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E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

Discussion in 'Serious' started by TheBlackSwordsMan, 22 Feb 2016.

  1. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    "The remain camp" (as if it was a single entity) had an impossible task, because it was trying to fight a range of opponents (the leave "camp") who had absolutely no problem in outright lying. Publicly. Repeatedly. And there are still people who believe those lies, impossibly. I've spoken to people who still think the NHS is going to get £350 million a week, that we hold all the cards, that the EU banned bendy bananas(!), that WTO rules aren't going to completely bloody ruin the country.

    Better still, I've spoken to people whose beliefs vary on a week-by-week basis, depending on what the tabloids have claimed in their Sunday issues, yet they don't seem to realise it: they knew exactly what they were voting for, nobody said we would leave the single market; oh we're leaving the single market which we always would be doing, but we'll easily get a trade deal; oh, we don't have a trade deal which we knew we wouldn't get, but WTO is superior anyway; <fast forward six months> rat fricassee is fine once you get used to the flavour, we always knew there would be hardships involved...
     
  2. stuartpb

    stuartpb Modder

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    I'm not trying to claim the leavers were squeaky clean or they ran a good campaign. What I am trying to say is that they "both" ran a campaign that was an absolute embarrassment. On one side we saw the leavers coming up with crap, lies and generally just blagging. Then on the other we saw the remainers sticking their fingers in their ears and hearing only what they wanted to hear. If problems came up that conflicted with what they believed, they ignored them or shifted blame.

    I genuinely believe that if our politicians had taken the concerns areas like mine faced, before the referendum was even a thing, then we could be all talking about a non event here. There are lots of areas around the UK that suffered similar or the same problems. These politicians didn't take these concerns seriously and they certainly did not offer any solutions. We were left high and dry. For that they should be held accountable. That's what I don't like about this thread, apportioning blame but not doing so in a measured manner. I blame both leave and remain for the absolute shambles of a campaign.

    A good starting block would have been for MP's to come into their constituencies, meet with people who were considering voting leave, finding out why they were voting that way and then working with them to address the issues. What we got, and other areas did too, was denials, recriminations and also contempt.
     
  3. loftie

    loftie Multimodder

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    John Oliver sums up brexit pretty well, N.B. swearing. Watch from 8mins.

     
  4. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    That's my whole point: if you, the electorate, are not prepared to just vote out MPs who don't deliver for you, there is no incentive for them to deliver for you. There is no point in complaining that the politicians you voted for aren't listening to you if you vote for them anyway at the next election. They'll just think you're suckers and they've got you in the bag. Which, incidentally, is why the Tories keep turning the screw of austerity tighter and tighter despite all the complaints:

    And indeed, according to the recent polls: at the next election people will vote Tory again.

    Voting Leave will not change anything. You are just a battleground for a proxy war between different factions of the Tory party, and you're all going to be collateral damage. The Brexit your constituents have been promised will be nothing like the Brexit they voted for: not a British workers' revolt, disenfranchised poor taking back control Brexit but a globalist deregulated markets neoliberal non-dom millionaire's Brexit. Your constituents are active participants in their own con.
     
    Last edited: 18 Feb 2019
  5. liratheal

    liratheal Sharing is Caring

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    Taking everything you say at face value, and taking you at your word, I'd suggest that, perhaps, the way your concerns were raised contained the same rhetoric and accusations that regular, run of the mill, xenophobes use. To someone not intimately familiar with your particular area, it doesn't sound a million miles apart (IE: Me) so your MP (And, let's face it, all MP's are so detached from their constituents it's sad) will no doubt have heard something they'd assumed was going to lead down the road of foreigner bashing and shut you down. Rightly or wrongly.

    I may be old fashioned but I think it should have been up to the Leave campaign to prove their point, not just make **** up like they did. It should have been the Remain campaign's job to take the Leave campaign to task over all of the lies, instead of just calling it lies. And somehow distilling the truth into easy soundbites for news agencies to run with. Easy? No. But there should have been a damned good effort. Which there wasn't.

    IMO both campaigns relied heavily on the gaps in the knowledge of the people supporting 'their' campaign, and seemed to work on the basis that they could either lie, or ignore, the rest.

    It was a *********** on both sides of the fence. Cameron should be deported, along with his family for being the herald of this dumpster fire. He's no stranger to storing money in tax havens, maybe he should **** off to one of them with his cash. The referendum should have needed a 60-70%+ majority to be considered as a 'victory' for either side.

