This comment seems to be borne out spite more than any kind of logic.

- The EU exit was, among other things, accused of being a way to relax regulation and legislation to degrade product standards to a US-like level. Chlorinated chicken was a big item on everyone's discussion agenda a while back. This is now evidently happening.

- The government is severely underfunding the NHS, despite paying it lip service. Some accuse the government of doing this as a form of sabotage, so that the service quality degrades and the private sector can swoop in as the saviour. This is controversial because:

a) Brits are very proud of the NHS as a nation (or at least that's the dominant narrative in my news bubble)

b) The privatisation of British rail has been a disaster - ticket prices have skyrocketed, and service quality took a nosedive in some areas.

Train company profits count for about 2% of the total cost of the ticket, and (pre covid) the network carried more than twice as many passengers as it was under BR - nearly 2 billion journeys a year vs a steady 800m in the 70s through 90s. in terms of distance, pax-km

1970 36b 1980 35b 1990 40b 1997 42b (end of BR) 2010 64b 2018 81b

Since 1997 that's a 90% increase.

France has increased 40% since 1997, Germany by 60%.

Fares have increased, but this is a reflection of the cost shifting to the passenger and away from the taxpayer. In 2009/10, franchised train operating companies were paid £275m to run the services (and another £3b was spent on the network those trains run on)

By 2015-2016 that operating subsidy had gone, and instead the TOCs paid £1.2b/year to operate their trains (some areas like Northern and West Midlands were still subsidised, but South West trains and Southern were paying their operating dues and paying for the tracks they run on)

It doesn't make sense to justifiably complain about overcrowdning (high demand) on one hand, but complain about high prices on the other. There is competition to rail if the price was too high -- driving, coaches, flying, not traveling, but the fare is obviously at the right level to result in record levels of travel and relatively low subsidy.

https://fullfact.org/economy/how-much-does-government-subsid...

Government subsidies have tripled since privatisation and fares have risen by 20% after inflation.

That doesn't seem like a win for efficiency. And of course it's the customer who bears the cost - which aren't just economic, but also social, because good public infrastructure reliably offers many-multiple ROI for economic activity in general.

And the question remains - how would BR have fared (ha...) with those generous subsidy levels instead of the very constrained resources it was forced to operate with?

Not only has privatisation been very expensive and poor value in real terms, it also destroyed one of the UK's biggest engineering employers and R&D development cultures.

The HS125 is still one of the most popular trains today. Experimental APT tilting technology was given away to European companies and then sold back to the UK in the form of foreign-built tiling trains.

Those could easily have been designed and built in the UK. There were also losses in signalling research - essential for maximised efficiency - and in network integration.

So it absolutely does make sense to complain about overcrowding and high prices when a nationalised network would have been cheaper to run, better value, and also more advanced technologically.

Of course this ideologically unpossible. Even so. Ideologues need to explain why jobs were lost, safety was trashed, engineering and R&D skills were off-shored in addition to higher subsidies and uneconomic fares.

Note this importantly doesn't include Scotland, Wales, Merseyrail (public) or TFL (public)

Rail subsidy jumped after railtrack was replaced with nationalrail, and the legacy of decades of underfunding in rail under BR was apparent. That underfunding is obviously going to happen under a tory government interested in cutting short term costs. You can see that as of 2015 subsidy per passenger mile was about the same as it was in the 80s and 90s[0]

Rail subsidy is split into two parts

1) Track costs 2) Service costs

Your figures are including major capital expenditure - specifically HS2 and Crossrail, so not really comparable with subsidies in the 70s and 80s when there weren't massive capital programmes and expansion.

I'm less concerned about track maintenence costs or track capital costs -- that's like the government paying for road maintenance or new motorways - it's good. It's the service subsidies that interest me. Basicalyl how much is the taxpayer using to subsidise rail travellers (who tend to have higher income and higher wealth than average), and during the 6 years I have data on, those dropped by £1.4 billion.

Remember that under BR there were competing sectors - intercity, regional railways, network southeast, all of which were shit. Now there are competing franchisees, some of which are shit, but we often get a choice (Virgin vs Chiltern vs London Midland for London-Birmingham, XC vs TFW for Crewe-Bristol, etc. This means more choice and cheaper fares for me, the passenger).

In 2015/16 the franchise "GTR (Thameslink etc)" pays £278m for the privilige of running trains through central London. Meanwhile Northern, which have very few routes that pay their way, get paid £122m from central government. You could argue that Grant Shapps would be better running these services, I'm not convinced.

Effectively Brighton->London commuters are subsidising rural travellers in Yorkshire. You could argue this shouldn't happen, and those commuting into London for high paying jobs should have cheaper fares, at the expense of fewer services in the North. That's a very Thatcherite view, but that's ok, everyone's entitled to a view.

APT predated privitisation by 2 decades so I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. Virgin ordered the class 390s.

It sounds like you don't like the state of the rail industry in Britain in the 80s and 90s, which is reasonable. It's hardly the fault of privitisation didn't start until 1993 and didn't begin operation until about 1997

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

Considering that this is about the same as inflation and less than the usual annual ticket price increase which is decided in part by the government, I strongly suspect that this number is an accounting exercise more than anything else.

There's also the profits made by the trains leasing companies as many TOCs lease their rolling stock

> There is competition to rail if the price was too high -- driving, coaches, flying, not traveling

There's no real competition for most commuters around London at least. The trade-off is rather with the cost of housing.

It makes perfect sense to complain about overcrowding for that reason and because pay a lot of money for their tickets, indeed.

People commute by train because it's the least bad option and/or the only viable option. That does not mean that it's good or that there is real competition.

If the number of trips has been increasing I think that the main drivers are the concentration of jobs within London and the booming housing costs: People live further and further away and have to commute by trains.

I'm no fan of the franchise system - especially when companies like Virgin East Coast get out of the obligations if they don't make enough money, but rail is stronger now (well 2019) than it has been since before the motor car was created, and the strength coincided with the franchise system coming in.

> People commute by train because it's the least bad option and/or the only viable option. That does not mean that it's good or that there is real competition.

We haven't seen the same growth in other European countries though. And it's not just commuting into London -- long-distance travel has ballooned too - hence the need to build HS2.

In cities like Paris, public transport has huge capacity and is cheap (and in Paris employers have to pay half your season ticket).

Lower growth there does not mean that we're doing better, it means that we're starting from lower... And the UK has had a robust population growth as well.

That sounds awful - so I effectively get a paycut if I walk or ride to the office?

If you buy a season ticket (at least a monthly ticket) to commute between your home and office you send a copy to HR and they have to refund you half of it.

What seems to happen now is the manufacturers e.g. Hitachi lease the trains to TOCs complete with maintenance plans built it.

Think Eurostar was the first model of this in the Uk

Privatisation has not been perfect, but only someone who does not remember the old days of British Rail in the 1980s and 1990s would consider it a disaster. It's true that fares are high, but service levels and passenger numbers are both far above the British Rail days. (UK rail passenger numbers reached an all time record in 2019)

Prior to Covid, many of the busiest lines were operating near their capacity limits, so setting fares any lower would just cause even more severe crowding. And fares, of course, generate revenue to reinvest into expanding capacity.

In any case, UK rail operators are now de-facto nationalised due to Covid. This has been recognised by the ONS, with rail operator's debts now counted on the government balance sheet.

ONS recognises full nationalisation of the UK railways: https://www.ft.com/content/1baa6b50-47ba-416e-b172-90a77a34c...

TL;DW revenues and passenger numbers are demonstrably lower with privatization than when nationalized. Unlike other industries, the UK's franchise privatization model is not subjected to free market forces, allowing rail companies to win contracts by underbidding only to fail to meet their targets.

This isn't the vindication of privatisation you seem to think it is. Passenger numbers (and fares) are hitting records, and the operators are still using the exact same rolling stock as in 'the old days of British Rail'. Privatisation has led to massive corporate profits at the taxpayers' expense, without providing the investment the railways need.

How is it that half of the UK's private operators are subsidiaries of other countries' nationalised operators? When the East Coast Mainline was renationalised (after the franchise holder claimed it was impossible to run profitably), it jumped from the most expensive line with the least customer satisfaction to the line with the highest customer satisfaction.

The 'bad old days' of British Rail were because of persistent underfunding, not the ownership structure. The UK state spends more on railways today under a privatised system than they did when the entire system was nationalised.

https://www.bringbackbritishrail.org/

I'm not suggesting it is. I'm saying that privatisation has not been a disaster, which was the OP's claim. If privatisation was a disaster, passengers would not have flocked to the railways in record numbers.

> "the operators are still using the exact same rolling stock as in 'the old days of British Rail'"

This isn't true in the vast majority of cases. With very few exceptions (like a few remaining HSTs), you'd be hard pressed to find any train operating into London that dates back to British Rail. Many routes have been through multiple rolling stock upgrades since the BR days!

