exercise their right to vote we could have continued hoarding our unfairly accrued wealth and contriving to pay little or no tax, and continued exploiting the workforce with zero hours contracts on a pitiful minimum wage - damn them!
exercise their right to vote we could have continued hoarding our unfairly accrued wealth and contriving to pay little or no tax, and continued exploiting the workforce with zero hours contracts on a pitiful minimum wage - damn them!
I don't mind them coming out in droves because of the Corbyn offerings, we are allowed to be greedy at times and that is democracy, after all.
It's the fact that they couldn't be bothered to do the same last summer that irritates me. It shows an astonishing lack of foresight. I also find myself wondering what % of these same students have parents who would be hammered by Corbyn's tax changes and whether or not they've considered that and the impact it will ultimately have on them.
Again, a lack for foresight. Or maybe they're all just thick nowadays. :sherlock:
It's all a matter of opinions isn't it... imho the policies Labour came up with did more to help parents with young kids, Uni students and the old and disabled. the fact the Tory party look like ditching a lot of policies makes you think they weren't good in the first place
You mean you don't support the nationalization of the railroads, the postal service and the energy industry, IUFG? Don't you remember the nirvana that was the 70s when those industries provided a superb service at virtually no cost to the taxpayer? I bet you also think that high tax/spend plans might have a flaw especially when they don't add up.
You fool. ;-)
Well, I don't consider myself as smug but I am more than disappointed. The election campaigns were fought on the basis of 'Brexit is settled', and saw UKIP's vote collapse to nothing, from a fairly substantial national share, and to the benefit of the two main parties. Over 80% of people voted for parties who said they would leave the single market.
Now the election is over, May's battering is being used as an excuse for the dominant political and media classes to do what they've wanted ever since the referendum - to stop Brexit. The electorate at large hasn't voted against Brexit in this election (even though some people will have done), they have voted on all the basis of various reasons.
If this scenario plays out as we imagine, the majority who voted Leave will have been betrayed. UKIP will be back in five years when Britain is still subject to undemocratic and unnacountable external rule, still has no control over its borders, and still subsidises other countries from which it gets little (except cheap labour which is good for the wealthy and bad for the less wealthy).
Funnily enough I put the same question to someone the other day but in reverse. He was whining about losing £200 a month under Corbyn's tax hike and that he couldn't afford it as his kids were off to university soon. I pointed out that a Corbyn government would save his kids 27 grand each over their studies. Silence....
He was wrong about the tax anyway. He earns 82 grand, the rise would have cost him pennies. So, selfish and thick, as you said.
The argument has to be that the will of the people was expressed at the referendum. If that was true before the election it is just as true now. I would also agree that any Brexit that involves remaining in the single market and retaining freedom of movement is an absolute betrayal of that vote. Nobody in their right can honestly think that those voting leave were voting for that. Its a joke.
There are more complex, longer term issues in there around cheap labour, the drift of skills and capital towards the areas of economic strength within the EU and away from those areas requiring development. The potential for widening an east-west divide within the Union that already exists.....
I have already heard plenty of references to a 'jobs Brexit', an 'economic Brexit', a 'Brexit that works for Britain'. As you say , this is politician-speak for the political establishment devising a brexit that works for them.
Yes, it will absolutely be a betrayal, but the reality is that whether or not Brexit is good in the long run, it will clearly be bad in the short run. And many politicians will be thinking 'if we go hard Brexit the economy will die and there goes my seat. If I go soft Brexit the economy should be just fine and I can argue my way out of the betrayal argument'.
Brexit may ultimately be better for the country but it clearly has a far lower downside in the short run and as I said, it's all about the here and now nowadays. As we've just seen with the student vote.
I think a betrayal of the referendum would make us no better than the Irish who simply hold referenda repeatedly til they get the answer they want, but it may be worth it just to see every blood vessel in Berni's head erupt in a sort of hyper aneurysm.
I believe it was the EU that demanded that the Irish keep voting until they delivered the required result. And the EU have ignored referendums in France, Netherlands and Greece because they didn't like the outcome. This contempt for democracy is one of the reasons that some of us voted Leave in the first place. That the British, pro-EU elite are behaving in the same way comes as no surprise.
All tax changes are good for me!
1. No parliament can bind its successor. Otherwise the 1975 vote would have been good for all time and the Jocks wouldn't have been talking about an IndyRef 2. Which, btw, has been derailed by the general election. People voted to say there was no longer a majority in Jockland for the party wanting independence.
