E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

The Big Ben Bonging Farce of 2020.

Says it all really. If people are so eager to have it bong why not suggest it much sooner? 'But we do it every new years eve!', exaclty we have a year to plan for a specific date, it's not a half baked suggestion a few weeks beforehand.

Daft. Although thinking about it i'm now inclined to see it happen - an historic old timer clinging on to life being supported by scaffolding... Yeah, it would be the perfect image to us leaving.

 

Or the rushed and bodged setup ends up cracking the bell. That would be rather poetic.

 

Well tbf, the bell is already cracked... it's why it sounds so distinctive.

 

Our Dear Leader has to do the setup himself, only way up and down will be via zip line.

 

Perhaps Mark Francois could just hit his own head with a hammer. Being a large, cracked, hollow noisy vessel himself, the sound should be almost indistinguishable.

 

I've started reading this thread from the beginning (the end-of-year accounts won't procrastinate themselves) and it's fascinating to see how much lively disagreement and nuanced debate (admittedly sprinkled with the occasional bit of trolling) used to be the norm in here. Now it's pretty much 100% pro-Remain voices.

As a tentative pro-Remainer myself, I find this troubling. I don't like echo chambers. I thrive on being disagreed with. Since it'll take me approximately two months to read the whole thread at my current speed, can someone shed some light on why the pro-Leavers, er, left? Were they driven out by the sheer cogency of your arguments or did they just tire before you guys did?

edit - also who's jrs77, and did 2015-me have a good reason to block him or was I just being intolerant? (I do vaguely remember being quite intolerant back then.)

 

IIRC he was a bellend to everyone, before he got banned.

 

The problem is... IMO at least... there have been no compelling arguments as to why leaving the EU would be a good thing. It never was about being able to reap tangible benefits or rewards, it was always about ideology and you simply can't have a rational debate about an ideological argument. No one - on here or anywhere else - has yet made a single convincing argument as to why leaving the EU is a good idea or a net positive benefit that we would get from it.

It also doesn't help that everyone's version of Brexit is different; different people want different things from it and there was/is no one version of Brexit that people can agree on and say 'Yes, this is what Brexit means'. Initially the flag-wavers like Nigel Farage wanted a close relationship or a EEA/EFTA-type agreement, but now that's Brexit-in-name-only and not a 'true' Brexit. Initially the idea of a 'no-deal' Brexit was a worst-possible case scenario that no-one wanted, but for some that is now the only 'true' Brexit.

EDIT: Edited out my whinging...

All the arguments in favour or against Brexit have been had already.

Speaking of blocking people... did we ever find out what walle had for breakfast? (LOL, I can't even remember if that was this mega-thread or another one in Serious! )

 

I think some of the pro-leave folks got temp bans for being a little too close to overt racism and intolerance, and opted not to come back to this thread for one reason or another.

But for the most part I think Byron's right. Can't debate ideology, and that's what this entire **** show is about.

 

That was basically my impression. Leavers' arguments were ideological rather than rational, therefore were easily challenged.

The response was basically one of butt-hurt: poor Leavers complaining about being called xenophobic even though Vote Leave (and Leave.EU) won the vote on a pretty explicit anti-immigration rhetoric. Of course, Leavers complaining about being called names didn't garner much sympathy from this EU immigrant who had been called names by various tabloids for decades, and several times by the UK government itself since the EU Referendum.

Sometimes bad ideas are just bad ideas, and cannot be rationally defended.

 

A strong pro-Leave sentiment which has nothing to do with anti-immigration sentiment that I have heard a lot IRL, from people of a certain age (over 50, basically) is that they voted to enter the EU back when it was primarily just the EEC, and that it's ballooned in responsibilities and powers since then. The concern being not that it's necessarily doing any harm, but that its existence and growth were an automatic process, not a democratic decision with any fallbacks or alternatives. People feel railroaded. They voted for an economic solution and got a huge swathe of mechanisms affecting environmental policy, product safety, animal welfare, manufacturing, and a whole bunch of other stuff I don't know much about.

I voted Remain because I believe strongly in deferring to impartial experts, and all the impartial experts I could find were saying that Leave would be terrible for the economy. However, I find the above attitude quite sympathetic. If you order a starter and they bring you a three-course meal, it's reasonable to be upset, even if it's a perfectly good three-course meal. You didn't order one.

The second pro-Leave observation I find sympathetic so far is that most of the claimed benefits and improvements the EU has brought us are things which, at this stage, we would arguably have anyway, and certainly things which we wouldn't lose or backtrack on now that they're commonplace (animal rights, worker rights, environmental protections and the like). This is the part of the pro-Remain argument that has always seemed fishiest to me: the idea that without the EU, we'd still be in the dark ages. Surely our government would opt to adopt most of these beneficial changes, just as most first-world nations do? We all tend to follow the same road by imitating and plagiarizing each other, as nations.

 

Well, the first paragraph of the Treaty of Rome mentions an "ever closer union". The UK government leaflet on the 1975 EEC Referendum mentioned this political union too (on page 5), with bullet points on what that exactly meant:

In fact there was a heated debate about it in the campaign for the 1975 referendum. So everybody who cared to be informed would have known that the UK would not be joining a simple economic community.

In fact, Margaret Thatcher passionately argued that it was the political aspect of the Union that was even more important than the economic one:

A frictionless single market is only possible by all members agreeing on joint standards and regulations (indeed a huge swathe of mechanisms affecting environmental policy, product safety, animal welfare, manufacturing, and a whole bunch of other stuff people don't know much about, as well as worker rights, economic and financial policies, the Four Freedoms), overseen by a supranational body.

Second: it is woefully naive to think that Brexiteers are going through all this trouble to Brexit, just to keep animal rights, worker rights, environmental protections and the like exactly the same, or make them even better, when that could just as easily be done inside the EU. Nope: they want to Brexit for a reason, and that is to diverge on all these standards, and not in a positive direction, but a negative one.
Underlying this naive assumption is that surely first world nations will value animal rights, worker rights, environmental protections etc. no matter what. A brief look at the US will tell you different, and that is where the UK is heading.

 

I find your logic depressingly sound. As usual.

edit - by which I of course implicitly mean, thank you for saying it. I hate the message, not the messenger.

 

Also the cynic in me think they're wanting to diverge as hard and fast as they are in an effort to make the inevitable push to re-join in the future harder/impossible.

 

A hard and fast diverging sounds painful, don't you need a license for that sort of thing.

 

Yeah. I'm willing to bet that any EU based regulation and legislation that's rescinded in the first few months after leaving will be dolled up as "The NHS will benefit from not having the ridiculous working hour limits imposed by the big bad EU! Don't worry that your doctor/nurse fell asleep mid sentence, that's just power napping for better care during their 120 hour work week!"

 

I opted out of the average 48 hour working hours in a week over 20 years ago, pretty much most employed in the UK have this right and have for a very long time.

https://www.gov.uk/maximum-weekly-working-hours/weekly-maximum-working-hours-and-opting-out

 

You do, but the point is that you have the legal right not to be forced to work for longer than that - if you want to opt-out and voluntarily do more hours then it's - at least in theory - your choice. It may not always be that simple, but for the Tories that's where cutting legal aid comes in - can't make your employer obey the law if you have no access to legal representation

 

You also can't, in theory at least, be penalised by your boss for refusing to opt out of the 48hr maximum.

In practice [at least in my experience] they'll dick you around in other ways.

 

Indeed you can't legally be penalised, but, as you say, there's voluntary and then there's "sure it's voluntary but we will find other ways and other justifications to penalise you".