I'm a UK citizen and I would really rather not have my economic future such as it is (I do not own a house in London, and would probably have difficulty raising a mortgage on a parking space there) flushed down the toilet for some mythical concept of 'control'.
Economics is really important as some of my pro-Brexit neighbours are beginning to realise.
Sure, economics is important. In global currency terms, the value of my home has declined substantially, I've lost a notional mid-5-figure amount expressed in EUR or USD terms. But if you're not internationally minded, if you don't visualize the possibility of yourself living outside of the UK, you're unlikely to consider it a real loss. It's a lot like how poor people can be self-limited by their self-conception, something you might have seen in teaching. (I grew up poor myself, it took some time to expand my horizons, and the process still isn't complete.)
If you live your life locally, why would you care if French cheese and Spanish ham gets more expensive? You probably think it'll be better for British producers. In fact you'd probably consider it just fine if the soft southerners have to pay more for their wine.
The big irony is that pro-Brexit regions have economies that are more dependent on the single market than pro-Remain London. Proving that's the case before Brexit, however, is hard - and if May's deal goes through, it'll go some way to softening the blow. So the decline will be even more imperceptible, until 20 years later, and finally you notice how shabby everything back home is when you come back from your Continental holiday.
Remember also that the majority of degree educated people under 50 voted against this. I'm not seeing any decrease in polarisation whichever way it goes.
Where I live, many people depend on the automotive supply chain. This is not a case of boutique cheese for us, it is a case of mass unemployment. I've lived through one of those episodes.
I wish people wouldn't see Brexit as the ultimate test of British values. It's just a thing that roughly 50% of the country are on different sides of - like milk in tea or marmite on toast. That doesn't mean they fundamentally disagree on every other political issue.
Even if as you suggest we go ahead with Brexit and somehow come out better off, do you think we won't find something else to divide us again? Whether you support Brexit or not says nothing about whether you support immigration rights, free trade and regulation and those political issues say nothing about what your values are as a person.
If this makes little sense to you then try this experiment, find a friend who is opposed to your view on Brexit and then try to find out whether or not they actually share the same fundamental values as you. I'm willing to bet that you have a lot more in common than you think.
On our values:
- London: I love London, whereas the pro-Brexiters generally see London as a filth-infested pit of crime, stabbings, Islamic terrorism, a failed experiment of multi-culturalism, and a grand distraction that occupies far too much public attention.
- Immigration: I distinguish between EU free movement and immigration, they do not. They do not value the right to settle anywhere you like in the EU in the same way I do. They see a feeling of European identity above national identity as stark raving bonkers, loony bin stuff.
- Nationalism: I've seen the poison of nationalism in Ireland and how it leads to conflict and violence; they seem to see little difference between nationalism and patriotism or supporting a football team. They don't understand the danger.
- Regulation: I am strongly in favour of central regulation for everything that affects inter-state commerce because the alternative is a race to the bottom with short-sighted politicians pursuing beggar-thy-neighbour policies. Whereas Brexiteers dislike regulations coming from Brussels, seeing it as an imposition with not enough democratic checks and balances. I'm sympathetic to the criticism of lack of democratic checks, but I think the answer is EU reform, not leaving the EU. Other, more left-leaning people might resent EU restrictions on state aid, I'm not in favour of state aid either - you see how US states competed with one another with tax breaks for Amazon, it's far better to have central restrictions on this nonsense to cut it out.
So on the topics you list, my position and pro-Brexit positions are opposed.
That's probably what the Cameron administration tried to do and failed. After he promused to hild the referendum and won tge majoriry, he probably hoped the outcome would be something like 48% leave and use that as a bargaining coin to negotiate with the EU. It didn't work because the Brtis voted to leave instead.
National governments are jealous of their powers, and fearful that the lightweight EU parliament would just be a tool of lobbyists rather than responsive to citizens, that citizens wouldn't be engaged with their representatives. And in many ways they're right. But it's a Catch-22: the EU parliament will remain a bunch of lightweights for as long as it has little power.
The EU definitely has a bunch of problems. Top of the list is democratic back-sliding in Hungary, Poland, Romania. And Euro area fiscal union or some other mechanism of fixing economic imbalances under monetary union without needing pro-cyclical austerity and depreciation. And migration from Middle East and Africa. And USA's pivot towards unenlightened self-interest and Russia's reawakened regional power-plays. Brexit is a fair ways down the list at this point for the rest of the EU, much less democratic reform, alas.
The fiscal union was flawed from the onset, which is why Margaret Tatcher opposed the UK joining the Eurozone. And she was right to do so.
People in Poland, Hungary and Romania should fight for democracy, as opposed to waiting for the EU to fix their problems. Democracy is won in the street, it isn't granted by decree.
While I don't like their policies, this is what the people want and this is what democracy in eastern europe looks like.
The 20th century was filled with dictators that won election repeatedly. Winning election repeatedly isn't the hallmark of democracy; peaceful and regular transfer of power is much more indicative.
In any case, democracy is about far more than simply winning elections. Protection of minorities, apolitical rule of law, independent media. Hungary is regressing badly across the board.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-viktor-orban...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/hungary-vikt...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/world/europe/hungary-orba...
I agree with Fidesz's anti immigration stance, but I what I don't agree with is eroding democracy.
Romania is practically led by crooks who also got elected democratically. Now they're eroding democracy and the judicial and giving themselves a get out of jail free ticket.
Yes it does. This "my political views say nothing about me as a person" statement really aggravates me. It doesn't make any sense. Of course your views are part of you as a person.
More specifically to the matter at hand, how does your vote on an issue directly related to immigration, trade, and regulation have nothing to do with those issues?
Supporting brexit simply means you do not want the UK to be in the EU. It doesn't mean that you don't support any of the EU's policies. You might prefer more immigration from non-EU countries for example but still support Brexit. Similarly, you might think that the regulation that we get from the EU is a good thing - you just don't agree with the system of governance that the EU is built on.
> More specifically to the matter at hand, how does your vote on an issue directly related to immigration, trade, and regulation have nothing to do with those issues
Your vote on those issues of course does reflect your views on those issues. I am referring to values beyond those we are argue about in politics such as a value of fairness, justice, community, family etc. I.e there is a vast swathe of issues on which most people in society actually agree - violence is bad, dishonesty is bad, crime is probably bad etc but that large proportion of values are never shared because they are obvious. I want to bring them up because otherwise it's all to easy to project opposing values on all possible spectra onto those on which we disagree with only a few small issues.
The small issues at hand are core to the role and conception of the nation state, and how it is changing in a globalizing and regionalizing world. Chris Grey wrote a very good article on this yesterday: http://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2019/01/britain-is-o...
How are these different issues to the ones that are voted on?
I fail to see any separation. Immigration is directly related to community, regulation to justice etc...
I think you're far too quick to make assumptions about what the baseline of shared values actually is. Yes, it may be easy for us to say that most people think violence, dishonesty or crime are bad things, but absolutely everyone on earth has a different definition for each of those, and differing ideas about to whom or what such definitions should apply.
At a certain point, there are hard lines in the sand, across which it is impossible to find common ground. For me, and many others, this issue is one of those.
http://www.efta.int/About-EFTA/Frequently-asked-questions-EF...
The fact is that Brexit divisions have settled in in the country, becoming more part of people's political identity than political party.
There's a complete lack of political leadership, with May saying what she thinks majority Tory supports want to hear, and Corbyn saying as little as possible to try and avoid making any decisions on Brexit, hoping May pushes Brexit through so that Tories can be blamed for any downside. Functionally, that means the two main parties are pro-Brexit, Tories vocally, Labour passively. With FPTP voting, there can only be two parties without vote splitting, so there's no functional political opposition to Brexit.
If Brexit does happen, well, Brexit won't be over; it's going to grind on for decades of negotiations trying to replace and replicate what the EU already did. Hopefully, that ultimately means coming back to the EU.
Why do I think Brexit probably needs to happen, though, even though I don't want it and it's not in my interest? Leavers won't understand the folly of Brexit until after it has happened. If it doesn't happen, it will poison politics for decades, and the UK would be even more obstructionist than it's been to date.
There hasn't been a positive identity-based case made for Remain. Everything has been framed as economic arguments, and in particular economic harm from leaving. Free movement - a reciprocal right of EU citizens - has been misleadingly framed as immigration. The history of UK joining the EEC has been rewritten and misremembered as joining a simple trade area that got out of hand. It's too late to turn these sentiments around, and there's no leadership trying to do it. In fact quite the opposite: because Tory membership is so pro-leave, Tory leadership contenders are all out-doing one another in EU-bashing.
None of the political leadership is thinking of the good of the country, everything is on the basis of party politics.
It's the kind of thing that helps you understand why world wars get started.