Time to start a new thread: odds on when the Tories will ditch BJ and who they will turn to instead?
This just illustrates the immense gap between leavers and remainers - remainers think that leavers are motivated mainly or solely by race - they are wrong and that’s why they cannot grasp the counter arguments of the leavers. This results in remainers trying to debate the wrong things - because to them immigration is the issue that they try to use to both condemn or persuade leavers.
More effective would be to use other major points, such as law made outside the UK and imposed on it by what is effectively an international committee. Leavers are also concerned about EU interference in the UK legal system.
How about the perception by leavers that EU nations often impose law through EU directives that UK tends to follow but other EU nations simply ignore or bypass - EU enforcement of EU wide law in France and Italy in particular can be very patchy.
How about French police not even enforcing their own laws when UK trade is held up at ports by French protesters?
There are many other things that Leavers have as issues in relation to the EU, but like any populist movement, different issues hit the buttons of different people - sure immigration might be an issue for some leavers - but it is extremely lazy to use this as a stereotype for all Leavers and that alone helps to build the barriers between the two sides.
If you accuse a whole group of people of racism instead of actually focusing on specific concerns then don’t be surprised at the reaction to the insult is to dig in ever further.
I have seen Leavers persuade wobbly Remainers by arguing in favour of fishing licences, agricultural subsidy, control of military forces among other issues - I have yet to see Remainers succesfully persuade wobbly Leavers using racism as their key message.
They could use other arguments such as the effect upon employment, or prices in the shops or myriad other matters.
There are indeed many issues with the way the EU works that are in need of reform.
But the decision by the Conservative Party was that they should abandon the whole project rather than try to work within it to create a dynamic and very large scale internal market. The US has a single currency, free movement of labour and capital and benefits from a very flexible, robust economy. The benefits of scale and diversity are clear.
I think this was wrong and I have yet to see any viable alternative put forward by the Brexit faction. They are simply hoping for the best, that the economy will take off once we leave the EU.
Where is the plan?
My suspicion is that there isn’t one. Free trade zones? A Singapore style financial services economy on the edge of Europe? I guess it might spur the EU on to make some reforms to create an internal market for services. But the UK will not benefit.
Thatcher had a rather different attitude to the EU. She negotiated and drove a hard bargain. Access to a continenal sized market was not lost on here. Sad to say subsequent Conservative leaders did follow this up.
Easier to regard the EU are a bunch of federalists with a penchant for socialist policies. The Labour party were just as bad, but regarding the EU as bunch of market oriented capitalists.
The political culture in the UK is not conducive to working with other European states as a group on a co-operative basis.
So where do we go from here?
I suspect the EU will start to apply pressure as soon as the UK tries to innovate and make progress. It will be able to leverage its far greater resources and the UK will have no voice. It will remain the biggest trading partner the UK has unless there a big effort to develop trade deals around the world. That presumes the rest of the world is actually ready to do more business with the UK. Just because the UK has had its Brexit moment, that does not mean the other countries around the world are ready for it. Conservative politicians are quite keen on waving bits of paper around proclaiming victory for their diplomatic and negotiating skills. Is has been a bit of that already. A long line of trade deals signed…apparently.
Lets see what is in the small print of this UK-EU trade deal, which is much the most significant change for many decades. What have we lost. What have we gained?
There are two peer reviewed studies there. Now, sure i will grant that a good number of the leavers were not motivated mainly by racism and xenophobia, but it is pretty damn clear that the majority of them were.
Especially telling is this line *
Whilst restricting immigration was a key motivator of Leave voters in our research, interviewees vehemently rejected accusations of racism. Instead, couching their views in seemingly non-racial ways, they framed their concerns about immigration as a ‘legitimate’ response to a victimised whiteness.*
Sure. But look at it this way. England is about the size of a larger US state- which indeed has law made outside the state and imposed on it . However, GB has had this for hundreds of years- what is parliament to Wales and Scotland (etc) but " law made outside them and imposed on them". Sure people in Wales and Scotland get a vote in your Parliament, but GB got to vote in the EU.
