given that economic experts and informed observers around the world are pretty much united in considering this a profoundly misguided decision made for very stupid reasons, really all you need to do is add that the Brexit outcome is a good one because it will also keep out all those lazy immigrants from undesirable countries, and you’ll have scored the trifecta of wrongness and put yourself firmly in Trump territory.
The fact is that the British voted on a historic EEC referendum in 1975 with strong majority support. Since then, managing Britain’s participation in the further evolution of the EEC has been duly delegated to a democratically constituted Parliament, as it should be. The one that declined to participate in the EU common currency. At what point are voters supposed to directly micromanage the affairs of state?
Excellent article, thank you. I received an email last night from someone knowledgeable on the issue whose opinions I greatly respect which expresses much the same sentiment. I’ll just quote two key sentences that succinctly sum it up: “Gone are the values of charity, of rational thought and of the power of knowledge. Instead they have been replaced by xenophobia, racism, selfishness and anti-intellectualism … The people who voted for the suicide of Britain’s economy on Friday are the same as the people who will vote for Donald Trump whose success seems more and more probable given the contagion of ignorance-worship sweeping the world.”
Here in Canada all I read on the CBC is how negatively this lunacy will impact us and the global economy, and the same goes for most countries that have any relationship with Britain – in terms of economic growth, investment growth, the housing market, and many others.
On a brighter note, one of the first countries to approach the UK for a trade deal was Ghana. The EU’s trade tarrifs with the developing world were decried as protectionism when they came in in 2012 (Guardian here), and it seems a lot of the affected nations are glad to see a way round them. (It damages local developing industry: things like saying that raw coffee beans can be exported tariff-free but if they process the beans and export coffee the export tariff is 7.5%. No amount of campaigning got it changed.)
The Euro leaders are all talking about wanting a quick divorce and also how they intend to play hardball with Britain over their exit settlement (whatever that entails; I’m not sure precisely). Britain, otoh, if they’re really leaving, is under no obligation to oblige them. By dragging their feet and taking a while to think about maybe holding a second referendum, British negotiators may get a better deal from the EU negotiators who want to get this over with.
And also, you know, it is reasonable for Britain to not want to rush into anything and also to have a government that is committed to the separation running the negotiations. This is going to be complicated and no one has any easy answers.
Bottom line: always get a pre-nup.
Where it is arguable opinion I don’t need a cite. Which part of the quoted words requires a cite?
The only factual claim I make is that the E.U. in its current form was never put to the UK in a referendum. Do you want or need a cite for that?
these would be the same economic experts that lauded the idea of the euro and maintained that there was no upcoming crash in the run up to 2008. Economist are brilliant at predicting the past.
you just can’t help it can you? you assume that anyone voting leave must have a problem with migration. It is a lazy, sloppy tactic based purely on your own political views and nothing at all to do with the person you are speaking to…i.e. me. Now you could ask the thoughts of a “leaver” on immigration but I doubt you’d accept their sincerity.
What was the EEC? what was its mandate and scope and what is the EU now? The UK was asked about a trading bloc, not a supranational organisation with primacy over domestic law-making.
which have all suffered from the same cowardly aversion to check whether the people were still with them. Others countries have had referenda on the EU treaties, the UK never did. Of course the EU, being the staunch democratic body that it is simply refused to accept any dissenting voices and forced countries to try again until they got the “right” answer. People do notice these things you know.
FFS, again and again and again we hear this from the losing side. It is self-mollifying bullshit. People cannot accept that a rational choice can be made by the opposing side. It simply must be down to all the negative traits mentioned above because how can someone think differently to me and be a good and rational person? I see this trait more and more in political debating and it really doesn’t help at all.
I understand this is a heated debate for a lot of people, I’m glad that I’ve not been in the middle of that. My wife and I talked long and hard about this subject. We are both highly educated, liberal (with a small “l”), pro-migration, pro-europe (with a small “e”). Not a hint of xenophobia, racism, selfishness or anti-intellectualism that I’m aware of. And yet we ended up voting for different camps. The same is true of discussions with other friends and family.
