Soma answers his own question, both more eloquently and correctly.
There is a two-to-one ratio of Welsh Labour MPs to Conservatives. Wales is historically DOMINATED by Labour. The progressivists (see Nezz’s post from three days ago) are not aligned with a traditional Labour outlook.
P.S. The new ruling party? The referendum was on Brexit alone. The new ruling party is the same as the old ruling party, sans David Cameron as PM.
P.P.S. The Daily Mail is not owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Maybe not a Baltic state, but Poland easily might. Poland has a lot of natural sympathy with Americans due to Polish-Americans, Revolutionary war History, willingness to fight alongside us, and other factors.
I agree Poland is the most likely intra-EU US ally after the UK is out. The black sites after 9/11 and the missile shield placement, and many commercial agreements there point towards Poland willing to go against EU interest in favor of US interests in some cases, some of them of magnitude.
However I would argue this is more due to more recent history. Namely the cold war and the horrible times Poland went through during it. This created a lot of Pro-american sympathies within the political class and the population (the US also helped the Solidarity movement and other anti-communists, so there’s a direct line there). I would say (from talking to Polish people) that this is by far the biggest factor in Polish sympathy towards the Us by a really wide margin.
It’s a two-way street. The Poles are remembered a bit for volunteering during the American revolution much like Lafeyette, and the US was a big target of Polish immigration.
Also practical reasons- Poland wants the US protecting them against others because no one else ever did. Americans in general like Poland.
It’s certainly true that the UK has been the largest impediment to integration, but it wasn’t the only one, especially when it comes to the euro. I can’t imagine Denmark going along with fiscal integration, and the Dutch are pretty restless about the EU right now.
Plus Poland has pulled its own weight like most former Warsaw block countries. It’s one of only 5 countries that hit the NATO target of 2% GDP on defense. Poland sent troops to not only Afghanistan per NATO treaty obligation, but also Iraq.
I think there is a lot of support by the US military personal for Poland, along with the Baltic States, there is a general sense that these countries appreciate the US’s role in NATO far more than Western Europe.
Needless to say,having Mr Putin practically next door, makes the benefit of NATO a lot more tangible than it does for Belgium or France.
It might be because Murdoch demonstrably understands politics, even when he’s disgusting, whereas Hawking is merely a popstar, using his fame from a different field to garner an audience for ignorant diatribes. On philosophical matters, one might as well listen to Ozzy Osbourne.
Such a degree of integration presupposes a sense of shared identity that cannot be fabricated. In fact, everything the progressives attempt to fabricate it backfires and fans nationalism instead.
Ah I see. By waterboarding you mean, Greece and Greeks happily engaged in corruption, fraud and tax evasion as a society for a decade largely based on access to cheap borrowing due to falsifying economic statistics in order to join the Euro, who accepted bailout conditions aimed at fixing the structural problems in both its Economy and administration, failed to meaningfully complete this, continued to run at a deficit even when interest payments were excluded, and attempted to call the EUs bluff years later only to realise the EU was not going to back down.
If I shoot someone, refuse a plea deal and get sentenced to the fullest extent of the law I am being legally waterboarded. After all, think of the human misery.
Yeah sure Soma, anything to rag on the EU. When are you going to back up any of your claims rather than engaging in rhetoric and grandstanding?
Greece had the same options Ireland had, refuse the bailout, abandon the Euro and devalue. Like Ireland, they realised that that would not solve any of the structural problems with their economy and that they would still be running at a deficit while inflicting untold human misery on their citizens due to the inability to import anything of meaningful value.
What happens to a first world health service when the cost of medicine and equipment increases significantly in real terms?
Nothing obviously, only bad things happen when following an EU plan.
If you shoot someone and get sentenced to 90 years, when others are sentenced to 6 years for the same crime, you might wonder whether you are being treated fairly. And if you suspect that your harsh sentence is due to being part of a gang, you might wish there were an effective process to leave the gang. You might even go on TV and tell the world that despite your years of living large, you’ve come to realize that gangs are bad.
True. And speaking for myself, at least, Poland was one of the places where the iron curtain started to fall. I remember watching coverage of the Solidarnosc movement as a kid, and it was clear that those were momentous events. I have always believed that Lech Walesa deserves significant credit for the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.
I don’t have a horse but I don’t quite understand the analogy?
Right now I’m thinking that Greece was on its way of going to a bad place because of decades of corruption and mismanagement so the years of misery were coming anyway and I don’t think I appreciate how the misery was any different with the EU or otherwise.
The EU is not a gang. Gangs are formed to commit crimes. You might analogize the Berlin-Rome Axis to a gang. Or the Soviet kleptocracy that occupied Eastern Europe for two generations. They had high enough body counts where gang analogies and waterboarding analogies start to make sense.
And I’m curious why there’s no “effective process to leave the gang.” This thread is about the UK doing just that! The issue isn’t about being unable to leave the gang, but about how many gang resources you will continue to have access to after leaving.
A better analogy: The EU is not a gang. It’s a club. There are both costs and benefits to membership. You cannot get the benefits without the costs. One of the biggest benefits of the EU has been creating an environment that sustains peace. It’s a big accomplishment, but can easily get lost if you start equating economic polices with war crimes.
It’s a lot easier when you get to keep your own currency.
