Evening all. Glad to see things have slowed down a tad here for the weekend, but it’s still taken me a couple of hours to catch up.
Thanks to howabout for the economics lesson and also for conjuring images of Mark Carney, Yanis and Canadian passports all in one lovely post!
No thanks to the many people who have mentioned Paul McKenna (though it had to happen). I knew him quite well socially some years ago and he is a complete worm. If this post gets deleted it will be because I can tell you with authority that he does use hypnotism in unethical ways.
I don't understand why remain and the current MPs are accepting the result of this referendum.
This question has been bothering me a lot too. I feel its because Westminster is in a proper cleft stick as far as respecting, and being seen to respect, democracy is concerned. No politician can be seen to ride roughshod over an election result, hence this mealy-mouthed the-people-have-spoken narrative, which is getting right up my nose atm. It reminds me of Clegg after the 2010 election, and we all know how well that worked out. It also makes me wonder why such care was taken to structure the referendum as advisory rather than binding, which is unlikely imo to have been a random decision.
There are many who still feel Art.50 will never be invoked, that the longer it is before it’s invoked the more likely it is that it will never be, and that some kind of deal/fudge will be done. My own view is that outrage over the lies and propaganda, and a decision to set the referendum result aside or re-run it, were more likely if they had happened promptly. That didn’t happen, thanks in part to the untimely and noisy implosion of the Labour party. The only MP who unequivocally denounced the Leave vote was David Lammy afaik and he was roundly criticised for being undemocratic as soon as it became apparent no one was going to be bold enough to join him. Kudos to him for speaking his mind, though, especially as it was what we were all thinking. It was noticeable that Tim Farron started off talking about fighting an election on a no Brexit ticket, and a day or three later had modified that to campaigning on a rejoin the EU ticket, partly as an early election seems increasingly unlikely. So I feel we are on a one-way moving walkway now, and can only hope it moves as slowly as real ones, giving me time to make some Brexit plans of my own.
That said, I’ve mellowed slightly in my view of the Leave vote. Having felt it was a completely bullshit outcome, driven by lies and ignorance, I can now appreciate that it was a very clear message about social and political exclusion, which it can only be a good thing to have brought squarely out into the open. We (by which I guess I mean I) live in quite a political bubble. I came from a working/lower middle class background and have always been left-wing (and a bit broke) but a combination of life events and opportunities meant I had a decent education to fall back on and have mainly lived in economically buoyant places. At an intellectual level, I’m aware of how Thatcher’s Tories decimated British industry and damaged the communities that depended on it, but most of the damage done left me totally untouched.
There was an item on C4 news on Friday about a photojournalist who’d been visiting communities in Leave areas since the referendum, photographing people and talking to them about why they voted to leave and it was too depressing for words. They filmed him in Burnley in a rundown neighbourhood with boarded up houses and shops. Yes, the ignorance was astounding (“We’re having to build 250,000 houses a day just to house all the immigrants, innit”