The bus slogan that £350 million being paid to the EU would go to the NHS instead was a lie and a particularly stupid publicity stunt. Happy? It was not a promise of a freebie from the EU to the UK. Someone could try and twist it into being a promise that the rebate would continue post-Brexit, but that was never said, and anybody who tries to make that assertion would be compounding a stupid lie with a further stupid lie.
Well, it kind of was saying that no money would have to go to the EU anymore. I don’t see how it “twists it” to be considered a post-brexit promise of an extra £350 million going forward. It’s the only way that it makes sense, frankly.
A few choice quotes from The Economist:
“The hard-core Brexiteers have nobody to blame but themselves. Mrs May did everything in her power to give them what they wanted, from “red lines” on Brexit to seats at the cabinet table. But they behaved like ravening crocodiles who, having consumed an arm, immediately demanded a leg for dessert.”
I would have compared it to a shark who takes a bite out of some swimmers then smells blood and decides it really likes it. You don’t give people like that anything anymore than you’d give military expansionists a bit of land to placate them. Any attempt to listen, understand, compromise will be taken advantage of.
“A woman who has devoted her life to the Conservative Party—who stuffed envelopes as a teenager and who met her husband at a meeting of the Oxford University Conservative Association—found it easier to deal with a crypto-communist than with the fanatics in her own party.”
Canadians will remember how the populist low-brow Reform party split from the Canadian Conservative party only to merge with it later although it didn’t merge with the Conservative party so much as consume it. We also saw the barbarians take over the GOP with the Tea Party and Trump to the point that some Republicans just can’t abide what their party has become.
“The Brexiteers also have passion on their side. It is easy to mock MPs such as Mr Baker, who told a TV interviewer that “everyone knows I’m Brexit hard man Steve Baker”, or Mr Francois, who barrels around the House of Commons like a character out of “Dad’s Army”, but the country is full of people like this.”
Elected representatives are just that: representative. Part of the discomfort that’s been felt by liberal latte drinking types like us is that we’re surprised at how much of the population is made up of people like hard Brexiters or Tea Partiers. If 1% of the population espouses white supremacist, xenophobic, chauvinistic, or authoritarian beliefs, that sucks; 1% of the population is unlikely to have a large systemic impact. Dysfunctional weirdos are gonna be dysfunctional and weird, I guess. But if it’s 10% and half the country is willing to ally with them, take their lead and give them their pound of meat then we might be living in quite a different society than we thought and that’s scary.
What I’ve read about the hard Brexiter wing of the Tory party like Mark Francois or Boris Johnson makes me think it’s the same layer of people as elected Tea Partiers as you can see here: Official Clip ft. Jason Spencer | Ep.2 | Who Is America? | SHOWTIME - YouTube
“The party that was once the instrument of the British establishment is in the process of metamorphosing into a full-scale nationalist-populist party.”
“Mrs May’s decision to sit down with Mr Corbyn is undoubtedly a welcome move in the short term because it is the only way to break the Brexit logjam. But in the longer term it will make it more likely that Britain’s political system will continue down the road to disaster—and that in the next election the country will be faced with a choice between a populist left championing the “many” against the “few” and a nationalist right championing ordinary people against cosmopolitan elites.”
Before the Dems and GOP in the US or Labour and Tories in the UK, there used to be other parties, right? How does that political realignment tend to occur?
There are special, **exceedingly **boring circles of Hell reserved for people like you. You know that, right ? 
In the U.S., yes, but other than minor parties, you have to go back to the 19th Century to find them. The Democratic Party came about in the 1820s (evolving from the Democratic-Republican Party), and the Republican Party was founded in 1854, as the Whig Party faded from prominence.
I’m by no means an expert on 19th Century U.S. political parties, so I can’t comment on what caused those realignments back then (and the demise of other parties, like the Federalists and the Know-Nothings). The big realignment in the 20th Century was the shift in allegiance among many white Southerners from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, which was driven in large part by the Democrats’ support for civil rights.
Like Huis Close combined with this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c45FtDhdDoY for all eternity
Forgive my Canadian ignorance but what were those about? Why did the Whig Party fade? Was the liminal stage as much of a mess as today’s GOP and Tories?
The Whigs were, from what I see in a quick read, formed in the 1830s, primarily in opposition to President Andrew Jackson, and the Democratic Party. They seemed to be the party of business owners and the upper class, and favored a strong legislative branch / relatively weak executive branch. They fell apart in the 1850s over the issue of slavery, and whether or not it would be allowed in the new territories.
When the Whigs disintegrated, it sounds like many in the Northern branch of the party became Republicans, while many in the Southern branch became Know Nothings (a smaller, nativist party, which wasn’t around for very long).
In the same direction as what you’re saying, the Decline section says the party split over nativism, prohibition and slavery. There’s little doubt which past factions correspond to which present factions in this analogy. A party falling apart over a very divisive, nasty issue is what’s happening to the Tories right now.
So, there was a split between the more cosmopolitan wing that wanted to increase the circle of sympathy and cooperation with other beings and those who were fine with that circle being restrictive. It eventually gave us Lincoln, secession and the US Civil war. I don’t think we’ll have a civil war in either country but we can expect the forces of vileness to go down bitterly.
The fact that none explicitly campaigned on it doesn’t mean they didn’t mislead their listeners into assuming as much, or simply didn’t care to correct that mistaken assumption. I mean, you say as much when you concede the bus thing : Leave was lying. No ifs, ands, thens or buts. Farage even said as much. Why trust anything else they say, when you know that ?!