    It was all done wrong, but given the polarising nature of the topic, I don't think anything but hindsight would have provided that kind of clarity.

    As much as it's going to suck, I cannot fathom supporting going back on the referendum. IMO, as a vindictive prick, the surviving members of the 52% that voted to leave should see the country wide pain, and feel it, because if it's rolled back now, the 'issue' of being in/out won't go away. The Leave campaign lies need to be burned into the collective memory of the country so when the topic of rejoining the EU comes around, it doesn't get ****ed up again.

    Or, conversely, the nay-saying of us Remainers should be exposed. But I sincerely doubt that'll be the outcome.
     
  6. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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  7. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    "When I voted for the 'F*** Business Party' I didn't think that it was going to f*** the business that employs me..."

    But it's OK: there will just be some retrospective memory editing in Leave voters: "We totally expected that car manufacturers were going to close when we voted for Brexit, it's all a price worth paying... By the way do you happen to have a good recipe for rat fricassee?"
     
    Last edited: 18 Feb 2019
  8. Corky42

    Corky42 Where's walle?

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    I'm not saying that's not true but I'd say it's more that it's a battleground for a proxy war between the two main parties. It's the same philosophy that Thatcher touted in documents that were released in some 30 year latter thing, IIRC she said her main motivation for selling off social housing was because they were breeding grounds for Labour voters.

    And Labour are no different, Blair, most likely, didn't place a restriction on immigration from the newly joined eastern Europen nations because immigrants, especially poor immigrants, are more likely to vote for left-wing political parties.

    It's also why, i suspect, Labour voting areas have been hardest hit by austerity. People believe the cause of austerity is the profligate spending of the last Labour government, even a decade later and even after we know that's not true. IMO Conservative politicians belive, and with good reason, that the harder they squeeze the less likely they are to elect another Labour government.
     
  9. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    One of the greatest piece of political spin/marketing was the conservative pushed idea that a financial crash that happened *while* Labour were in office, happened *because* Labour were in office.

    10 years on, Labour still can't shake the 'Well they caused the 2008 crash' narrative.
     
  10. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    That's because people are too dumb to distinguish between correlation and causation.

    The Tories have until recently been doing brilliant image management. Everybody believes that they borrow less and repay debt more than the Labour party, while historically the opposite is true. So people think that if they keep voting Tory, things are bound to get better someday, right? Right?
     
  11. adidan

    adidan Guesswork is still work

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    Honda is closing Swindon then.
     
  12. liratheal

    liratheal Sharing is Caring

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    It can't help that the most charismatic Labour leader in recent memory is Tony B. Liar. Which, considering his competition, isn't exactly a hard-fought race. Brown alone could sink the competition with his gaping vortex of charisma. Harman was so thrilling I completely forgot she existed. Miliband was the least interesting of the Milibands, and the most interesting Miliband still makes me want to eat Miliput as an alternative. And then Corbyn. The first known vertebrate with no spine, also the first known vertebrate to make the same noise as a flip-flop in motion when supposedly debating.
     
  13. stuartpb

    stuartpb Modder

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    To you it may seem I'm being xenophobic, that's an accusation I and others have met in the 5+ years since we started speaking out. I don't agree. There was and indeed still is a problem with a segment of our community, in the fact that we could not get them to engage. We tried. We really did. All we wanted was for all segments of the community, new members and old, to get round the table and start dialogue. That was our primary goal. We weren't asking for the new members to be kicked out nor were we expecting it.

    With that in mind and after speaking to senior council and police representatives, I formed a social enterprise, where we organised community events in the hope that members of the Roma community would engage that way. It was fully supported by the council and police and we received some seed funding to help get it off the ground. This was in a background of far right groups using our community to further their cause, namely the EDL and Britain First. When they came, they were told quite clearly we'd not invited them and they weren't welcome. There were some within the community who did though but the majority didn't and neither did I.

    With the social enterprise we held probably 20 large community events in the area. We also organised free and open to all community activities. In all that time we managed to get no more than a handful of people from the Roma community engaged. When I got involved in the community group here we were considering protest action, because we'd held numerous meetings with the police and council and they conceded there were genuine concerns and that they were not being addressed effectively.

    They admitted that they had no protocol for dealing with a large influx of immigrants into a small community and to help with integration and engagement issues. They admitted they were caught off guard. That is why measures were put in place to try and deal with the problems. We were working with them to try and resolve the issues not to deepen the existing divides.

    We'd been asking our MP to attend a public meeting with her constituents for 2 years and it took several media reports before she'd attend. Prior to her agreeing, her line was that she thought her presence would be a distraction. I still have that reply from her office now.

