EU referendum are you in or out

[gribbles]

Yes. Yes it has.

http://ec.europa.eu/esf/main.jsp?catId=381

A few years back, I managed an Adult Learning Centre that could not have survived without European funding and made a significant difference in many ‘working class’ people’s lives operating in a deprived Ward in Lincolnshire. Giving people varied types of support and training to improve their circumstances, getting them into work and out of poverty traps.

There were many schemes similat to and different to ours that the ESF made possible that made a significant difference to many ‘working class’ people.

[Meow]

I don't understand the prosperity that EU is supposed to create, in 1988, I worked a full time factory job, which at the end of the week just covered the room and little food. Today in 2017 a Min-wage if you lived where I grew up in SE, you'd worked a full time job you'd still be in the same position. So you tell me where is this prosperity that EU has supposed to create for, for min-wage people, or working poor living in the EU, in modern Brittan today. there is no prosperity. The EU has done nothing for the working man. sure you augment maybe it created more working poor jobs, but where is the prosperity, it is only good for business, not the working poor.

Unless you can force companies to share the profits (let's say 30%) with the employees, nothing changes. The problem is that is that the only political regime
with the muscle to enforce that without giving in to corruption and the evil influence of lobbyists is a dictatorship.
The refusal of the fat bastards to share their success with those who allowed it to make it happen in the first place is sickening and will not end well as more
and more money goes to the 1%.

By curiosity I read up on how the french revolution started. It went like this : the landowners (aristocrats mainly) wanted always more from their land
so raised the rent they charged to the agricultural workers (peasants) until it made no more sense for them to cultivate the land as the return they got from it was lower than what they would have to pay back in rent. So they stoppped working the fields. The harvest got smaller and smaller and so the price of bread went up as there was less flour to be found. People began to starve and got so angry the heads of some silk-wearing powdered bigwigs got chopped off.

Let's hope the current super privileged gold-plated assholes realise the insanity of their behavior before we get to that stage.
Or maybe they think they can get away with it as they can always move from one country to the next in this globalized economy. They have so far,
with little repurcussions for them. They are also probably betting on automation to neutralize the potential roots of any organized opposition, leaving the state
to distribute the minimum survival income and so prevent any serious explosion from happening. Cynical but could work for a while. Indefinetely ? Not so sure.

Well unfortunately, Some of this 1% is responsible for ruined the planet. This is more like the end of the roman empire, i think in someways...what also sad is that this is a debt based society, it has to be, for everything to work. It's the banks that have all the power now.

Yes. Yes it has.

http://ec.europa.eu/esf/main.jsp?catId=381

A few years back, I managed an Adult Learning Centre that could not have survived without European funding and made a significant difference in many ‘working class’ people’s lives operating in a deprived Ward in Lincolnshire. Giving people varied types of support and training to improve their circumstances, getting them into work and out of poverty traps.

There were many schemes similat to and different to ours that the ESF made possible that made a significant difference to many ‘working class’ people.

Sounds like the YTS. I wish the EU could have worked for me. I never felt it did.

[Barney]

Yes. Yes it has.

http://ec.europa.eu/esf/main.jsp?catId=381

A few years back, I managed an Adult Learning Centre that could not have survived without European funding and made a significant difference in many ‘working class’ people’s lives operating in a deprived Ward in Lincolnshire. Giving people varied types of support and training to improve their circumstances, getting them into work and out of poverty traps.

There were many schemes similat to and different to ours that the ESF made possible that made a significant difference to many ‘working class’ people.

To be fair, it's not going to be the lack of EU funding that causes Adult Learning to collapse - that's being done regardless of funding by those that manage it. My SO is an Adult Literacy and Numeracy tutor (in Lincolnshire no less!) and what's happening in her establishment is nothing short of gob-smacking.

[gribbles]

Oh, I don't disagree with that at all. I ran the centre about 10 years ago, and one of the reasons we had to close was LSC changes, not EU or anything. And I've watched things that made a difference get canned (or just made ineffective or impossible to do because of changes elsewhere - again our own gov. decisions) ever since.