The misery isn’t different because of the EU, it’s different because of the Euro. Greece doesn’t control it’s currency, so the “usual” way out of these issues, inflation, is out. Germany has some issues with inflation, something about it leading to an Austrian leader or something. :D
It’s also worst because for a while, being in the Euro was seen as a shield against financial issues, so Greece was able to take on more debt than it would otherwise.
There was always going to be pain, but now Greece (and other countries), are caught in a vice, with apparently very few alternatives to make it better. If Greece had it’s own currency, theoretically it could print money, become cheaper for foreigners, more tourism, more exports (for whatever it is that Greece exports), etc. Doesn’t help that avoiding taxes seems to be Greece’s national sport…
It could be solved by fiscal transfers, but strangely enough voters aren’t interested in paying the debts of other countries.
I realize minting new Drachma would be an additional hurdle, but a relatively minor one compared to some of the larger issues that would arise from an EU member country leaving. (See: Brexit.)
The largest of the hurdles stopping Greece from leaving the EU is that Greece doesn’t want to leave the EU because, even in this terrible crisis, they still see themselves as benefiting from the EU. And they’re right to feel that way. I don’t think leaving the EU would solve many of Greece’s problems.
I agree with the average Greek that the EU has been giving Greece a raw deal over debt restructuring. It’s a shame the IMF’s proposals aren’t being acted on. I don’t think Merkel is going to have much luck squeezing blood from this stone. But there are real political (not criminal!) reasons why the deal is so raw. And a lot of those reasons stem directly from the actions of past Greek governments, and the fears that a bailout will be squandered absent structural reforms. (And also because modern democracies have great difficulty pursuing enlightened economic policy; Japan and the USA are proof that this is not a uniquely European problem.)
What other Euro countries have been treated differently to Greece, given roughly the same circumstances?
There is an effective way to leave the process, Greece simply didn’t want to. Greece also never said “Being a member of the EU is a bad thing”.
If my analogy is bad, yours is just…irrelevant.
Exactly. As mentioned, fiscal transfer is answer, e.g. debt relief. However political reality made this impossible. The Germans didn’t want to bailout the Greeks, unlike how the US federal government was willing to bail out Detroit.
Again, this is not to say Greece wasn’t profligate.
Finally, the truth comes out. You see nothing wrong with “legal waterboarding”, others see this as a straightforward contradiction: there is no such thing as “legal waterboarding”, as long as the law respects basic human rights and dignity.
You see nothing wrong with punishing Greeks with the harshest bailout conditions, which is austerity, because austerity can correct their profligacy. I can agree with the attitude that the Greeks need to sort its budget out properly, but I cannot agree with the attitude that anything goes, including the infliction of preventable human misery, like letting their healthcare system collapse. But the Greeks deserve basic decency. Even “basic European, first world decency”. stemming from the fabled European solidarity so dearly held by the Europhiles (the “fraternité” in “liberté, égalité, fraternité”), but so sorely missing when the EU dealt with Greece last year.
Exactly. Think of the human misery. You used that as a punchline. I see it as a genuine reason.
Again, this is not to say Greek healthcare system was super efficient in the first place. My point is to use the stick as well as the carrot. The carrot is bailout AND debt relief. The stick is structural reform.
Alas the past is the past, the whole refugee crisis changed things again between EU and the Greeks. And now goodness knows what Brexit will do.
Debt relief isn’t a fiscal transfer, it’s a subsidy.
The US federal authorities did not bailout Detroit.
Detroit is a city, not a state.
Germany did bailout Greece
I would have thought the sarcasm was obvious. You have yet to once explain how Greece is being in some way ‘waterboarded’ beyond talking about unspecified ‘human misery’, and have attached zero culpability to Greece (saying that they were profligate while blaming all of the events on the EU is not attaching culpability).
The EU is not a bottomless pit of resources. Again more waffle about human misery. The billions sunk into a Greece that is still a corrupt structural basket case, could have been invested in the new Eastern members bringing their infrastructure up to western european levels. Think of the untold human misery that would have been avoided in those countries Soma. HUMAN MISERY.
Human misery.
Full disclosure: I most definitely have a dog in the fight in the form of my good lady wife and in-laws, the latter still living in Athens.
As such, I’ve seen first hand the effects of austerity on the Greeks. Seeing so many old age pensioners looking through garbage bins for food and sundries will never become easy. Thankfully my in-laws have been luckier than most but watching their pensions dwindle while emergency taxes from the government head in the opposite direction is also a hard thing to take. We help them where we can but like a lot of middle class Greeks they’re very proud people, which makes it all the worse as you watch the dreams and plans they had for their retirement disappear into the ether. I think that’s the human misery being alluded to.
The endemic corruption in Greece existed long before it’s EU membership. You don’t have to spend long in the country to realise that it pervades all levels of the system, as my experience goes very little attempt was made to hide this (the priest at our wedding required a brown envelope for gods sake!) As such I’m always staggered by how Greece made it’s case for membership in the first place let alone managed to avoid any sanction during the boom years for its corrupt behaviour and lack of progress in any kind of improvement. To expect all the necessary change to happen now, during huge levels of austerity and the migrant crisis and for the normal people of Greece to wear it with a smile is a mistake as all it achieves is a feeling of being punished not helped.
For this, and it’s failure to realise Greece’s short comings prior to its membership or prior to the financial crisis the EU does need to shoulder some of the blame for Greece’s situation and it should look for a solution that doesn’t put Greeks through the wringer so thoroughly. All the current policy achieves is increased resentment against other EU states and seemingly desire for alliance with Vladimir Putins Russia.