    The problems were and are real, does that make us xenophobic for stating that? Does it make us xenophobic for stating the facts of the issues here in our community? See this is half the problem, we speak out we get accused or the blame is shifted. At what point do members of the Roma community take some responsibility for their lack of willing to engage and work with the wider community? I think it smacks of double standards myself. If we can't discuss the issues in an honest manner, then there never will be improvements.

    I am jaded to the point I ended up winding the enterprise up. We saw great successes with the community events in easing the tensions here and providing a positive point of focus for the community but one of our main objectives was to unite the community and find ways in which we could all work together to better the community. Truth be told, it failed miserably in that respect. The council tried helping, the police did, some local charities did, our churches did, but we were constantly banging our heads against a brick wall. So when you say I'm teetering on xenophobia, if you want to call it that so be it, I know I'm telling it how it was and is and I don't feel guilty for that.

    Also liratheal, I'll extend the same invite to you as I did every MP and senior authority who couldn't or didn't want to believe us when we said how bad things are here. Come into our community, spend a few days here, speak to the people here. I'll even offer you a bed and food. If you can't believe us, then see for yourself. As bad as it is, you'd still receive a warm welcome from the community. Even though times are bad, there are still sensible and warm people to meet here! I say that with absolute sincerity.
     
    Last edited: 18 Feb 2019
  14. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    And because Blair was do disliked by those now in charge of the party, it's like they can't help themselves but say/imply 'remember the last time the govt said 'Labour' on it? Remember when we won 3 election on the bounce? It was ****.'
     
  15. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    Yes. Because of the EU-Japan trade deal it can now consolidate manufacturing in Japan. The Swindon plant is currently the only one Honda has in the EU; a detail that must have ceased to be a concern for EU trade negotiators sometime around June 2016...
     
  16. liratheal

    liratheal Sharing is Caring

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    I mean, from what I remember, charisma was literally all Blair had going for him. I don't recall him making any particularly stellar decisions. Apart from having Charisma Vortex Brown involved, because although he sucked the fun out of the rooms in the postcode he happened to be in, he was at least (seemingly) capable of doing his job.

    I think you missed the bit at the start of my post where I said 'taking everything you say at face value'. I didn't say you were xenophobic, just that a politician who is as detached as they normally are would probably have heard whatever you had to say, heard sentences that sound very similar to a xenophobe and immediately dismissed you/your community based on that.

    What I meant with my post is: However you view your standpoint, however valid your complaints are, you still went at a politician with no personal experience over something that to someone with no prior knowledge could sound like xenophobia. And a politician is not going to want to go on record talking to someone who might be xenophobic because their image comes first. Not your problems.

    IMO, it's a fringe of the political correctness stuff impacting how we judge things.

    Should you be allowed to say, with evidence, 'This group of immigrants are causing big problems in our community: Here's the evidence'? Yes, you absolutely should.

    Can you? Not without people who's job is to look good in the media to win votes thinking 'Oh jeez, here's another racist!' - Whether they are accurate or not.

    IMO, it's all about phrasing. But I'm not gifted with a big enough vocabulary to know how one can raise the issue without it sounding like it's a thin veil over a xenophobic agenda.
     
  17. adidan

    adidan Guesswork is still work

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    You know Brexit feels like a permanent state of that period where you feel you're losing your balance on a step but haven't quite started falling.

    But you know the bump will come.
     
  18. stuartpb

    stuartpb Modder

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    I get what you mean, I agree it may possibly have come across like that to our MP, the thing is though, senior council officials and the police were begging her to attend the public meeting too. I don't know what excuse she gave them but I do know she refused. She let us down again, after the first meeting she promised publicly that she would return for further public meetings, at 6 monthly intervals. I was asked to attend these too as community representative.

    It was then decided without consultation or notice that these would be closed meetings with myself, the council, Winterton's secretary and any other agencies involved. I was informed that I had to inform the community of that decision. It went down like a lead balloon and I personally got accused of selling out by a few people here because of that. At every opportunity, she shunned us. I know she wasn't scared of losing the vote here because our community makes up a very small part of her constituency.
     
  19. adidan

    adidan Guesswork is still work

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    Tory MP reckons Honda closure is just down to diesel sales and restrictions, not Brexit.

    It is a factor, like Nissan in Sunderland, but it's not just that.
     
  20. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    I'm surprised he hasn't started blaming immigrants or the EU yet.
     

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