Is there anyone in government with any modicum of decency and intelligence?
I can’t think of any off the top of my head
laughs
I believe we voted against Balls in 2015.
Brexit was an ethno-nationalist project, run entirely about immigration, with overtones of xenophobia and racism from both Leave sides. It was only about immigration, it was only about foreign people, it was only about the other.
17m people are racists, or chose to enable and empower racists by standing alongside them.
They openly rejected people like me, my family, our culture, our heritage. These people want to cleanse me and people like me from the UK.
This is proved again and again.
One third! Thats 5 MILLION people who believe in what amounts to 14 words "“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” . This is not a tiny minority of poor mislead souls.
and now, 2 years, on, when the dangers of Brexit are revealed, when the polls confirm it was purely about immigration and xenophobia, the Brexiters continue to push for pain and misery to be inflicted on us all because they hate darkies more than their granny needs insulin.
I.e this week, in Peterborough
He said he was for a hard Brexit, crashing out of the union unless a better deal were struck
This c**t wants us to have chaos, wants hardship, wants us to starve, wants people to die from lack of medication or treatment.
So bollocks to your excuses for these vermin.
Its just the same as the Trump voter and Nazi threads, there’s always someone trying to excuse and defend those who seek to inflict pain and misery on others due to their bigotry and hate by making out they are victims of a nefarious few. Bollocks, everyone went into Brexit knowing what they were doing, they made the choice to stand with Farage and the ethno-nationalists. Their choice, their responsibility.
They are vermin. I HATE them.
You do realize that you’re preaching the same type of hate that you accuse them of, right?
I also disagree that Brexit is entirely about immigration. I think that it’s more likely the result of neoliberalist policies that have led to widespread economic and social inequality and have left a large amount of people feeling disenfranchised and marginalized by the system.
I don’t think this is a problem that is specific to the UK but is instead manifesting in many countries. See the recent riots in France for an example. I agree that the current conditions make it easier for racists (crazies) to flourish and that it’s a very dangerous road but I firmly believe it’s a symptom not a cause.
I think this is disingenuous. The UK existed perfectly fine before being part of the EU and will exist just fine without it. There might be some initial bureaucratic issues but the sky won’t fall in.
I also think this is a distinct failing of the Remain message. Instead of extolling the virtues of Europe the message has been predominately about fear.
You what? These people want to cleanse me and my family from the country and Im supposed to what? love them? empathise? sympathise?
Im not fucking Gandhi m8
I didnt start the race war. I wanted the status quo. I didnt hate immigrants. My actions here are self-defence, not attacks.
The right-wing nutters for whatever reason believe themselves to be in the right. They believe in what they’re doing. If I was the target of racism then I expect I would also feel as angry as you seem to be. However, the issue is that they are misguided in their belief systems. I don’t think you can fight that with hate (although I can fully understand the sentiment). It just exasperates the problem.
You grant them so much political competency! Most people don’t care about politics. It takes an awful lot to get even a simple message into the average voter’s mind (hence the frustrating repetition of catchphrases).
People voted leave for a smorgasbord of nonsensical and contradictory reasons. People voted remain for the same. The average voter had neither the time, interest or background knowledge to do anything else.
All bad people believe they are in the right, so that doesn’t mean anything.
Amongst my family, an aunt and uncle voted to Leave because they felt like they’d been conned. They voted to join the EEC in the 1975 referendum, but say that the what they were told they were joining isn’t what the EU has become. They identify as British, not as European, and fundamentally do not want to be citizens of a European state. (Their position is the one I have most sympathy for; the main difference between me and them I think is that however big the democratic deficit in the EU, and however much it sometimes sucks, leaving is going to suck far more).
One of my brothers voted Leave as, I’m not sure exactly, an anti-capitalist protest vote. He doesn’t like the globalised corporate world we live in and seems to have chosen the most disruptive option in the hope of change. I really struggle to understand his thought process so I’m not sure I’m even summarising his views correctly.
My Mum voted Leave because of immigration. She probably lives somewhere on the racism spectrum, in the sense that the British identity she inhabits is the one from her childhood, where (nearly) everyone in London looked the same and spoke the same language. She would never be personally racist or discriminatory, or anything other than genuinely nice, but is racist in the abstract; willing to believe almost any Daily Mail story about how they are ripping us off and destroying our country.
The point I"m aiming at is that there are a lot of different reasons for voting Leave. The idea that it’s a monolithic block of 17m racists is nonsense. pwk’s concept of collective guilt is also bullshit; these people didn’t elect a National Front government, they voted their choice on a single one-off constitutional question. You don’t get to invalidate someone’s political beliefs just because you found an asshole who accidentally agrees with them.
And dismissing 17m people as “vermin” is talking like a Nazi. In the end, this is just blowing off steam on an internet forum, but still, why would you want to talk like a Nazi?
We’re not tired of this argument yet?
No, not all people who voted for Brexit or Trump are racists. Some are just dumb and really didn’t understand what they voted for. Some are lazy, and didn’t bother looking at the issue in detail before voting. Some are lacking in empathy, and voted for some economic or some other non-racist reason without even thinking about what it meant for a significant portion of the population.
Yes, all people who voted for Brexit or Trump voted for a racist agenda. Whether they meant it or not, it doesn’t take much of a logical analysis to see that the effect would be to harm the minorities in the population. Anyone doing even the minimal due diligence before voting would have realized that.
I keep hearing about the democratic deficit of the EU and I always wonder what that means. There’s such thing as EU elections, and their results hugely influence EU politics. And yes, that German politicians have a vote on policies that influence UK, Spanish, whatever politics is the fucking point of democracy, that people have an equal say (the same way politicians from those countries have a vote on policies that influence German politics).
A lot of the democratic deficit conversation is structured by a minority protesting that a majority has more influence. The EU means that every country is a minority in itself, and that you have to assume policies that are decided by a wider body, even if you disagree with it, because that wider body is a majority. That is democracy. The opposite is democracy when I like it, self rule (and screw the other people) when I don’t.
I’m OK with European reform. Towards tighter integration and less national sovereignty, so it can actually be truly democratic. From my point of view most of the stupid decisions in Europe come from national governments lately, not from the EU itself. The subject of this thread being perhaps the best example.
Opression is defined by the oppressed, not their oppressors.
Whether or not white Leavers or their apologists think they are racist or not is irrelevant.
And accussing me of being a Nazi for criticising these scum who hate me and my family is utterly offensive. Especially when you are apologising for them from a position of power, privilege and safety.
I didn’t start the race war. They did. I am punching up. I am right. They are wrong.
Hear, hear. If I were our benevolent dictator, the US would join the EU. It is the future, especially so if it manages to transcend nationalism.
I mean, this is some special stuff here. The dog whistles have been tossed for more direct measures.
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You somehow equate Trump and Brexit. This just seems like a category error. A vote for Trump was a vote for who governed your country for the next four years. A vote for Brexit was a one-off decision about the constitutional future of the country. It’s logic on about the same level of “Hitler was a vegetarian, therefore vegetarians are Nazis”.
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You invoke “empathy”, and yet you can’t bring yourself to imagine that anyone, not a single person, can have had good and valid reasons to vote for Brexit. They’re all either dumb, lazy, ignorant or don’t care about others. So to answer your first question, I am tired of this argument coming from the smugly self-righteous who refuse to acknowledge the possibility that anyone who disagrees with them can have done so in good faith.
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The effects of Brexit will of course be universal. I’ve no idea what simple “logical analysis” proves that they’re going to be targeted at minorities.
Ah diddums, you’re offended? I didn’t call you a Nazi, I said you were choosing to talk like a Nazi. Calling everyone who voted one way in an election “vermin” is about as Nazi as you can talk.
Yes. Good argument, well made.
I’m sure there’s a conversation to be had about the threads of racism and nationalism that have surfaced as part of the debate around Brexit, and how violent racists have been enabled by some of the rhetoric. We might even turn out to agree about a bunch of things. But your simplistic rhetoric is what I was responding to, and your justification of it is just as simplistic.
Yet if the point of the exercise was to limit immigration — and it was sold that way, and many indeed voted for that reason — then its broader effects don’t make that base end disappear in a puff of smoke, and I think you have to grant that it was indeed targeted at minorities, e.g. the ones being locked out.
The European Parliament rarely sets the agenda for any of the major initiatives or treaty changes that happen within the EU. Executive action and regulatory detail almost always come from the Council of ministers and the Commission. The process of the EU constitution was a great example of the democratic deficit. It was decided that the EU should have a constitution, but the convention members would be entirely appointed and unelected. Allowing the people to vote on the text of the constitution that was going to govern them was entirely optional; of the 18 countries that ratified it (before it went down in flames) only 2 held referenda. And then what happened when it was rejected? As much of it as possible was packaged up in a treaty and ratified by governments and parliaments with as little democratic consultation as the political elite could get away with.
There’s a long intellectual tradition in Europe of assuming that political integration should happen for our own good whatever we, the people, think. It reminds me a lot of the creation of the ethnic timebomb that was Yugoslavia. A bunch of intellectuals decided, post WWI, that of course all southern Slavs were basically the same and would love to unify under a Serbian government in a country of their own. No-one asked their opinions, of course. Despite decades of propaganda, oppression and education, it turned out the national identities don’t just disappear into a nice friendly collective.
Parliament is legislative and council executive, yes. The Council represents democratic governments. And makes decisions by majority. Nothing really out of the ordinary from functioning representative democracies.
BS. We are constantly being democratically asked whether we want to be part of the Union or not. People who don’t vote to anti-EU parties in all their national and European elections (and they have a fair share of votes, so it’s not like they don’t have a chance to have their opinions represented, they just are a minority at the national and European level, and thus democracy permits the majority to choose). If Europe is integrating it’s because the people of Europe are constantly voting for pro-EU parties that support integration. That’s democracy. It does not come from up above, it comes from an decision agreed by democratic governments. Saying it’s antidemocratic is bollocks. What’s antidemocratic is not accepting the decisions of the majority.
The EU constitution is one of the big mistakes the Union has done, but it’s also 14 years old. Kind of a dead horse. I am critical of other processes, but most -but not all- of the time my criticism is due to individual governments having too much power. That is, not about the EU forcing decision, but about being unable to, like in the recent immigration crisis.