But note that rolling stock is not something that the operators have much control over anyway. Upgrades are decided/determined by the Department for Transport as part of the franchise terms. So if you do find yourself on an ancient train on some regional route, that's really the government's fault, not the operator's.

> "How is it that half of the UK's private operators are subsidiaries of other countries' nationalised operators?"

Nationalised operators tend to have low costs of capital, so can potentially bid lower for franchises than private competitors who are likely to be paying higher interest rates. They also already have management experience in running large railways, which helps to support their bids.

> "The 'bad old days' of British Rail were because of persistent underfunding, not the ownership structure."

I think this is partially true.

> "The UK state spends more on railways today under a privatised system than they did when the entire system was nationalised."

Yes, but again, passenger numbers have increased dramatically in that time. In 2019, the UK's total rail subsidy (including Network Rail spending) was 3.97p per passenger mile. That's just about as low as it's ever been since at least 1980.

Some are, some aren't - Cross Country had plenty of new rolling stock when they were Virgin owned, and GWR have replaced many of the 125s in the last 5yrs

There are a couple of other reasons:

The Lansley reforms were about increasing non-NHS provision. They mostly failed because private providers simply can't do the job for the money the NHS gets paid.

Where we see private provision (for example, specialist commissioning in mental health services, or learning disability and autism services) we see terrible standards of care. Winterborne View, Whorlton Hall, St Andrews, are all non-NHS providers. Cygnet Health have had a bunch of inadequate CQC reports.

Indeed, you seem to admit that here, when you state that you got your views of what British people believe from your "news bubble". For example you think everyone else thinks the NHS is awesome, because left-wing journalists told you that's what everyone thinks. One day you'll talk to a Brit outside of that bubble and get a real shock to discover they aren't enamoured with the NHS at all. Remember, nobody has copied the NHS model. Nobody! The rest of the EU looked at it and thought the UK was crazy to do that, they all went with far greater private sector involvement. The NHS is a socialist anachronism and plenty of people would love to move to a more standard social insurance model, but even expressing such an opinion results in nasty, vicious attacks by the left, so people quickly learn to just stay quiet about it.

Quite possibly one day there will be a referendum on this and the same sorts of people whose minds were blown by Brexit will have their minds blown a second time by the degree to which people vote against the NHS.

Likewise for rail. The UK just had a vote on that: Corbyn had very few identifiable policies but re-nationalisation of rail was one of them. Voters rejected that agenda on an a-historic scale. Again, if it ever became a topic of serious political debate like the EU did before the Brexit referendum, you'd be shocked at how little support nationalisation would end up having. Ridership was in decline for decades before privatisation. The moment they were privatised that trend went into reverse and ridership started climbing again, until it reached new records pre-COVID. Ticket prices were rising because the newly privatised railways became so popular (limited supply+growing demand=rising prices).

Regulation: Whilst the US is not a low regulation zone by international standards, the EU is even worse. I love this headline, UK leaving GDPR. Hell yes. Another brilliant move by the UK post-Brexit, the latest in a string of them. GDPR is a disastrous "law", in quotes because it barely qualifies as a law at all in the traditional sense when you read it. Laws are meant to explicitly state what they disallow but the GDPR is so vaguely worded it could be interpreted to mean almost anything. Just on basic constitutional grounds, junking it is a smart move.

But there are practical benefits too. GDPR imposes staggering costs on businesses to deliver dubious 'benefits' which approximately nobody outside of the reflexive "it's EU so it must be good" bubble actually cares about. There has been no mass migration away from US tech firms at any point, GDPR implementation changed basically nothing about the online experience and the EU's various attempts to legislate tech firms away from domestic markets just made it impossible to create local competitors. Beyond being banned from some local US newspapers and forcing yet more privacy popups everywhere, GDPR has been largely impact-free.

I would say that most people will not vote against the NHS though. They may vote to reform it or get it more money, but they will not mostly vote to get rid of it.

The NHS is an upside down version of the US healthcare system. In the UK the political system is hijacked by the population to keep doctors wages low. In the US the political system is hijacked by the healthcare industry in order to keep healthcare wages high.

Or because 87% of Britons polled said that they are very proud of it.

>you'd be shocked at how little support rail nationalisation would end up having.

56% in favor. 15% actively against. Majority support even by members of the party that was most against it.

>The NHS is a socialist anachronism

This is a popular view among investors & high net worth individuals. The US system is extraordinarily profitable as a mechanism for parasitic wealth extraction and UK based investors are not blind to this. They want some sugar too.

Nonetheless even UK right wing papers owned by those very people shy away from this view. 87% is above the threshold where they feel comfortable contradicting the popular view.

Rail nationalisation was below that threshold and the barclay brothers owned telegraph, for instance, would attack the idea with savage abandon of a rabid dog.

FWIW, I think we should keep the NHS and have it free at point of use. However, I don't really care how that service is provided - government employees, private, whatever - as long as the service is good.

Overall costs have not been going down much but various parts of the service are given to contractors who do a worse job at a higher price and take a fat cut. Richard Branson notably has done this. The PPE fiasco that caused much of the spread of COVID was largely because of this - much of it was bought and didn't arrive: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ppe-scandal-procur...

Nonetheless people's emotional impressions of the service tend to have a lag. Your Mother's cancer treatment from 9 years ago will have a much bigger effect on your impression of the institution than statistics about how well it is doing now.

Eventually it will be privatized entirely as a "fix" for the problems caused by privatization and the costs will skyrocket.

Just like the cost of my railway season ticket to London or a trip to the doctor in the US.

And let's not forget Tony Blair put in place some internal market reforms as well.

Do you have a source for this? How does it stack up against other countries? Is it possible a greater share of people were hospitalised and thus the number of infections at hospitals was higher as a result?

I believe the NHS funding and operational model is similar to that used by military veterans in the US.

When Cameron first called the referendum Remain was in the lead. When topics are debated thoroughly in the public sphere and serious campaigns are run, people's opinions can shift pretty dramatically. That's why politicians campaign.

Nobody has ever spent time campaigning to keep railways privatised in the UK because the Conservatives have always chosen to fight elections on other issues, whilst Labour have made nationalisation a priority for years. If people were asked to make a direct decision on this and there was competent campaigning involved, I am very sure nationalisation would lose. The arguments are weak.

87% of Britons polled said that they are very proud of [the NHS]

The same poll showed even more people are "proud" of the fire brigade, although there's nothing special about the British fire service. They are also more "proud" of the post office than Oxford or Cambridge universities. All that poll says is that people tend to answer "proud" (whatever that's interpreted to mean) when asked about institutions which they frequently interact with and are rarely exposed to any criticism of.

Just like with the railways, British people are not exposed to serious debate about the NHS. The Conservatives have, for now at least, given up trying to debate it because they prefer to be a centrist party and because Labour consistently exploit people's emotions by conflating the NHS with healthcare. For instance the left will happily imply that any criticism of the NHS (a bureaucracy) means hatred of nurses and loving of cancer, or other nonsense.

They're exposed to investor dogma like yours on a daily basis from most of the investor owned media (telegraph, the mail, etc.). It isn't quite as vehement as yours because they know the limits of what their audience would accept but their owners views are broadly in line with yours.

It's a bit hard to attack an institution that cured your readerships' mother's cancer, for instance, and not lose their trust. They learned this lesson the hard way.

>For instance the left will happily imply that any criticism of the NHS (a bureaucracy) means hatred of nurses

They'll state that a below inflation pay rise does that because it does. They tried to supplant it with a weekly "clap a thon" instead. Cringeworthy.

Although, it's not strictly nurses investors and the investor backed government hate it's nursing unions, among other impediments to parasitic US-style profit driven value extraction.

> All that poll says is that people tend to answer "proud" (whatever that's interpreted to mean) when asked about institutions which they frequently interact with and are rarely exposed to any criticism of.

You just wrote above:

> One day you'll talk to a Brit outside of that bubble and get a real shock to discover they aren't enamoured with the NHS at all.

> plenty of people would love to move to a more standard social insurance model

Probably should choose one: either people have an bad opinion of NHS, or they don't.

2) left wing journalists? For what newspaper? The UK newspaper industry is dominated by right wing papers. I think international readers may get there wrong idea about it because they see the guardian online... because the guardian is free it gets shared a lot. If you want to see a typical British newspaper try the Daily Mail (Don't take this as a recommendation!)

3) The idea that the Corbyn election defeat was mostly about rail nationalisation is one of the most absurd things I have ever read.

4) The businesses I work with spent trivial sums on GDPR.

  >The NHS is a socialist anachronism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan

"Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_for_the_rich_and_cap...

I'm rather sure your Labor party (at least Corbyn) was constantly attacking EU/Brussels and often dutch for neoliberalism.