But that's a different argument to the one I was making to Meow

[F-ZeroOne]

Sorry, but the last few posts couldn't help but bring to mind...

[KlaxonCow]

Oh dear.

A problem with Brexit is that there is a bit of a democratic deficit here, in that Corbyn is really as anti-EU as the Tories are, in truth, and, thus, throws up absolutely zero opposition - or even proper scrutiny or criticism - to the government's rather frequently farcical behaviour on the issue.

The case in point that's prompting this is that Owen Smith MP voiced the possible need to double-check that the country still wants this and it's really in our best interests - something that, after all, even Nigel Farage has also said and isn't opposed to doing - which is perfectly in order with his role as the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, considering the Good Friday agreement's going to be in tatters from all of this, and Corbyn just unceremoniously sacks him then and there. Great.

The only actual political voice that makes any case for the EU is the essentially non-existent Lib Dems. So that's perfectly useless.

No, this is not an argument that Brexit should not proceed. It won the referendum. Whatever our misgivings about that, I continue to hold the position that the democratic process is more important than any of its individual decisions. However terrible. Because if we don't hold to democracy, then we open the door to autocracy - some leader unilaterally deciding what's what, regardless of what the people say.

But the fact that there's not any anti-Brexit voice apparently permitted in the political sphere is rather dangerous. Even if you're all for Brexit, we should still have the sense to permit criticisms of the process, as you surely want Brexit to be successful. I mean, if it's not, then we might be forced to crawl back to the EU, plead for membership, get saddled with the Euro and so forth. Those who advocate for Brexit really, really need to also be pushing for it to be done right or their worst nightmare could be the result - Britain is so economically damaged by a botched divorce that it's forced, in years to come, to rejoin the EU to keep from complete economic catastrophe and then that'll be ten times worse than what we previously had.

Criticism must always be permitted. That's the true purpose of "freedom of speech".

Sometimes you've got it horribly wrong and you've got to have the good sense and wisdom to allow people to let you see this.

[Harlequin]

No, this is not an argument that Brexit should not proceed. It won the referendum. Whatever our misgivings about that, I continue to hold the position that the democratic process is more important than any of its individual decisions. However terrible. Because if we don't hold to democracy, then we open the door to autocracy - some leader unilaterally deciding what's what, regardless of what the people say.

Aside from my agreement with Clement Attlee that referenda should play no part in a representative democracy, all the last referendum indicated was that the electorate was fairly evenly split between wanting to leave and remain part of the EU. It was by no means a mandate from a great majority of the public for a Hard Brexit.

[merman]

And growing evidence as to how undemocratic the referendum actually was... Vote Leave now accused of funnelling funds through another campaign group, insisting it was used to pay a data-mining firm closely related to Cambridge Analytica...

[KlaxonCow]

Danny Dyer, of all people, sums up Brexit beautifully here:

[Governmentyard]

If we ignore all the following:

It's probably a bad idea to deny EU citizenship to the millions who voted to retain theirs, or could not vote to retain theirs
Much voting was done by people who can't demonstrate an understanding of what they voted for
The referendum was only advisory and completely non-binding, per the official parliamentary guidance given to all MPs prior to the vote
The demographics of each side disenfranchise those who this will affect the most, for the longest
The lack of democratic balance in parliament throughout the decision making
The oversight of the process by a supposed remainer
David fucking Davis
The state broadcaster's callow and Faragian coverage
The maginalisation by said broadcaster of larger parties in the narrative

We can still look at the basic facts of the situation today, namely what we have on the table, what we seem likely to be able to achieve, and how the mechanics of the process have gone so far. And in so doing, if anyone can make any kind of compelling argument for Brexit as if we woke up to find ourselves where we are right now, the nation being unaware of anything before today... bang, this ios happening, this is our progress, this is the likely outcome... would we still do it?

I think the eventual cliff-jump will be enabled by what have now become meta-arguments about how things have been around Brexit over time. Abandon the rhetoric about the referendum, forget which side you are on, let's start basing all conversation on whether this is going well now or not.

