On June 23 2016 the people of Britain had a vote to decide if we wanted to remain within or leave the EU (European Union). This has too often been misquoted as do the people of Britain want to remain within Europe or not. Europe is a continental plate and short or relocating the entire population to another part of the planet Britain remains within Europe.
The volte was to leave by a small majority, but a majority never the less, 52% of those who could be bothered to vote voting to leave. It should be noted that it is generally accepted that older voters were more likely to have voted leave than younger voters. Most of my daughters friends for example would have voted to remain : they were too young to vote at the time but now are old enough.
The Prime-minister has negotiated an interim deal which has few people happy. Many on both sides feel that much of British law remains controlled by the EU and we are no-longer in a position to influence it. Whether it is the continued imposition of EU laws and standards you object to or the loss if influence depends on which side of the argument you are on.
There is a vote in parliament on Tuesday to decide if we are going to accept this interim deal. If accepted there will be further negotiations on a final deal which are likely to take several years to complete, possibly over a decade. However it looks like the deal will be rejected and the ramifications of that are possibly including a change of leadership within the Conservative party and a general election.
I’m not looking to re-open the debate on should Britain be in the EU or not as that has been done already and there are some in the UK who are trying to re-open it already.
I am more interested to see how this plays in the rest of the world. Is this a local story only or do people, other than the political classes, take an interest in this and what do they think?
Rightly or wrongly you have a good point. I think personally most of the damage wlll (has been) be done by the uncertanty. But I just wanted to say …
Quick response to that point. I work at a big university in the UK (in Physics), the % of the undergraduates and PhD students there (18 - 25 ish) that voted to leave is quite high (I would say 35 - 45 %). The loud minority of the young people who voted to stay are very quick to shout down anyone who didn’t vote the way they wanted and so most people who I teach and voted to leave either lie or keep quite. There are few things worse than being labled a racist now-a-days.
A non-binding vote, meaning no action was required to be taken on the result.
Not sure what point you’re trying to make here. The shorthand expression “leaving Europe” means “leaving the European Union”. I don’t think anyone is rationally trying to make the argument that we will leave Europe, the continent.
No deal has been reached. The terms of the deal to be signed have been finalised, but what May is doing now is going to EU leaders in an attempt to renegotiate the terms so as to placate those who do not agree with the terms regarding the NI backstop. No deal has been reached.
“Many on both sides”? [citation needed]
Also, the EU legislature includes representatives from the UK, some elected, some not, and we have a say in the process. May’s best case scenario has us having to abide by EU legislation with no representation. That is worse than any alternative.
The debate never closed, as more and more information was made available over time showing how unprepared the government is to depart the EU. The basis for the original referendum was as soft as sand, and the arguments used to get us to a Leave vote have repeatedly been shown to be either wrong or flat out lies. ÂŁ350 million a week, anyone?
If you think this is a story local to the UK or EU, you’re deluding yourself.
Yet we are acting on it. I fail to see the point of a referendum if we ignore the result. I personally think we should remain in the EU but we live live in a democracy we must follow the will of the people. This may have changed, now we know the true option on the table, but we can’t abandon it on my say alone. There may be an argument for a fresh vote however.
I’m being a pedant here. I don’t think anyone seriously believed we were considering relocating but to me the concept of the EU and the continent of Europe are to mix up. I know you come from Scotland and I am English and while there is much I love about Scotland, and many of its people, I would no-more want to be considered Scottish than you would English.
This government has reached a deal, though it still needs to ba approved by MPs to come into law. The actions from yesterday suggest it will not be approved as it stands if at all. I apologise if I gave the impression this was now UK law: this was not my intent.
I heard the claims too, and like you took them to be false but many were taken in.
The fact that very few people have responded to this and those that have all live in the UK sort of illustrates my point. I believe this has a significant impact on the world economy, maybe here we are more interested in tech toys, but where is the wider global interest?
There’s less than a thousand people registered to this forum, and only a handful have visited this week. That you’ve not had a massive response to your post speaks more to the traffic this site receives rather than the interestingness of your topic.
No, no we must not. That’s not how things work in the United Kingdom. We live in a representative democracy, meaning that you personally rarely get a say in things; that’s left to the person you voted to represent you, be that a councillor, MP, MEP, MSP, AM or MLA.
That would be my wife. Although, I don’t remember an election…
There’s the thought in the US that Brexit will be voted over, and over if necessary, to get the results that certain powers want. But, that’s cynicism talking.
This comes from the Danish/Irish/Dutch/French experiences, but it’s a misrepresentation. In those cases, countries voted on whether to accept proposed changes related to EU treaties. After rejection, their representatives went back to the EU process and obtained either actual concessions (rarely) or verbal reassurances (more often); a further consultation was then held to take stock of such developments, and public opinion decided those changes or reassurances were enough.
It wasn’t “go back and vote again, because you will do as you’re told”, it was “ok, I hear you that you don’t like X, what about Y instead?”. And it couldn’t be otherwise - those changes didn’t appear out of thin air, they were designed by the very governments those countries had democratically elected before. “The EU” doesn’t really exist of its own volition, it’s an expression of the represented will of 28 (soon 27) countries in constant communication. It’s not some sort of Chinese Party Congress, it’s more like Washington: a place where every State gets represented exactly as it wishes to be, but is then taken as some foreign scapegoat for each and every local problem.
Yes and no. I’m an Italian expat in the UK, and of course I get asked by folks back home. The sentiment is usually one of (or a mixture of):
Good effing riddance, the Brits were a real pain in the ass, constantly trying to weaken the project. We could use losing a few more crazies, like Hungary and Poland.
Are they insane? Don’t they understand that they’ll become the US’ or China’s bitch?
It’s sad, really. I thought their politics worked better than ours, but clearly not.
<insert concern for other expats - the Italian community in Britain is among the largest in the country>
Newspapers covered it fairly extensively, precisely because it’s of direct interest to a lot of families with expats over here. It’s no secret that some of the populists currently in power in Italy are financed by Putin and/or have a nostalgic longing for pre-Euro days, and would probably jump at the chance to leave. Their own electorate disagrees strongly enough that they’ve had to shut up about it, though. The overall feeling is that the UK political classes have lost the shine they had in the Blair years.
I voted to remain but the whole thing is so very tiresome that I’ve no longer the will to discuss it anymore. I think i’m not alone in this!
The only reason I’ve popped up here is to make you aware of a podcast done by the New York Times that I quite like because it almost always spends the whole half hour talking about one story in depth and it’s history.
I like it as it’s good for non US residents who may find American current affairs difficult to follow due to a lack of background information on who’s who, etc, as it explains the issue at hand from the beginning.
It’s almost always a story about everyone’s favourite president POTUS DJT but on Tuesday they ran a story about Brexit.
This rather succinct analysis of the whole ordeal confirmed that like it or not, no matter what happens, the Brexit beast is with us to stay for the foreseeable future. Joy.
I’m from Quebec, We’re the poster child of independence never-endums!!!
It’s great to see the focus of all the armchair pundits aimed at someone else for a change.
I wish you guys the best of luck, and I hope it works out and gets settled quickly and you never hear about it again. But probably this will drag on for generations. And given the connected nature of the world these days it will always be too much for some and not enough for others.
The Irish situation is interesting, but personally I wish there was more reporting about Gibraltar.
Please respect our code of conduct which is simple: don't be a dick.