If your political position is re-nationalisation then it's easier to do it outside the EU unless you think the Conservative party stays in power forever.

Have you ever known any government departments that don’t howl about being underfunded? The NHS is the 4th largest employer in the world, 1.3 million employees to provide healthcare to a nation of 67 million.

The Labour Party is currently claiming that NHS spending will be cut next year... because the emergency funding for the Covid situation won’t be made a permanent part of its budget!!

Yet taxpayer funding for health per head of population in the UK is lower than

France

Germany

Sweden

Switzerland

And get this -- THE USA

In 2009 - so before Obamacare came in, the US government spent $3,700 per person on healthcare. Not per person covered by medicare and military, per citizen.

The UK spent $2,700, and everyone was covered.

Doctors and administrators are very well paid. Even nurses are when you factor in the pension. The only genuinely underpaid staff in the NHS are its cleaners who are the REAL frontline against infectious diseases. Didn’t see them doing many Tiktok dances however, too busy with real work.

Brexit mostly was and remains a domestic issue which is why it's such a touchy subject on HN where there is probably a significant number of Britons commenting.

As someone from the continental Europe, this is not at all my experience, but I'm sure this depends on the specific social bubble I'm in. There are plenty of people around that had their lives complicated because of it, enough that most people I know have very strong feelings about it.

But mostly, no one cares.

The barbarians are good, loyal and brave. They don't spend their time with cultural frivolities like theater, bathing and running a shop.

Note that it's morning in Europe, and as such there will be lots of British/European people around, for whom Brexit is a bigger deal.

Similar to how broadly views on Trump outside of the US tended to be similar, when people have some distance from a debate they do tend to fall down on one "side".

I presume by "Twitter hot take" you just mean "takes I personally disagree with", right?

"I think it's hilarious that Britain will fail. Who agrees?" is not really what I consider a good seed comment. It's fine to think Britain will fail, but at least provide something for people to discuss with you.

Also the quotes are from "Blind's man brexit", and if anybody is interested, this is probably the best geopolitical book i've read so far, and it is not at all limited to the four quotes.

The quote about the colony is in the opening, and what's funny is that less than 5 pages later, Barnier complains about the English cherry picking. Is this something that's taught in "public" schools in England?

This is certainly the case in the way the EU tried to treat the UK after their own COVID vaccination programme descended into farce.

#2 The UK has departed from the trading bloc it does 60% of its trade with. It desperately needs new trade deals outside of it. Since America is the biggest economic bloc outside of Europe and because they're big and we are small they have the leverage and that means we start abiding by their rules.

#3 There were plans leaked on how this would be done with the NHS (e.g. deliberately hamstringing the NHS's ability to negotiate drug prices). They kept them secret from the public.

To be frank, your comment seems borne out of a kind of appeal to moderation rather than particular knowledge of UK domestic politics.

Nonetheless you can measure each country's contribution to the Iraq War as a rough proxy for how much they supplicate. The UK contributed by far the most of the three while Canada's involvement was minimal.

For as long as I can remember, the Irish government has been quite deferential towards the US, e.g., allowing the use of Irish airports (mostly Shannon, a civilian airport – but also Casement Aeorodome, the headquarter of the Irish Aer Corps) by US military to carry troops, weapons and – quite possibly (aircraft were never inspected) – victims of “extraordinary rendition”. Every year, our Taoisigh (prime ministers) are always eager to have a photo opportunity with the US president on St. Patrick’s day.

I’m guessing that this is mostly to attract Foreign direct investment into Ireland from US multi-national corporations as can be seen by our notably low rate of corporation tax – and the government’s unwillingness to accept the tax income that the EU considers to be owed to us by Apple. Neo-liberalism has been the dominant political ideology over the past few decades with one former Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) famously declaring that Ireland was (ideologically) closer to Boston than Berlin. This dominance left Ireland particularly vulnerable when the 2008 financial crisis eventually hit us – without the widely touted “soft landing”.

However, the relationship isn’t all bad: a number of US administrations – particularly Bill Clinton’s – helped to bring about the end of armed conflict in Northern Ireland. That was probably the most important political achievement in the recent history of Britain and Ireland (one that Brexiteers, sadly, don’t seem to care about or have forgotten about).

Ireland is officially a neutral country but, as you correctly point out, has a long history of allowing the US to use Shannon as a de facto US Airbase. And, as you also correctly point out, has almost built its entire economy in recent years on providing tax incentives and other bribes for US mega-corporations to set up [nominal] HQ there. The phrases "House of Cards" and "They don't love you back" immediately spring to mind.

That unfortunately means sending kids to die in Vietnam.

(In my mind: I am just a person on planet Earth, trying to get from position A to position B, less than 5 metres away).

Having now lived in the UK and Netherlands for over 10 years, I feel this would never happen here. I would expect this in the US though (so I rarely jaywalk on the few times I have been there).

I tell this anecdote as an example to my friends when I try to describe how Australia has a mix of influences from both Europe and the US.

I remember when there was a law who passed thru in Australia where every small company could fire anyone on the day (it wasn't the case before, i think there was a 3 month period or something).

The law passed and the only comments I could get from colleague at that time (not from you dan ;)) was "humm okay then"

In france there would be riots for months and years if such law passed.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it does seem unusually French.

From what I can tell the workers rights situation in France really does dissuade some companies from setting up there.

I think there would be a lot of noise in the press about it here, but I don't think riots in the streets would be part of it!

It wouldn't happen in the UK because jaywalking is not a crime in UK.

Quiet Australians accept authority moreso than UK folk.

This is so far from my stereotype of Aussies that I feel sure it must be a troll, designed to bring out a legion of shirtless, shrimp-barbecuing cobbers, turning the air blue with their feelings about authority.

It's definitely true. Australia loves the smack of firm government and is quietly very, very authoritarian.

There's an Aussie term "Wowsers" [0] which is fascinating, as there is no British equivalent term. It often feels like the Wowsers and the Larrikins [1] are fighting an endless battle for Australia's soul. The Wowsers always win.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wowser [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrikin

* Lockout laws

* Jaywalking laws

* Weaker environmental protests than UK, despite Aus lagging the rest of the world on environmentalism.

* Mandatory helmet laws.

* Illegal to perform DIY electrics, e.g. change a plug.

* International travel currently banned. To leave Australia at the moment would require either exemption, or I relinquish citizenship.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Cronulla_riots was the last riot involving shirtless shrimp barbecuing cobbers. Not a proud moment.

??

As someone moving to Australia in a few months, I feel like this is something I ought to know about...

> International travel currently banned.

This is the same in many countries, including the UK right now.

Arduino is fine.

> This is the same in many countries, including the UK right now.

Yes, true in UK during the past 1-2 months of national lockdown?

Aus's has been the case for 12 months.

Current lockdown started on the 4th of Jan, and the travel restrictions came in then. We also had lockdown part 2 back in November, for the whole of November, lockdown part 1 from April-June last year, and various degrees of lockdown in between with regional variations...

I've lived in Aus before, and I agree it's great for many reasons, am looking forward to being back.

On the electrical thing, I know there are some restrictions on what you can do in the UK - putting in new circuits, adding new lighting circuits etc. I've pushed the boundaries a bit here AFAICT by fixing a lighting circuit* and swapping a few single sockets for doubles. Other work like putting cat 6 in the walls I did myself without a thought. Looks like I need to take a look at the regs.

( * the light switch in our bedroom somehow flicked between "one bulb on" and "two bulbs in series", with no off setting )

(oh wow, you're right, I can't change a light fitting, or even legally change a plug from UK -> Aus without breaking the law. Will have to buy new cables where I can, maybe change one or two plugs before I leave!)

> This is the same in many countries, including the UK right now.

It isn't really. Many countries barred non-resident non-citizens from entering but only a couple went to the extent of attempting to prohibit their own citizens from leaving. The latter restriction is far more draconian.

OK then, but the UK is currently one of those places. Without good reason it's currently prohibited.

ANd I honestly don't have a problem with it, we're in the midst of a pandemic. :shrug:

By all means, protect your own country by preventing people from going in, but people should be free to leave to a different place with more relaxed rules at their own risk.

Preventing your citizens from coming back is worse.

I think what happens is they just get told one day to target it, when they'll stand around and catch people, otherwise they just don't care unless they take a personal dislike to you. I have heard of times they'll descend on Sydney CBD intersections like this in mobs to send a message. The rest of the time, jaywalking is generally very casually done here and not really a big deal like in some US movies.

Weird, as I met a dutch woman in Australia, from Maastricht, who was deathly afraid of crossing the road at the wrong time because where she was from she could get in trouble for that.

Whereas I lived in WA for a couple of years and never saw anything like it.

The shock of their financial sector leaving.

The shock of getting pitiful trade negotiating.