Likewise, the two parties promising a hard Brexit got only 44.2% of the vote (and a minority of seats.) So over 55% voted against a hard Brexit and there is no majority in the HoC for such.
2. And no, a softer Brexit would not be a betrayal of the vote. Only of some people's interpretation. Were people asked if they wanted to stop free movement? No. Or leave the EEA? Or the SM or CU? Or if they had a problem with rejoining EFTA? No, no, no and no.
Basically, if they had wanted those questions asked, they should have done so at the time. They didn't.
And if the voters had wanted to answer those questions themselves, they should have done so this month, when they had a chance to vote for the two parties promising a hard Brexit. They didn't.
They didn't. The referendum didn't ask, ad therefore didn't answer, these questions. The GE did. And a majority of voters and of MPs said the answer to a hard Brexit is no.
If the voters don't like this parliament giving a soft Brexit, they can vote for a hard Brexit party next time. {Just like if the Jocks do want IndyRef 2, they can all go and vote SNP.}
We can join EFTA, which wasn't precluded by the referendum, and then voters can vote for a party promising to leave that or promising a referendum on leaving.
Sorry, but if you believe in GB's parliamentary democracy, then you have to accept that the answer to questions given in a recent GE trump questions not asked in a prior referendum.
Hopefully we can rejoin EFTA, wait for the OAP Brexiters to die and then rejoin the EU. ;)
Errr.. the only slight problem here is that you insist on being incredibly precise about what leavers voted for in the referendum while at the same time extrapolating all kinds of desires and motives towards Brexit from an election campaign that wasn’t about that.
The electorate believed that the Brexit issue was resolved, largely because both major parties committed to the referendum result. You can see this clearly by the fact that the significant UKIP vote collapsed and drifted back to the two main parties, both promising to respect the referendum outcome.
Trying to suggest that this is in any way a public mandate for rethinking Brexit is absurd. If you want to overturn the referendum there are only two acceptable, democratic ways of doing it. Either the public clearly votes for a party promising to overturn at an election (to borrow your thinking, they had the chance to do this and didn’t take it) or you hold a second referendum (which neither of the main parties proposed).
This is why you should never hold referenda- too confusing for everyone
If I was the sort of poster to go in for ad hom abuse I would call you a tedious, ageist, soap-dodging windbag.
Your arguments are rubbish, btw. The labour leadership have said they would leave the single market. The election was not fought on Brexit, but on lots of issues, and your pretending that it was is weasilly *******s.
Precisely. Not only was the election NOT about that, but the result doesn't even translate in the same way. I could have voted Lib Dem as a remainer and it would have had no effect on the make up of parliament whatsoever. This is why you hold a referendum on a big single issue. At an election, voters get to decide what they care about.
Yeah but the point is that any voter should take all issues into account and vote accordingly, saying 'but it won't make any difference in my constituency' is contrary to the democratic process and leaves you in a position where you have no right to complain.
If I voted Leave but then looked at all the issues and decided to vote Labour, I have no right to complain when the minority government is forced to water down Brexit. If it meant that much to me, I should have voted Tory. If it didn't, I have no right to complain. :shrug:
The problem is that an election wasn't just for what sort of Brexit you want, it was for all the other things that effects your life... so to say those that wanted a hard Brexit should vote Tory doesn't cover it, you might be opposed to every other policy they have
No, they wouldn't. Free tuition would revert to the old system of capped numbers and would hugely reduce the number of places available. EU students (apart from Ireland) would apply as EU citizens but would not gain free tuition. They would likely face the full cost tuition in the same way that international students do, but without the visa restriction. They would also be excluded from the capped numbers- which is why when you walk around Oxford, Cambridge or UCL you will hear a million and one American accents- its far easier for them to get into the best institutions than it is for a home student.
Yet billions in taxpayers’ money goes to supporting these institutions in the form of research funding (research-intensive university is politician speak for the universities that they went to).
Obviously we still allow home students to go to the crap universities
Nonsense. What if your chief desire is to deliver a rebuke to the PM or the party in power? In those circumstances, it's perfectly legitimate to choose the candidate most likely to give that PM or party a bloody nose - regardless of whether you agree with all their policies or not.
Democracy is a means of representing yourself and trying to make manifest your wishes. It's not an opinion poll.