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Wow, 40% are happy with the UK staying outside the EU. That’s a lot of people, especially given the continuous stream of newspaper articles crying how terrible and disasterous brexit has allegedly been.
Probably because rejoining now means it’ll be on very different terms. Luxuries like keeping the Pound would go away
While the UK had a bunch of luxuries, keeping the pound wasn’t one of them. Eurozone != EU
Every EU member is obliged to join the eurozone. The EU members who have not yet done so are still to meet the convergence criteria, with the only exception being Denmark who obtained a special exemption (along with the UK) during the negotiation of the original Maastricht treaty.
On the flipside, although Sweden is technically obliged to join the eurozone eventually, it has avoided doing so by intentionally not fulfilling the convergence criteria (by not joining ERM2). Most political parties in Sweden acknowledge it would be in everyone’s best interest to join but a national referendum rejected the euro in 2003. The EU seems content to let them do whatever for the time being, so maybe the UK could chart a similar course if it were to rejoin, hypothetically.
I’m convinced that a new Swedish vote today would have a different outcome. Lots has happened in 20 years. The SEK sucks right now as well.
I think if the EU could agree to allow national motifs on the obverse side of the banknotes as well it would become a no-brainer for sweden to adopt the euro, that feels like the major blocker for the average swede, we like our motifs.
And it just feels somewhat silly to not allow it anyways, surely if it’s okay to have national motifs on the coins then it should be fine on bank notes? And it’s in the spirit of the EU.
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Honestly, an overwhelming percentage of that 40% are likely old racist people.
You forget not everyone bothers with the news.
Yep, reading facts gets in the way of good old fashioned jingoism!
Thing is, not all facts are true. And once you think you’re being lied to, there’s little chance of being convinced otherwise.
not all facts are true
wat
Alternative facts!
Something someone claims as a fact could actually be a lie. Eg, “72% of statements people make on the internet are false” is false, but sounds like a fact to those unaware.
Thing is, not all facts are true.
That seems to be contrary to the standard definition of “fact”. Perhaps you meant to say:
People aren’t always right when they state something as fact.
Okay, to be pedantic, “not all things presented as fact are true”
Well that sure changes the message of your first comment…
A lot of people don’t give a shit about anything but themselves.
It’s easy to live in a posh Tory area and not feel the effects, or to be blissfully ignorant that some of the negatives in your life wouldn’t be there if we had EU backing.
the negatives
Just out of curiosity, what negatives do you see there being?
Off the top of my head:
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Councils/areas that received EU funding that are now feeling the pinch, especially in areas like Wales.
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The sheer number of job losses (see the Digby Jones Index for examples).
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Reduced movement, and an inability to hire in some industries, with zero flexibility of movement elsewhere. While I’m all for trade deals with the US and Australia, they almost definitely won’t be allowing British citizens an easier time to move.
Lots of these don’t particularly affect people in the South East, and in many places that were both Labour and Brexit strongholds, poverty and underfunding are the norm anyway, so it’s not like things getting “worse” are noticeable.
There was a great article a while back called “the sociology of Brexit”. Sadly, I can’t find it any more, but it explained the above far better than I could, and indicated why many that voted to leave the EU wouldn’t change their mind, regardless of what happens.
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Councils/areas that received EU funding that are now feeling the pinch
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The sheer number of job losses
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Reduced movement
None of these seem to be dependent on being a member of the EU, only dependent on a competent government making good financial and budgetary choices and good treaties.
To me these are problems which have been only revealed by brexit, not caused by it.
I’d say they’re both. A competent government would ensure that we plug any gaps, and they would have already agreed trade deals with major nations that surpass what we already had with the EU in terms of free trade or movement. While I wouldn’t want to see the UK become the new Mexico of the US, I can see lots of British people happily performing seasonal and manual work in the US, and open markets for students to study in both countries.
I’d strongly disagree when it comes to the top two points. They’re just not possible when Britain is such a tiny country. We shot ourselves in the foot when we left, because we had zero leverage against the EU.
