What is more, public opinion never came out in favour of this kind of Brexit. Yes, they voted to leave and the official Vote Leave campaign spoke of taking back control. But that is a tenuous mandate at best. That campaign, after all, quite deliberately avoided telling the public what leaving would look like. Subsequent polling and deliberative inquiries, moreover, have shown that, offered a choice, a majority of the public favours something far “softer” than what is now on offer.
That entire paragraph could be rewritten – well, obviously, anything can be rewritten – to detail how that agreement to join the common market morphed into the political union that no one did or would have agreed to……
The extremes on both sides destroyed any chance of a reasonable step-by-step dismantling, but after wasting my efforts on promoting EFTA, then Common Market 2.0, as a one step at a time, exchange contracts before booking the removers sort of thing, the screams of the hard remainers convinced me to to support F*** it and chop it off at the knees.
25 days to WTO…..
It doesn’t stop on Dec 31st, we can deal with anyone, even the EU post-brexit. It was after all the EU which could not envisage an independent UK and that is what hampered the negotiations. That and the secret promise remainers made to never really leave.
Once we’re out completely and they are forced to accept it, then maybe we can talk again. On a level playing field.
Didn’t we get where we are thanks to Gina Miller? Wouldn’t we have had a Brexit in name only if she hadn’t interfered? Brexiters should issue a coin in her honour.
“Blame staunch Leavers or purist Remainers, but the real fault might lie in our wantonly destructive politics”
The real fault was Europhiles failing to compromise.
At every push for more integration, support for membership declined. And at no point did the Europhiles take that seriously. Even after they lost a referendum, they wouldn’t the compromise of May’s deal.
If they’d treated the growing opposition to further integration with more respect, we’d still be in the EU. Probably saying no to further integration and expansion, but we’d still be there.
‘That entire paragraph’
It comes off as an “angels are on our side” argument.
“The real fault was Europhiles failing to compromise.”
Yup, it wouldn’t have taken much concessions from the EU to Cameron to swing the vote in favour of holding on to nurse. Something on freedom of movement, something concrete stating we would not be asked to integrate any further or be forced into the Euro, or the Euro-army, and they’d have got their way. By throwing it all back in our faces I think that made up a lot of waverers minds. They literally sent Cameron home with nothing and his tail between his legs.
Of course its hard to compromise when you’ve convinced yourself your opponent is a morally defective imbecile, as Euro-enthusiasts have about Euro-sceptics.
Public opinion never came out in favour of footballers ‘taking the knee’ in memoriam of an American suicide with a nasty criminal record. Millwall Football Club please note.
I don’t remember anybody on either side talking about a ‘Soft’ or ‘Hard’ Brexit before the referendum, but when the Remainiacs lost they suddenly switched to saying that there was no mandate for a ‘Hard’ Brexit.
Lying c**ts.
“Public opinion never came out in favour of footballers ‘taking the knee’ in memoriam of an American suicide with a nasty criminal record. Millwall Football Club please note.”
Its suddenly occurred to me that it might be rather difficult to identify out of a load of masked men who exactly is booing…………..BLM type wokeness runs into covid wokeness, what larks!
BoM4 – If they’d treated the growing opposition to further integration with more respect
Yarp, and I think it’s related to the increasingly intolerant outlook of the (for want of a better term) liberal elite
The shadow Equalities (lol) Minister was forced to resign today for her outrageous belief that maybe our society should be a bit more tolerant of people who aren’t 100% in favour of gay stuff:
“There needs to be something in place that protects people of faith as well as those who think the other way. It is an issue of conscience. It is like people having a choice who for reasons of conscience cannot participate in conducting an abortion,”
At some point after 1997, the establishment decided that it no longer needed to put up with the proles having the temerity to disagree with them. That’s why you can now be arrested, charged and convicted for pointing out that a man in a dress is a man in a dress.
The vicious rearguard action against Brexit/democracy exists in the wider context of elite opinion being fully in favour of destroying and replacing its legacy lower classes.
At some point before 2010-2015-ish the EU was just a “meh” thing to me, something where you treated the party members who gave long speeches on European integration as harmless dotty uncles, it’s half an hour to beer o’clock, just check your paperwork and listen politely. But then it because a cult, and the cultists demanded you make your position explicit. I was happy muddling along not making a decision, the typical British Compromise. In the referendum Cameron reassured me that he would not resign after a Leave vote, so satisfied by Cameron that Leave would be handled in a moderately safe set of hands, I voted Leave, as Cameron had assured me that it would be safe to do so.
The very next day the lying basterd liar resigned, the lying basterd.
I am hoping against hope that someone at Number 10 grows a spine, and goes: “Bugger this for a lark.. We aren’t getting this done before the christmas recess. Drop it. It’s Done. See you in January..”
IIRC the serried ranks of remainers in the MSM and on social media never described what staying in the EU was going to be like either
In particular they described Eurosceptic predictions of EU armies and further integration as nonsense
Never forget that Cameron went to the EU begging for a few crumbs to feed the hungry. The EU told him to fuck off. THAT describes the EU perfectly and why the sane in the UK decided to jump ship. Hungary, Poland and others are watching the UK with interest.
