UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
view the rest of the comments
Not from the UK but... the damage is already done right?
I mean rejoining was always going to be inevitable, the only question is whether it's now or in 50 years, or incrementally over 50 years.
Point is, it will be on EUs terms.
It was utter stupidity. The only nation in the history of the world to impose economic sanctions on its self. The nation was lied to so a select few very rich people could make their lives easier.
Do you know what the most googled term was after the referendum? "What is the EU?"
A very naïve view on how the world works. There are plenty of countries that have voted for secession, and secession will always have an economic impact.
It can only be considered stupid if there was enough information to understand the effects of the decision prior to taking it. Because of the lies and money spent on campaigns, the relevant information was tainted. Sitting on your high horse and calling people stupid is never going to convince people to change their minds.
The most googled search reference of 2016 was not “What is the EU?”. It did not even strike the top 10.
I agree Brexit was a bad decision, but two wrong don't make a right. Attacking people for being misinformed is not an intelligent choice imo.
It is very disingenous of you to compare actual independence referendums to the brexit referendum. Those are all about national entities gaining indepence from other national entities. That is not what brexit is, and EU is not a national entity. So those events are not comparable in the slightest.
EU was a trade union, and it was objectively a net benefit for the UK (since it was the biggest market for the UK), and has nothing to do with national independence referendums, even though that is of course what brexit propagandists wanted brexit voters to think it was.
And this is exactly why this particular event is monumentally stupid and without historical precedence.
I would never argue it was not stupid. I am against calling the people stupid as it solves nothing.
As for the rest of your comments that is just down to definitions. The UK was most definitely part of a trading block and took part in the political structure. This is much akin to saying a town is not a city.
Sorry, just a bit angry about it. None of the lies have come true and the politicians refuse to talk about it like it hasn't made things worse in the country.
I am with you all the way on that one.
C'mon man.
An article from The Times?
A magazine based in the US; with search terms involving the US election, hurricanes, and the Powerball?
These are obviously search terms exclusive to the US.
Here are the 2016 search results directly from The Goog, itself - but from the UK - y'know, where Brexit happened.
While not number 1 under the "What is" section, it does pop as #4, alongside "What is Brexit" at #2.
Sorry but I find this naive. The information was there. We have a highly literate population and widespread technology that means the vast majority of the adult population have instant access to unparalleled levels information through a user-friendly device carried in their pockets. It is unacceptable for them to use 'I don't have a PhD in economics' as an excuse for not bothering to inform themselves before voting, in this day and age.
I agree there were lies and disinformation, but for many Brexiters this isn't what decided their vote. Indeed, many of them were crystal clear that they thought Brexit was a desirable outcome regardless of whether it would cause economic damage - 61% of Leave voters saying significant economic damage would be a price worth paying, 39% going further and saying they'd consider it acceptable if Brexit led to them or their family members losing their jobs.
We shouldn't make excuses for these people. Call a fool a fool.
But, I was told people were not stupid and they knew what they were voting for. How dare I assume they didn't understand the implication and how dare I think I know more about it than they did.
I understand your point that attacking people and calling them stupid wont "make them change their mind". But they had the time to research and understand the implications before the referendum. They've had much more time now to go back over it.
Banging your head on the wall pretending it won't hurt, doesn't make you misinformed or need education. It makes you stupid and it needs to be called out. I don't need to convince someone that banging their head on a wall will hurt.
Sadly, I do need them to stop banging their head on the wall. As it's a shared house and we've all got to live here. Holes in the wall ain't helping anyone.
Stupid is as stupid does. You have no evidence that people understood. There is plenty of evidence people are changing their mind now they are seeing the effects.
If they were misinformed then it was willful ignorance. Anyone with several functioning brain cells could see that it was an idiotic idea. And then they had an infinite number of opportunities to roll it back, but they decided to swim to the bottom of the boiling lake instead of just saying "maybe not."
The people who heard Gove say they'd "had enough of experts" and thought: "yup that's me, I hate people who know what they're talking about".
It's obviously condescending to say that it was stupid. But what's the more generous read of it? A spiteful protest vote against social progress? There could conceivably be coherent arguments for independence, but certainly there weren't any anywhere near the leave campaign.
It is clear that the referendum result could not be repeated today. This in itself is very indicative. What exactly has changed?
agree with this but just to add that the assertion that "what is the eu" was the most googled term is wrong, but slightly less wrong if you refer to a uk source, it's still not there but "what is brexit" and "what is article 50" did appear in the top tens by region. source: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/top-google-searches-trends-2016-uk
There was a top trending search within the UK for "Brexit", which was also within a sub category. I am sorry but this is a far cry from what you said. I agree Brexit is bad, but using information that is not correct gets swooped up by the con artists that try and push the Brexit narrative.