Being unprepared with anything to offer for negotiating leverage.

The domestic identity further polarizing and inability to form consensus.

You speak in the past tense but this hasn’t actually happened and shows no signs of happening in terms of banks relocating jobs and capital. If anything London is getting stronger.

Let’s hope that the NHS gets properly funded and doesn’t get privatised. Because the US vaccination rollout is a shambles.

Japan: You guys have vaccines?

In all honesty, this statement is fairly close to being hilariously wrong. The US vaccinates more people per day than any other country in the world. The reason why the UK has a higher per-capita vaccination rate is A) there's less of you to vaccinate, and B) the UK isn't doing two doses. The former makes the rollout easier - there are countries like Israel where they're close to vaccine herd immunity as they simply needed fewer doses. The latter is a calculated risk only somewhat supported by the available medical data. I don't expect every country to adopt First Dose First, especially if they've already given two doses to high-risk populations that would benefit from getting half their protection sooner.

Trust me, there's plenty of other things you can harangue the US about all day - vaccines aren't one of them.

I trust "the math" that shows a better population outcome there, even though individuals will have higher risk profiles this way.

(I'm aware that all sounds quite America-like already)

The basic premise of the "it's an establishment stitch up" argument is that Britain will be weaker and poorer, but the establishment will end up with a much, much bigger slice of the smaller pie such that they gain overall. It's not clear to me how that's supposed to work though. How is this pie-grab supposed to work as the pie itself shrinks? Some people might manage to pull it off, but the whole establishment class as a group?

Anyway, this whole premise flies in the face of who we know voted overwhelmingly for Brexit - ordinary British voters, many of them up north and from working backgrounds - even as the actual political parties, majority of MPs and most business leaders were arguing against it. The evidence for an establishment stitch up rests on a few very specific data points, like the fact that Jacob Reese Mog and some of Nigel Farage's hedge fund friends have already and will continue to do quite well out of it. They're hardly "The Establishment" as a whole though. They're just some of the people I was talking about trading on volatility, and hardly representative of the financial sector as a whole that is getting screwed over by losing passporting.

The vast majority of the city and other business leaders where asleep at the wheel - what they should have done is had a quiet word with Harry Peirce (MI5) at the club about these dangerous subversives.

I have always wondered how true this is. It is certainly a common claim, but anecdotally I know several small business owners who I am fairly sure voted Leave because they didn't agree with EU-style regulation such as the subject of today's discussion. And this is in the Cambridge area, which overall was literally the most pro-Remain place in the entire country. Most of those people did not talk much about their views on Brexit in public because of the peer pressure, which I think was unfortunate. Even if few minds might have been changed in either direction, it would have been better for the issues to have been properly debated.

This is false, because every time it was presented for a vote Leave won. If the majority were Remain, Brexit would necessarily not have happened.

As for the alleged ordinary voters, what did they want out of it and what are they actually getting out of it?

The Conservatives have a majority and are there any Remainers left in that party - I thought most of them had been purged before the last election?

My MP still has posts on her blog about how ardently pro EU she was and how she believed staying in the EU was the best idea. Not long after the referendum and May coming in, she was fully behind Brexit and ready to do whatever it takes. A lot of Tory MPs will just go with the prevailing wind on everything and this is also how they stay in power because being progressive is not a vote winner in a broadly (small c) conservative country.

And the ones that didn't were purged

Interesting guy, my opinion of him changed (for the better) when I found out he presented a regular Jazz show on the radio.

I'm really not sure about that. I agree that may be the case with some of those ruling individuals. My impression is that Johnson doesn't believe in anything, except his personal interest and profit.

Others in that cabinet, however, really appear to be true believers.

> Others in that cabinet, however, really appear to be true believers.

My impression is that they all have those same beliefs - their personal interest and profit.

(Clarification: I'm exaggerating for rhetorical effect. The UK won't become impoverished or really stop being an advanced-economy, but it's still going to be far poorer (in a total GDP and PPP sense) than it would be had this whole Brexit business never happened.

Debatable. But even if the EU was - or was not - a tightly integrated federated state, I'm far more concerned about the UK withdrawing itself from the world's largest free trade bloc. I see it heading towards either economic protectionism (bad in the long-term) or getting into a race-to-the-bottom (potentially even worse).

That's a strange thing to say. Globalisation is usually criticized as a race to the bottom. The opposite of that is protectionism, which you say is bad. So which one are you in favour of?

Take the UK for example: at the time of its accession to the EU it had a sizeable manufacturing and mining economy. Globalisation directly led to those factories and mines closing, but being in the EU meant the UK could specialise in emerging sectors and immediately export to the rest of the EU for free (e.g. service-sector, information economy, banking, finance, media, etc).

Globalisation and economic-interdependence is also the main driver for world-peace. I’d rather be unemployed because someone in France does my job but cheaper than be fighting in a war against France for some sense of “national pride”.

Globalisation needs a friendlier face, yes. And we need better ways of managing the local negative effects, like better unemployment income for plant closures - but I don’t believe the sentimental negatives in any way outweigh the long-term benefits.

A bit like a supercritical fluid, where transition between liquid and gas occurs spontaneously.

This is much talked about but so far I've only been seeing the opposite. Since brexit, the UK has so far banned fish trawling in the North sea, banned live export of animals, banned the import of fois gras, and created a much more environmentally friendly alternative to the EU's (absolutely atrocious) common agricultural policy.

> lowering regulatory standards

I'd argue that not all regulation is good regulation, e.g. the GDPR

> Lowering taxes

This is could feasibly happen and you could say it already is by looking at the way the tories have further rigged the housing market and stamp duty post-covid. But I fail to see what that has to do with the EU really. I don't know a lot on this subject though.

> undoing workers' rights legislation

I can see this one happening sadly. Am I not right in saying though that a lot of workers rights come from the judiciary, not the government? Example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56123668

Brexiteers would see tony martin as a hero.

(Is this another one of those issues where someone is in favour of Brexit because they think the EU prevents something that is nothing to do with them, because they've been lied to by the UK press again?)

Thankfully the armed police have very stringent training in the Uk.

What we can't have is pistols, apart from 20 or so people in the Olympic pistol shooting teams.

Do you know what does help keep the wealthy wealthy? A ready supply of cheap labour from outside the UK.

Many leading brexit proponents are rich people who made their money from the collapse of the soviet union and have assets largely outside the UK. One conspiracy theory is that they are attempting to crash the UK economy in order to buy the dip, make money from shorts and the sell off of state assets.

Another conspiracy theory is that brexit has an ideological basis in the idea of the soverign individual - related to the idea of the randian hero, the idea is that as states weaken in power, rich people will be able to transcend citizenship and attain some kind of libertarian utopia where they can do what ever they want. One of the leading brexiteers dad wrote a book about it which apparently has some following, but maybe people are just surprised that right wing politicians want a smaller state.

There is also an idea that the UK and its dependencies (e.g. virgin islands) are a tax haven. A lot of brexit money came from US activist billionaires and hedge funds, but a lot of it came from very rich russians who fled tot he UK in the 1990s with huge amounts of money that Russia say was stolen visa corruption and other criminality. The theory is that brexit was a response to EU money laundering and tax evasion rules that would have linked these rich criminals to their money to its sources, leaving them open to russian legal challenge. The theory is that for those people, brexit was a means to escape the net.

In my opinion, the role these factors played is probably overstated - brexit was primarily a backlash against globalisation and change, and a protest against the UK status quo by parts of the population that didn't believe they benefited enough from it, much like the election of Trump in the US.

If anything I think it is rather unfair to hear people from other EU countries treating this process as something along the lines of 'suits them' and 'they've made their bed'. When in reality a large chunk of them have pretty much not agreed to any of this but are still set to suffer the consequences.

One wonders if remain had one if the leave campaign would have accepted "The vote was clear, put up with it and shut up".

I completely understand why EU governments would be absolutely fed up with the UK government though.

Sadly my generation (40 and younger) are going to have to live the consequences of something we didn't vote for (49 and younger voted remain getting more strongly remain as you go younger) - it's absolutely frustrating.

"In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-3630668...

But equally, politically, and democratically, it is not tenable to call a referendum (which is something quite rare in the UK) and then to ignore the result. So the reality is that the government and Parliament had to abide by the result even if the referendum was legally not binding.

Now people are of course free to campaign for the UK to join the EU.

Or to campaign to leave the UK - which I suspect is a more achievable and sensible option. I'd doubt if the EU would want the UK back anyway.

But it feels like the UK needs to do some domestic cleanup before that has a chance of happening. Seems like the UK media and political landscape has gone completely off the rails.

Bit like buying a house - you want it? Ok, well do a survey... it has a bit of dry rot - you still want it or shall we look at other options?

This would smooth out the issue of sampling the decision at one exact point.