And here is where I break the habit for the first and last time and share my voting record with a third party. I voted to remain, she voted to leave. My despair is not with those that vote differently to me it is with those that refuse to accept in good faith that any opposing position can be taken for noble reasons. That is why I’m being a hard arse in these threads and making the comments that I do.
Anyhow, I’ve expended all the energy and comment that I want to. I’m rather sick of all the run-up and fall-out and I don’t want to escalate this into animosity with people on this thread that I respect and with whom I share probably 90% of a worldview so I’ll bow out. The sun still rose this morning, the world still turned, the rain still fell and England still beat the wallabies in rugby so whatever the fall out I suspect that cool heads will prevail and no-one will be getting strung up by their heels on a meat-hook, though Boris should probably steer clear of making any claims regarding train-punctuality.
“I and my wife and friends voted for rational, non-xenophobic reasons” is not a rebuttal to the assertion that “the overall result is based on irrational, anti-intellectual, and xenophobic decision-making on the part of the electorate.”
You sound a lot like the kind of people that I like. But you have made one assertion that I must disagree with. I do not see a factual basis for calling the EU or the British membership in the EU undemocratic. Britain has, as you agree, joined the EEC through a democratic process. Sure, the EEC has changed a lot since then, as one would expect over the course of more than forty years, but every one of those changes has been overseen by representatives from the UK that have come into office through a democratic process. Britons may not like being in the EU in it’s current form, but as long as they have elected governments that have kept them in there, there is nothing undemocratic about it.
As I say Acsenray, I’m going to bow out of this discussion but it is a final point worth responding to.
“the overall result is partly based on irrational, anti-intellectual, and xenophobic decision-making on the part of the electorate.”
The bolding is important. That is a statement I would wholeheartedly agree with. As would
“voting for remain was partly based on inertia, self-interest, lack of confidence and fear of the new”
We both know that the above statements are true but it would be wrong in either case to allow such lazy labelling of people’s arguments. I don’t do it and …to be fair, the rigour of the dope means that it rarely happens here either. The media at large and the wider public discourse though? that is a different beast.
The same is true of the Trump phenomenon. I think he is a fucking nightmare that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy but it would be lazy and damaging for me to think that every voter for him is venal and stupid.
That’s a point hardly worth making. It’s a form of nitpicking that is just a distraction from a discussion about societal trends.
Not every such voter might be venal, but a voter who votes in a way that foreseeably brings on a stupid result for non-venal reasons is still stupid voter.
A few comments of my own to follow up on that. I take you at your word that you and your wife voted for opposite sides for well-considered reasons unrelated to xenophobia or other knee-jerk reactions and it would, in any case, be presumptuous to make any such assumptions about what you believe and I don’t think I did, and my apologies if it seemed that I did. What I thought I was implying was that the “leave” side is, unfortunately, aligned with such ill-considered views, as others have pointed out. I think the quotes above suggest a false equivalency and are misleading in the sense that it seems that the “leave” side was not so much “partly” as “mostly” or at least “significantly” driven by the stated factors, and that many of its proponents were either ignorant of the economic consequences or content to accept them if exiting the EU solved their perception of what the “real” problems were.
The whole Brexit thing may have been more nuanced than the Trump fiasco but it’s fundamentally about the same thing for many voters: the sense of disenfranchisement and loss of control over their future, the growing disparity in wealth and income, international turmoil and growing antipathy towards immigrants and a great suspicion of those who are different.
Think about what you said about Trump. On one hand “I think he is a fucking nightmare that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy”. Yet on the other hand, “it would be lazy and damaging for me to think that every voter for him is venal and stupid”. This is at best quibbling with the fine points of whether “stupid” means the same thing as “misinformed” or “dangerously naive”. If the first part is true, which it manifestly is – the guy is a dangerous self-serving demagogue – then at least some of the second part must be true. Do you know of any well-informed respected person who genuinely supports Trump? No liberals do. No conservatives do. A few mainstream Republicans have been cornered into a position where they reluctantly have to, and others are still fighting.
You say that the rigor of the Dope should mitigate irresponsible generalizations, but truth demands that certain generalizations in fact be made, simply because as broad statements about what drives certain beliefs and ideologies they are manifestly true.
This just isn’t true, Bobble, and your argument is even weaker when considering the treaties that the various UK governments have negotiated with the evolving European entity.