'Brace yourselves, Britain. You're about to know what a crisis is'

[Moomin8]

Seven decades of prosperity have lulled the UK into thinking we’re special – that disasters only happen to other people

This article pretty much sums up how I feel about Brexit. I hope that someone can stop this madness yet. This is not a fun time to be expecting a baby not knowing what life she's going to be born into in January :(

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/30/brexit-britain-crisis-uk?CMP=sharebtnn_fb

I agree a lot of people have their heads in the sand. I recently read a book about Sarajevo- before the war it was a relatively middle class city, had hosted the winter Olympics and so on. People were very much of the opinion "it can't happen here“. See also Syria, Venuzuala and so on.

I'm not saying there will be a civil war or anything like that but my point is that there lots of countries where people were relatively well off and then one event plunges everything into chaos. For a less extreme example, you can look at Argentina.

The very rich will be insulated, and of course if the worst comes to, they will just leave the country. The poorest will, as always, suffer the most, but it's very likely the middle classes will be hit hard too.

And we are doing this to ourselves.

Agree that 'it couldn't happen here' will be the downfall of the UK. We are - on a societal level - far too comfortable, far too complacent, far too secure. British (well, English really) exceptionalism has been a driving force behind brexit. We think we're special, and therefore somehow insulated from disaster. We're not, and we won't be.

I agree SansaSnark. I have said before on these threads how in 1984 we were rejoicing at Torville and Dean's magnificent Ice-skating routines in the winter olympics and 10 years later the country was at civil war and then broke up. The country must have been reasonably prosperous to host the Olympics.

@peregrina when I lived in London many years ago I was friendly with a big group of people from the former Yugoslavia. One night we were sitting around watching a Eurovision Song Contest retrospective (as you do!) and it turned out that Yugoslavia had won in 1989 and therefore hosted Eurovision the following year, which kicked off a discussion about how things had been previously. One man who was slightly older was telling me how a Yugoslavian passport was once a great one to have, you could go all over the place without visas. It was a stark contrast to the refugee status they all held in the UK at that time.

Anyone going to this? Please share widely, even if it makes no difference in the end you'll be able to tell your children in the years to come that you didn't stand by and do nothing.

www.peoples-vote.uk/let_us_be_heard

Yes, I will be marching. I half expect it to get violent this time, with Johnson sending in agents provocateur, or at least turning a blind eye to someone else doing so. But that is what standing up and being counted is about.

Yugoslavia was never “rich” in a western way, but it was very, very different from the soviet block, and more importantly... people were mixed. A friend from Sarajevo celebrates every event from 3 religions because her family is scattered between orthodox, catholic and Muslim, and they lived peacefully for decades. The fact that at some point they turned against each other, and that a political dispute escalated into a civil and religious was is a prime example of what can happen to anyone, anywhere.
I should go back and re-watch No man’s land by Tanovic. A punch in the stomach, but full of powerful reminders.

Half of my family emigrated to Venezuela after ww2. At some point they had a driver and a summer house on a island etc. My auntie was a single woman and had a wonderful life, for an uneducated seamstress. Holiday trips to the States, independent life, savings enough to buy a flat back to her native country. Thanks god for that! She went back after retirement and survived on social services support and by taking lodgers, because all savings were frozen, exchange rate fixed to a preposterous rate. Now my relatives there have got power shortages like everybody else....

It's genuinely scary how we are witnessing a right wing coup, hiding in plain view - the blaming of our own faults on others, the demonising of 'immigrants', the repression of media accountability, the production of a demagogue, the claims that the actions are "democratic", the weedling beaviours of the 'opposition parties' (mainly Labour), the refusal by police to investigate crimes associated with the main coup actors.

One relief of sorts is that the coup is being fronted by fuck up incompetents like Johnson, Patel, Truss and Hancock plus Javid - they are derisory and hated figures. They will fuck up project me-me-me and will always be unelectable thereafter. Just how much damage will they do before that point.