5011

I’ve tangled with him upthread but…I don’t quite agree with this! :O

5012

I don’t have much time today so forgive me if my points are brief or under-explained.

No problem. I’ve engaged with you often enough to know that your posts are in good faith. It’s a pleasure to debate with you.

Only from the perspective of Remain supporters :)
The referendum was a political campaign and as such it was rife with heavily biased information from both sides. The referendum result still stands though. It has not been declared invalid.

Again, it’s about perception. I don’t believe that a break up of the Union is likely. I’m not convinced the risk to the Union is as high as Remain supporters proclaim.

I disagree 100%. A 2nd referendum will only cause more contention and further the divide. Its validity will be immediately in question. I think it’s unlikely to occur. It’s also deeply offensive to Leave supporters. Why bother voting at all if your vote is just going to be ignored?
However, a 2nd referendum after we have left the EU would be valid. Also, a 2nd referendum in order to pick the method of Brexit (without Remain as an option) would be acceptable.

I agree completely. To porogue Parliament to force through a no deal Brexit would be terrible. I don’t support it at all. Unfortunately people on both sides have become radicalized. It’s not good.

Ideally I would want a deal, I would accept no deal if an agreement wasn’t possible. If Parliament cannot deliver Brexit then we need a GE. If there was a GE and a Remain supporting party won then I’d grudgingly accept that result.

Only from the perspective of Remain supporters :)
I believe Brexit has been catastrophized. It’s a bureaucratic readjustment. Although Brexit may negatively impact the economy in the short term people still voted to Leave anyway. The short term costs are worth the long term benefit.

But we still don’t have total control over our laws nor can we easily hold the politicians that make those decisions to account. “Muh sovereignty” :)

… and just how prolonged and extensive the pro EU campaigns have been going on.

Personally immigration is probably bottom of the list of my “reasons to Leave” and agree with what you say here. However, we still lack full control. “muh sovereignty :)”.

Thanks for surreptitiously calling me a racist, nice :)
Seriously though, it’s about perception. You cannot comprehend the perspective of Leave supporters and so you seem to view us as evil. It’s not about stoicism. It’s an ideological disagreement between two groups. I don’t know what else to tell you. Being eurosceptic doesn’t make me evil or crazy. I just have a different opinion to you as to the benefits of the EU.

5013

With that sort of principle, you’d be in a right old pickle if the British public voted for something impossible to implement in the way it was presented!

Imagine if the public had voted for literally leaving Europe, as it would make us better off. Would you still be in favour of strapping nuclear engines to the south coast, lest we flirt with authoritarianism?

5014

Of course not but that wasn’t the referendum that was held :)
The referendum was (although badly handled) a reasonable question:
Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

5015

So your principle does have limits! So really this is a matter of degree, not principle, and I suspect you just evaluate the practical elements differently.

For what it’s worth, I have some sympathy for the argument - but I think the political dangers are far higher by enacting Brexit than not doing so.

At least, for the country. The Tory party is in deep shit either way. It made promises it can’t, and could never, keep. That’s no reason for everyone else to help them out!

5016

It comes down to Brexiteers not believing leaving the EU is actually such a problem. And until you actually leave, nothing can prove otherwise.

5017

This is one thing I really think should be picked up here.

The result of the Electoral Commission investigation was that if the referendum had been binding, it would have been declared invalid. As it wasn’t binding, there was no mechanism by which it could be declared invalid.

“It has not been declared invalid” is a poor characterisation of this and so a very weak argument.

Exaclty the same problem as climate change.

5018

and more fallout from the shift to hard/far right that Brexit represents.

They had previously won support from senior Conservative politicians including Andrea Leadsom and Esther McVey, who said parents should have the right to choose what their children were taught.

Tatchell said Ukip, the Brexit party and the European Research Group (ERG) of Conservative MPs had all attracted politicians who were vocally opposed to gay rights.

The former Ukip MEP Bill Etheridge quit the party last year saying it was seen as “a vehicle of hate towards Muslims and the gay community”, while the Brexit party MEP Ann Widdecombe last month said science could one day “produce an answer” to being gay. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the ERG, has said he is opposed to gay marriage on religious grounds.

Most of the Brexiter politicians mentioned in this thread voted against LGBT rights of course, and for the BXP and Farage and Widdecombe, homophobia is more or less a policy.

Again, no one believes this is purely about the UK leaving the EU. Why you lot are entertaining Draxens bullshit I dont know. His links to Alt Right channels and his comments on immigration (and his posts in MeToo threads) shows what he’s really in this for.

