Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UK triggers the official Brexit process in a letter to EU

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 649 posts

Re: UK triggers the official Brexit process in a letter to EU

#521

Post by Scarblac »

presidente20 wrote: post #400
pluma wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it you're saying "the EU is undemocratic because we don't want to participate in its most direct democratic process". Do I need to point out why that argument is flawed?

No. People see the EU as undemocratic because Parliament is neither the main policy-making body nor the main executive power. It is more of a supervisory body, akin to the role of Congress or the House of Lords. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament#Control_of...

And the reason it is is that they don't want their own democratically elected governments to lose sovereignty. If you give the EU parliament more power, the national parliaments must lose power.

I don't see how one is more democratic than the other.

Re: UK triggers the official Brexit process in a letter to EU

#522

Post by cat199 »

hiddencost wrote: post #388
rayiner wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's at stake here is more fundamental than federalism: it's self determination. Throughout history, discrete groups have waged wars of independence to ensure that they can have a government that reflects their shared history, culture, and values. My family is from Bangladesh, which fought a war to separate from Pakistan over cultural/linguistic differences. In another example, Israel is engaged in an existential b…

^-- Submarine argument of the current white nationalist movement. Basic flaw: it elides "the wants of white nationalists" with "the culture of the country" and tries to imply that the wants of white nationalists are the only one that exists. A subset of people are being prodded to give up their sovereignty; a significant chunk of folks in the UK actually wanted the EU, most notably immigrants, students, young folks.

^-- Submarine argument of the current globalist movement. Basic flaw: it elides "the wants of globalists" with "the culture of the world" and tries to imply that the wants of globalists are the only one that exists.

Re: UK triggers the official Brexit process in a letter to EU

#523

Post by Panoramix »

avereveard wrote: post #450
cJ0th wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are being prodded to give up their sovereignty to a supra-national bureaucracy, and to be assimilated into a hetrogenous body politic with hundreds of millions of other people with which they share little other than said bureaucracy. It's just not true. People of the European continent have been mingling with each other for about 2000 years. The whole continent's juristic thinking roots in the Roman Empire,…

countries have many element in common, but the eu as organization has given the middle fingers to those values putting economic interests of few above all else. i.e. why do Italians have milk quotas, spain has orange quotas, but germany has not car quotas? the general feeling is that few are getting the advantages of the free market and many are taking the piss. on the other hand where's the democracy in the Dublin I…

I think you are confused. The quotas (which are EU-wide) are there to protect farmers. By limiting the production there is no surplus (there used to be extraordinary surpluses) and therefore the prices are guaranteed not to drop or fluctuate too much. This also prevents monopolies from dominating the market. Particularly benefited are Italians, who would have a hard time competing against milk powerhouses in Germany.

As for cars, they are decidedly different products than food.

Re: UK triggers the official Brexit process in a letter to EU

#524

Post by cat199 »

mjevans wrote: post #435
ben_w wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds a bit like the British democracy to me. How many Brits know that bishops sit in the house of Lords? Some know, sure, but many? How many of us know what the Privy Council is and who the members are? What powers are purely ceremonial and which have teeth? Why can't MPs resign like normal people? How and why there is judicial independence from parliament seems to be news to the Secretary of State for Justice, if…

Maybe it's time for that last one to change. Refactoring a system in a well-intentioned way can optimize a lot of inefficient and ineffective approaches and gives an opportunity to bring things that may be scattered about in to locality for increased comprehension and decreased error in modification.

... witness the USA as a clear-cut example of this process in action.

Re: UK triggers the official Brexit process in a letter to EU

#525

Post by Scarblac »

folli wrote: post #429
hocuspocus wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK is putting itself in a much tougher situation, this is absolutely not comparable to Switzerland and Norway. And some of the forecasts about Switzerland turned out very real. We have to agree and comply with Europe on most things, without much bargaining power. And the EURCHF swings can literally put businesses to the ground overnight.

This could also be construed as the EU acting as a hegemony and abusing their economic power to force smaller countries to accept their terms. The same can be currently observed when some EU exponents demand that the Brits get punished for pulling out.

It's almost as if its own interests come first.

Re: UK triggers the official Brexit process in a letter to EU

#526

Post by cat199 »

vidarh wrote: post #274
Nursie wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Commission gets a bad rap because basically it's been stuffed with cronies and friends of council members. The UK may be the worst for this, we had one Commissioner who had been disgraced out of the UK cabinet twice, and then found himself in a nice 'untouchable' position on the Commission. He's now a Lord. There are flaws in UK democracy certainly but I don't think the EU got it right. I also fundamentally have…

The problem with the structure of the EU is basically: How do you set up a supranational state without massive constitutional changes in all the member states? Because the appetite is not there for large constitutional changes. The result was basically a giant hack on top of the existing systems by leveraging the authority that the member state governments have to act as agents of their state in carrying out their du…

> How do you set up a supranational state without massive constitutional changes in all the member states?

Considering it was never intended to be a state, I think your argument belies the source of the complaints..

Re: UK triggers the official Brexit process in a letter to EU

#527

Post by cat199 »

prodmerc wrote: post #486
folli wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could also be construed as the EU acting as a hegemony and abusing their economic power to force smaller countries to accept their terms. The same can be currently observed when some EU exponents demand that the Brits get punished for pulling out.

Yeah, no shit, that's the whole point of a strong economic union.

And for breaking out of one..

Re: UK triggers the official Brexit process in a letter to EU

#528

Post by barking »

mpweiher wrote: post #495
barking wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but opinion polls got it wrong in the cases of Trump and Brexit. It seems a lot of people who intend vote on the right (for the want of a better term) are coy about it when asked.

I knew someone was going to mention that. Yes. However, I mostly talked about relative movement of polls. While not entirely impossible, it seems implausible that people should suddenly all get more coy. Especially after "their side" just had huge victories. If anything, I'd expect them to be less coy than before, because they just got validated. And the one absolute I mentioned about the French runoff is 2/3rd vs. 1…

Le Pen is steady at about 1/3 Macron is at about the same with everyone expecting the final 1/3 to support him in a run-off. Seems pretty safe for Macron. I don't know much about France, is there ever much of a shift before the second vote historically?

Re: UK triggers the official Brexit process in a letter to EU

#530

Post by rleigh »

csmattryder wrote: post #45
te_chris wrote: post #6

Today is the day that David Cameron's legacy is solidified: The hubristic toff who saw his nation as a play thing.

He gambled 64 million people's livelihoods to defend his party against another, that right now, doesn't even have a sitting MP (for those outside the UK, that's the UK Independence Party). There's tables at Vegas that haven't seen that level of loss.

He might have made a gamble for political reasons. But, don't forget that there had been strong demand for a referendum on the matter since at least the mid '90s. It was long overdue, and (being cynical) had been denied because the outcome wasn't going to be what the government wanted (i.e. they knew the majority would have consistently voted leave, and didn't want to hold the referendum until they could guarantee a remain vote).

When given the chance to express their true opinion of EU membership, the majority voted leave. Not a particularly shocking outcome, given the lack of love the EU had in the eyes of most of the populace, and always had despite several decades of indoctrination.

Post reply on HN