Next PM's in line: Theresa May: Pro snoopers (spying) charter. I don't like the term police state but her actions are worryingly in line.
Boris Johnson? A very charismatic idiot. His selling point being the golden coloured hairy creature that has permanently occupied his scalp.
Yes. We have a great line up of next potential PM's for Britain.
-Want to stay in the EU?
-Want to trade in the Eurozone?
-Enjoy low corporate tax rate of 12.5%? Pro-business government?
-Enjoy friendly, well educated, English speaking, Pro-American people, good beer, decent music, nice quality of life, low crime and safe green natural environment? (Look how much fun even our soccer fans are http://www.irishexaminer.com/euro2016/euro2016-banter/10-rea...)
Invest in Ireland -> http://www.idaireland.com This has been a public service announcement from the country next door. #irelandlovesyou :)
I want our brightest and best to do more useful stuff, engineering and literature and medicine or whatever. We should consider our education system to have failed every time a bright student goes into finance.
It's the only long term sustainable plan. Convert debt to equity and keep the deposit base low.
Transport is poor compared to European standards and the cost of living is quite high. But if you live close to the city in Dublin it's not bad and it's a great place to socialise and be within 45 minutes of nature. It's probably one of the few capital cities in world where it's not unusual to strike up a conversation with a random person beside you on a bus.
Also it's a pretty easy place to do business. Our nature is humourously sarcastic and not liking authority which means we are pretty good problems solvers and management tends to be quite flat. The software is also small, so your only ever really a phonecall away from having a pint with whoever you need to speak to in the whole sector - from a graduate you met at a conference to a government Minister.
People also work to live not live to work (like the US) which makes a big difference. Also a big part of worklife is around interactions with colleagues - it's basically an assumption that most offices are full of at least a few characters who like to have the "craic" and banter. When working abroad I found I really missed those tiny interactions you have on a daily basis in Ireland - e.g someone telling you a story and making you laugh. Even in London you don't get that. It's not something you can pickup by getting an MBA but it makes such a big difference to the quality of life - compared to a stale work environment.
If your thinking about moving, drop me a mail!
http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/travel_and_recreation/t...
Further, I don't think it's fair to underestimate the experience and historic perspective old people have, that young people don't. After all, many of the older people who voted yesterday where around before the EU came about, and are able to factor in that extra information, plus their historic perspective in their decision, which, by definition, makes for a more informed decision.
You are right that older people tend to be more conservative, but you yourself may end up being more conservative when you are 90, vs. how conservative you are today, and you may only realize the reasons for it once it happens, and perhaps you will think those are actually quite good reasons, who knows.
The bottom line is that if you just attribute the older population's decision to "bad taste" and "shortsightedness", you may not realize the true reason behind their decision, which diminishes your ability to understand and influence others.
Not necessarily. You'll still end up with people making decisions based on looking at the past with rose-coloured glasses, which isn't necessarily a fact-based decision. I think it's also equally likely that people will draw conclusions from economic conditions that had zilch to do with whether the EU existed or not. Thinking that experience necessarily leads to a informed decision ignores the way that humans works.
Are you going to learn from that and change your ways?
There was lots of flatly false and misleading crap coming from the Remain camp as well. Just look at how Cameron see-sawed on the consequences of an exit. Before his negotiation it was "things will be OK even if we leave, the economy is fundamentally strong". Then it was chaos, doom, "economic self harm", permanently worse off etc. Now the vote went against him it's back to "everything will be fine".
When the leader of the campaign can't even stay consistent on such a basic thing, that campaign cannot claim a monopoly on truth.
Misinformation, fear campaign, memes, troll farms. It seems in social media age that's how you do politics. Viral marketing means you never have to say you were wrong.
But you are mistaken in blaming the electorate. The "misinformation, fear campaign, memes..." have always been around. The primary reason people voted out the previous bunch is corruption and tunneling of the wealth created to a narrow group of people (a problem not limited to Poland only)
But they currently don't because the older generations actually show up on voting day.
[1] http://graphics.wsj.com/brexit-whos-voting-what/?mod=e2fb
I guess nobody followed up on your citation, because the link you supplied clearly states:
> Sources: YouGov online poll of 1694 likely voters conducted June 15–17; (demographics); YouGov online poll of 2001 likely voters conducted June 9–10 (economy and immigration); margin of error for both: +/- 3 percentage points
Absolutely nothing about the actual vote, just polling predictions.
Welcome to the United States?
Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out.
- Max Planck
Today was a very harsh lesson for young Brits. They'll have to live with the outcome of this decision for three rest of their lives.
The one positive is that those young people might now be encouraged to actually participate.
I misread that as "demagoguery", and was going to vigorously agree.
His persona is that of a charismatic bumbling idiot, but idiot he is not. Underneath this persona lies a highly intelligent, disingenuous, manipulative and calculating operator.