I'm from the UK and from the North. Don't try and understand the stupidity of these people from these areas as economically developed as the worst parts of former soviet states now in the EU. These areas received a lot of EU development funding and still voted for Brexit AND the Tories (in 2019) that imposed austerity that made their post 2008 lives worse.
They are thick as mince and deserve the ridicule as much as the lying brexit politicians deserve jail time.
The only hope to not repeating the mistakes is the best quality education for as many people as possible. This hopefully enough of the smart ones from these areas are politically aware and active enough to offset the manipulation of the morons.
South west here, and it was the same here. We got so much EU funding for so many things - for a while we had the fastest broadband in the UK (yes, including London and the south east) because the EU paid for it, not to mention roads, farm subsidies, and a bunch of other "regional development fund" stuff - and now all that money is gone and the UK government haven't replaced it with anything. Brexit support here was like 60%, because too many people believed the lies.
I think ultimately what most people were really voting for in the referendum was an end to austerity and an end to top-down decisions made by faraway people who don't understand the real lives of people in these regions. The mistake they made (because of lying politicians) was that the problem was the EU, rather than our own government.
I think we should have just renegotiated stuff with the EU on the threat of leaving rather than playing our entire hand
I agree. There were definitely a few things with the EU that weren't working well. The one that stirred up a lot of emotion here was the matter of fishing, because there was a lot of very real tension between local fishermen and the fishing boats from France and Spain. But leaving the EU wasn't the right answer to these problems. Having an adult conversation to find a way of improving things was the right way.
I think conservatives voting against their own interests is a very well established trope. Certainly is in Australia.
Plenty of octogenarians who vote conservative while complaining their pension is too low and they can't afford rent.
Maybe the EU’s terms will be better for UK workers and the climate.
The damage wasn't a one time thing, it's ongoing. The longer we're out the more damage that will be done.
Diplomacy is all about concessions and what each country wants. The UK can sell security and an expansion to the EU market. The biggest thing the EU sells is standards.
The stuff that is coming into the UK atm is dogshit. This sums up exactly how things are going.
But it like she says in the video. The UK are frogs in the slow boil pot. We are going to have a bad incident before people wake up. The sad part is that having a bad incident like BSE etc has long term effects. The BSE crisis of the 90 in the UK took 15 years to reverse. Unfortunately a bad incident would be a large trigger point for removing the last of the Brexiteers.
The UK will certainly be on less favourable terms than they left if they rejoin. The pound will be a hot issue. This new system that Macron wants to create is an unknown quantity. We have to wait for a change of government before we find out what it entails. The EU have shown that they want to deal more with Starmer than they do with the Tories by mentioning it at a time Starmer was visiting. It also shows that the UK has something that the EU wants, or more specifically France and Germany wants.
I would go as far as to say we need a change of population. Which we'll have in about 20/30 years once all the fuckwits from my era (I was born in 1957) have died off. Muppets in the flats where I live and my sister in law etc. are still convinced there are hundreds of thousand of immigrants queing up to rape them and take their jobs, Keir Starmer is going to turn UK into a communist annex of Russia and so on. The fact that they're retired so dont have a job, and Russia hasn't been communist for decades is neither here nor there. The Daily Mail and the like tell them so. So it must be true.
Well I can say a member of my family voted for Johnson because he has nice hair. I literally spat out food on hearing that remark.
We need a better education system for the population. With the education system we have currently, the population will never be savvy to the cons that the politicians are using. Better education is the only way to stop ignorance. Politics and critical thinking should be part of our main school curriculum.
I would argue that we also need a PR voting system. Currently those politicians only need to con a few thousand people to control 65m. They gear their campaigns to small areas while ignoring the rest. Even changing the population and education system will never eradicate this.
Please elaborate, because the last “security” thing I saw out of the UK was their stupid bill attempting to back door encryption as well as having vendors sit on zero days so they (and hackers out there) could exploit them. None of that would be good for the EU, let alone the world.
The whole point of the EU is to stop Europe from continuously going to war with each other.
The UK has a very credible military base. Germany and France have tried in the past to combine the military forces of Europe. This is not to undermine the French who also have a credible force. Germany does not and could not argue it was in the same league. The UK military has been diminished under the Tory government, but the expertise is still around.