E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

I wonder how many people will still care by 2020. It is obvious that they have already been screwed over on the "more money for the NHS" promise and the "British sovereignty" promise, and nobody even noticed.

 

Politicians banking on general apathy towards politics getting bad enough to give them a free pass on whatever they do?

Was the secret deal with Nissan to import the japanese style of running a government?

 

Fun fact: many people believe that the UK has already left the EU. Others believe that George Osborne is still Chancellor. Do you think they would notice whether the UK is still in the EEA, as long as it has "left the EU"?

The idea of protesting mobs in the street if "their will is not respected" is just Farage's masturbatory fantasy. Won't ever happen.

 

So much for poor old Zac Goldsmith wanting the Richmond by-election to be all about Heathrow, turns out Richmond'ites voted for an anti hard Brexit party.

 

1872 majority for the Lib Dem - although in my own town the tory has less than 1/2 that and she is hard brexit supporter

 

It made me laugh to read that Labour lost it's deposit, what ever the reasons, and there's probably many of them, a 21% swing is nothing to be sniffed at.

 

To prevent further thread derailment.

Wouldn't using the term parliament mean exactly that, the collective legislative and constitutional arms that make up parliament.

I thought each arm of parliament held sovereignty over different things, for instance the Queen could declare a war if she wanted to.

All true but you seem to be taking things rather literally, as was mentioned in this thread sometime ago we have an unwritten constitution based on gentlemanly agreements and as such the Queen has very little actual power.

It is rather as you've just explained how the Queen holds all the power but then you go on to say how, in effect, she can't exercise that power making what you previously said rather meaningless.

Well unless it's written into the bill what happens afterwards then yes plebiscite is only advisory, it's hardly our fault the government failed to define what the electorate were voting for, the only thing that is our fault is not spotting that we were being taken for a ride.

If people were vote for little more than vapourware that isn't the fault of the conman it's the fault of the people who put their trust in the conman, if someone tells you to sign over the title deeds for your house and they'll give you a better house you'd at least want to know what the new house looked like.

Are you saying the politicians lied, what's the world coming to when you can't take a politicians word as his bond, and what's the world coming to when the electorate put their trust in politicians without getting a legally binding agreement.

Yes and Cameron said he'd continue as PM and trigger article 50 immediately if we voted to leave, we were told there'd be an extra £350 million for the NHS, we were told lots of things during the campaign that were either untrue or have since been revoked, so tell me what makes the claims that we'd be leaving the single market anymore truthful than all the other lies we were told?

No it's not, it's pointing out that people were hoodwinked by con-artists and they both failed to realise it at the time and still fail to recognise how they've handed over the keys to the castle without getting anything in return.

It has nothing to do with understanding every single little detail, it's about being able to know when something sounds to good to be true it probably is, it's about recognising you're being conned, that you have been conned, that the only way to beat the con is to walk away and refuse to be a part of it, to not try and beat the conman at his own game.

When people constantly tell you something you really have to ask yourself if there's some truth in what their saying, that maybe they see something you don't.

 

Moreover:

No, I know what I mean. Parliament = House of Commons and the House of Lords (+ token monarch with no real power). But carry on putting words in my mouth and then telling me in lengthy explanations how those words are wrong.

Allow me to introduce you to the Bill of Rights 1689. Discuss.

Let me introduce you to the EU Referendum Bill 2015 briefing paper:



Discuss.

And frankly, if UKIP campaigned for 20 years to leave the EU, I would expect them to have some sort of plan or vision of what that looked like. But they don't. Farage ran off, his MEPs have punch-ups in Strasbourg and their New Leaders of the Month have shorter life expectancies than mayflies. And now they are focusing whatever watery vision they have on taking over the Labour heartlands. Hello? Aren't you forgetting something? Isn't there a whole Brexit to plan? But no. They have already moved on, trying to finds some political relevance in this post-Brexit Britain.

If every time a politician reneged on his promises the country went into constitutional crisis, Britain would be an anarchy. Again, read the small print: advisory only. No constitution is violated if the government simply chose to ignore the result. Bypassing parliament however, is a constitutional challenge.

Isn't that what "have our cake and eat it" meant? I'm sure that most people actually don't even know what it means to be in or outside the single market.