Because it's not, and I feel just as bad for those who rationally, unjingoistically preferred to be out as those who didn't. It's as if we are going into a World cup managed by Steve McLaren and people are acting as if we've got Hoddle or Venables in the dugout. We're not equipped to stand a chance of success.

[KlaxonCow]

It was by no means a mandate from a great majority of the public for a Hard Brexit.

I'm in total agreement.

I've been consistently critical of this Brexit farce throughout.

And you're right that it was only a hair's breadth win for Leave. If you watched the polls in the run-up to the day, Leave narrowly grabbing the lead was a last minute thing too. Literally the case that had the referendum been a week or a fortnight earlier - and possibly also a week or a fortnight later too, with the polls bobbing up and down as they were - we very likely would have had a different result.

In other words, Leave's win was basically a "margin of error" thing, at best.

And, without doubt, that twat Cameron was stupidly negligent - and arrogant to boot - to have not rightfully insisted that there had to be a set minimum percentage of the population voting and a set minimum margin of victory. That the vote had to be a genuine representative poll of public opinion. Nothing more than a simple majority alone was just not good enough for such a big and important constitutional question as this - for everyone's benefit, in both directions.

All I was conceding was that, once the rules were set, we have to carry out the result.

I guess I'm echoing Churchill's "Democracy is the worst possible system... except for everything else we've ever tried".

Is this good? No, it's fucking terrible. But we attack democracy itself very much at our peril.

All the rest is more than a hundred times worse. So all I'm saying - all I was conceding - was that we really, really, really don't want to ever head down that path, no matter how shit democracy is this day. Because democracy will be shit on many days - most days - but it's still a damn sight better than anything else, so we'd be wise to forever preserve the system, even if we hate many of its individual specific results day-to-day.


(Basically, it's the Golden Rule. "Do unto others as you would have done by you". Because the problem is that if you "overrule" the things you don't like much today then, tomorrow, folks will start "overruling" the things you do want. If you shit on others, be sure that they will inevitably shit on you back. So we must preserve the "no shitting on anyone" rule on all sides. You've got to be fair to others, otherwise you set the precedent that they've got no incentive to be fair back to you, when the tables turn. And the tables always turn.)

[Harlequin]

I guess I'm echoing Churchill's "Democracy is the worst possible system... except for everything else we've ever tried".

Is this good? No, it's fucking terrible. But we attack democracy itself very much at our peril.

Referenda are more ochlocracy than representative democracy.

[zip accident]

Democracy is a mechanic, the ideal it props up is freedom, every time democracy opposes freedom, democracy is the darker path.

[Harlequin]

Democracy is a mechanic, the ideal it props up is freedom, every time democracy opposes freedom, democracy is the darker path.

Whose "freedom", though? The "freedom" of those who do not wish to be restricted by the EU, for example, or that of those who wish to keep those "freedoms" guaranteed by the EU?

[KlaxonCow]

Whose "freedom", though? The "freedom" of those who do not wish to be restricted by the EU, for example, or that of those who wish to keep those "freedoms" guaranteed by the EU?

Yes, exactly.

And the gist of democracy is to limit the restrictions of freedom as minimally as possible, in the quest to maximise all freedoms as far as they can be maximised.

Unfortunately, in the case of mutually exclusive options, then it's just logically impossible to not restrict someone's freedoms. Leave the EU and the latter are pissed off, remain and the former are pissed off.

And while there could well be more nuanced "in-between states" on Brexit that we're just not getting from this government, it is, in the end, a somewhat binary "in or out" because the EU itself perfectly reasonably insists that you can't not be a member of the club - not contribute to the pot or anything - and yet get all the benefits of being in the club.

Otherwise, they would simply have every single member state turning around and saying "We'd also quite like to get all the benefits without paying anything too, thanks". So, in fairness, they have to maintain that "backstop" here, lest trigger the collapse of all of it.

I said that straight after the vote. Only now am I hearing a few people in the media actually bothering to pick up on this. There is a limit to what the EU is able to concede, before it becomes an existential threat to the very existence of the EU - and they are simply not going to willingly cross that line.