I genuinely think that he didn't believe in Brexit; rather he saw a potential route into number 10 and took a gamble on it.
The funny thing is that basically Cameron used a similar gamble to be elected.
Push Brexit referendum, and hope for a Remain outcome.
I mean, it would be funny if the well-being of millions of people would not be impacted by all this gambling.
Neither Boris nor David made a unilateral decision. The people took action and voted against the EU. Lots of people are in shock but should not be.
I really don't think people's best interests have been served.
Asking "the people to have their voice heard" on international organizations and trade agreements is particularly ill advised because those are "how" questions instead of "what" questions, and to a first approximation nobody actually cares about how. People care about whether their job is secure, or their groceries are affordable, or their culture is preserved.
Leaving the EU may or may not be a good idea for Britan, but crucially very few people really know whether it would or not. The level of specialized training necessary to reasonably predict the effects of leaving on any of the core interests that people do actually care about is prohibitively high. Directly asking whether to leave the EU is a bad idea because it doesn't capture what "the people" really want and it forces a specific course of action even when there may be safer and more effective methods for achieving the same ends.
Boris was this before being elected as mayor of London, somehow the image is perpetuated even now. In the run up to his mayoral elections his strong points were hardly discussed and his persona highlighted more than his abilities and skills. People perceiving him as a joke.
This is what eludes most and reinforces the notion that some of the electorate will purely vote on superficial terms.
He is absolutely manipulative and disingenuous who's riding on his buffoonish idiocy image.
It feels like this borders on elitism. That the people don't know what they want. I don't often see a similar sentiment when people vote along with the views of the elite (questioning sanity and motives).
There are plenty of intelligent people in all parties, disagreeing with them doesn't make them idiots. Greenspan comes to mind, I think his basic market beliefs are wrong, but don't think he's an idiot, I have read his book. GW is a lot closer to idiot level because of his demeanor AND his actions, but let's be serious few actual idiots make it that far, just not all of them are way above average intelligence.
Knowing you're outclassed isn't the mark of an idiot, but of a brilliant mind. Trump thinking he has an excellent memory and is the best in everything is the mark of a true idiot.
I don't think Trump is an idiot, more of a huckster with extreme emotions, but certainly loves to pander to the idiot mentality.
Dan Quayle is really the only true idiot I can call to mind who had a major position in a US party I can recall.
People used to say that about George Bush too. The fact he played off his ridiculous gaffes and wasn't always illucid doesn't mean he wasn't an idiot.
Bojo is conniving and he's managed to acquire a good number of strategic allies but he's still not particularly smart.
Your family being rich and extremely well connected politically, both domestically and internationally, gets you much further than your family merely being rich, and you being useful figurehead for people who are quite smart -- and smart enough to realize that you are more useful than them as the public face of leadership -- piled on top of that, gets you even farther.
However the key here is, they never spent less than the year before, simply reduced the amount they increased spending. Increasing spending is not austerity
You can go line by line down the list of European countries and their government expenditures. Only a few of them reduced spending, most have increased spending. In actual fact, only two or three nations experienced any real austerity, but they all pretend to have.
What they're really experiencing, is the total suffocation of economic growth by extreme debt. The exact same thing Japan has been enjoying for a quarter century.
Which implies him grabbing the leadership and dismantling the UK is not buffoonery, but deliberate. Scary.
UK needs to vote conservatives out, and it needs to reconsider switching the voting system (this time to a proportional representation one).
PR is superior to AV and FPTP and should be implemented. It shouldn't even have a referendum. It should just be done.
Alternative Voting (AV) is a single member district voting system that produces results where the representations of policy views in the elected parliament are more proportional to the views in the electorate than first past the post, and thus is a method of enhancing the proportionality of the election system for a parliament when the status quo is FPTP.
It do so less than Single Transferrable Vote (STV) in multimember districts (AV -- known more often to US audiences as Instant Runoff Voting [IRV] -- is just the single-member-district case of STV, which supports any district size).
Its relationship to other PR schemes where not all candidates are directly elected by-name by general election voters (the most frequent being Party-List Proportional and Mixed-Member Proportional) is complicated -- those schemes optimize for proportionality of partisan composition of the legislature, but provide weaker accountability of individual politicians to the general electorate.
But PR itself isn't a system, its a (continuous valued, not even binary) feature of an electoral system. You can't "implement PR", you can adopt a system that increases (or decreases) the degree to which you have PR.
And Boris Johnson is no idiot. It's part of his act.
It was a reasonable gamble that failed.
What I don't get, and didn't get with the Scots referendum either, is why on earth they didn't require a super-majority? Surely with something as critical as this, you'd want a bit more convincing than a 2% margin?
It doesn't have to be a 3/4ths or even 2/3rds, but a 60.1/39.9 split would've been nicely convincing that one side is definitely in a minority. Instead we've just proven once again that the UK is fractured politically North/South/Scotland/NI/etc.
