but don’t call those calling for a new civil war nasty names eh? We must remain civil to the ethno-nationalists or something isnt it?
Hoey is an odd fish, an ethno-nationalist right wing racist sectarian unionist who is currently in Labour. No ones quite managed to explain why she’s a Labour MP other than “pin a red rosette on an inanimate carbon rod and certain constituencies would vote for it”. I’m silently rooting for Vauxhall Momentum and their deselection campaign on this rare occasion.
I mean in the abstract, I agree. But I’m not Irish*, and though I know the outline of the difficulties I don’t have the personal level of attachment. So all I can say is that having the two parts of Ireland be able to work out a permanent solution to their deep socio cultural divides and unify as a single peaceful nation sounds wonderful.
But I have no idea if such a thing would be possible today, and if it would be desirable at this particular historical moment.
*by ancestry I’m about 1/8, but I hardly think having family come from there 150 years ago qualifies me for insight
Having worked very close (stone throwing distance) to a number of bomb sites thoughout the 80s and 90s I was obviously anti-terrorism, but we’ve had the peace agreement, and people like Martin McGuiness showed that peace and reconcilliation was possible.
and then with the rise of the online right, even before Brexit campaign begun I started running into a lot of Proddies and bloody hell, they are a nightmare. The online Proddies are ultra-hardcore racists and ethno-nationalists, a really bad bunch. The DUP is the political wing of the 17th Century. Homophobic sectarians to the right of Pence and bordering on Dominionism.
and what with the Brexiters openly baiting the Irish with references to famines/occupation/war/oppression and gleefully throwing the GFA to the wolves too its really swung my sympathies the other way, but the biggest driver for that is my exposure to the Unionists.
So you feel that you’re beyond needing to make an argument? You can just assert your truth and everyone must accept it?
They’re people, with individual and complex motivations. You can over-generalise, caricature and dehumanise them as much as you like in your own head. But you’re lying to yourself if you think you’re anywhere near to reality.
I was equating kinds of voters, not the topic itself. But I’ll keep Trump out of the discussion for the sake of simplicity.
What’s a reason that doesn’t fall into one of those categories? That last one is really hard to get around, since there were plenty of people talking about how bad Leave was economically. And I think immigration effects speak for themselves. If you know it’s going to be bad for others and go ahead anyway…well, there’s your lack of empathy. And if you didn’t know, you were ignoring the entire Remain campaign.
Just because it affects you doesn’t mean it’s not affecting someone else as much or more. Minorities tend to be at the bottom of the economic ladder and bear the brunt of the negative effects. And again…immigration was always going to be an outsized minority impact.
That’s a recent article, but there were folks shouting about it during the campaign. And Leave knew it, why else would they be promising more work visas to counteract the Brexit immigration effects?
People don’t get to vote on treaties. That’s part of the point I was aiming at. Governments negotiate and parliaments ratify, but citizens don’t get to vote. Citizens get to face the dilemma at the next general election, of either voting on the single issue of the last European treaty or the other five years of stuff that happened locally that they want to hold their government accountable for.
So the dynamic in the UK for example, is that if Europe was the most important issue to you as a voter, you had no party to vote for in the '80s and '90s. Every party was overtly pro European integration (Lib Dems, New Labour) or were theoretically sceptical, but once in government, inevitably haggled over the next treaty in Brussels and then ratified it in Parliament. You couldn’t get out of that shitty treaty they’d ratified; vote them out at the next general election if you like, but that didn’t un-ratify anything. And whoever you voted for was still going to sign the next treaty.
Then UKP arrived, but you’re still faced with the terrible choice of voting for this single issue party as your government for the next five years just in order to get one that agrees with you on Europe, or stick with voting for a party that might have some minimal competence at doing things like running an economy and other minor details. (Thus 52% of people voted to Leave the EU, but of course UKIP never came close to that in a general election. Farrage as Prime Minister FFS?)
As you said, we got to elect a European Parliament, but they don’t take part in treaty negotiations. National governments got elected, but almost always and entirely for domestic reasons. There wasn’t any genuine democratic accountability at the European level for any of the long-term decisions that really mattered. And that’s going to be true as long as the EU acts like it wants to be a government, but is built as a treaty organisation.
And you dismiss the EU constitution as this historical detail that happened 14 years ago, but it was one of the three most important events in the history of the EU. And just like the other two, citizens went largely unconsulted (and when they were consulted and gave the wrong answer, they were ignored).
What non-EU treaty has the British public been allowed to directly vote on? All I see are devolution and territorial integrity referendums.
While I think direct democracy is something we could use more of, we are representative democracies and direct vote is highly unusual. There’s a point to be made that direct voting on complex issues might not express the will of the people, since most people will be uninformed and vote without full understanding. I mean, we are on a Brexit thread.
This sounds like the UK political system (or at least the spread of viable parties) is crap. It does not say anything about the EU, though, just about the UK.
