Subject: Well then...
Author:
Posted on: 2016-06-24 08:41:00 UTC
Britons have voted to leave the EU (51.9% Leave, 48.1% Remain), and David Cameron, Her Majesty's Prime Minister, says he'll resign.
So, yeah. That happened. Thoughts, any- and everybody?
Brexit 'leaders' still cannot believe they pulled this out, their lies are now pretty clear, some people say to regret voting Brexit, and Boris Johnson got cold-feet now this happened... unless according to the press.
Verdict from people in the United Kingdom?
There is a petition for Parliament to "implement a rule that if the remain or leave vote is less than 60% based a turnout less than 75% there should be another referendum."
That's not the exciting part. The exciting part is that said petition has passed the 100,000 signatures needed to force Parliament to debate it. To force a Parliament which mostly wants to stay in the EU to debate it.
If this goes to a vote, I don't know a) whether the Tories would demand a 'no' from their MPss, and b) whether their MPs would obey.
So. 'Exciting'. In a somewhat scary way.
(Why scary? Because if this brings down the government, then we have 17 million voters who'll be thinking independence was/about to be 'stolen from them'... and one Nigel who's made that his entire platform. So, uh, no vote of No Confidence, plz?)
hS
What are these petitioners thinking? You cannot retroactively change the rules and repeat the voting until you get the desired result. And they probably don’t want that a future referendum to get back into the EU would require at least 60% based on a turnout of not less than 75%. I hope the whole parliament votes NO.
I was very much for Britain remaining in the EU, but now I’m for respecting the democratic decision. All over Europe, populist parties (including the German AFD) pretend that everything would be better if their country left the EU, but there is no empiric data to prove them right or wrong. So like it or not, you are our lab rats now, and we will carefully watch what happens. I am sorry for you, but I hope a lot of bad things happen. If everycountry leaves the EU, Germany is left to dominate Europe by economic power and population, and I certainly don’t want that.
(I never thought much about it, but there may actually be a reason why the Pottermore Sorting Hat put me into Slytherin.)
HG
The 'democratic decision' was that almost exactly half of the voting population of the UK want to be citizens of the EU. The other half, by a very slim majority, are going to forcibly strip us of that right.
Remind me what it's called when having a slight majority gives you absolute control over a minority's rights...?
hS
But the law saying that the result doesn’t count when it’s less than 60% one way or the other should have been made before the referendum. In hindsight, it’s impossible to tell how many people didn’t vote because they believed that their vote would not be necessary to get the desired result, but would have voted if they had known which rules would actually be applied, so it looks like cheating.
On the other hand, the news I just watched seem to imply that the Brexiteers weren’t prepared to win. Maybe they would actually like to have another referendum so that they can loose and continue to complain?
HG
Is there anybody around here who support(ed) Leave? If so, why?
The Guardian has put together graphs of how the different voting patterns correspond to different demographic characteristics. And the results are... ugh. The results are ugh.
And yeah, the fact that the 'ABC1 social grade' (ie, upper and middle class) areas are richer and better educated should surprise no-one, because those three are strongly correlated (in a bad, 'exclusion of the poor' way). But the fact that those areas are also younger surprises me. The fact that the areas with the highest number of immigrants were the most pro-Remain surprised me even more.
Hang on a second, I've got a theory. Maybe - wait, wait, hear me out - maybe living around immigrants teaches you that they are not actually the devil. Crazy, I know, but the graphs seem to support it...
(And yeah, it was the old people who won't have to live with the consequences their entire lives who voted Leave. Go. Flippin'. Figure.)
hS
I live in a town full of them. I am in no way surprised that my future was torpedoed out of spite by a bunch of reactionary old codgers in seaside towns whose primary occupation consists of waiting to die.
It's all over the radio. Now to see what happens.
All of them exceedingly uncomplimentary towards my countryfolk.
We've done a stupid thing, pulling away from an international community we should be drawing closer to. We've placed ourselves firmly in the hands of whatever government manages to spew enough xenophobic rhetoric to get itself elected next, with no outside force to stop the Big Business Nigel is so exultant about 'defeating' from influencing the government into giving it exactly what it wants. We've lost Scotland (there's no way they won't demand another Independence Referendum - and it'll pass this time, guaranteed), and quite possibly Northern Ireland after that goes through. We've reduced England to a minor country on a mucky archipelago off the coast of Europe.
And I am so, so angry.
hS
I can't help but shake the feeling there's going to be some kind of fallout over this that nobody predicted or anticipated while discussing possible consequences of leaving. Just... this nasty gut feeling that I really hope is just me being paranoid.
I might have rather selfish reasons for being unhappy about this decision, too: how much are they going to tighten their immigration laws, now? :(
This shouldn't affect immigration from outside the EU - I think we already had full control over that.
Besides, you come from an English-speaking country, and one that's viewed as rich; the xenophobes won't worry you're going to Come Over Here and Take Our Jobs.
Even though you're objectively more likely to take the jobs they're actually willing to do, than someone coming from Poland who ends up in heavy manual labour.
hS
It's a comment on the fact that, by and large, the people who em/immigrate are either very highly skilled (doctors, teachers... footballers I guess) or very low-skilled and looking for any job they can get (crop-picking, bus-driving, working night shifts to make chemicals used in 70% of England's water treatment plants). Neither of those sets of jobs are the ones the people complaining about Taking Our Jobs are willing/able to do.
Evidence: we constantly have signs up advertising for that last position, and for lorry drivers, in one of the most pro-Leave areas of the UK. The British aren't taking those jobs.
hS
But my plans of leaving this God forsaken country are now far more difficult to execute.
You'll have to put up with hella cold winters, but the ultra-right-wing tide hasn't reached us yet.
Plus, our Prime Minister is cool.
The referendum vote itself has no legal ramification. First there has to be an official meeting of the European Council. Once that happens, it will trigger Article 50 of the 1973 Treaty of Lisbon, which gives both sides two years to negotiate an exit.
However, because the UK is so intricately entwined with the EU, it could take many years longer than that. During that time, EU laws will still apply to the UK and it will be, for the most part, business as usual.
I hope Cameron is happy with his last term, because his country will pay quite the cost for it. Now that independance means staying in the EU, Scotland will leave as fast as possible, and northern Irish also began talking about this.
And I'm not even talking about the students (an article from le Monde talks about an English student who could finish her studies only thanks to Erasmus), or what will happen in Europa, where all the right-wing... politicians are talking about their own referendums.
Like I said, I hope it was worth it, Cameron. You gutted your country and Europa for this.
As a guy on the other side of the Atlantic, this stuff doesn't make the headlines as much as the massive storm that is the Trump nomination right now so forgive my ignorance.
I thought Cameron was a Remain campaigner; why is he to blame for the loss? Wouldn't Farage and the UKIP be the primary source of Leave arguments?
Here, where Trump is a direct threat, we've all been talking about Britain.
--Key
The Conservatives have been blaming the EU for all Britain's ills for decades, so the 'Cameron supports Remain' thing was a last-minute change as it is. Throw in the fact that he made the referendum itself a campaign promise to get elected PM, and the fact that while his government is officially in support of the EU, his party was officially neutral... yeah, it's very hard to believe that he put his heart and soul into keeping us in the EU.
And if he did? Then he failed miserably as a Prime Minister. He let a right-wing nationalist xenophobic party claim 15% of the vote in the general election, and then dictate to the government how it should deal with the EU. Whether he was complicit or merely incompetent, David Cameron deserves the blame for this.
hS
British conservatives use xenophobic scapegoating to get votes, too?*unprintable obscenity*I'd've thought the people would've learned from the examples of Hitler and TrumpSure glad we don't have anything like that in New Zealand Hahaha, who am I kidding? :-(
I'm not happy about this either.
Yeah, boo to you, Cameron.
He was so desperate for being relected that he promised holding this referendum... And now he pays this promise, even after backpedaling like mad.
I kept the faith, and I kept voting
Not for the iron fist, but for the helping hand
'Cause theirs is a land with a wall around it
And mine is a faith in my fellow man.
Theirs is a land of hope and glory,
Mine is the green fields and the factory floors.
Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers,
And mine is the peace we knew,
Between the wars.
-- Billy Bragg, Between The Wars (1985)
We've been swinging our trouser-mounted black puddings around on the world stage for a while now, because certain politicians (Farage, Gove, similarly wasted pregnancies) seem to still believe we're a superpower. We're not. We gave it all back, because power is not the end goal. It now seems that the lessons of history have been categorically forgotten, because we are going to shrink and turn inward, and to quote one of Terry Pratchett's short stories on the matter, "that's not what being human means. You've got to reach out."
That's taken from a story about virtual reality, in which everything grinds to a halt while people live in a fantasy world of their own creation.
The irony is not lost on me.