Ah, OK: people knew that the £350 million per week was a lie; they knew that there're would be no extra money for the NHS; they knew that they would leave the Single Market with all the economic penalties involved, they knew that whatever "leaving the EU" actually meant would be decided by the PM, not parliament; they knew that they would lose passporting of services and what that means in a largely service economy, they knew that inflation would rise and therefore the prices of food in the shops; they knew that farmers would not be able to find the seasonal labour to pick their fruit and vegetables for next year. They knew that Turkey was never going to join the EU, they knew that EU immigrants on balance contribute more to the economy than take out, they knew that non-EU immigration was actually larger and less controlled than EU immigration, they knew all that. Sure.

The very fact that people are still demanding things that are legally and logistically impossible, such as invoking Article 50 now or even just repealing the 1972 ECA, or simply stopping paying membership fees, tells me that they don't understand at all what they were voting for.

Frankly people were, as Corky42 says, conned. They are still being conned, but they are too proud to admit it so they rather continue being conned than to call the con and walk away.

 

You'll find it is more complicated can that.

Single Market membership isn't only dependant on being in the EU or not, but also on being in the EEA.

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/pra/Pages/authorisations/passporting/default.aspx

Or wait? What was that other thing with Single Market access? Oh yeah, the EFTA,
http://www.efta.int

But wait, Norway might not want us in that...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-uk-return-to-european-free-trade-association

Except there is another wrinkle, Switzerland is in EFTA, but its access to the Single Market is dependent on a whole bunch of different agreements due to it not being in the EEA, so EFTA membership would not necessarily mean Single Market access.

And as recently has been discovered we don't actually know if we will be an EEA member or not once we leave the EU (and that is independent of the do we want to or not wrinkle).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38126899

And then we have to differentiate between the Single Market as it currently exists and as it is currently being worked on.

What about our involvement in the currently ongoing creation of the Digital Single Market (which most likely won't be finished by the time we trigger art 50 and not even by the time the two years are up)?

Sufficiently confused yet?

 

I was responding to Nexxo who very specifically excluded the Queen.

Again, I was answering Nexxo who made a very specific point of excluding the Queen. Also, most (I appreciate not all) of our constitution is actually written down, it's just not written down into a single document like the US constitution.

It's not really meaningless is it. Like you said, power is in her name and the government wields it in her name. I've no doubt the House of Commons would want to wrest power from her if she tried to abuse its use, but that's not the same as her not having it. Again, I was answering Nexxo's point that she has none, whereas as you've just said, she does. I'm not claiming that's a good thing, it's just what it is.

I know that. What I refuted is Nexxo saying that it was not possible to have had a binding referendum, it is possible, they just chose not to make it so.

It was defined what people were voting for - our membership of the European Union. They were also explicit that leaving the EU would mean leaving the Single Market, which is an integral component of the EU. Both sides made the point explicitly and repeatedly.

All parties from all sides were in unison on the issue that the will of the people would be respected. If they renege on that now, I think that will cause a crisis in this country, not least in the popular vote abandoning the mainstream parties and a dangerous rise in support for hard-right and hard-left parties, as is happening across Europe.

I understand your point about politicians lying to us anyway, but I feel there's a pretty big difference between a single party saying, for example, that they won't raise taxes if voted in - and then once in power saying, "actually, the economic situation is worse than we thought, I'm sorry, but we will have to raise taxes after all."

I think that's entirely different to all of the parties saying they'll give a vote on a subject directly to the people, that the result will be respected, and then the majority in the Commons, across all parties, flatly refusing to honour it because they don't like what the people said.

There's lying in the sense of being suspicious of someone's original motives, and then there's open, bare-faced lying, which is quite different. I believe that is how most people would see it. The Liberal Democrats told bare-faced lies in the 2010 election, and they were crucified for it in 2015, going from 57 MP's to 8. If that happened to both the Conservative and Labour parties, I think our country would be plunged into chaos. I think that's a very dangerous, and very real possibility if The Commons decides to ignore or defy the electorate.

Cameron was a vain, incompetent, I would even say malfeasant idiot. He was also a leader for the Remain camp and he lied his backside off about that as well - as did the chancellor Osborn. Corbyn was also supposed to be a leader for Remain, (after a lifelong career of vocally wanting to leave) but he never really bothered to say much of anything - although plenty of other senior Labour and Lib Dem leaders were all too happy to lie as freely as the Conservatives did. Again, a charge I level at both sides.