Add onto this the fact that the government wheeled out every 'expert' it could find to constantly cry about how bad brexit would be - most of them were lying (Mark Carney, George Osbourne in particular told lies of the most astounding nature - for example that brexit would cause more damage to the economy than WW2? Think about that for a minute.).

If anything the establishment was stacked against brexit.

But on your WW2 point, I did think about it for a minute.

Britain fought WW2 for 6 years, 1939 – 1945. Brexit has no known endpoint. Imagine that even 10% of the trade impacts we've seen since the end of the transition period on 1 January persist. Then you can quite easily calculate how many years it will take to damage the economy more than WW2. Off the top of my head, I don't know if that's 6 years, or 60 years, or 600 years. But there's certainly some finite number that will do it.

It was clearly reckless to hold a vote on something without a plan on how it was actually to be implemented or even what it might look like; and there were calls for the government to do some investigation here and publish a report or some such document - the decision not to do so was in order to sow that uncertainty.

I think it would have been democratically unconscionable to not have had "No Brexit" as an option on a second referendum, but that would have required a relatively complicated ranked voting system, and arguably it would have made more sense for the first referendum to have been set up that way instead.

I suppose the alternative would have been for Remainers to boycott the hypothetical second referendum, and hope that the number of votes for the different Brexit options summed to substantially less than the number of votes for Brexit in the initial referendum.

[0] https://www.markpack.org.uk/150719/dominic-cummings-second-r...

[1] https://metro.co.uk/video/jacob-rees-mogg-suggests-holding-s...

So no plan. Genius.

There was no single, set-in-stone outcome on either side.

I voted to stay in, but the remain campaign was far from honest.

It's also apparent to me that the remain camp did keep fighting Brexit tooth & nail much like Farage might have, so I guess we have symmetry.

(I say this with tongue firmly in cheek, but I do think there is some truth to the idea that people broadly get more conservative as they get older)

Yeah, but unfortunately only 64% of the under 35 year olds bothered to turn up, while in the older age groups the turnout was much higher (80% for 35-64, 89% for over 65). That was probably a result of many (including the polls) thinking that the "Leave" side didn't have a chance of winning, same as many US Democrat supporters (also supported by the polls) didn't think Trump could win. The US voters got to correct their mistake four years later, no such luck for the UK voters unfortunately...

So the students (18-24) that could vote had to be:

A) living with parents during studies, or registered to vote at parents place while not living there full time (illegal) — or! Live full time on their own, which is rarely

and

B) to not go to Glastonbury, one of the largest festivals in the UK for young adults.

Hindsight being what it is tells us this was foolish, it that’s how it was.

https://www.gov.uk/electoral-register

> It’s sometimes possible to register at 2 addresses (though you can only vote once in any election).

> For example, if you’re a student with different home and term-time addresses, you may be able to register at both.

The EU isn't perfect, but you'll struggle to argue that it hasn't expanded peace, prosperity and human rights across the continent. This is motherhood-and-apple-pie stuff.

Arguments in favour of Brexit thus tend to boil down to immigration and 'sovereignty'.

There's a consensus amongst economists that immigration makes us financially better off. That makes it hard not to ascribe a strong desire to cut immigration to a powerful desire for ethnic homogeneity and/or a powerful dislike of foreigners. Those things are very close to racism.

Meanwhile, the 'sovereignty' Brexit delivers is almost wholly illusory. In practice, we'll get to choose which of the big players to take the rules from. That's going to be either the US (which hardly anybody actually wants — most Brits value our health service, non-toxic food and drinking water, holiday pay, and so on — and also isn't very helpful, because the US is far away) or the EU (whose decisions we used to play an outsized role in, but no longer have any influence over).

It would be hilarious — if it weren't tragic and a little terrifying — that the ones in charge of 'taking back control' are also the ones stifling parliament, suppressing voting, and attacking academics, judges and the rule of law. As far as I can see, the only ones taking back control are the rulers, and the only ones they're taking back control from are the other citizens of the UK.

Is it necessary for the UK to stay in for this peace to continue? Would you like to talk to some of the southern states about the expansion of prosperity that has come along with monetary union?

> There's a consensus amongst economists that immigration makes us financially better off.

In aggregate, not individually. Great for those of us in the middle classes, but I have a lot of sympathy for those who see their low wages effectively pegged to minimum wage, and who have to compete for those minimum wage jobs with a huge pool of people.

We have stories of fruit and veg going unpicked because labour can't be imported as easily, and the few brits who enquired about the work wouldn't do it, they wouldn't live on the farm and work long days for the lowest possible pay. This speaks to me of industries in dire need of reform, propped up by the importation of those willing to accept standards nobody should have to accept, because of a disparity in wealth between countries.

Was leaving the EU the right way to go about fixing this? Probably not, but to sweep these issues under the rug or worse, call people racist because of them, was counterproductive.

>> In aggregate, not individually. Great for those of us in the middle classes, but I have a lot of sympathy for those who see their low wages effectively pegged to minimum wage

There are two arguments here:

1. If an aggregate gain isn't being redistributed so we're all better off, that's a failure of the tax and benefits systems that politicians could (and I believe should) address.

2. But aside from that, there's good evidence that immigration simply doesn't hurt those earning least. See Esther Duflo, for example: studies "all come to the conclusion that the effect of low-skilled migration on low-skilled wages is zero". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1pZfFY132Q

"Empirical research on the labour market effects of immigration in the UK suggests that immigration has relatively small effects on average wages, with negative effects on low-paid workers and positive effects on high-paid workers."

I'm going to presume that page is well sourced as it's associated with Oxford University.

I don't disagree that many of the reasons people voted for Brexit were things that could have been addressed by the UK government in various ways. But they weren't, and Brussels Buck-passing was practically a parliamentary sport. Perhaps that can end now.

I haven't watched the video yet. But does she address the BoE paper? https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2015/the-impac...

Maybe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement#Brexit

The solution is to create more jobs, not shrink the population. The idea that you get free labor and don't take advantage of it so backwards. It's only working because it's a psychological trick. In aggregate you are worse off.

Literally every country suffering from an underutilized workforce should just utilize it, even if artificially. Restricting immigration is basically equivalent to a waiting strategy where you just hope that the competition (e.g. China) runs into labor shortages and thus your own labor surplus no longer becomes a liability. It works but it's so slow that if you were the politician of a waiting nation you should rightfully be criticized for doing nothing.

>We have stories of fruit and veg going unpicked because labour can't be imported as easily, and the few brits who enquired about the work wouldn't do it, they wouldn't live on the farm and work long days for the lowest possible pay. This speaks to me of industries in dire need of reform, propped up by the importation of those willing to accept standards nobody should have to accept, because of a disparity in wealth between countries.

This is where things get absurd. You are complaining that all those immigrants are stealing all the farm jobs with impossibly low pay but at the same time you never cared a single bit about those jobs and would never do them yourself?

Is this not just the broken window fallacy?

> Restricting immigration is basically equivalent to a waiting strategy where you just hope that the competition (e.g. China) runs into labor shortages

I'm not sure I understand the point you're trying to make here?

Are you trying to say that in order to compete on the world stage you need a surplus of low/underpaid labour? Why is that good for the people that find themselves in that surplus?

> You are complaining that all those immigrants are stealing all the farm jobs

I'm doing no such thing. Please re-read my post after discarding some of your preconceptions.

I'm saying the pay and conditions attached to those jobs are wholly unreasonable. That they should not be run like that in the first place, immigrants or no.

Those companies were only viable because people could be flown in from places where there were lower expectations on working conditions and enough of a wage disparity that it made it worthwhile for those workers to be paid the minimum. They were often made to live in cramped conditions in temporary accomodation on-site, in a way that's totally incompatible with (for instance) a family life. That's not a good thing. That sector needs reform.

(Yes, immigration law was hiding this and contributing to wage suppression. I am in no way accusing any class of people, immigrant or otherwise of "stealing jobs".)

That is indeed a problem, but it is your problem. If 48% of people support anything, there must be some reasons for it.

You're right about the consensus among economists. At the same time, 10 years ago there was a consensus about the virtues of free trade. Then Autor et al. wrote "The China Shock" and other similar papers, and, well, now there's not a consensus any more. Also, economics isn't immune to bias. Are papers showing a link from immigration to low wages, or crime, or reduced trust, likely to get a fair hearing?

Is desire for ethnic homogeneity close to racism? It seems to be very widely shared - including among impeccable liberals. See the evidence on white flight in Kaufmann's Whiteshift. Homophily is close to a human universal, so it's not obvious that it is wrong, or stupid, to prefer others like ourselves.

If we trade we have to accept rules. But now we get to choose which, right? As you say, if we don't like US rules on chicken, we can trade that off against the costs. The value of tying ourselves to the EU depends on how you view its future. There's a fair case that it is an aging, sclerotic continent that can only make money by imposing fines on US tech companies. I don't say that's the only perspective that you can make.