They’re just not possible when Britain is such a tiny country.
Logically then you’re saying that as a member of the EU we got money handed to us, sourced ultimately from larger/richer nations like Germany.
For me, this is a reason to leave the EU, not be part of it.
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They wanted to go, now they should have to live with it.
id rather international politics be based on whats beneficial as opposed to whatll punish people best
You monster
They are?
Still can’t believe we voted to leave. Madness.
And on a non-binding, simple majority vote. The results were like what, 52-48% for such a momentous decision? Should’ve required something like a 60% minimum, though they’d just have kept calling for the same vote every year.
This is what gets me. Require 2/3 for constitution changes, but 1/2 to leave EU?
The UK doesn’t have a referendum procedure for constitutional amendment, or a 2/3 supermajority in the legislature. It’s basically simple majority in the legislature for anything that might be called constitutional, as any act of Parliament can do anything other than binding future Parliaments.
There are other countries which do have 2/3 supermajority.
looks
Finland has a 2/3 requirement of legislators, for example.
That makes it worse, to be honest
Why? I mean, if you’re saying that the bar was set lower for specifically Brexit then for similar actions, I could understand taking issue with it in that one might feel that the higher bar should be used.
But why would there not being a supermajority constitutional amendment bar make not using one on Brexit more objectionable?
Oh, okay, get you.
So, in all honesty, I probably wouldn’t say that the UK has a constitution – that is, there is no well-defined set of rules that are treated in any way different than the others.
The UK had a monarchy at one point, where the monarch had very real political power. Then real, codified constraints were placed on the monarch’s power, like the Magna Carta. The monarch could not just disregard these.
So in that sense, the UK was a constitutional monarchy, where political power resided in a monarch who was constrained in a very real sense by a constitution.
The problem is that the process of removing political power from the monarch continued, and today the monarch really has no political power at all.
The House of Lords has also been stripped of virtually all political power.
The UK today is basically run by a simple majority in the House of Commons. I have seen this described as an absolute republic (contrast with an absolute monarchy), which I think is a not unreasonable position to take. There is no rule that constrains the House of Commons other than that future Parliaments cannot be bound by the current Parliament. The House of Commons has overwritten Magna Carta text the same way they would any other law. It does not constrain how they may act. Because the monarch has no real remaining power, the old constitutional rules that did constrain the monarch are basically inert.
The British legal take is that they have an uncodified constitution. That is, they do have a set of rules, but they aren’t enumerated and the idea is that there is just some things that people would refuse to do because it simply isn’t done.
My problem is that I have a very hard time distinguishing between that and any state that doesn’t have a constitution. Surely there are also conventions in every country and situations where ultimately, a leader might be disobeyed.
And it’s hard to add a constitution within the current legal order to constrain future Parliaments, as the one rule is that they basically cannot do that. I think that you’d probably have to do a constitutional convention and get both Parliamentary and popular support and say that this is somehow “special” and permits binding Parliament.
My impression is that EU membership was going to be a way to basically bootstrap something akin to constitutional restrictions into place in the UK. Basically, the UK could leave the EU if Parliament wanted, so a majority in Parliament would be where sovereignty was vested. However, as long as they never actually exercised that right, in practice, EU treaty restrictions would be followed, and so that provides a practical framework to build on. The ECJ could say “this law of Parliament violates EU treaties”. Unless Parliament then said “okay, we’re ignoring EU treaties”, possibly via Brexit, then there can be long-running constraints on Parliament. But Brexit kinda nuked that.
I remember wondering on /r/ukpolitics whether there might be a constitutional convention as a result of Brexit, since I would think that Brexit would kind of force a reset on all that.
I also noticed some people in the UK writing things along these lines, that post-Brexit, suddenly a lot of constitutional issues become very prominent and that maybe it’s time to codify a constitution. Let me google up an example…
This document uses the term “elective dictatorship”, which I suppose is sort of another way of writing “absolute republic”.