No-one said £350m would be spent on the NHS, it was briefly suggested, (and immediately shot down) that it could be spent on the NHS. It was an incredibly stupid thing to say, (by UKIP I believe) but anyone who pays enough attention to politics to hear the claim would have also heard it immediately shot down as well.

Likewise, constantly quoting the £350m figure was also an incredibly stupid thing to do, (again by UKIP I believe) - although in their (very limited) defence, they did repeatedly say, when pushed, that was how much we were on the hook for before the rebate, (a rebate which could be rescinded) not what we paid currently. A weasely, but technically accurate argument.

Both sides lied repeatedly, so that's not a one-way thing. It was a terrible campaign, the worst I've ever seen in this country. But do you remember over a million people losing their jobs almost immediately, house prices collapsing, an 'emergency budget' the day after the vote with massive tax rises and a huge hike in interest rates. All supposed to happen the very next day. There were even some MP's (and senior European MEP's and politicians) talking about how a vote to leave could not only cause a Europe-wide crash, a global crash, but even embolden Putin to attack Europe and start World War Three! I mean seriously!

To be honest with you, I personally think that if the Remain side had lied less they'd have probably won by about 52/48 instead of losing 52/48. It was simply that so many of their lies were so blatant and so obvious that people just got the hump and stopped believing anything that they said, when underneath all the lies was also a fair amount of truth. And once again, that's true of both sides.

Well that's entirely a matter of perspective, as many people feel they were handed over years ago, (with no permission from the electorate) and this was a matter of taking the keys back.

UK law is currently subordinate to EU law, so if there is ever an EU law that overrides existing UK law, or one that the UK electorate simply don't like, tough, there's nothing that we can do about it as a member of the EU. When UK parliament is once again supreme, you have the option of voting out the government for a new party to change the law.

When people imply, or actually state, that the result should be invalid and retried because 'one side' didn't understand what they were doing, then it is clearly about understanding the detail. To say one side knew what they were doing and the other didn't is patronising.

As for not trying to beat the conman at his own game, again, that is an argument to levelled squarely at both camps. I wish both sides had taken the high road, but shamefully, neither did.

Maybe. Or maybe the people who disagree with you understand the core arguments perfectly well and just have a different opinion to you. The truth is, there was no 'right' or 'wrong' answer to the question, it was simply a matter of preference. What do people want.

I'm not an avowed, Euro-hating loon. I've travelled all over Europe and spent many years working with Europeans, both as colleagues, clients and friends. It was a difficult choice. There were numerous, valid and good reasons for staying in. I just decided that, on balance, there were more negatives than there were positives. That's my opinion.

I have no problem with people who wanted to stay in, I understand the reasons why they would. I respect their opinion and their reasoning behind it, and I also respect people who put up a strong, logical and articulate defence of their position. I'm just sick to the back teeth of some people's snide, patronising stance - whereby anyone who voted differently to them is 'uninformed' and 'unthinking'.

 

How could anyone have had the possibility to carefully consider the positives and negatives when the May government (who we didn't even know would exist at the time we had to choose) to date still refuses to share what they intend to do with brexit?

 

Well you'll have to forgive me for the misunderstanding there Nexxo, I was simply replying to what you'd said, not what you meant.

Also, I said: "So if by saying parliament you simply mean..." so that's hardly putting words into your mouth is it - that's me making a point of trying to clarify and understand what you'd said. And judging from your answer here I still think I'm right, as first you specifically excluded the Queen, and now you're saying: OK she's there, but basically irrelevant. Which is constitutionally not true.

I never stated that she had unlimited power - that concept left the room in 1215, never mind 1689.

And? What point do you think you have successfully made?

I know there was no requirement to implement the result of the referendum, we've already covered that. I have also stated why I think it would be a stupid and outright dangerous thing not to.

As for: "The UK does not have constitutional provisions which would require the results of a referendum to be implemented." That's basically an empty statement. We may not have constitutional provisions that require it, but nor do we have constitutional provisions that forbid it either. If the government had wanted it to be binding, they could have chosen to make it binding in the proposed bill - and if that bill had passed then it would have been law.

The main reason it wasn't made binding was because Cameron thought it would be harder to pass a binding referendum in the house, so, (as usual) he took the easier option. The reason he thought it would be harder to pass is because he knew many MP's (and Lords) who opposed leaving would refuse to pass a binding referendum bill. That doesn't alter the fact that parliament could have made it binding if they chose to.