Lastly, the UK is a democracy. The EU, hardly (see Perry Anderson's recent essays in the LRB for a fairly comprehensive account). Democracy sure has its flaws, but doesn't the threat of the boot encourage politicians to get things done? In this context, the contrast between the UK's vaccination program and the EU's is telling.

Physical reality: Factories are in China we don't have to work in the EU to get manufactured stuff! The Chinese are working their butts off for us and we are making them rich in the process!

Anti free trade idea: Chinese people working their butts off for us should be illegal. We would rather work ourselves and prefer expensive domestically produced products (if you did, why make the "inferior" competition illegal?). We don't need high skill jobs, low skill work is just as important!

One particular reason: while trade increases welfare, it also has distributional effects. As trade barriers go to zero, the marginal effect on welfare of a further reduction becomes small, compared to the marginal effect on distribution.

Another reason: globalization allows capital to avoid restrictions (e.g. on environmental externalities, child labour, slavery) that are seen in the West as part of the social contract.

Here's the Autor paper: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18054/w180...

Dani Rodrik's recent work on populism: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23559/w235...

And his classic "Has globalization gone too far" is worth reading too.

Sure, and I think the most palatable conclusion is that a very large number of people are not well informed. If you look at UK news outlets — what they choose to report, how they choose to report it, and the interests of the people who own them — this doesn't stretch credibility very much.

> Also, economics isn't immune to bias. Are papers showing a link from immigration to low wages, or crime, or reduced trust, likely to get a fair hearing?

Yes, I believe they are. I am wary here of Michael Gove's quasi-fascist rhetoric of having "had enough of experts".

> it is an aging, sclerotic continent that can only make money by imposing fines on US tech companies

The big tech companies are too large and too powerful to be safe for democracy (or indeed for healthy forms of capitalism involving genuine competition). I would like to see more action taken against them everywhere. The EU is large enough to stand up to large corporations of this sort. The UK outside the EU is not.

>Yes, I believe they are. I am wary here of Michael Gove's quasi-fascist rhetoric of having "had enough of experts".

Heh.... I'm an economist. Trust me on this one.

Why not? Australia is smaller and just stood up to them.

1/ You're right, UK is big an rich enough to make them cave a little, and is also speaking english and have a good diplomatic reputation, that will help.

2/ Australia is a weird country and have weird politicians, i don't think any western country could've done the same on their own.

Do you really want them to have an influence across the whole of the EU? By leaving, our dysfunctional politicians lose influence which will help with the peace and human rights that you mentioned earlier.

Peace takes two sides, so it's hard to argue that having your dysfunctional politicians run unchecked isn't going to lead to worse outcomes across the board.

Edit: maybe you were joking? Ha ha.

If we had remained then, what would the EU have prevented them from doing so far? Would they have stopped the corruption with regards to the Covid contracts? I guess we would have to keep GDPR, but then GDPR might have been stronger in the first place without the UKs influence.

> the UK used to be a major world advocate for human rights

Yes, but we aren't any more and our press freedom index is quite low by EU standards.

>Yes, but we aren't any more

Have you got a source for this?

The ECSC then EEC did that, and of course NATO, ECHR, Schengen and various other institutions and agreements. The EU came into existence much later and claimed credit for things that were set in motion decades before. Noone would have voted to leave the EEC, the EEC was great.

Actually I think after seeing the vaccine rollout by the EU, many more Brits would vote to leave.

It's interesting how events have turned out.

Right now we have a global pandemic so all countries world wide are affected. And unless the whole world is vaccinated we won't get past it since the chance that mutations occur that all possible immune against our vaccines increases the more people get infected.

Currently there are 4 Producing Vaccine "producing" countries/groups

USA, UK, EU, Russia and China.

From these 5 groups only the EU and China are exporting vaccines. I am unsure about russia. And the Chinese vaccine is also not that widespread outside China. But I know that the EU even supplies Canada and Mexico with vaccines, while the USA and the UK have export bans. That is one of the reasons why vaccinations are slow in the EU in addition to being slow last year with ordering.

So while they have great numbers at home concerning the amount of people vaccinated. It is morally debatable whether or not that is the correct approach for a global problem.

You can easily find this information online. The following picture is pretty clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_V_COVID-19_vaccine#/me...

Also Russia is quite open about licensing the vaccine production technology to other countries, e.g. one of the countries which will soon start manufacturing it domestically is Italy.

My theory is simply that, at this point in time, the EU countries are insufficiently well linked and coordinated to face a crisis on this scale with the efficiency of something like the US, due in part to the variety of cultures, languages and political philosophies within the bloc.

> It's interesting how events have turned out.

it's more or less the same as every other crisis the EU has had to deal with: it ends up being handling extremely poorly

the EU is more or less good at one thing: trade negotiations

everything else it ends up involved with has pretty much been a disaster (sovereign debt crisis, migrant crisis, last days of yugoslavia, vaccine procurement, Russia, etc)

It’s the other continental armies (China, America, Russia) that worry me more.

The UK is actually the exception to the growing hate and nationalism in Europe!

The benefit of UK in Europe was that it helped curtail the exscesses of the continent. I worry for the EU now as it seems more toxic after Brexit than before.

The main representation of the UK in the EU parliament was from UKIP, a nationalistic political party that formed a grouping with other nationalists.

By leaving, the UK has reduced the size of that nationalistic group.

Are you in the UK? I find this a rather peculiar view.

LOL

Your own example is a single datapoint and according to the vote statistics you are a de facto minority in your age cohort.[0]

[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/graphics-how-the-uk-voted-eu...

I haven't done the math, so I won't make assumptions, but I would bet the percentages from the polls roughly match up with the actual results from the referendum

> Also did they vote remain because it's cool or did they actually have some other reason?

That's an entirely different point, you're just moving the goalposts now. The question isn't whether young people were justified in voting remain, the question is did they vote remain.

What were your reasons behind your decision? What economic class are your parents in?

From my perspective, it's more like "it was inevitable". The people pushing for Brexit would never give up. So the choice was either leave now, or keep talking for the following years/decades/centuries about how the evil EU oppresses the UK, and how everything in UK would be perfect if only...

In some way, it reminds me of dissolution of Czechoslovakia. I was not happy about that either, but realistically, the choice was either do it now, or keep forever listening to voices on both sides about how all problems are caused by the other half and everything would be perfect (though probably disastrous for the other half) if only...

Once you have a major fraction of your population -- and it doesn't make a difference whether it's 48% or 52% -- believing they are being oppressed, it becomes unfalsifiable. Every time something bad happens, you have an explanation ready, and it doesn't matter whether it makes sense or not, believing that it is all someone else's fault is always popular.

If the lesson from Czechoslovakia applies here, at the end none of the prophecies of heaven or hell came true, both sides continue living their boring lives. The only change is that now when something bad happens, this one excuse is no longer available.

So, my guess is that after Brexit, the life in EU will more or less remain the same, and the life in UK will more or less remain the same, with the exception that "everything would be perfect if only EU stopped interfering with our perfect country" will disappear from political speech.

That doesn't seem to be disappearing. My guess is we will be hearing a lot more about the EU for the foreseeable future.

Soon after dissolution of Czechoslovakia, people in Slovakia blamed Czechs for all kinds of things. (We had an agreement that neither side will use the old federal flag; they kept it. We had an agreement that the national treasure will be split proportionally; they decided to keep it all. Plus a few more things. I am sure the other side also had their complaints.) A decade later, after most politicians from that era retired, no one mentioned this anymore. People who were not yet adult during the federation simply don't care; it's ancient history for them, like complaining that your garden does not have nice flowers because dinosaurs once stomped on it. Yeah, but what did you do about it since then; you had enough time to do something, right?

I feel like an old person just for mentioning the old issues. Similarly, ten or twenty years later, Farage will be just some uncool old grandpa no one cares about. It may be hard to imagine, but it will happen.

>Farage will be just some uncool old grandpa

Fortunately that has already happened.

Yes, but a far larger chunk has. Every country gets the leaders it deserves and the UK is no exception.

All things considered it was relatively close so not exactly a far larger chunk.

I don't have any spite towards the British people but I do hope that the EU will act in EU interest which means facilitating the return of financial services that shifted towards London since they joined and not letting the UK and whatever the borderdeal ends up as serve as a loop to ignore single market regulations.

"there are some demographic trends that will influence opinion in future. These changes will tend to pull British public opinion in a pro-European direction, and should be sufficient to produce a majority of 52%-48% for ‘Remain’ in 2021"

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/05/01/demographic-trends...

also add the EU's disastrous vaccine procurement scheme, combined with its attempt to obscure its total incompetence with petulant nationalistic flailing

Giggle count: zero.