The problem is that no one knew what leaving like like, in part because the Leave camp danced around it.
If Leave had to campaign against the actual terms, the vote would have failed.
No one knew? I’m sorry but pretty much every single repercussion the UK is feeling right now was rather obvious when you take the time to think on it and consider the EU’s point of view as well. The only people who are surprised about stuff like being treated like every other outside country by the EU were the ones who didn’t think one second about it and wanted to believe the lies.
That it would be shitty was obvious. But exactly how shitty was impossible to nail down, and hence impossible to argue against effectively. Every different Brexiteer had a different idea of the outcome, which changed under any kind of pressure. They hid behind non-statements like “Brexit means Brexit”.
Why do you think it took so long and so much arguing to get to any kind of agreement afterwards? We knew they were going to trash a load of laws and retain some, but couldn’t know which because the Leave camp didn’t have a plan or a manifesto.
They had a bus, but we know how accurate that was. Or are you arguing that they should be allowed to blatantly lie in political campaigns and we should expect the populace to know in advance which ones are false? People are not that smart.
Should’ve required something like a 60% minimum, though they’d just have kept calling for the same vote every year.
This discussion came up back around Brexit.
While I can understand an argument in favor of stability – you don’t want to sit at 50% and have things waver back and forth – there are a couple issues.
First, for better or for worse, this is not really the international convention. In the referendums I’ve dug up for independence, the norm is plurality of votes. This isn’t quite independence, but it’s probably most analogous to it, especially given that one expects ongoing integration.
Second, it seems to me that to bias towards the status quo, one would have also needed to have also met that bar to join. In fact, there was no referendum at the time of joining, an issue which had its own controversy. If a 60% supermajority is required to leave, it seems to me that the same should be true of joining.
I think there is a strong argument for considering people who didn’t vote as accepting of the status quo, at. which point leave voters only accounted for about 30% of eligible voters.
It’s insanity
My theory is a group motivated to change the status quo is far more likely to be mobilised to vote on that issue than a group in favour of maintaining the status quo, i.e. being forced to respond to that group. Because you’re trying mobilise a group to do nothing, there’s no impetus to the counter-movement. I think any vote like that is naturally biased towards the group seeking to change something, though it would be hard to quantify the extent of the effect and would only apply to specific single issue votes. I said this during the lead up to the Brexit vote, that more people in the country would prefer to stay, but the “leave” voter base would be over-represented at the ballot. I think the whole democratic system fails to function unless everyone is compelled to vote, because of weird effects like this.
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I think there are some people that voted to remain that wouldn’t necessarily agree (or immediately afterward have agreed with) rejoining.
Rejoining presents a very different prospect - we will have lost our veto, we’ll need to join the Schengen area and will have to adopt the Euro. Some people may have issues with some or all of these things.
maybe you’ll even have to drive on the right hand side and drop the english language, speak french instead…
come on, bring up more horror stories :)
I’m really sorry but which of the three things I’ve suggested do you think wouldn’t be part of an agreement to rejoin the EU?
Incidentally I don’t personally think of them as horror stories. Joining Schengen sounds like a positive to me, joining the Euro doesn’t bother me and the kids of the very is simply a prince well last good Cameron’s folly.
Only 1 in 10 has changed their mind after the shit show that the last 7 years have been?
Not really 1 in 10. A lot of them simply died due to old age and covid.
Some probably moved to the EU, I could imagine
who’d they be voting for to rejoin? i am not aware of any labourpartymove or even an english politician with a backbone. or will their king make them join? this is really confusing coz if it was a democratic country there would a pro join-the-eu party. so murdoch rules the UK, not the people over there.
Good luck getting the same generous terms as before.
No amount of luck will make that happen.
