[QUOTE=Burney;4166767]Funny that the overwhelming majority of them never get it
1) You said they campaigned on Hard Brexit. I just put you right and pointed out that there was more than just a semantic distinction. Neither side has a clear view of their own position.
2) Nope, they opposed it as 'uncosted and of extreme concern'. The concern being that the process would cost time and money and would inevitably delay payments to those who need it.
3) See my original response. Again, this was attacked for so many reasons. You are ascribing it to one specific in order to construst a narrative that enables you to laugh at the stupidity of others.
[QUOTE=Peter;4166768]Anything other than a binary choice would have been meaningless, though. It was first necessary to establish democratically that we no longer wished to be in the EU and only from there could we work out what form that would take. To have hedged the vote about with various options would have been to dilute it to the point of worthlessness. Equally, the vote that took us in was binary and offered no nuance (to the point of dishonesty, in fact), so it was only fair that the vote to take us equally simple.
[QUOTE=Burney;4166784]Funnily enough, I thought the question was unfair on the leave campaign. Obviously you cant spell out a deal but issues like the single market and free movement are big enough to have been pulled out from the detail. I would argue they are almost implicit anyway.
The vote to go in was to join a completely different institution. It lost any legitimacy decades ago.
[QUOTE=Peter;4166789]What would be the point on voting for those things without first knowing whether people want to remain in the EU or not? Equally, us voting unilaterally to keep things that the EU isn't likely to grant is pretty meaningless.
Also, people are always going to say that - if they can - they'd prefer to be in the single market. At the same time, though, they will generally vote against free movement if it means high levels of immigration, without recognising the fact that those two wishes are incompatible.
It would have helped if the people that decided to call the referendum had formulated a plan to enact in the event of the outcome being Leave, and to have explained that plan. As it was it never occurred to them that they could lose.
A soft (fake) Brexit where we remain in the single market, keep freedom of movement, retain the large net contribution but are politically excluded wouldn't be much of a brexit, imo. More of a vassalisation, perhaps.
[QUOTE=Peter;4166797]Well I would argue that those things were said repeatedly by both sides during the campaign, but OK. Let's say you did that. By the same token, would it not have been necessary to include similar in the Remain vote? Making clear, for instance, by voting Remain, are you signing up for 'Ever Closer Union', the increasing movement of sovereignty away from Westminster and the future possibility of an EU military? After all, what's sauce for the goose...
[QUOTE=Burney;4166801]Well the terms of remaining were far clearer than leaving but I take your point. I do think it would have been better to be slightly clearer about the leaving options before the vote, if not in the actual question. The problem was there was no organisation to speak for it, just a loose collection of political oddities and opportunists.
[QUOTE=Peter;4166823]There was an organisation to speak for it - they are called the Remain side and comprised the entire UK and much of the global political establishment. Everyone knew what it meant for FOM and everyone knew what it meant for single market membership because everyone on both sides made this explicitly clear. The difference was that the Remain side pitched these consequences as incentives to stay (Project Fear) whereas the leave side did the opposite.
[QUOTE=Monty92;4166833]Firstly, I thought it was obvious that I was saying there was no organisation to speak for the leave side. Exemplified by the fact that they walked away from the reference to NHS spending the morning after the vote and everybody claimed it was everybody else's idea to say it.
Secondly, no, everybody did NOT know what the consequences were. Most of the people voting have no idea what free movement means or what the single market is. As obvious as it may seem to you there are millions of people who barely know what the EU is, and the belief that it is widely understood by all pitches your ignorance alongside theirs, only with far less excuse.
[QUOTE=Monty92;4166848]Giving information doesn't help people understand something that is totally alien to them. Everybody is entitled to vote however they wish. The original point wasn't about overcoming ignorance, it was about asking a clearer question to avoid the sort of nonsense we are hearing now about what people voted for.
I know you're not thick, a. Indeed, you know that I know that you're not thick :shrug:
Have you listened to the average conversation on a train or bus recently? Ever taken a cab? The lumpen proletariat are, without doubt, as cows in a field, lowing only for their X Factor and cheap booze.
Of course it does. I know someone who voted Remain because he was sick of immigration. I know someone who voted leave because he wanted closer ties with Europe.
The biggest mistake you can make in politics is to believe that the massed ranks of the stupid are lined up on one side. The second biggest is to ask people why they voted a certain way. Trust me, you don't want to know unless you are writing a stand up routine.
Democracy is the process of giving people a choice between two or more things that they don't understand. It works as long as they are equally ignorant of both sides of the debate.
My point regarding leave was that I felt it had been deliberately constructed to scare people into voting for the thing they knew (remain) rather than the thing that sat in the dark (leave). In the end it didn't matter, although leave may have won a bigger victory with a clearer choice- who knows.
I think you're taking a rather uncontroversial belief - that most people are thick - and using it to push your line about the elite industrial complex. While your position on elitism is entirely valid, I think you need to be careful not to venture into straw man territory.
After all, both Charlie and I are far from Remainers.
Hardly a straw man in the context of this discussion. A pillar of the EU as I see it is to restrict the role of the demos in politics, leaving it to the 'experts' (the elite).
I can't speak for your reasons for voting Leave but if I disliked the proles and their ability to vote as you do I probably would have voted Remain :shrug:.
Possibly. But I still think an awful lot of Leave voters assumed that a hard Brexit would never happened. Had the referendum made it clear that they were voting to have no access to the common market, no longer be part of the customs union, no longer have a financial passport and that that would be the case from the first day of Brexit with no guarantee of any free trade agreement at that time, I think the vote might have been different.
And perhaps had it been made more clear to Remain voters that they were voting to transfer more and more powers over time from an accountable Parliament to an unnaccountable Commission, that Britain would never have control over its borders and immigration levels, and that the EU would continue to expand into more countries at ever greater expense and with an ever expanding bureaucracy, and that their vote would be worth less and less ... the vote might have been different again.
The democratic deficit argument was quite hard to swallow when an unelected Westminster PM and cabinet was planning to negotiate Brexit without consulting parliament in any meaningful way. A freak election result may make us look rather more accountable but I am still prompted to ask why so many people seem to find Westminster democratically acceptable yet reserve nothing but rage for Brussels.
Not really including you in that, before you ask. :)
This 'no access to the common market' tosh. Explain to me how China and Japan happily access the common market, but we wouldn't be able to? I think what you might mean is 'access to the common market with the imposition of some small rates of duty, which we can negotiate.'
As for the customs union, we import goods from all around the world and have a perfectly functioning customs apparatus in order to do so. As does every other nation on earth. What's the big drama?
The argument that 'There are problems with our democracy, so we have no right to complain about the structurally anti-democratic nature of the EU' always seemed an odd one to me. Jorge used to trot it out rather a lot.
There may be democratic deficits in Westminster, but they are things we can vote to change should we so desire. The democratic deficits in Brussels, however, are far greater and not subject to our democratic scrutiny in any way, shape of form.
Besides, if anything, I would say that this country at the moment is suffering from a surfeit of democracy rather than a deficit.
Now that I'm well up for. I'm now old enough not to get called up and only have a daughter, so I'm very happy to wave the lads off to go and give various frogs, wops, dagoes, spics and krauts a damn good thrashing.
Disappointingly, I found I ran out of insulting epithets for our European brethren rather quickly there. :-(
We don't vote for PMs, we vote for MPs. I have no problem with continuity PMs like May and Brown leading their parties without winning a GE. Do Parliament get consulted in any meaningful way when EU bills become UK law?
However flawed UK democracy might be it is at least more democratic than the EU. Magna Carta was a long way from universal suffrage but it was still an improvement on absolute monarchy.