In this regard the democratic deficit of the EU is pretty similar to that of the UK or any other member state for that matter. Should it change? Perhaps, but leaving the EU due to “democratic deficit” when the country leaving is perhaps less democratic in its structure (first past the post) is ironic. Or fallacious. Probably fallacious.
You say people vote national governments exclusively on national reasons. Well, people do have strange voting customs (certainly, stance towards EU integration is for me one of the major issues I would deny a party my vote for), but if a population is not taking into account the stance of a government regarding the international organization to which they belong, it doesn’t mean people don’t have a choice, it means people are ignoring it, due to stupidity or lack of information.
Tl,dr: there’s not so much a democratic deficit as a lack of voter interest.
Because when you’re talking about the economic effects you seem to want to paint every Brexit voter as some asshole voting to hurt other people. But that’s not what happened. They voted to hurt themselves. Money isn’t always the most important issue when identity and autonomy are on the table.
Valid reasons to vote Leave (off the top of my head)?
“I voted to join the EEC in 1975, and 40 years later it’s turned into something that I never wanted and have never been consulted about as a citizen.”
“I feel British, I don’t feel European. I do not want to be part of a European state which I feel no connection or loyalty to.”
“Europe constantly tends towards protectionism, heavy regulation and dirigisme. The short-term costs of leaving will be outweighed by the long-term costs of staying.”
Not being a Leave voter, I’m sure I can’t successfully speak for all of them.
All of those reasons, I would argue lack empathy given that Remain pretty clearly called out the damage that Brexit would do to the British economy. Just because you feel the short-term costs outweigh the long-term doesn’t mean everyone else does, particularly those minorities who would be most affected by the immigration restrictions.
Having said that, I don’t expect you to agree. If you think those are legit reasons and the people who chose them were justified in doing so, then there’s not much I’m going to say that will convince you.
It strikes me that they all beg one question or another. What has the EU become which is undesirable? For whom will the costs of staying outweigh those of leaving? And how is the middle reason different from “I’m one of us, not one of them?”
As reasons, they’re remarkably empty of content. They amount to ‘I don’t like the EU’, which tells me almost nothing.
One world government, army currency/economy limits human violence, dominance, antagonism and oppression to separatism and tribalism. It’s why Im puzzled at the shit your pants outrage you get from the Brexiters at even a sniff of a EU Army. Im like, erm doesnt a single European army guarantee no more European wars? It’s almost as if we learned a lesson from millions of war dead.
The question was (paraphrased) “do you want Britain to be a member of the EU?”. They are all straightforward answers!
I think there are maybe a few Americans on this forum who are seeing this issue through Trump-coloured glasses. This is not an issue that suddenly emerged in 2016, that can be easily fitted into some perceived global trend. It’s a debate, a source of political pressure, that’s been building up for at least 25 years (from around the time of the Treaty of Maastricht).
I’ve already written about how there’s been little practical democratic accountability or control of the process of transferring sovereignty from Britain to the EU. I (unscientifically) feel that one element of the Brexit result has been a kind of collective emotional response. Something like; “so here we are living in a supposed democracy, slowly handing over power to a new federal state that’s also supposed to embody democracy and human rights. And this is only the second chance we get to vote on the process, in 41 years? Yeah, fuck you!”
The question assumes there are valid and invalid reasons, where I assume things like racism would be considered invalid reasons.
But the reasons you offer are all incomplete. The speaker who doesn’t like what the EU has become might not like it because it’s full of Muslims. The speaker who doesn’t feel like a European might mean I’m not a bloody Pole. And the final reason leaves open, as I said, the question of better for whom?
They’re just forms of “I’m against being in the EU.” Well, sure, we got that part, but the question was why you’re against it, and whether that’s a ‘valid’ reason.
Not me. I see the EU through the rose-colored glasses which show me it’s the most successful anti-war project in the history of modern Europe.
Personally, I don’t see a problem with being against the EU, for whatever reason. Depending on what it is I’ll judge you and place you in a category that might be more or less nice, but hey, we all like and dislike stuff for reasonable and unreasonable reasons.
The problem is disliking the EU while trying to extract advantages from it / influencing it to your own purposes. That I have an issue with. Want to be outside the EU? Fine, lots of countries are, but none of this be outside when it suits us, inside when it doesn’t.
I’m pretty sure most of us posting in this thread are Europeans.
And from an European point of view, this indeed has parallels to the Trump vote. There are real grievances people could have had against the US political establishment and the impoverishment of parts of the population that made parts of the Trump platform (as before the election) somewhat not totally unreasonable. As there are legitimate (if hipocritical) reasons to vote for Brexit.
The problem is that you don’t get to choose which parts of a platform you support. By casting your vote you are supporting a platform no matter what, and doing a personal balance of pros and cons. Both both platforms used xenophobia as their main argument to convince voters and thus voting for them does align you to that viewpoint, or at least means you care less about it than about the other issues in the platform you support, which is splitting hairs, imho, and doesn’t really change a lot how I personally see those half hearted supporters.