The US for all the lack of controls that citizens have over business at the very least has a very federalised (in the Euro sense of the term), distribution of power, whereas Britain is pretty much governed from London.

I find that many of the quintessential problems of the U.S.A. were inherited from the British Empire and seem pervasive throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. England too has a district based system, leading to close to a two-party state, and a common law legal system where the judge and juror are often more powerful than the letter of the law.

If anything, the U.S.A. remedied some of the unusual quirks of common law legal systems. — I was recently acquainted with knowledge that in both the U.K. and Australia, a criminal defence attorney would, when his client confess to the crime to him, almost certainly recommend that he be released, and that latter seek new counsel, and that the new counsel be kept in the dark, as apparently the system is designed such that a criminal defence attorney is completely handicapped in defending his client, know he of the latter's guilt. — this is less so the case in the U.S.A., which is rather unique for jury trials, and in most civil law jurisdictions there is no reason not to confess to one's attorney.

The only thing the EU referendum conclusively demonstrated was how easily manipulated people are by the media they consume.

What do people mean when they say this?

The referendum wasn't a statistical exercise that sampled a subset, so the idea of "error" seems really oddly applied here.

- There was a lot of misinformation spread (on both sides of the debate). So people were voting for issues that didn't apply.

- There were a lot of protest votes from people who assumed "Remain" would win and who also did want to remain but wanted to voice disagreement with the government and/or concern about unconditional relationships with the EU.

- There options were too vague. "Remain" largely meant keeping the status quo but some read it to mean including countries like Turkey (who were extremely unlikely to ever join the EU anyways). Likewise "Exit" meant different things to different people. Some people wanted a "hard exit" (no EU trade deal). Some people wanted to stay connected to the EU but to have a revised deal. People were voting for the same options but expecting different outcomes.

And as a result of this there had been a high number of people voice regrets about the vote they had cast in post-referendum opinion polls.

Sadly we will never know just how accurately the results reflected peoples true opinions because all calls for a follow up vote had been literally laughed at. However subsequent general elections have demonstrated just how far from settled the debate was.

I just object to the use of the phrase - there is no margin for error here, it forms the full picture of how the population voted, not an estimate.

People use this phraseology, and I've even seen the term "not statistically significant" bandied around as well, to try to say that no conclusions could be drawn, as if it's a scientific paper with a sample in it.

  "This result is reflective of what the majority _want_"

  "This result is reflective of what the majority _voted for_"

I do get your point that "margin for error" is a statistical term and it is not technically being applied correctly here. But the crux of what that term refers to does still apply to the former context above.

As for why the context matters: because every conversion that happened since focused on the former point with MPs even coining the phrase "the will of the people" yet the people's "will" was still unclear.

That all said, I don't think there is any way such a referendum would have worked on a topic as diverse and complex as our relations with the EU.

But they are a 100% reliable indicator of how people would vote, because they did vote that way. And I'm really not sure it's valid to start second guessing that what people actually wanted is different to that, because you then have to second guess every vote and really, where does thaty leave democracy?

> That all said, I don't think there is any way such a referendum would have worked on a topic as diverse and complex as our relations with the EU.

Very much agreed.

Normally I'd agree. But as I said, there were concerns going into the vote that the options were too vague and as a result opinion polls post-referendum showed that a considerable number of people voted for options that didn't support their opinion.

This wasn't a typical poll where you vote for a party to entrust or a narrowly defined set of options. This referendum was vague and poorly defined. In cases where that's been a problem in Europe those respective countries have then responded with second referendum after communicating clearer information, reviewing the poll options and taking other measures to ensure they accurately capture public opinion. Instead the UK called a general election and as a result muddied the conversation even further with topics like education and healthcare.

Let's back that claim up with some examples:

Why the referendum was called in the first place? Cameron never wanted a referendum but did so as an attempt to unify the Conservative party because with the right wing opinions fragmenting between multiple parties the Tories were starting to lose dominance (more parties within a set demographic on a first past the post electoral system means fewer votes for any particular party within that demographic). When the Conservatives had a near monopoly in the centre and right wing policies it meant that left wing parties could never catch up due to how fragmented they are (Green, Labour, SNP, local independents, etc) so left wing voters have always had to vote a little more tactically and go for the party most likely to win in their area and hope for a coalition. So the original goal for the referendum wasn't about addressing European issues but instead about monopolising the right wing vote which was getting fragmented by nationalist parties. Cameron assumed it was an easy win and that he could curb the tide of MPs leaving his party for more nationalistic counterparts. He's even gone on record stating this and how it turned into an epic own goal.

With regards to whether we would have been better off in or out of the EU -- frankly that's one argument I don't want to get drawn into because, frankly, nobody actually knows. Most of the arguments on both sides of the debate were FUD and the most honest point anyone made was "it's complicated and we don't really know for sure."

The referendum was advisory, so it would have been possible for parliament to vote not to enact article 50. But parliament voted for it.

Not all the parties did. Labour, for example, also didn't. The Greens have always been fiercely pro choice so a referendum falls within their remit and LibDems have often flip flopped around the issue of Europe depending on what seems the most popular alt-vote at the time. Then you have the right wing parties who are naturally nationalistic. But many of the left-wing nationals (like SNP) were pro-Europe.

This is all moot though because my point wasn't who supported the EU but rather the Tories motives for the referendum.

> The referendum was advisory, so it would have been possible for parliament to vote not to enact article 50. But parliament voted for it.

Indeed. But that is another tangential point too. I do have opinions as to why it wasn't treated as an "advisory" vote but those are just opinions so I'll refrain from clouding the debate.

I'd like to hear them!

Thanks to your comment I re-checked the Labour party manifesto for the 2015 general election and you are right. They do mention a referendum but only in the case of a transfer of power from Britain to the EU:

"Labour will legislate for a lock that guarantees that there can be no transfer of powers from Britain to the European Union without the consent of the British public through an in/out referendum."

What we need is respect for democracy.

I wasn't complaining about stolen votes. Nobody was suggesting election fraud had happened with the EU referendum.

Manipulated people, sure. But there is evidence of that with many of the claims made during the campaigns being proven false (like the Brexit bus slogan and like many of the ads reported here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-44966969). There is actually a lot of documented evidence about the misinformation that happened during the referendum on both sides of the debate (https://constitution-unit.com/2016/08/23/fact-checking-and-t...) but it didn't seem to make any difference because you'd often see the same FUD repeated (both for and against Europe) when chatting to people -- be it social media, TV/Radio call in shows or regular face to face conversations with family and friends, etc.

The question of our EU membership was such a complex one that even many experts were littering their statements with caveats and disclaimers. So it wasn't really a topic I'd have expected the layperson to be informed enough to make a good judgement of. And the targeted ads on platforms like Facebook, plus the aforementioned deliberate misinformation campaigns did little to help the situation. So I do think it's fair to call out the result of the referendum as being within a margin of error.

I do agree there have been parallels between the EU referendum and Trump's campaigns (both of them in fact). But you also do need to be careful not to dismiss the credible claims of bad practice because some egotistical oaf also happened to make wild made up claims too. There's definitely a sliding scale of misinformation where some items aren't technically inaccurate but are worded in a way that intentionally misinforms the reader (a practice often seen in click-bait headlines) but on the other end of the scale you'd have statements that are very clearly bullshit (like the Hillary child sex ring "scandal").

It's fair to say the last 5 years has been a real low point for my trust in the democratic process.

> What we need is respect for democracy.

I agree but that respect has to be earned from the campaigners rather than blindly given by the voters.

My point was that the first side which started claiming faulty elections wasn't Trump.

He also made repeated claims of "large scale voter fraud" in the lead up to the presidential election of that year.

I also feel there's a real difference between "we have evidence Russia's been up to something, and think Trump may be involved" and "Everything that goes against me is stolen! You can't trust anything!"

> I'm not American so I've not been following it that closely.

Neither am I, but from what I can tell the Mueller report came back saying it didn't have enough to pursue, or really link Trump, but something was definitely up. Various Trump supporters went to jail over that report IIRC as well, having lied. Very murky dealings.

The trouble with the DPA was fines capped out at £500k and international enforcement was limited so large international companies like Google and Facebook could treat the law as an optional slap on the wrist while smaller international businesses effectively flew under the radar, the GDPR largely rectified both of these issues while modernising the laws in response to issues that generally didn't exist prior to the mid 2000s.

UK market is large enough to stand on it's own and EU has been grossly incompetent in public for a while now. There's going to be downsides for sure but becoming "America like" is not going to be one of them.

It makes sense for smaller countries like mine (Croatia) because of free travel, easier access to a larger market, lower cost of doing business, and truly being too small to negotiate good terms on a global scale. It probably makes a lot less sense for UK which can negotiate it's own terms with other global powers that fit them much better.

