Starmer's resigned

[Sadcafe]

So the admittedly boring but truly decent PM has announced his resignation and the egotistical, pompous Burnham will doubtless become PM. God help the country

That Brexit fiasco is not democracy. It's our democratic right to vote for those who we think will be best (or least bad) in government. It should not be up to us to take momentous decisions like leaving the EU. We elect the government to take decisions for us. Referendums are only for guidance and are not binding. Regardless of the result, it should never have gone ahead. Moreover, it was crazy to drag us out with such a narrow leave majority. Yrs ago the first referendum on scottish devolution delivered a yes, but with less than 60%. It was only with the 2nd, in 1997, that the result cleared the magic number and devolution went ahead. Devolution is a minor issue compared with leaving EU, and it smacks of insanity that the Tories handed such power to only slightly over half of the population, many of whom couldn't begin to understand what they were voting for.

I'm sorry but his and his party's reluctance to have a proper inquiry into rape gangs on behalf of the vulnerable girls/women and his involvement in securing the previously twice sacked for scandals, Peter Mandelson's appointment as US Ambassador (friend of known paedophile) far outweigh Boris's situation with Chris Pincher (where victims were adult men).

Starmer was no better than any of the corrupt politicians.

'couldn't begin to understand what they were voting for'.

Superior much? And this is why we need democracy.

Yrs ago the first referendum on scottish devolution delivered a yes, but with less than 60%. It was only with the 2nd, in 1997, that the result cleared the magic number and devolution went ahead.

So, in the event of a referendum to rejoin the EU, the threshold to rejoin should be at least 60%? That sounds sensible.

Not superior at all. We're not economists an not qualified to make such decisions

No, because the first was conducted on the basis of any majority, so any further referendum should follow the same rules. It won't happen in any case.

You said it was crazy to drag us out with such a narrow leave majority - therefore it must be crazy to change course again with a narrow majority.

Was there a threshold for the 1975 vote? The original EEC vote. If not, why did you want to change the rules for the vote in 2016?

Not crazy because it would simply be rectifying something done badly. In the 1975 ref, more than 60% voted to remain in Common Market.

The common market was VERY different to the EU that it morphed into without further referendum.

Exactly @Badbadbunny I hated what the EU became, but I am a great believer in the Common Market.

It’s pretty reasonable and sensible what the PP is saying. It seems like your bias towards leaving is clouding common sense and judgement here.

Yes, but you'd have to have been following the trail for my post to make sense.

I was listening to the News Agents last night and Lewis Goodall made a very good point (apparently taken from something Jeremy Hunt has been saying) that the EU now is quite different from the EU we left and any decision to rejoin should be taken on that basis.

Not at all superior. PP just understands that the economic.implications of leaving were very complex and the vast majority of the electorate would not have/could not have understood them. Many don’t even appreciate this fact. It should never ever have been a decision taken by referendum.

But many people did not vote around the economics. They voted for Brexit because the EU was imposing laws that the UK did not want and we had virtually no democratic voice to change that. It was about democracy and sovereignty

A good example here is men in women's spaces - part of the reason women in the UK still have more rights than most women worldwide (fact) is that we're not part of the EU, parts of which have handwaved through self-ID with no scrutiny of the risks or conflicts of rights and no consideration of the evidence. You could argue the EU bureaucrats 'couldn't begin to understand' what they pushed through. They certainly haven't bothered to scrutinise the risks and impacts. In some cases that was true, it has been ignorance, in others it was imo a deliberate plan to strip women of any rights and children of safeguarding.

I voted Remain but being a woman who cares about women's rights and the safety of children, I now see the benefits of Brexit.

Starmer is piss poor on women's rights and the safety of children.

Personally I'd rather live in a country where women still legally can say 'no' to men and have single sex spaces (and the concomitant benefits for child safeguarding) than a slightly better economy. What's the point of having money if you have no freedom or human rights?

Googling that suggests USA, Russia and Belarus, as well as countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Not sure any of those are on my list at the moment.

I would love to have single sex spaces for women but not at the expense of everything else.
And I think this country was moving towards that anyway, albeit slowlly.

Perhaps the Remainers should have entered into meaningful debates and informed people real facts about the consequences of leaving, rather than just insulting everyone by calling them retards and far right?

The Remain campaign was woefully weak and lacking in any real facts and figures, it was just based upon thinking all Brexiteers were thick.

I'd imagine lots of people who voted Brexit voted that way just to stick two fingers up at the smug political elite and Remainers rather than them actually wanting to leave.

I completely agree with this. And who is most responsible for that arrogance? David Cameron and George Osborne.

Nail on the head, but it didn't help that Labour wouldn't get off the fence and didn't really get into proper debate either.

The leave campaign was incredibly strong. There’s a good programme on it. I didn’t vote leave but can see why it was a better campaign strategy.

I think you are summing this up well. Which is very rare. You are correct on this side of things, as well. The reasons are historical - British jobs for British workers.

I agree.
This total failure of understanding of the situation and failure of political messaging has been repeated since by the democrats and the US and by Labour wrt Reform.

Women gained rights through being in the EU. When I had my first child I had been working for a year in the same company. Since I was employed through an agency I was classed as a temp and would not have qualified for maternity pay but for a very new EU rule entitling me to the full amount just like any other employee. The same could be said for employment legislation in general. Shortly before the referendum Jeremy Corbyn pointed out to voters that many of the rights they enjoyed came from the EU.

But this way of thinking implies that the UK is incapable of making its own laws to protect its citizens' rights without the EU. That's simply not true. The UK was a leader in the EU, often paving the way for change. We were not a silent partner.
We are equally capable of making great laws outside the EU, if only we had the politicians to see it through.

What's happened since we've left is that the EU has moved in a more authoritarian position especially with regard to regulation. That would now prevent us from doing certain things, for example, with regard to AI.

The Common Market is a wonderful invention and it's clear to see why we joined and voted to stay in. But the EU since then has turned into something way beyond what was originally envisaged.