I know little of Britain's political system. If Article 50 isn't being invoked until the end of the year, can Britain have another national vote on Brexit before then?
Technically yes. But I imagine that if they did everyone would be incensed and vote leave - to send a message. Whoever was in power at the time would be hoisted out in short order.
There isn't going to be a Britain to have that vote. Scotland is leaving and the Brexit vote has reraised the spectre of terrorism in Northern Ireland.
Many things could be said about it but today is a particular bad day to talk about the "EU's retarding democracy" as we, the UK, just got a new prime minister no one voted for...
Since when do you elect Prime Ministers? You voted the conservatives into majority power and they're free to select their leader.
Sure, you voted for the PPE and they're free to select the government. How's that for EU democracy working for you?
If they do give a deal to the UK wouldn't that trigger more exits? If countries see they can leave the EU and still get a trade deal they'd be more likely to leave than if they saw the UK get shafted (so to speak).
Yes, that's why the EU is doomed and will be gone within a decade no matter what they do now. It is a fundamentally unattractive entity. The people who run it have never even tried to combat rising anti-EU feeling across the continent, as they believe the EU is inevitable and unstoppable, so why bother trying to make it more popular. Now it's probably too late: they've become so gripped by groupthink they can't refor…
> It is a fundamentally unattractive entity.
This presumably explains why 28 countries have joined and there are still more waiting to join.
> The people who run it (...) believe the EU is inevitable and unstoppable
The people who run it are for the most part the elected leaders of the member states, who are no strangers to euro-skepticism, since they never fail to exploit it when it suits them (e.g. to deflect criticism of unpopular legislation by claiming that "Brussels" requires it).
I've read many of your comments here and I'm not convinced you have a good understanding of how the EU works. [1] is a committee meeting that tries to establish how we could disentangle ourselves from the EU. It's very long but it's full of great info how the exit could work, and as a side-effect full of info how the EU itself works. Making a case from an uninformed POV is not convincing me. If you back up your state…
What specifically do you have in mind? You've said I'm wrong but not given any examples. I tend to not argue from the basis of how the EU is supposed to work, because it tends to put its long-range vision ahead of following specific rules. See how the deficit rules are working out: France is allowed to break the rules "because it's France" (Juncker's words). To predict the behaviour of such an institution it's better…
E.g. "in practice, if the EU doesn't strike a deal with the UK (which it won't) then I think it will suffer more exits."
That is quite a bold statement that needs a lot of statements from people who can make these decisions to back it up. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
Chile, Switzerland and Iceland all have free trade agreements with China. The EU doesn't.
Are you saying "any trade deal is better than no trade deal?". Just because the EU doesn't have one with China doesn't mean Switzerland's deal is better.... than a deal that doesn't exist.
No, I was just giving some examples. If you follow your logic the UK needn't worry about not having a trade deal with the EU.
The UK's premier scientists can always get jobs elsewhere - and probably will. After a while, if research funding dries up, there won't be any more premier scientists being produced. Two, if you vote for people who are going to deny you prosperity, you don't get prosperity. If the working classes don't understand that, it's not the fault of the professional classes who - mostly - do. The reality is that some of those…
I still don't hear the voice of the working class in your response. Never the less, both the Tories and Labour fleeced the working class with the promise that they too could enjoy the prosperity the professional class would get to enjoy. The problem with socialists with respect to the working class, is that they treat the working classes all as one. The native working class are subverted for the non native working cl…
Was it actually "socialists" promising any of this in the UK? Corbyn seems like the first leader of the Labour Party in decades who you could call socialist, and he hasn't been in long enough to contest a single election yet (and might not be allowed to stay in the party leadership long enough to ever do so). I don't think you could say Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Ed Miliband were really even attempting to sell a socialist agenda to the working class, which might be part of why they didn't succeed at it. They were trying to sell something like U.S.-Democratic-Party-style centre-left progressivism, which didn't really inspire the traditional Labour base, especially in the poorer, post-industrial parts of the UK. Although Blair did win a few elections, and inspired a different group of people, the cosmopolitan, socially progressive middle class.
Couple of things: The UK has premier scientists. The EU would be remiss to not find a way to work things out. If not, I'm sure other places will pick them up. These are field leading scientists. Two, upper middle class still don't get it. They're still tone deaf. The Brexit was the working class demanding what was promised them, which was prosperity that never came. Instead they got sold out for a cheaper European wo…
The UK's premier scientists can always get jobs elsewhere - and probably will. After a while, if research funding dries up, there won't be any more premier scientists being produced. Two, if you vote for people who are going to deny you prosperity, you don't get prosperity. If the working classes don't understand that, it's not the fault of the professional classes who - mostly - do. The reality is that some of those…
All of this was laid out in the Brexit arguments. We all watched it on TV and read about it. Leave said they would continue to fund science, farms, Wales and Cornwall and match the EU funding.
Weather this actually happens will be interesting. I think the Tories will neg on that. I think Labour would keep funding.
But in Cornwall, all those millions of EU funding were spent on total crap and none of the local people saw much (if any) of the investment. Most of it went to big business or to stupid stuff.
That's assuming tax revenue remains the same, which all economists agree will not be the case. Whether or not Brexit will boost public finances is entirely down to how much of an impact it'll have on the UK economy. No one knows what the impact will be, but almost everyone agrees that it will be negative... though no one agrees to what extent. So there's really two questions here: a) just how much more/less public mo…
"That's assuming tax revenue remains the same" And it's assuming that a new government is inclined to take the money and give it to the kinds of projects that the EU used to give it to - I can think of a lot of reasons why that might not happen.
I talked to a senior diplomat recently. He said that when talking to diplomats from China, Russia, the US in the beginning of his career some 30 years ago, nobody asked about the EU opinion on issues. In the last 10 years, however, he never heard "what does Britain or France or Germany think about XYZ" but only "What does the EU think". What some leavers don't realise is that the entire world had gotten used to deali…
I know little of Britain's political system. If Article 50 isn't being invoked until the end of the year, can Britain have another national vote on Brexit before then?
It's not clear if they'll be waiting until the end of the year.
David Cameron said he was going to wait for his replacement to start Article 50, and he would step down in October. Now that he's announced that he's stepping down tomorrow, we'll have a new prime minister much more quickly than anticipated. That might mean Article 50 could be coming within the next few weeks/months.
I talked to a senior diplomat recently. He said that when talking to diplomats from China, Russia, the US in the beginning of his career some 30 years ago, nobody asked about the EU opinion on issues. In the last 10 years, however, he never heard "what does Britain or France or Germany think about XYZ" but only "What does the EU think". What some leavers don't realise is that the entire world had gotten used to deali…
So politicians will stop asking "What does the EU think" and go back to asking "What do Germany, France, and the UK think, and are they in agreement"? The distinction is less important than you think, because the second question gets at the heart of the issue and naturally follows the first. Unlike the US, The EU does not have a strong executive/legislative/judicial (and perhaps more-importantly, a shared language/na…