5019

Democracy is predicated on people changing their minds, allowing every few years / events for people to reverse course. Not even just every five years for a general election here, but whenever someone has the political capital to call one. Plenty of decisions never get put into effect because of administration/public opinion changes, not to mention advisory votes with no legal binding, that brexit, political stunt that it was, is. Lies made to the public should not be made policy as a matter of course, and they usually are not anyway.

Choosing Brexit as a hill to die on is a politicial Tory decision, not an honorbound immovable or immutable event outside of democracy’s juristriction. And sure, leavers might feel betrayed by another referendum, just as I feel betrayed by any politician who talks about promising wealth equality or tackling environmental change, and doesn’t.

So your arguments about not enacting brexit as authoritarianism are exactly the opposite; enacting one policy regardless of changing political consensus is despotism if it’s no longer what the people want and subsequently vote against.

Would you prefer an authoritarian government as long as they enact Brexit?

Anyway, your responses to BloodybattleBritain make more sense than the pithy, “we voted therefore we should get it, come hell or high water” nonsense.

5020

I don’t quite get this argument. The public goes to the polls every few years to decide whether their previous vote was a good idea or not (ie. whether to change government). Why would it be such a problem to do the same for a leave referendum, given that sufficient time has now passed for the public to make another decision on whether their previous vote was a good idea or not? The original vote to leave - 3 years ago now - has not exactly produced much of anything at all. In some countries, that would be enough time for another election.

I see my post partly overlapped what spiffy was essentially saying.

5021

The Trump-UK Ambassador-Johnson thing is picking up momentum.

and of course, the quotes from dozens of Labour MPs about their party around the other big story in that link show that Labour is putting just as much effort into destroying itself as the Tories are.

Westminster is utterly dysfunctional.

5022

I think the dissolution of the United Kingdom would be an acceptable outcome should Brexit be forced through. The biggest fuck you to the jingoists, imperialists, colonialists and the “Conservative and Unionist Party” there can be. “Great” Britain? No longer. Ha, fuck you.

Even the Orange Order wont oppose it should the people of NI want it.

5023

See, this position seems like nonsense to me. Having made a bad decision, one which now is obviously bad, nevertheless we must see it through, else the deluge?

(I understand that you don’t think it was a bad decision, but you should be arguing that, not the necessity of carrying it out because it was decided.)

5024

BTW, as an aside, Dan Carlin had an interesting discussion on his Hardcore Hostory Addendum podcast, about how the one thing he was envious about in an authoritarian regime was their capacity to plan long term strategy, and not have it upended by changing democratic mandates. His example was for exacting climate policy, how it can be difficult to convince an electorate about expensive necessary steps if it flies against the short term wealth expectations of the population, via tax spending etc, even if it’s to save everyone in the end.

But he wasn’t advocating it, of course, since humanitarianism and environmental mindfulness doesn’t seem high on the despot bucket list.

5025

+1234

5026

I think the argument is more along the lines of ‘politicians need to fulfil their promises, lest the population stop trusting all politicians’. There is some merit in this, but limited by the fact that such damage has already been done.

5027

I don’t think that’s a better version of it. There is no doubt that bad decisions will sometimes be made, and that the badness of those decisions will be recognized, and that something other than plow straight ahead anyway will be the better choice. Once you acknowledge that fact, the argument that we must do it because we said we would becomes falsified, and you can’t use it as your principal reason for doing something. Instead, you have to be arguing whether doing it is a good thing or a bad thing, independently of what anyone decided before.

5028

Would you guys still hold the same position if the circumstances were reversed?

What if Remain had won the 2016 referendum but Parliament was predominantly Leave - they ignore the referendum result and force Brexit to occur.

5029

That’s a false equivalence… Parliament is not predominantly Remain now. The fact they haven’t pushed Brexit through is on the Brexiteers’ heads, not ours.

That being corrected yeah, I’d be really angry, but if we were drawing an equivalence, the country would have shifted Leave, and democracy will do what it does. Just like I felt living in the States when Bush got elected twice, I felt betrayed. Oh yeah, and that time Clinton won the popular vote.

5030

I think it’s that anger (or something like it) that fuels The Brexit Party (and that Farage is capitalizing on).

As a Leave supporter I didn’t understand the anger of Remain. It took me a while to fully grok the depth of feeling and disenfranchisement that Remain voters were feeling.

The worst thing about Brexit is that both sides now just shout at each other. We’re all too entrenched in our own camps and the middle ground has been lost.