My cite is the sheer number of people who enthusiastically voted “Leave” then had second thoughts when journalists actually told them about all the shit they would be losing (instead of only promising them all the fantastic shit they would get if they did vote to leave). And, sure, journalists and politicians should have done that due diligence before the vote rather than (apparently ?) assume the British public weren’t complete idiots. But that doesn’t absolve the Leave campaigners.
I don’t remember very much about my seventh grade American History textbook, but I quite clearly recall that it had, not one, but TWO sections with the title The Whigs Elect a President. So that’s what I know about the Whigs. They won the Presidency twice.
Some people have mentioned the idea that rich Brexiteers stand to gain from Brexit. I’m not seeing how it works. The reasoning behind it sounds to me like conspiracy theory stuff. It’s like
- Engineer the collapse of the UK economy
- [mumble mumble] hedge funds [mumble] speculators
- Profit!
Glossing over the, let’s say, significant challenges of step 1, the effort towards which could surely be directed more efficiently in making money in conventional ways, what actually is step 2?
Shorting the pound? Or UK stocks likely to be affected by the tanking of the UK economy? OK, but anyone who thinks the UK economy is going to tank can do that. You, reading this, could easily do it right now. So it requires us to believe that the Brexit plotters were confident enough that their plan would work that they bet against the UK before everybody else did. I hope they were quick, because you’ll recall that the pound fell sharply upon the referendum result.
Some of this stuff seems to have originated in small-time websites like the “London Economic,” whose writers, or perhaps it is “writer”, do not necessarily have an in-depth grasp of the world of investing.
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/jacob-rees-mogg-line-huge-personal-windfall-britain-exits-single-market/07/02/
The conspiracy theory in this case is as follows: Rees Mogg’s company invests its clients money in emerging markets. If the UK were less able to trade with Europe, it would trade more with emerging economies, thereby making them, and Rees Moggs clients, richer.
This theory is, I think you will agree, lame. It actually manages to overstate the significance of the UK economy to a degree that would make the most ardent Brexiter blush.
I know some conspiracy theorists have moved on to “rich Brexiteers want the UK out of the EU before tax haven rules kick in”, but that doesn’t seem very plausible either. Even if there were a rich-people movement against such a thing, again, engineering a referendum result seems like the most time-consuming and expensive way of doing it. Just get a good accountant, for god’s sake.
When times are hard, some people have to sell assets to get by. The über-rich can afford to wait out the hard times, buying assets and hiring labour on the cheap as they go.
How true that is I can’t say, but that’s my understanding of some of the logic.
Perhaps you should read William Rees-Mogg’s books (Jacob R-M’s father) for the details.
- Blood in the Streets: Investment Profits in a World Gone Mad
- The Sovereign Individual: The Coming Economic Revolution and How to Survive and Prosper in It
How to explain Jacob Rees-Mogg? Start with his father’s books
More than twice - IIRC, Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore were Whigs. As was William Henry Harrison. So the Whigs had at least four Presidents. Four? Yes, because when Harrison died, he was succeeded by his veep, John Tyler.
The Whig Party didn’t so much die as melt into the Free Soil party - an antislavery party - to become the Republican Party. I think Lincoln started as a Whig.
This is all I can remember without going to Wikipedia, so don’t assume I’m completely right.
This is from Wikipedia, so I would defer to your expertise more than mine, but:
So, this was a vote on whether to have more “indicative” votes. It didn’t pass a bill or an amendment. Why wouldn’t procedure have led Bercow to vote “aye” and allow the Commons more debate?
It was technically a vote to allow the House to take over the order of business from the Government, and the Speaker reasoned that that’s the sort of thing that requires positive endorsement. Given that that hadn’t happened he felt he had to vote No.
In other news Theresa May has written to Donald Tusk requesting a further Article 50 extension until 30th June. Last night Tusk floated the idea of a flexible extension - extend for a year, but the extension lapses if the UK can get its shit together before then. Given the PM must have been aware of his plan, I suspect the 30th June date is a red herring for political cover purposes, and we’ll take his offer.
Just to reiterate the point I’m arguing against:
You’ve made two assertions about Leavers wanting non-reciprocal rights without providing evidence for either of them. I assume you’re just being creative to make your point. That’s fine, but you should be able to back it up. I’ve asked for one specific example of the Leave campaign promising a non-reciprocal right. None have been provided by you or any other participants in this thread. Instead there have been blanket statements and some attempt to twist that stupid bus statement from being a lie into a promise of a non-reciprocal right. At least in this thread, it ain’t the Leave side making stuff up.
Also, are you actually claiming that the Leave side should have been presenting the negative aspects of Leaving? That was Remain’s job, which they failed at. Are you blaming Leave for Remain’s incompetence? Or merely stating that Leave should have been more moderate? In that case, shouldn’t the Remain campaign have been reining in all the Chicken Little sky-is-falling statements? Did any Remain campaigner repudiate this Donald Tusk statement?
There was a by-election yesterday in Newport West which Labour won. This means May now has a majority of 5. However, Labour’s majority over the Tories was significantly reduced. Usually it’s the government that loses vote share in by-elections.
Regarding fishing rights, the pro-leave fishing industry was up in arms during negotiations when it came out that they couldn’t block EU boats from our waters AND keep access to EU fish markets. They seemed to think that they could pick & choose which parts of fishing policy to keep.
I’m sure you’re technically correct that the leave campaign hasn’t suggested that we can keep the same benefits that we want to deny the EU, but their message has certainly been that we can chose to keep anything that benefits us and drop anything that doesn’t, and that the EU should\would accept that with no trade-offs.