Brexit mega thread part 11: is fucktastrophy a word?

[mirages08]

Part 11 of this mega thread

Couldn't see a new one?

Hope you don't mind a newbie starting it!

Divergence to a lower standard is always going to mean higher costs and less trade.

Divergence to a higher standard is a selling point.

But higher standards are not the point of Brexit.

Thinking we were ever going to diverge to a higher standard is just delusional.

Well an obvious one is the death penalty. There are lots of others though. We could vote to make British citizenship impossible to get if you weren't born in the UK to two British parents. We could then only make public services (schools hospitals etc) available to UK citizens. We could vote to bring back military service for young people or exclude over 85s from all healthcare or only allow women who've had children to vote. The list could go on and on. There's a saying 'the tyranny of the majority' and I would remind you, Hitler and the Nazi party were hugely popular. An absolute democracy were the will of the majority prevails in every decision is a very dangerous thing, minorities need protecting, I can’t believe you can’t see that

Majorities can even vote to make policy that they really don't understand, that's hugely damaging to the economy, and against almost all expect advice.

See Brexit...

Thank you for the reminder of the 2024 review being just a review Utah although obviously i feel very sad it’s not an exercise that can make any substantive change. It’s an example of why Brexit is such a hard topic to discuss and understand for a lot of people( I very much include myself in this) because it’s still so complex and technical and cloaked in political nuance . It’s much simpler for some people who voted leave to treat it like an act of God that they can’t change or an article of faith they must defend. While trying to avoid to cognitive dissonance from their own everyday life experiences in Brexit Britain.

Remainers clinging to hope like me aren’t in a good place either without a clear point of change anywhere close on the horizon and seeing things getting worse and worse against our consent.

The solid hope I have is that time is on our side because as we get further away from the vote, it will get psychologically easier for leavers to change their mind, and remainers to be galvanized to stop the rot, and if we don’t have a Tory government easier to see the manipulation of the country to serve Tory party internal infighting. so I think in ten years nationally we’ll be ready to go back in. Just have to hang on until then and try to make it happen then. I really hope so!

Hitler and the Nazi party were hugely popular.

Were they ? Voting suggests otherwise. The Nazis were a minority party shoring up a coalition as I recall. It's more akin to the ERG somehow running the country. And the ERG would claim to speak for the majority.

There are two ways to look at Nazi Germany. One is to take the view that all the right winger nutters in Europe "just happened" to live in one country at the same time.

The other is that a lot of people were tricked by the propaganda and rhetoric and by the time they realised, it was too late ...

History has very very very subtly been leaned on so that the latter option is less talked about. Which then feeds the narrative of a Big Bad Bogeyman that the Brave British Underdog (Empire ? What Empire ? Doncha know we stood alone ?) had to face down.

It would be an interesting exercise to objective take something which defined Nazi Germany, and see if we have it here. Crackdowns on protests ? Check. Removing the judicial oversight ? Check. Demonising foreigners ? Check. Plaintive whining about some "unseen enemy" ? Check.

Remember you can now be jailed for longer for "protesting" than if you whacked someone around the head with a baseball bat.

https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/offences-during-protests-demonstrations-or-campaigns

Meanwhile in the US, loser Republicans are now saying that maybe democracy is a bad thing since it lets people get what they want (which seems to be abortion and dope).

I found out yesterday that our vet has been trying to hire a second vet for the prescribe for three years since the last one left. There is a national shortage of vets apparently.

(Brexit sent some home and discouraged others from coming here, plus our immigration system is a mess and our country not known for being welcoming any longer. )

I knew this was the case in many medical specialties and dentists but I hadn't heard about the shortage of vets.

Sheesh - won't you agree that anything was wrong with brexit?
Unseemly haste was in the invocation of article 50:
Referendum: 23/6/16
Parliamentary sessions:
27/6-21/7
5/9-15/9
10/10-8/11
14/11-20/12
9/1-9/2
20/2-30/3
Article 50 invoked 29/3/17 after less than 20 weeks of Parliament sitting.

Given that fixed the timetable do you not think that a hell of a lot more planning was needed that would have avoided the subsequent chaos, the crap deal and chaotic disaster that was Boris premiership?

@FrankieStein403 for some people Brexit is akin to a religious cult and @LouiseCollins28 is one of those.

@FrankieStein403 raises an interesting point. So, what do I think has been wrong with Brexit??

20 weeks of Parliamentary time to push the start button on the Brexit process should have been more than enough.

Boris's premiership clearly was chaos as the Covid enquiry is showing. As I've said many many times on here I wasn't a fan, at all.

So what has gone wrong?

The antagonism to the EU from the British negotiators was clearly the wrong attitude. I think it went both ways tbh but Britain could and should have adopted a different attitude. I think this is now better.