Firstly, they do have a basic plan: ie, to leave political Europe and revert to them being just trading partners - and trading partners on whatever best terms we can get after negotiation. It's really not brain surgery.

Secondly, what would it matter if UKIP had a plan or not? UKIP are not the government, they are not even a significant party in current parliamentary terms, (1 MP out of 650) they have no power over anything.

It was the Conservative government who called the referendum and the Labour opposition who supported it. It is, and always was, for them to have a plan. Neither of which bothered to prepare for the 'wrong' result.

Honestly, I don't give a monkeys whatever they do. If you're looking for someone to have an argument with over UKIP, you need to talk to someone else - I'll not fight their ground for them, even if I think some of the vilification they get is completely out of proportion. (Although I do think that some of the out-of-context and rabid vitriol thrown at them is counter-productive and partly responsible for their rise).

As explained above, the whole of parliament promising to abide by the result of a simple in/out question, and then the whole of parliament (or the best part of it) reneging on that is entirely different. Waving a bit of legal small print, get-out-clause won't quell the electorate when they were explicitly told, by everyone, their vote would count. Like I said to Corky, I genuinely believe that could plunge the country into chaos at the next general election.

And it wouldn't just be people who voted out taking their votes elsewhere either - I know people who voted remain who are fed up with it on principle too. Like I explained above how I was a close leaver, most of the people I know who voted remain were close calls as well, and they too think a democratically taken vote should stand.

A negotiation is two sides wanting opposing things. At the start of the negotiating we'll ask for everything and offer little in return, and they'll want everything from us and want to give us little in return. Both sides will start off with hard, bold rhetoric and unreasonable demands and will (very slowly) move forward from there - with probably both sides claiming 'victory' at the end. Surely that's not difficult to grasp is it?

Maybe. We trade with pretty much the rest of the world without bilateral trade deals at present. There's no current deal with the US, but we still buy and sell stuff with them. Same with China, same with most of the world. Unless they go psychotic on us and want to start a high-tariff trade war, (always a possibility) there'll be a few percent added to goods & services in each direction. Currency fluctuations, past present and future will have a bigger impact - unless they go the trade-war route as some kind of twisted, self-flagellating form of 'punishment'.

Remember too that the single market does not currently cover everything. Things like insurance for example are excluded, as they were concerned that London would take over the European market.

Also remember all the caps, restrictions and fees they've tried to place on London trade in an attempt to both skim money off the capital, and also simply move the trade to their own countries. Germany and France have been actively hostile towards London in an attempt to move business to Frankfurt and Paris, so the idea that the single market is a comfy, cosy utopia for us is not the full picture.

I've no doubt that not everyone fully understood all of that, no. But then there are the same arguments in reverse.

Did everyone who voted remain know they were trying to cream billions extra from London, taking money out of the UK and into the EU for doing absolutely nothing at all? Did people know that they were actively hostile in trying to lure business away? Did people know that not all services are covered in the current agreements? When people kept saying an EU Army would never happen, did people know they would start talking about it less than a week after our vote? Turkey would have been in talks to join, if not for Erdogan's authoritarian crackdown on opposition - the EU signed a deal with Turkey last year, (in relation to migration through Turkey) that expressly talked about speeding up negotiations to join. You can't say that was never on the agenda when there are official deals saying it was.

Triggering Article 50 immediately could have been done, but not now there is a court case relating to it - even if logistically it would have been an imprudent thing to do. In fact, if you read the wording of Article 50 itself, we don't technically even need to trigger it, we could simply inform them of our decision to leave and leave immediately. Not saying that's a wise thing to do, but it would have been legally possible within their own framework.

The lack of clarity goes both ways, which is why I get irritated when people say it is only one-sided.

 

We may not have had access to the fine detail of leaving, but come on, people knew, more or less, what it meant to stay in, ('ever closer union') and more or less what it meant to leave.

Leave meant leaving the political European Union, with all the political baggage that entailed, and then trying to negotiate as good a deal as possible in terms of trade and other co-operation. Knowing what those precise terms were going to be was always impossible to know beforehand.

As I've said previously, I don't know a single person, not one, who voted to leave who didn't understand this - all I keep hearing is people who voted to remain stating that those who voted to leave didn't understand it.

As for what May wants, she'll clearly want the best deal she's able to get: No tariffs if possible, low tariffs if it isn't. To not pay any money into the EU if possible, to pay the lowest trading and co-operation fees possible if it's not.

