It's quite clear that Boris did not want the referendum to win. While (like all tories) he would occasionally grumble about Brussels nobody considered him anti-EU during his time as mayor.
He was, however, obviously after the top job. He would upstage Cameron every chance he got.
When he decided to switch back to being an MP, Cameron brought him into his cabinet (without a formal position) He knew he had this referendum campaign to fight and having the popular internationalist by his side would help him command as much party loyalty as possible.
Boris then immediately pirouetted (bad mental image, that) and decided to lead the "Leave" campaign instead. The grassroots (largely Euroskeptic) tories who will pick the next party leader would appreciate his help. Cameron already announced that he would leave before the 2020 election, so this would mean PM Boris probably in late 2018/early 2019.
So the best result for Boris would be a narrow referendum loss while looking like a great anti-EU warrior. A lot of the rhetoric he employed was to this end -- when he would compare the EU to the Nazis, it would make him look fierce to the hardcore Euroskeptics who controlled his future, while whispering to the electorate-at-large that the whole Leave campaign was nutty.
It didn't work. He got what he nominally wanted, and now he has the chance to be PM faster than expected... but he has to deal with the fallout from this disaster.
If Cameron had invoked Article 50 immediately then the rest of the party would blame a sloppy exit on him... "we had a great plan to pre-negotiate everything, but Dave messed it up!" He's not giving them that option: if the country is to be destroyed, he wants them to pull the trigger.
It's startling watching the "moderate" Leave wing falling over themselves to dial back all of their promises during the campaign.... turns out there isn't more money for the NHS... of course there would still be free movement of workers from EU countries... maybe if Scotland doesn't want to do it we should call it off to preserve the union.... etc etc.. In victory, they're terrified of what they've done.
Of course, to the far-right any wavering will be seen as treachery. A fight is brewing there.
Meanwhile, Labour is also in full self-destruct mode. Corbyn just sacked the most credible member of his shadow cabinet and many of the rest will probably leave in protest. There have been many times in British political history when the out-of-power party goes through this sort of process, but never when the governing party is also in such disarray. Interesting times, unfortunately.
I don't know if UKIP will disappear, though. They could now be the party of northern grievance, locking Labour out of power entirely.
It's not clear to me. I think you are taking it as self-evident that Leave is a bad idea. In the mainstream narrative, the EU is associated with everything nice and international and the only reason to be against it is if you're a crazy old-fashioned nationalist.
There's a classical liberal case for Brexit, though, which Gove articulated reasonably well. I think Johnson kinda believes the same things, though without Gove's conviction (I voted Leave but I don't like Johnson, I think he's an opportunist). Like all conspiracy theories yours assumes that the conspirators concoct these elaborate schemes which have multiple failure modes. Leave had roughly 1/3 odds of winning all through the campaign, so it's not that much of a surprise. Nor is it clear that a Remain vote would have helped Johnson's career, given that almost the entire establishment backed Remain.
> It's startling watching the "moderate" Leave wing falling over themselves to dial back all of their promises during the campaign.... turns out there isn't more money for the NHS...
The media is really playing up this angle. Vote Leave isn't the government and the referendum wasn't a general election where the campaigners campaign on a particular manifesto. There is now more money in the UK budget, where it gets spent is up to the next PM.
> I think you are taking it as
> self-evident that Leave is a
> bad idea
It's funny to watch Leavers complain that people think they're racist, with all their great arguments about common fisheries, not being able to depot Abu-bin-whoever, and whatever other weird non-issue is flavour of the day, not to mention the supreme irony of a people with an unelected upper chamber claiming they're booting out a directly elected upstream parliament for "democracy".
Most but not all. Economics is currently split into multiple schools which disagree on philosophical fundamentals, and is hardly an exact science. How many economists predicted the financial crisis? Those that did tend to be small government advocates. (I don't endorse everything he says, but Nassim Taleb is one example, who is also pro-Brexit).
I wish someone had made this point during the campaign, to answer the snipes that Leave was anti-intellectual, anti-expert, and so on.
He just wants all these puts he's been buying to be worth something [0].
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/nassim-talebs-universa-invest...
France is trying to prevent Americans from publishing true facts in the states, because misguided Frenchmen might accidentally seek such facts out and read them.[0]
Also, it's not altogether clear that any good long term compromise has been found to balance the needs of the strong economies alongside the more fragile ones.
You staved off Grexit, but retained the powderkeg of local fiscal policy with central responsibility for solvency of members.
Now, if I were in the UK, I probably would have seen these as secondary issues to the value of the common market. But worrying about concentrated power doesn't seem alien to me. And given the UK and EU are both in the WTO and so culturally related, it's not like I'd fear both sides will instantly revert to quotas, 1000% tariffs, and random visa denials.
Ok, ok, academic leavery aside, the mainstream leave does seem related to immigration, and that's troubling even if leave could be justified on other grounds. Nate Silver had a comment on the 538 podcast, something like, "We hold up liberal democracy as the pinnacle of governance, but it seems to have a systemic problem with immigration." That seems troubling, and I'm not sure entirely what to make of it yet.
[0] http://www.voanews.com/content/google-appeals-french-order-f...
I have no idea why you claim that I have a "conspiracy theory" when I am commenting on the motivations of one man (which, by definition, isn't a conspiracy)... yet you yourself call his motivations into question by calling him an "opportunist". As far as I can tell your argument boils down to: 1. Boris is an opportunist 2. Anyone who claims that Boris acts opportunistically is a conspiracy-spouting nutter.
> Nor is it clear that a Remain vote would have helped Johnson's career, given that almost the entire establishment backed Remain.