Smaller political entities have always had law made outside them and imposed on them . Cities by Counties, Counties by States (in the US) and upon them by Federal.
Not everyone- but a solid majority, even tho, as shown above- they deny it.
I am not going to get into the Euro debate because its been done to death already, the vote has taken place and we are at the next stage of consequencies.
Until and unless one side or the other examines the issues of the opposing camp the gap will likely widen - it will not stay static.
If you accuse anyone of racism then you will get negatice reaction, further discussion at this point is lost - no minds will be changed.
As a simple matter of strategy its a really poor move, and lets get to the other accusations made by remainers
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Leavers are all old - in the patronising tone
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Leavers are all badly educated
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Leavers are all ignorant
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Leavers are all lower social levels - use of class in any debate in the UK is especially pernicious
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Leavers are all from northern depressed post industrial towns, therefore (so the argument goes - attach prejudice here…)
6.Leavers don’t care about MY (*self entitled) future
As a strategy for persuading other hold opinions different to yours, can you not see it is a dreadful one. It does nothing to address percieved issues, nor does it propose alternatives - it just means that those Leavers will continue to be ignored and their concerns, real or imagined will just be sidelined.
Tell me how that is likely to change opinions - I just don’t see it.
I can easily put up a shopping list of concerns that Leavers have, none of which have actually been addressed by Remainers others than gainsaying - largely by ‘Shut up be quiet and go away politics’
The Remain campaign was especially poor given the national nature of British folk - which is to respond to fear tactics by digging in and giving the fear mongers the FU too salute - completely the wrong tone. Trying to indimidate people with different views in the UK with dire warnings of doom was never going to work.
It’s always a delight being told by Leavers how the Remain campaign was patronising, abusive and based on fearmongering.
An excellent display of barndoor marksmanship, if I do say so myself. You’ve painted a beautiful target around the end result and declared it a bullseye.
The very same delight that Leavers have when they are told teir views fit some sort of blanket stereotype - welcome to the club.
I have yet, in four years, to encounter a single argument for Brexit that isn’t based on lies about how the EU works, lies about how world trade works, lies about how Free Movement works, or lies about what benefits migrants to these shores get and how that relates to the EU.
The Brexit camp can essentially be boiled down to 5 ingredients:
a) small-state ultra glibertarians who fantasise about a Singapore-on-Thames;
b) Empire nostalgists who think the Commonwealth is just yearning to treat Britain as their natural leader and give it the red-carpet treatment when it comes to trade deals;
c) ‘liberal’ brexiters who persuade themselves that trade is actually very simple because they, personally, cannot conceive of why it should be complex;
d) your pure boil-in-the-bag racists who think brown people didn’t come here before 1973.
e) plain gullible types who have no idea what sovereignty means in practice but have swallowed without question an overly simplistic definition which is simply impractical in the modern world, and arguably was never outside of the once-in-a-millennium blip of an island nation occupying a fourth of the world for fifty years.
I have tried - sincerely tried - to find a Brexit argument that even makes sense.
All Brexiters fall back on is the ‘arrogance’ argument - remainers are arrogant because they can’t understand the obvious sense Brexiters are making.
Yeahhhhhhh. That’s projection.
Brexitism and Brexiters are put arrogance. They are thrown heavy doses of reality day by day on how Brexit is an absolutely ragingly insanely bad idea, and they insist it’s just negativity, or selective reporting, or just otherwise dismissed as not worth knowing or understanding.
That’s arrogance.
I sort of agree. Most leavers didn’t want to leave; they just thought they did. They didn’t know that the EU was mostly about industry and trade. They consequently couldn’t see why alignment of laws made sense.
It’s hard to recall four years later, but straight after the vote most leavers simply couldn’t understand how leaving wasn’t straightforward because they never actually knew what the EU was and had no idea how it could be hard to leave. That it would be easy to leave was one of the lies they were told and accepted. To them it was just some sort of money-sucking, foreigner-introducing, law-imposing Europhile’s club. How hard could it be to just resign membership and leave?
