Seriously?!?
Fraxit!
Firaxis
I think the uk is building up enough resentment from the rest of the EU over all this, that they (the EU) might prefer we just leave, and let them get on in building the EU as they prefer. And i wouldn’t blame them. All this ‘Great Britain’ posturing, while loved by the man down the pub, in the BNP, with some of the Lords and Duchesses and ‘horsey’ folk and other generally decent but bigoted types about this issue, well it really is just a dream from an echo of a long distant past, nostalgia in a bad way, and impractical.
The EU may well be better off without us sadly.
Hey, Zak - how does this tend to play out with internal politics? For instance, is it a situation where Wales and Scotland lean in one direction while Londoners lean in another?
Well Tony Blair did say, in an interview on NPR this morning, that leaving the EU might well lead to Scotland voting to leave Britain. I presume they would then apply to join the EU again.
And, given the political split already there, this makes a fair bit of sense. Granted I’m not from the UK, so haven’t followed those internals too closely, but I’d have figured this was a likely course.
For some reason, the meme of “Well, that there is your problem!” came to mind upon reading that.
Scotland and Wales are definitely more pro-EU than England, but I think London is pretty pro-EU for England. See eg this somewhat old poll.
I don’t know how to vote. I do know that neither side is making much of an intellectual case, but I am sick of the pro-EU side trying to smear everyone who isnt pro-EU as idiots or racists. That really pisses me off.
I do know that as a guy who runs a business that sells all over the world, the target countries being in or out of the EU makes fuck all difference. Everyone sets prices in dollars in games anyway :D.
The only EU legislation I’m familiar with is the dumb-as-fucking-crazy ‘cookie law’. I’m also aware that they cant decide where to put the parliament (I;m not kidding) so it moves every 6 months. Presumably to waste as much money as possible.
I think the no vote will win. If we had a vote on it a decade earlier, it would be different, but with all the euro problems + refugee crisis, I dont think tje majority are going to vote to stay in.
I’m still on the fence.
I remember back in the heady days of the late 90s there were some arguments that Britain should join NAFTA and sort of eff the EU. For one, it has a lot more in common (shared history/language) with Canada and the United States than Germany.
I thought this was happening soon, so when I read “23” in this post, I thought it was happening a couple of days ago. Now that it didn’t, I came back and re-read it. June 23! That’s pretty far away. That’s quite a bit of time to sway public opinion one way or the other.
I remember back in the heady days of the late 90s there were some arguments that Britain should join NAFTA and sort of eff the EU. For one, it has a lot more in common (shared history/language) with Canada and the United States than Germany.
On the other hand, Europe makes up nearly twice as much in UK exports and imports as the Americas, and it’s exports of services to Europe that prop up the UK’s trade balance.
Yeah, economically speaking being in the EU is worth more than being in something like NAFTA (but maybe that would change?). To go to Dan’s question, i think seeing how close the vote to stay part of the uk was in scotland could very well indicate that if the uk opted out of the EU, Scotland may very well look to the EU as the preferred partner.
Wales is a little further back on that road, they only have a fraction of the self-governing powers that Scotland has, so i suspect while it would kickstart an internal discussion, and having the Scots (and Irish) as an example to look at, it would be a little further down the road for an likely Welsh exit from the UK. The Welsh, like the Irish (obviously) and Scottish are in general more favourable to the EU than ‘England’ in terms of the national differences within the uk.
All this is just the echoes of history off course, but it seems that stuff does matter (as the usa will find out in it’s future in relation to how it deals with other countries), and does survive an incredibly long time.
It’s surprising just how durable those national identities are.
I don’t really understand why the population is even being consulted. We’re not economists. Is it a philosophical thing? “Would you like your laws to be governed by rich people from your country, where you get to vote for 1/650 of them” vs “Would you like your some of your laws to be governed by rich people from around the EU, where you get to vote for 1/751 of them” ?
I don’t think it’s sensible to ask the population, as most of them are afraid of Brussels the banana straighteners making it gulag-level illegal to sell things in lbs or whatever.
edit: Ps, I personally feel like it’s harder for people in the UK to feel “European” as we have the channel separating us from the continent (so I still need a passport to use the chunnel), and because we already speak English, so any attempt to learn a foreign language in school is usually treated with disdain by school children, to them the language feels kind of “useless” as everyone speaks English whenever they go on holiday, so what use is French anyway?
Doesn’t a national ID work? I don’t need a passport to FLY within the EU.
I’ve never found the EU experiment to be persuasive beyond a certain point (free trade, moderately open borders, some co-operation re. police, etc.). That was really quite beneficial and quite enough.
The countries of Europe are too different to be a proper large conglomerate of states like the US; different languages and fairly different political philosophies and versions of the Enlightenment (Scottish/Lockean vs. Continental/Kantian). To unite the lot of us in a solid political union you’d have to have an actual empire uniting us by force, like Napoleon or Hitler tried to do, or like Qin Shi Huangdi succeeded in doing with ancient “China” (which was sort of quite like Europe in some ways at the time).
It’s time to call a halt to it. Especially after this migration mess, which really seems to have been a deliberate attempt to dilute and destroy the various nationalisms in some sort of hopeful push for Kantian cosmopolitanism, mixed with not a little bit of liberal guilt (there’s a Soros interview floating around where he more or less says as much).
The stupidity of it is obvious in that it’s just exacerbating the nationalisms - as if that weren’t what it would obviously do, as a vast social experiment thrust on people who never asked for it in the first place. Particularly with the imports’ Islamic cultures being so alien.
People are going to look back on this period and wonder, “wtf were they thinking?” IOW, with the immigrant experiment, they’ve done exactly the right thing to tear the EU apart. Without it, they could have looked forward to just a continued blending of Europe at its own pace, maybe even eventually getting over the cultural and language differences. Now they’ve fucked themselves by being too over-eager.