And now you have a country split down the middle.
In 5 years time we'll just be talking about England alone. With maybe Cornwall and the North splitting from London and the South East.
Might be time to dig up my Scottish ancestry and get a dual passport...
If there's another Scottish independence referendum, Scotland would gain independence from a NON-EU country (UK) and then apply to join. This is similar to the situation with Slovenia, which gained independence from Yugoslavia and then joined the EU. Spain didn't veto that.
Very slim chance though, seeing as it was mostly the Labour heartland that voted for Leave.
Arguably, allowing a partisan realignment wherein people would vote for representatives balancing views on the EU with other policy concerns would have been healthier for the nation (if more disruptive to the elites of the existing major parties) than trying to preserve the existing party structure by splitting out the EU issue to a referendum.
And, it probably would have been more likely to succeed at keeping the UK in the EU.
There aren't two sides in that war.
just... wow
https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/brexit-wins-an-illusion-di...
"Britain has voted to leave the EU. The reason? A large section of the working class, concentrated in towns and cities that have been quietly devastated by free-market economics, decided they’d had enough.
[...]
Neither the political centre or the pro-remain left was able to explain how to offset the negative economic impact of low-skilled migration in conditions of (a) guaranteed free movement (b) permanent stagnation in Europe and (c) austerity in Britain. "
Were you think physically displaced, rather than "taking over the role of" displaced?
'Military interventions' during Cameron: Libya (2011) , Syria and Iraq are the first to come to mind. The first being politically motivated rather than on humanitarian grounds.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23892783
I agree that Blair was a war-monger.
If this is all we're holding politicians to then it's a really sorry state.
The man has doomed a generation and removed the easiest way for that generation to leave the country and prosper elsewhere.
Talk about lack of perspective. In the long term it's absolutely insignificant. It's like people calling GWB or Obama the worst US president. Can't believe such a poorly thought out comment is at the top.
The same exact undertones that drive Trump's support in the US (and to a lesser extent Sanders) were what drove the Brexit movement. Many of these people don't even understand the EU, they just want to give the finger to everyone who happened to be on the Remain side.
The vast majority of people who voted for it were older, so won't have to live with the consequences, or working class who outright rejected the arguments of experts/academics/etc. This was a "my heartfelt ignorance is just as valid as your knowledge" situation.
So, yes, 500K more people voted for Brexit than voted to Remain. But what is it that they actually were voting for? If you listen to them talk or look at surveys, it had little to do with the EU beyond immigration.
Want to know something darkly amusing? It's possible that they didn't. This is still anecdotal at this point, and of course the Remain side could be playing it up, but there are reports that at least some Leave voters intended it as a protest vote thinking it wouldn't actually happen: https://twitter.com/AdamWSweeney/status/746261907233988609
How wonderful would that be, if the biggest blunder in Britain's history happened unintentionally because some people wanted to stick it to their council. I need to go drink some more.
Well, the union between Scotland and the rest of the UK might dissolve, but going from four to three countries in the UK isn't really dissolving the UK (NI had a pro-EU majority, but it doesn't sound like it really changes the basic dynamics keeping NI in the UK.)
> "Worst leader ever" seems apt when you directly caused a nation's end.
Peacefully breaking with Europe in a way that might also result in a peaceful break with Scotland vs., for just the first competition that jumps to mind, the Munich Conference? Yeah, I think outside of the passions of the moment, Cameron's likely to be seen as something far less notable than "worst PM ever".
The people voted. Let's see what the people can do now.
That was a popular demand by the public as the UK hadn't had a referendum on EU membership in 40 years. He made a promise to hold the referendum because of this and fulfilled his promise. If a politician keeping a promise is a problem, then we're all doomed
Yes. We are.
It was a deal he striken during last election. To buy UKIP votes (their main goal was to leave EU) he said he will make a referendum. His calculation was that there are not enough UKIP voters (~20% maybe) to pass referendum, but it will allow him to get elected (his voters + UKIP voters).
Before the vote, the consensus estimate by economists was that this would be a 2% hit to GDP. Again, that affects people's daily lives -- it's essentially a self-inflicted recession.
-- Neville Chamberlain
To reiterate what al_chemist has already said, the price for UKIP supporting the Tories to form government was holding this referendum. It wasn't a lark on the part of the Tories. Not even Farage thought UKIP would win - the BBC had quoted him stating they weren't going to win on the morning of the vote.
David Cameron: losing the EU referendum
Gordon Brown: The financial crisis
Tony Blair: Iraq
John Major: Black Wednesday; Tory party "sleaze"
Margaret Thatcher: The poll tax
James Callaghan: The Winter of Discontent
… etc.
Enoch Powell
I don't think you can call the BMbB name "the will of the voters" in any intellectually honest way. If it had been made a ballot proposition during a regular election, then sure. But not with some silly internet poll.