May got the shit kicked out of her by her political enemies because she had to deal with reality while her political enemies knew that it was a saleable lie to their constituents that leaving was easy and therefore May was a fuckup if she was failing to do something easy. Johnson has had the benefit of four years of education of the UK public, who have slowly come to realise they were going to have to accept what they can.
What the UK public has got is EU lite. You say the deal “is otherwise mainly retaining the status quo that affects ordinary Britains”. I think a subtlety you miss is that it will retain the status quo that ordinary Britains will notice".
My friend likes to point out that supposedly at the time of the Brexit vote the top Google search in the UK was, “What is the EU?”
I accidentally hit “Reply” too soon. What I meant to say in conclusion is that the trade deal will slowly deteriorate as the EU transitions away from the UK but too slowly for ordinary Britains to notice.
And Britain is going to have to remain subject to EU regulation to maintain the current agreement. But it will be less direct and the average Britain won’t notice.
As you say the gist of the Leave promises seem to have been achieved. The foot has been blown off, the wound patched up. Job done. Woohoo.
It certainly reads to me that, at least on the question of maintaining “regulatory alignment”, we shall have the sovereign right to say “No!”, “No!”, “No!”, “Oh, all right, if we must” - much as we did as full members.
The difference is that, as a member of EU, the UK had the right to participate fully in making the regulations, and even had a veto right in some cases.
Now the UK is obliged to accept EU regulations on which it hasn’t had any say, and move in lockstep with the EU, or else face trade barriers and tariffs.
Absolutely. But we are where we are, and BJ’s got the paddle.
I forgot another flavour of Brexiter:
Unreformed semi-socialists who want autarky.
You oughta, man.
I believe I’ve mentioned my reasons more than once to you, but I’ll try one more time since they don’t fall into any of the categories you have set out. I had personal experience in my field of work (financial services) with at least 3 European regulations/rulings that are not only pointless but actually unhelpful to consumers (parts of MiFID II, the EODR, and the stupid ECJ ruling about gender ‘equality’ for insurance premiums). As a result it seemed to me it was time to rid British consumers of such (future) nonsense. Events since then suggest that perhaps, as DrDeth said above, we have to accept the bad with the good, irritating as that is.
I realised another example just recently - all sorts of products (especially toys) come with what appears to be an EU-mandated leaflet saying they are in compliance with whatever directive. Now, I can understand the benefit of common standards so that such goods can be freely traded across the bloc. What I cannot see the point of is a piece of paper inside the box telling us so (except of course as a penpusher’s reminder of their existence). The one this morning advised me I could the read the full text at lego.com. The number of people who actually do this must be approximately zero. And I don’t need to be told not to mix different types of battery, or how to dispose of them safely (those who do won’t read it anyway).
ETA: the above in response to @Malden_Capell
I’ve seen many comments like yours. They would be hilarious if they weren’t so unfortunate.
The EU had become the scapegoat for many people - the convenient bogey man to blame for regulatory failings and irritations.
You think countries outside the EU don’t face counterproductive regulations? Or patronising health and safety warnings? Seriously?
I had a conversation with an English electrician who voted to leave because of the regulatory and H&S red tape he had to comply with “because of the EU”. He was convinced that post Brexit he’d be able to fix such things by “calling the person responsible and sorting it out”. ROFL. As if red tape is a peculiarly EU invention. Heck, pre-EU the British civil service was legendary for its bureaucratic ways. Monty Python practically made a living off taking the piss out it.
No, your views say little about the EU and everything about how many people in the UK have come to blame the frying pan for the heat, and concluded that if they jump out they will be saved.
Of course I don’t believe red tape will disappear now we’ve left, or that what remains will be any easier to navigate. But the 3 examples I have given are all cases where domestic regulation was working as well or better before the involvement of the EU. So it’s not so much blaming the frying pan for the heat as trying to reduce it a bit by turning one of the burners off. We weren’t given the opportunity to vote for a reduction in NHS managers or HSE representatives - we voted for what was in front of us. No doubt many voted for ‘bad’ reasons; I resent the implication that I personally did so.