What exactly is it people want her to tell parliament? What are you looking to hear?

It should be obvious what she wants to get, (just as it's obvious what Europe will want). Giving away our negotiating strategies, red-lines and flexible positions in parliament will ensure we get the very worst deal possible.

 

From the Vote Leave website:

Just so there is no misunderstanding about what that means:

That all depends on what "respecting the will of the people" means. Again the EU Referendum briefing paper states that the government does not have to act on the result, and if it does decide to act on it, does not have to do so to a specific timetable.

Now this is interesting. You are obviously one of the most informed Leave voters who has really thought about it. Yet you do not recall this promise nor who made it. Tells you a bit about the quality of this campaign and how complex issues were ludicrously simplified. Let me refresh your memory:



Like you say, a stupid thing to say, but how many people believed it and based their vote on it?

Nope, it was Vote Leave. Big red bus (built in Germany). Remember?

More memory refreshers:

- Those dire predictions were predicted on David Cameron making good on his promise to trigger Article 50 the next day. As you say: most imprudent. He didn't in the end. Theresa May still hasn't.

- "World War III" was a straw man first mentioned by Boris Johnson.

Not that this would have been the end of the matter:

So, shall we have that second referendum then? Seems only fair.

What, like how we immigrants keep being made out to be a drain on the UK, and how Remain voters keep being called part of the "liberal elite"? I think that both sides could step back a bit. But, you know, where even Donald Trump has been calling for unity and promising to be a president for all Americans, the government is firmly disavowing the 48% as irrelevant. And that can only make things worse.

 

Oliver Cromwell tried to rip up magna carta

btw there is only 3 clauses still in effect in English law - the rest have been superseded.

 

Ah, no. I think you'll find that it's a bit more complicated than that.

What does it mean in terms of accessing EU airspace?
What does it mean in terms of NHS membership of the European Medicines Agency (based in London at the moment)?
What does it mean for the European Arrest Warrant? Interpol membership?
Whet does it mean for 40+ years of legislation when the 1972 ECA is repealed (no, May's Great Repeal Act won't actually work as simply as she pictures it. Complicated).
What does it mean for the Digital Single Market?
What does it mean for negotiations on fishery quotas (no, leaving the EU won't mean being able to catch more fish. Again: complicated)?
What does it mean for the Good Friday agreement? The soft border between N. Ireland and the Republic of Ireland?
What does it mean for passporting of services and the financial market in London, which still generates 30% of all UK taxes?
What does it mean for all those companies that invested in the UK explicitly because it offered access to the Single Market?
What does it mean for the supply chains of UK based businesses that are heavily interlaced with mainland Europe (a bumper for an Aston Martin car travels six times between the British factory and different mainland European ones as part of its production)?
What does it mean for availability of seasonal farm workers?
What does it mean for availability of health and social care professionals from Europe (whose qualifications mostly resemble the British ones) while there remains a shortage of British staff?
What does it mean for the Erasmus student programme?
What does it mean for shared research initiatives with the EU?
What does it mean for immigration? Yeah, that one. Points based? Caps? Just "control", whatever that means?
What does it mean for the EU immigrants already here? British immigrants living abroad?
What does it mean for the EHIC card?
What does it mean for Britain's WTO tariff schedule?
What does it mean for Britain's military involvement with the EU-27?

These are just a few things I pull out of my head as I type this. There's much more. How many people do you think are actually aware of all that? They're not. Most people believe that Britain can leave the EU while nothing really changes in terms of the economy (or even that it will really take off now the EU won't be holding it back anymore, what with it being only the 5th largest economy and the fastest growing, having the second most important financial centre on the world and the lowest unemployment in over a decade), and that's it. They think that they now have "sovereignty" and "control" while they just signed more human rights away to the snooper's charter that they don't even know exists. They wonder why Article 50 has not already been triggered. They wonder why the government even bothers, and doesn't just repeal the 1972 ECA (because unilaterally tearing up an international treaty without following its contractual exit procedure of course really encourages other nations to sign bilateral treaties with you). They wonder why the UK doesn't simply stop paying its membership fees (because a country that reneges on its debts is always an attractive investment opportunity and business partner). That's the level of understanding we're talking about.

 

To me it read like he was excluding her singularly, as in she alone isn't sovereign, she's part of the whole and can't act alone, or at least in most situations she can't.