His next career advancement isn't under the control of some vague "establishment" (mind your own conspiracy language there!) but the party membership at large. (He would have to finish in the top-two selected by the parliamentary party, but that probably wouldn't be hard) The membership is more Euroskeptic than the "establishment" as you put it. He would run as the candidate that would bridge the euroskeptic-grassroots with those more "establishment" types (old Etonian, former mayor of London, knows all the right people...) He'd certainly be the hero of the right-wing press as well.
Again, I think the only reason that Cameron brought him close was that he never thought Boris would make such a brazen move... a disastrous misestimation.
> There is now more money in the UK budget, where it gets spent is up to the next PM.
Part of the economic logic of the EU is that instead of every member employing their own bureaucrats producing basically-similar regulations, they would all just pool resources and do it once. It's more complicated and messy, but still cheaper than doing something 28 times. Plus then there's no complicated trade questions.
The brexit campaign of course ignore this all: they made the brazen claim that the UK sends all this money and gets nothing in return.... not even the money that's directly returned. (Hell, not even the "rebate" which literally never leaves the exchequer) That's not reality at all though.
So no, there is not more money.
That money is worth significantly less since the GBP dropped in value. And if multinational companies start moving their European/EMEA headquarters to Frankfurt, Brussels, Berlin, Dublin etc then there will be significantly lower tax receipts. Of course with the UK rumoured to lose its last AAA credit rating government borrowing costs will be higher as well.
This idea that Brexit somehow meant more money for the UK budget is simply ridiculous. Any disruptive change of this nature always translates to lower growth whilst people adjust.
I don't know that much about Gove's position, but from what I can tell it has little to do with classical liberalism and a lot more to do with nationalism. The classical liberal case was that the EU is a fundamentally broken organisation and it is beyond reform.
> The media is really playing up this angle. Vote Leave isn't the government and the referendum wasn't a general election where the campaigners campaign on a particular manifesto. There is now more money in the UK budget, where it gets spent is up to the next PM.
But voters treated it as such. It's pretty clear that a sizeable number of voters - probably not enough to change result vote but still perhaps 5% - were registering an anti-government vote. While the next PM might have more money, there will be a major backlash if it doesn't get used to replace EU funding, and the decisions about funding will now be debated in London, not Brussels.
Yes, but is it false?
Correct. It really is hysterical watching the quibbling about currency exchange rates and the stock market.
To put it politely, they have no idea what they are talking about. These students have never bought an option or held a single share but it's very generous of them to worry about the fortunes of currency speculators and bankers. That thought did not have its origin in their heads. Ron Swanson and I are very relaxed right now, watching Yes Minister and drinking Earl Grey tea.
If the parliamentary party picked the leader, he never would be within sight of the job. Unfortunately Labour is in the all-to-familiar trap of only wanting purity, feeling that the entire country will surely swing to the far-left any second now. You would think being out of power for 18 years last time would have taught them, but apparently not.
Had they picked David Milliband to be their leader, he would be PM right now. Instead they decided Ed was more left-wing, and went for him instead. When that didn't work they decided "oh, the country won't elect someone that left... lets see if we can find someone WAY farther out there"
Deposing Corbyn would be a start, but unless there is a sudden bust of rationality among the party members it won't mean anything. They'll probably choose Marx's corpse next or something (continuing the recent run of North London leadership, naturally) On a serious note, they'd probably just re-elect Corbyn as leader giving him a fresh mandate within the party.
In the last leadership election Liz Kendall was the only candidate that looked to me like she had a chance to win a general election. She didn't even get 5% of the vote. Right now, Labour considers general-election appeal to be toxic.
A large proportion of which probably just voted for Brexit - I think Corbyn wasn't that keen on the EU in the first place and knew that a lot of core Labour voters weren't keen on it either.
I suspect he thought what was bad for his enemy was good for him, how wrong he was.
Pretty much - even Farage seemed to be positioning himself for a narrow Remain win (in particular his 52%-48% comments about a second referendum).
That's all any of these analyses have to go on. A look on BoJo's face. Keep that in mind when you waste your time with all this.
But, that is somehow making him do a sad face?
Edit: And it certainly doesn't translate into 52% of people wanting him to win in 2020. If he negotiates a poor deal with the EU and/or 'forgets' about a few central 'Leave' arguments, he'll be in all sorts of trouble.
You have to understand how those people operate. They don't give two bits about reason and making sense. All they care about is to stay in power. They optimise for that and that alone. And 52% is power, beyond BoJo's (or Gove's or Farage's) wildest dreams.
If Brexit was a big mistake, thinking that Boris will get cold feet now that he has a clear line of sight to his goal (to be PM, duh) is an even bigger one.
That's not how it works - that 52% is not some uniform body with similar goals and vision beyond Brexit. This is the same challenge facing many popular revolutions - there is little uniting them beyond ousting Gaddafi, or "the 1%" (add Brexit to this list). Once they have "won", suddenly they realize they can't cater to everyone's wants and the whole thing splinters into factions.
While on paper it still looks like Boris Johnson is in a great position to the vast majority of the public, the next Prime Minister is going to have to follow through with what they know is a terrible idea, negotiate with the EU with remarkably less leverage than the 'Leave' campaign thought they had, try to deal with Scotland wanting to leave, restless regional pressure groups in Wales, Cornwall and other parts of the country, as well as try not to have Northern Ireland fall back into a state of ongoing political violence.
So Johnson either has put his hand up to deal with all these issues until the next general election in (or sooner) 2020 and go to an election with a struggling economy (I doubt and the Union slowly falling apart (remember, Scotland's independence would topple the sitting PM almost certainly) or he can wait it out, let another Conservative Prime Minister lose in 2020, and become party leader upon the election loss and hope to win in 2025.
I doubt he thought this through very well. On the plus side UKIP's work is mostly done so they mightn't poll as well any more.