Always felt like a turning moment to me, all the EU had to do was drop a few crumbs to Cameron not even anything substantive, but they were so sure of themselves they couldn’t even do that. In part I think they wanted some payback for U.K. being a pain in the arse for years and now the boot was on the other foot couldn’t resist being high handed
” In the referendum Cameron reassured me that he would not resign after a Leave vote, so satisfied by Cameron that Leave would be handled in a moderately safe set of hands, I voted Leave, as Cameron had assured me that it would be safe to do so. The very next day the lying basterd liar resigned, the lying basterd.”
I’ve never understood why Cameron has been given a free pass for this – he blankly lied to the electorate. He obviously had no intention of staying on if he lost the vote, yet is never called on it by anyone. One assumes because to the media and political class he’s ‘One of Us’ so calling him the cunt he is would not be the done thing. In an honourable country he’d be shunned by everyone as a piece of shit.
That campaign, after all, quite deliberately avoided telling the public what leaving would look like.
That’s because the leaders of the Leave campaign weren’t in government so would have no say in what came after Brexit, all they were saying is that it can’t go on like this and making suggestions. The majority of the public agreed and sent an instruction to Parliament to leave the EU.
Subsequent polling and deliberative inquiries, moreover, have shown that, offered a choice, a majority of the public favours something far “softer” than what is now on offer.
Well yes, because there’s a bell curve of opinion from out and no deals no matter what, to full political and economic federalisation within the EU, with the majority being somewhere in the middle. Furthermore it wasn’t leavers being indecisive for 3 years, it was Parliament fucking about trying to engineer either a revocation of A50 or a 2nd referendum. They could quite easily have instructed the government to go for EFTA/EEA or some other solution and May would have fallen over herself to sign up.
As for Gina Miller, as I said at the time, she made our case for us – Parliament is supreme.
Remainers also seem to forget that they never made the case for the EU all they ever did was serve up Project Fear, dialling up the dystopia as we got closer to the referendum and we still voted to leave. I’ve only heard perhaps a handful of Remainers have any introspection and wonder if they hadn’t gone around labelling the working class as thick, racist bigots perhaps they might have go a different result.
All the EU had to do was devolve landowner handouts and the budgets to the member states, and devolve convergence funding and budgets to members too.
Inequality of outcome is linked to productivity without a doubt, but the EU ran with that fact and decided they could make regions more equal by subsidising productivity gains. So the pre-existing capitalists gamed the system, output per job did indeed increase as factories automated, and the displaced labour forces migrated to the countries making the net contributions.
Only economic freedom can fix inequality, not subsidies. Scotland take note.
From Shaun Richards
Jim December 7, 2020 at 6:39 pm – “I’ve never understood why Cameron has been given a free pass for this …In an honourable country he’d be shunned by everyone as a piece of shit.”
You can’t expect a politician to lay out the grounds for him going. It would influence the vote if nothing else.
I mean he is a shit but he is a relatively honourable one. He did not support Leave and rather than try to make it work, he resigned. On a principle. That is not bad. Better than May who wanted to Remain so got into office in order to make sure we did Remain. She pursued a Brext-in-Name-Only, lying the whole time, in order to un-do the referendum. In a decent country she would be hanging from a lamp post.
@Diogenes
That’s a good thing isn’t it ? Especially if you are a first time buyer
Not so good for property taxes…..
Yes, the Remainers promised that voting Leave would result in higher wages and lower house prices. So I took them at their word and voted Leave.
My mortgage is £110 less than it was in 2016, and my wages are up about a third.
“I mean he is a shit but he is a relatively honourable one. He did not support Leave and rather than try to make it work, he resigned. On a principle. That is not bad.”
It is bad when he had specifically said during the campaign that he would stay on whoever won and implement the decision of the people. Its one of the (many) reasons I voted Leave – I feared what would happen if there was a power vacuum immediately after, and I was right to do so. Cameron said he would he would stay on and implement whichever outcome the people chose. That was a principled stance. Saying he would stay on regardless during the campaign then immediately running away like spoilt child because his option lost is not. Its behaving like a immoral unethical twat. He was either lying through his teeth when he said he’d stay on after the vote, or he’s so immensely arrogant he’d never even thought about what to do if he lost. Either way that makes him a cunt of the highest order.
@Jim
I’m somewhat with SMFS on this one. If he said that he’d quit if he lost, he’d have painted a big target on his back, and encouraged a lot of people to vote Leave. You have to bear in mind the electoral arithmetic meant he went into the referendum with a large chunk of the traditionally eurosceptic Tory vote already written off from his coalition, and he was therefore relying on a lot of natural left-wingers to back his position. Would they stomach voting the same way as someone they intensely dislike? Giving them an explicit opportunity to kick him out of Number 10 (or vice versa, expecting them to vote Remain when this was effectively a personal endorsement and bacon-saving of one David Cameron Esquire) would have been a massively risky call and made losing far more likely. It seems unreasonable to expect him to be blunt about the inevitability of his resignation, as that requires him to do something politically untenable.
Where I differ from SMFS is that lying in order to help win a popular vote (albeit lying about a scenario that you both hope and expect will never come to pass, so something you might view as purely hypothetical) doesn’t seem especially honourable to me.