To me it is, you can vest as much power in a single entity as you like but if you make it all but impossible to use those powers they're meaningless, they're nothing more than a figurehead.

IIRC he said "[they] can only ever be advisory" and legally that's correct as for plebiscite not to be advisory it needs to be written into the bill, i.e the default is that they're advisory.

You're correct on the first point but unless you've read something in the bill that i haven't there was no mention of the single market or what would happen post result.

You can say both sides explicitly and repeatedly said we'd be leaving the single market but again i point you to the amount of lies that both sides told during the referendum, why should what they said on the single market be any different from the other things they lied about?

Indeed, they're savvy enough to know they can't outright reject the result, however as was mentioned previously in this thread there's nothing stopping them from delaying things long enough until such a time that public opinion swings the other way, the government is already delaying things by appealing the high courts decision that parliament must vote on triggering article 50 instead of just accepting the judgment and getting on with it.

You have to remember the only reason the referendum was offered in the first place was because of the rise in UKIP and the internal divisions within the Conservative party was threatening to tear the party in two, it was intended to be Cameron's quick fix solution.

And please don't pretend only one side told whoppers, that only one side where playing the electorate like fiddles, if you like i can dig out a picture of Boris standing in front of a poster specifically saying we would spend the £350m on the NHS, that Mr Farage said he advised against making that claim, and may other claims that were proven to be highly misleading at best and outright lies at worst.

That's why a lot of people, in your words, seem to be patronising towards those who voted to leave and treating them like they''re stupid, it's not because they didn't or don't have valid arguments, it's got nothing to do with whose right or wrong, it's because the only people who are going to get what they want are the politicians, it's because parts of the electorate couldn't see they were playing into the conmans hands, that they didn't, and still can't see how the game was rigged.

Is it OK if i possibly answer the other points you've raised later as it's getting late and it feels like I've been typing for hours.

 

The date it gets triggered is pretty much irrelevant as the negotiations will take significantly longer than the scheduled two years anyway, 27 regime changes (and with it changes in negotiation strategy) to delay proceedings...
Probably going to be more like two decades.

(so they might as well just trigger article 50 today)

 

OK, you've glossed over or simply ignored most of what I said, but never mind.

You're right, I couldn't remember who came up with the stupid £350m off the top of my head, when I said 'I believe' I was making the point I couldn't remember. I've not been sat here all day I've been doing other stuff and drifting back, I guess that's what you get with typing from memory. My opinion of it still stands as quoted above though.

I agree with you about complex issues being grossly over simplified, again, both sides.

Regarding World War III, from your own quotes it's clearly Boris replying to Cameron - Boris may have been the first to utter the exact words, but it's clearly Cameron talking of the possibility of war in Europe. You don't think that was a bit, you know, hyperbole? Extreme even? Maybe a bit unbecoming of both a prime minister and leader of the remain campaign?

Also, you keep quoting Farage like I give a stuff about the man. I don't. I really don't. I happen to agree with one issue he stands for, beyond that, not really interested in the man.

And have I, at any point, made any reference to immigrants like yourself being some kind of drain? Who's putting words into who's mouth now?

I started off by replying to you about what you said, (people who voted out were uninformed and unthinking) and in return you're trying to hold me to account for what other people have said. I'm no more responsible for what some of the 17.4m leave voters have said any more than you are for what some of the 16.1m remain voters have said. There's been plenty of stupidity, deceit and aggression on both sides. How about we just stick to answering each-other, instead of throwing other peoples arguments at each-other as if they were our own?

As for disavowing the 48%, I don't think that's a fair statement to make at all. For a start, she was part of that 48% herself! It was a straightforward in/out question - it's pretty difficult to appease both sides when the two choices are diametrically opposed to each-other. She has to make a choice, and surely that choice has to be to go with the majority. You're upset enough as it is with a majority taking you out, imagine if it were a minority taking you out!

I agree with you that both sides should take a step back and calm the language a bit - but if you remember, I first replied to you when you basically said everyone with a different opinion to you was thick. And even in your further postings, you make some point and then follow it up with a patronising "discuss", as if you're a school teacher setting work for pupils to learn from you.

That's not really taking much of a step back is it.

 

Just to quote myself again, with added emphasis this time:

As we both clearly know, what you've put is the tip of the iceberg, and I don't know about you, but I'm not willing to write a 500 page essay on the subject, hence I simply said and other co-operation.