All that time spent trying to reverse Brexit in Parliament was wrong. So much time and effort could have been better spent IMO.

May's red lines - while I personally liked them - badly stunted the negotiations IMO.

Failure to make a big move early. Soo much of the public discontent I think was down to the perception that nothing was changing. Something totemic needed to be changed, fast.

Failure to land the new trade deals. Belatedly lots of this has happened but lots of them are mostly rolled over from pre Brexit days. Not getting a landmarmk deal with the USA was catastrophic. Joining the CTPTTP is good but came too late)

Failure to properly link Brexit and 'levelling up'. Most people vote for "better", they just do. If you don't deliver better, and the current government in myriad ways have failed to, you get turfed out.

Spades in the ground literally days after the vote was what was needed and it didn't happen.

Torrents of public money should have been flowing into the communities that backed Leave, immediately. This should have been paid for by cancelling all sorts of projects across London and the South East, also immediately. Sorry to be blunt about this but "No London/SE! You're not getting that... they are!" is what I think people needed to see, again and again and again.

To paraphrase @LouiseCollins28 , this wasn't the Brexit I voted for, and I've been lied to. So sad to see the slow awakening to the realisation of what being shafted really means.

So basically, Louise wanted the Brexit voting areas to be rewarded for voting for Brexit.

How very democratic...

>20 weeks of Parliamentary time to push the start button on the Brexit process should have been more than enough

Except it wasn't the start button it was the countdown clock - that's the mistake yMay, the Tories and now you made - assuming it was a start not the beginning of the end. It should only have been invoked once the ducks were in a row - at that point they hadn't even been identified

If the country votes for zero taxes but to still have good public services free at point of use because an unprincipled party said it could deliver that and a credulous electorate believed their unfounded promises, does ´what the country votes for it should get' still come into play, even though it's impossible and was never going to be possible

The antagonism to the EU from the British negotiators was clearly the wrong attitude.

..."the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage..."

I don't think any party would propose this and if it were proposed the electorate would see through it. If a government were elected on this and the delivery didn't happen (because of course it wouldn't!) then they've clearly lied.

Basically though, yes, the country should get the government it votes for (whatever their programme says) and that government should be held to account for their, as you say, impossible prospectus.

More broadly, I do think that the level of expectation of what public services will deliver for people is now wildly out of step with the amount of tax levied to support those services.

I think governments have been standing on programmes that are adjacent to "impossible" for the last 50 years or so, and every one of them has failed to deliver. They've tried to fill the gap between taxation and expectation either with a panacea of strong economic growth or with borrowing more and more of other people's money. Both strategies, IMO, ran out of road long ago.

Johnson used to be characterised as the UK’s Donald Trump, but now I realise that was wrong. Surely our Trump is Suella Braverman.

A complete lack of insight into her own limitations married with a bloodthirsty ambition for leadership and a willingness to inflame the most extreme right wing ideologues to whip up support. This Includes deliberately using anti immigrant sentiment despite being a child of immigrants. She’s also like Trump in being anti intellectual but has a natural cunning in playing to the worst mob feelings and doesn’t care if that leads to potential violence. What if we see the likes of the EDL getting involved in Saturday’s March incited by her rhetoric?

She really is a despicable person IMO.

I don't think any party would propose this and if it were proposed the electorate would see through it. If a government were elected on this and the delivery didn't happen (because of course it wouldn't!) then they've clearly lied.

Which is exactly what was promised with Brexit, and a small majority bought it.

Exactly this. The Brexit promised to the electorate was entirely impossible.

And now they are being gaslit into believing they didn't. With out own louise failing to see she's been had.

As the great philosopher John Lydon said: "Ever get the feeling you've been swindled ?"

It really is a dangerous game to play on an electorates stupidity - when it turns it can be unpredictable and very very nasty.

Louise XVII for example. What a stroke of genius to trick the revolutionaries into believing he was on their side (shades of Richard II). But look what happened when they realised they'd been hoodwinked.

And we all know that if that were to happen today, then there would be sellers on Etsy punting guillotine earrings.

The self-delusion and lack of self-awareness is strong in that one

@SerendipityJane too late. https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1543997576/silver-guillotine-earrings?click_key=9061205480051421f3ec0c68a34c9ed001230932%3A1543997576&click_sum=6c2267cf&ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=guillotine+earrings&ref=sr_gallery-1-4&organic_search_click=1&frs=1&cns=1&edd=1&local_signal_search=1

Agree 100%

We’re at page 39 @mirages08 want to think of starting a new thread? Or anyone else? Seems that Brexit is not fading quietly into the background as part of our sunlit uplands but continues to play out in a myriad of the unexpected as we head into an election year.