That’s what’s baffles me the most. Leavers were painting the whole situation as if they had the worst terms with the EU and were exploited at every corner when in fact the UK had one of the most favourable terms in the whole union. So many idiots …
It could be 90% in favour of rejoining, but it wouldn’t make much of a difference. The EU would need to see strong, long term cross-party support in Westminster before they’d consider it. The EU know that otherwise the issue is just going to keep re-emerging in UK politics so long as the Tories are ideologically opposed to the EU. I think the best chance the UK has is if the modern Tory party stopped being relevant electorally, because their membership’s views aren’t likely to change, and everyone in the EU institutions hates them for the damage their governments have done over the last 7 years.
I also would be really surprised if the EU would offer the same favourable terms the UK had before. Most likely they would need to show their willingness to integrate more in the union than they did before.
As someone from the UK, I am fully on board with this.
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They might not be willing to rejoin as equals though.
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If the trashy newspapers start doing their thing again, they’ll reduce that percentage successfully.
- True.
- When did they stop!?
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6 in 10… in the UK. You’d be lucky to find that level of support in the EU for the UK rejoining.
Yeah they’ll have to wait a couple decades before they’d have a chance of being let back in.
Aw yep. So 4 in 10 people are absolute morons. No surprises there haha
At least some percentage are just lying to themselves / the pollsters. We’ve seen enough bad-faith rejection of fact on this side of the pond to know that it’s fairly common with shitheads who refuse to admit they’re wrong.
It’s the same why so many people support rich folk and in politics side with them
They either think they also will become mega rich or they think the rich people deserve their money (even though almost all the richest men have broken laws to make that money)
I don’t think the EU is very keen to accept the British back in the warm nest… they’d probably leave again in 2 weeks’ time.
They would likely not get all of the previous special allowances back. Especially having a separate currency.
Having your own currency is not a special treatment at all - instead, the Eurozone is kind of an elitist club inside the EU that won’t let everyone in.
The “British Rebate” (or whatever it was called) that guaranteed 66% of the British payments to be sent back to the UK on the other hand should be gone for good. Same for not being a member of the Schengen area or adhering to the rules concerning fiscal stability.
British Schengen membership would probably depend on whether Ireland wants to remain outside Schengen or join. If the UK wants to rejoin the EU, Ireland will be able to choose.
instead, the Eurozone is kind of an elitist club inside the EU that won’t let everyone in.
Historically maybe, but it kind of changed in that all new EU members are supposed to commit to eventually also adopting the euro.
I’m from the UK and I would much rather we join back and switch currencies.
brexit was built on lies from the beginning it was painful watching people campaign to leave when the votes were happening.
Brenter
Breturn
Brejoin
This looks french. We can’t allow that
You sons of a silly person!
Gg no bre
Like Britain. I like it
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God there are too many stupid people. A lot more than that should want to re-join.
Ooo they can vote to leave again in 8 years
We can wait for 10/10… of all EU.
We don’t want them back.
Of course we do. As long as they accept the Euro and change road signs to metric. I honestly don’t know which one would feel worse for the English.
Oh also, No special treatment, road traffic on the right side, and paying for the chaos they caused.
I think we do. Both the EU and the UK are weaker apart. I doubt politicians will have hard feelings about it, especially when there’s money on the line. And like it or not the UK is a huge economy at least by European standards.
EU is stronger without the cancer that UK was, we don’t need to import yet another Hungary/Poland.
You’re getting downvotes, but the current way the UK is run doesn’t exclude another Brexit. Their anti-immigrant, pro-business, anti-privacy, anti-human rights party in a two-party system with a constitutional monarchy will be a bane to the EU.
I’d much rather see the UK broken up and the individual countries make a decision on joining. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland could secede and write their own, new constitution that does away with the monarchy and something like single transferable voting (anything but “first past the post” which leads to two party systems).
I love the sankey diagram that they use to illustrate a winner’s path to victory:
It shows at a glance whether a candidate won outright, like Pear did in this example. Or whether it needed to absorb the alternate votes of many others (and how many) to meet the quota. Like cake did.