I have no doubt there will be many negatives to Brexit, but as demonstrated by COVID situation there's a huge opportunity for UK - for example I suspect they can secure better trade deals with the US without having to worry about the protectionist interests pushed by other EU members.

The European Union has categorically failed, and if it survives this, it will need huge amounts of change.

Seems like not being part of a larger "union" has allowed them to start vaccinating at 3 times the pace of its European neighbours. Historically, power removed further from the people does not benefit the people. There are very few "economies of scale" in politics. As the system grows larger, accountability becomes more difficult and decision making is harder and harder.

Nice example is Iceland. after the 2008 crash. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-03-31/welcome-t...

https://fullfact.org/health/coronavirus-vaccine-brexit/

GDPR has given a 50M EUR handslap to Google and similar to some other large companies[1] while seriously hurting smaller companies with existing custom web applications for whom they may not even have someone on staff to modify those to be GDPR-compliant.

Small businesses like others must determine what PII is, how to anonymize it, and how to remove it when users request their PII to be removed. PII could be in their server logs or other locations that are inaccessible to most employees of the business. Backups might be excluded from PII scrubbing, but so much is unclear.

Let’s also talk about what it doesn’t protect. PCI, not GDPR, attempts to provide protection for cardholder data. GDPR doesn’t protect against PII that was previously shared. Nor does it protect from data being stolen, unless the user had their data removed prior.

[1]- https://dataprivacymanager.net/5-biggest-gdpr-fines-so-far-2...

Companies of all sizes can have a lot of PII and code that’s not GDPR compliant, and it’s non-trivial to fix that. When asked by a user to remove PII, the removal is sometimes incomplete at these companies. Even the process of incompletely the removing PII wastes time; the users requesting PII removal often didn’t even do business with the company, in my experience.

Companies of all sizes but often small companies hire out development of web apps that keep PII and may not have someone permanently on staff to maintain it to make the changes needed to allow users to remove their PII.

I’d go so far as to say that I’d intentionally not work with users if I knew they would be painful to work with, leaving me with nothing but a legal requirement to wipe their asses because they used my old site. I hope that EU didn’t intentionally do this to hurt small businesses and foster new startups within the EU to brunt the cost of this stupid, stupid law.

I’m a privacy advocate.

* A company is holding PII in a system they don't have the resources to manage .

* The software is insufficiently secure to hold that data.

* The company appears to be even be holding data on people that didn't even do business with the company.

* This is in-part caused by the (sub)hiring of companies that also were not scrupulous with PII in the past.

You say that this hurts said company, and they are going to stop doing that.

I'd say this is the exact intended effect of the law. Not so stupid after all!

Meanwhile, for people who scrupulously and ethically avoided collecting extraneous PII in the first place; I think the GDPR provides no great additional burden.

The situation we have now is that massive amounts of code and business processes that were created without the assumption that things like email addresses were protected information that users have a right to purge whenever they want. It doesn't particularly matter if you think this is right or wrong, what matters is that this is how the world is. So then, what to do about it?

A rational approach is to try to look at a cost-benefit analysis of various solutions -- how much would it take to refactor the code and update the business processes? More importantly, how much would it take to put into operation controls that effectively ensure that all the data was deleted? Finally, how much would it cost to get rid of all that data -- remember companies can have tape backups, recovery centers, and data was sprayed everywhere for decades.

So you get some number, say a hundred billion. Is it still worth the expense? Could there be some other solution?

For example, force companies to delete old data after X years, where X is say 10 after the business relationship has been ended. Or some other approach. That approach might cost only 20 billion. Or force companies to do this for new code and business processes but leave the legacy ones in place for X years. That might be only 10 billion.

As another example, look at C code. It's unsafe. We are aware of the problems with C code now and have discovered safer languages. But the cost of rewriting the existing pool of C code is huge. It doesn't help to wring your hands and approach this from a moral argument -- so security doesn't matter, we declare indignantly? Instead, look for practical ways of transitioning to safer languages over time, and other ways to isolate and mitigate the damage of unsafe code.

But at all costs, understand the limitations involved, and craft remedies that give you the most bang for the buck, because resources are limited and a dollar spent on this is a dollar not spent on some other cause, which might be more worthwhile than being able to delete any email address on command from a customer letter.

Especially taking into account that there might not be a linear relationship between the damage accrued by society versus the costs of the company to ameliorate such damage.

In this company, is there a solid technical reason why the log couldn't get rotated and/or aggregated and/or truncated to begin with?

Those are fairly typical things you might want to configure to do with a log; GDPR or no.

If the government passed a law requiring all housing to be be built to code to survive a magnitude 9 earthquake in a region where there are no earthquakes, and every house needs to be retrofitted, would you say the burden is low? After all, if you start from scratch without a house there is no requirement to do anything! And building a new house is much easier, after all!

But this is more like trying to explain why your attic has strengthened beams that were not on the original (default) architectural drawings, and gosh what are all those bags of white powder doing there?

The government doesn't even make it illegal, mind. You just need to explain why, if someone asks politely.

( https://goo.gl/maps/UgRPhuxfXoezDJHB9 so this business still wouldn't get in trouble. )

Hoping we see the light, and the blight that is the cookie law goes the way of the dodos.

If your teeth turn out blighted all blue/purple, you generally don't blame the tablets. ;-)

It’s really just theatre and on balance it makes the internet a crummier experience.

Meanwhile, the intent is to avoid the people with purple teeth until they learn to brush responsibly. ;-)

(Or if you truly must interact with them: use a lot of ad blockers and privacy tools; because you know what you're getting into)

I would rather bad actors were punished and enforced cookie banners were eliminated.

It's really hard to legislate against something that some people really want to do :-/

We were discussing something in a similar vein the other day regarding a security form for an enterprise contract and my reoccurring response was “officially or actually?” There tends to be a big gap between official compliance and what was originally desired.

Many years ago I worked with a mega mega corp that required a complex form with every change request, but they still ran my script that escalated my database permissions because they ran it as root.

Hacker News has reached new lows :(

It's like newspaper headlines that say X, but (have to) nuance it in the article itself. Except that Twitter doesn't support articles, so it's only headlines.

But the treaty of Lisbon changed almost nothing in reality. At least, not enough to warrant the birth of "Modern EU"

The euro is truly an unremarkable currency and I'm not sure that the EU would be much worse without it. It's equally likely that the EU would have done much better without the euro. I can't blame the UK for avoiding the euro.

Of course it's very fashionable on the internet to shit on brexit. "haha brits be dumb cus independent" - I can only imagine what sort of insecurity you're dealing with about your own country that you have to resort to this.

We'll see if this is still the economic "gold standard" to compare countries when China overturns the US in GDP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

Just ignore every other benefit of the EU to make your case.

Before, it was my right to live in the Netherlands. Now, it is just a possibility.

Thanks to the Withdrawal Agreement, because I already live here, I was given the "right" to apply for a residency, which like 99% of applicants, I received. I can now enjoy that for 5 years, after which I will need sponsorship from a company.

This sponsorship is a key difference, which anyone who has moved to the US can attest to. When your continued existence in a country is contingent on workplace sponsorship the power dynamics between you and your employer are really quite different.

In addition, it's one thing for me in a skilled occupation to be able to leave the country. But I have a friend whose boyfriend may be coming here on an art scholarship. She isn't in a skilled occupation. Before, she would have had the right to come here too. Now, I'm pretty doubtful that she'll be able to join him.

At 24 and probably unlikely to ever leave the UK I wouldn't expect you to understand any of this. But it is the lived reality, previously of every British person leaving the EU and now every British person who leaves the UK.

Edit: But of course, I'm not the first person to explain this to you, and it's not the last time you'll bray to the cheap seats with this mischaracterisation.

My point was that it is plain to see that the vaccine roll out in the EU has been mired by competing interests and slow bureaucracy, which is exactly what the eurosceptics were claiming is wrong with the EU in 2016. Thus the vindication.

If anything, this vindicates the Remainers who claimed that the UK government would become more deregulated and more beholden to corrupt interests.

The EU was faced with an almost impossible set of constraints, either leaving the poorer countries to fend for themselves (and being portrayed as not caring about its ideals of unity and equality), or forcing the richer countries to vastly overpay for the doses of the poorer countries (and being portrayed as a wasteful drain on successful economies).

Of course, it is in the interests of rich countries to help people in poor countries get vaccinated so that they don't become breeding grounds for new variants, especially if those countries have important trade links and free movement with said rich countries, but unfortunately people can get quite selfish during a crisis and not see the bigger picture. This is why we can't have nice things.

Talking about "queue jumping" or "corruption" really seems to be rooted in bitterness or just anti-UK sentiment.

Actually I thought I had written "corporate interests", but I guess that was a Freudian slip.