E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

As you say, you can be informed. Know what actually matters, know what promises are relevant to that and likely to be achievable and which are BS, know the voting track record of the MP you vote for. You may not be able to choose between "good" and "bad" politicians, but you can choose between (marginally) better and worse ones.

The sensible option with regards Brexit was to not listen to the unicorn promises and vote for the status quo. Primum non nocere; First do no harm. If you aren't sure of what you're doing, don't do it. If it sounds too good to be true, it is.

I know, and I respect you for that.

 

It might work if you broke up the monolithic parliament into several small parliaments that each deal with a clearly defined set of issues rather than everything, that way it would be easier to elect experts.

 

Oh, and get rid of FPTP. Proportional voting Cheesecake.

 

That wouldn't work as Archtronics points out, you only have to listen to the video in the tweet Mr H posted to see how one persons 'fact' is another persons semantic, if we limited politicians to such black & white thinking and or statements we'd swamp the court system with cases just to rule if they broke a promise, if what they said actually means what a 'common man' would believe it means and everything in between.

An easy to 'fix' would be a proportional representation system similar to the one the UK proposed, and was later adopted, by the EU and a similar voting system to the one the UK got the EU to accept (qualified majority vote). The reason politicians are the way they are is because the system forces them to behave that way, it's a system from a time when people believed there were only winners and losers, and the winner can make the looser do whatever they want.

 

Anyone vote in/remember the 2011 United Kingdom Alternative Vote referendum? I feel like degree of importance in the nature of that campaign and the result has been rather underplayed.

 

No one wanted to upset the status quo, and the Alternative Vote is a confusing system that isn't even true proportional representation. The campaigning was as bad as the Vote Leave campaign, it was painted as an even bigger bad than the EU with just as many half-truths, outright lies, and magical thinking. I spoiled my ballot in that referendum because I don't want FPTP and I don't want AV.

 

Wouldn't an AV voting system still result in an adversarial two party system though? Because that's the problem IMO, when your grasp on power depends entirely on beating a single opponent that becomes the overriding goal, sometimes at the expense of what they're fighting over.

 

Not serious (maybe...) but gave me a laugh https://newsthump.com/2019/01/30/br...oudly-and-slowly-until-the-foreigners-get-it/

 

Satire sites have become about as accurate as actual news sites these days.

 

And its companion piece - http://waterfordwhispersnews.com/2019/01/31/brits-****ing-deaf-or-something/

Oh whoopsie darn, you'll have to edit the URL. I'm sure you can figure out the word that's been censored

 

I really shouldn't be surprised but HMG's mind-bending levels of utter incompetence never ceases to amaze -

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So shelves may be empty and prices will go up.

It'll remind me of NZ. We had banana shortages, cucumbers were constantly expensive, tomatoes and other fruit and veg's prices would vary randomly (and by a lot, and I mean a lot) oh and in the winter you pretty much had a choice of pumpkin and/or broccoli.

Yay. :/

 

Maybot going with the mantra - If at first you don't succeed, bribe someone.

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Worked with the DUP.

 

I like David Lammy more and more each day

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and the myriad knnnnnnnigggithoods and 'honours' to those on the tory backbenches.

 

What's all the remarkable is that's it's only 35 pages so you could read the entire thing in, at most, a couple of hours...I should know as I've done what the person who was responsible for negotiating on behalf of 64 million people hasn't done.

 

To be fair, he would also have to read the 62 page pdf explaining the CTA, so it is 97 pages and that is just the light reading part...

...the real meat on the bone would be the legal analysis on how to square those two with the EU rules regarding external EU borders.

and that just won't do, anything above a 16 page cardboard book with drawings of ducklings in it just flies right above the head of the guy who only recently realized that the UK is on a series of islands.

 

The remarkable thing is that despite the levels of incompetence shown by our own ministers people are already blaming this on the EU.

I mean i know some of us saw the blame game coming from miles away and even said it would be foolhardy to place something like leaving the EU in the hands of such feckless idiots, but to see it all playing out pretty much how it was predicted is truly something to see.

 

Why would they bother to read it? The Tories don't care. They are ideologically driven, not people driven. They see it as an opportunity to rewrite the books to be more aligned with their laissez-faire worldview; Certain that the market will find a prosperous balance if only law would stop interfering and preventing it from achieving that balance. They're wearing blinkers, certain that it will all be alright in the end, and these hardships are temporary while the market finds an equilibrium. Just look at Universal Credit, a failure by every metric, but they're still completely in denial about its inefficacy.

Its this all over again - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys