UK Politics - a new thread for the new board

[SeanF]

Currently we have five Cabinet ministers on the Leave side, Gove being the main one

Chris Grayling, Culture Secretary John Whittingdale, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers

My guess is about 20 ministers and 100 or so Conservative backbenchers will support Leave.

I'll be voting for Leave.

[SeanF]

There we go. Referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union to be held on Thursday 23 June. I will be voting to stay in.

Thankfully Michael Gove has come out against, which will make thousands of people vote to stay in just because they don't want to be on the same side as the moronic cockwomble. If IDS says he'll be voting against it as well, the Better In campaign might as well pack up now. Job done.

If we do vote to go, I will have to consider leaving the country for somewhere else. But if we do go, at least Cameron would have to resign in utter, abject, humiliated defeat, which would be briefly entertaining (before our agricultural sector collapsed and Scotland departed the UK, at least).

Apparently the key deciding factor for many Tory voters will be the position of Boris Johnson. He may carry a large number of fence-sitters with him. He'll apparently vote for Cameron's position if London's interests are protected and against it if they're not, but we already know that one key demand of Johnson's has not been met.

Boris' stance will be determined entirely by his leadership ambitions.

[SeanF]

Being out of the EU might get us all free hot chocolate and cookies, too. But absent any reason to think that it will, that would be a terrible reason to give your vote to one side or the other.

As I say, those leading the exit campaign are largely boosters of TTIP and as such, they're not in any way more likely to give UK voters a proper debate on it than people in Brussels are. They have no interest in that.

Farage opposes TTIP, but I expect Conservatives are in favour.

[Spockydog]

My understanding is that Labour supports TTIP, but with ISDS exemptions for the NHS and other public services. The Tories just want to sell it all.

 

[SeanF]

My understanding is that Labour supports TTIP, but with ISDS exemptions for the NHS and other public services. The Tories just want to sell it all.

My objection to TTIP is the way that it undermines sovereignty and the rule of law.

[Werthead]

Quote

Boris' stance will be determined entirely by his leadership ambitions.

True.

Boris has achieved the success he has through slow, steady and incremental steps up the ladder, not gambling too heavily and taking solid, short steps. I think gambling his future on a 50/50 refrerendum might be considered too costly when he could instead be pretty much guaranteed a shoe-in in 2019 or 2020 anyway (as long as it remains Boris vs Osborne or May). On the other hand, he has to consider that his backing the Brexit campaign could bring support to that campaign and might even swing the vote.

The other problem he has to consider is that, as with Scottish Independence, the polling may indicate a 50/50 split or even a tiny lead for the Brexit campaign, but when voting takes place people may prefer to vote for the status quo rather than taking a leap into the dark, especially considering the economic status and prosperity of a post-EU Britain is far more dubious than a post-UK Scotland, and the potential damage done to the leave campaign once the debate moves to how the agricultural subsidies will be maintained (i.e. they simply won't) and other issues beyond the surface details discussed so far (the fact that it may trigger a second, and far more likely to succeed, Scottish independence vote). The benefit of the stay campaign is that they simply have to ask people to vote for a known quantity (the status quo) whilst the leave has to argue for a radical shift in our geopolitical position of the world, the outcome of which is extremely uncertain.

[Spockydog]

48 minutes ago, mormont said:

Spocky: the Brexit campaign will not affect TTIP in the slightest. I guarantee you, 100%, that a UK out of the EU would be signing up to TTIP. Most, if not all, of the major figures in the exit campaign are enthusiastic cheerleaders for TTIP.

Actually, no. The US has warned that if the UK leaves Europe then they will not be able to sign up to TTIP. They also made a load of ridiculous threats regarding trade tariffs, but seeing as we're snuggling up to China at the moment, that's less of an issue than the sovereign rights we'd relinquish with TTIP.

 

[SeanF]

Boris' stance will be determined entirely by his leadership ambitions.

True.

Boris has achieved the success he has through slow, steady and incremental steps up the ladder, not gambling too heavily and taking solid, short steps. I think gambling his future on a 50/50 refrerendum might be considered too costly when he could instead be pretty much guaranteed a shoe-in in 2019 or 2020 anyway (as long as it remains Boris vs Osborne or May). On the other hand, he has to consider that his backing the Brexit campaign could bring support to that campaign and might even swing the vote.

The other problem he has to consider is that the polling may indicate a 50/50 split or even a tiny lead for the Brexit campaign, but when voting takes place people may prefer to vote for the status quo rather than taking a leap into the dark, especially considering the economic status and prosperity of a post-EU Britain is far more dubious than a post-UK Scotland, and the potential damage done to the leave campaign once the debate moves to how the agricultural subsidies will be maintained (i.e. they simply won't) and other issues beyond the surface details discussed so far. The benefit of the stay campaign is that they simply have to ask people to vote for a known quantity (the status quo) whilst the leave has to argue for a radical shift in our geopolitical position of the world, the outcome of which is extremely uncertain.

If a majority of Conservative voters support Leave, any prominent Conservative who advocates Leave will be a strong leadership contender, even if Leave loses overall.

[Spockydog]

8 minutes ago, SeanF said:

My objection to TTIP is the way that it undermines sovereignty and the rule of law.

Exactly. Under TTIP, a corporation can sue a sovereign nation if it disagrees with its tax policy. There's already so much anger over corporate tax avoidance. In which universe do these lizards believe that people will accept this bullshit.

 

[mormont]

18 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Actually, no. The US has warned that if the UK leaves Europe then they will not be able to sign up to TTIP. They also made a load of ridiculous threats regarding trade tariffs, but seeing as we're snuggling up to China at the moment, that's less of an issue than the sovereign rights we'd relinquish with TTIP.

I haven't seen these alleged warnings, but frankly, if they had any credibility then people like Chris Grayling wouldn't be campaigning to leave the EU. Again, the biggest cheerleaders for TTIP are the biggest cheerleaders for Brexit. Brexit is not a way out of TTIP.

[Spockydog]

18 minutes ago, mormont said:

I haven't seen these alleged warnings,

Here you go:

Major blow for Brexit campaign as US rules out UK-only trade deal.

 

 

[Maltaran]

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

 

My guess is about 20 ministers and 100 or so Conservative backbenchers will support Leave.

I'll be voting for Leave.

There is a helpful list here - it's not complete, I presume because not all Tory MPs have declared yet which side they'll be on. Oddly enough, the only Cabinet member not listed is the Foreign Secretary - you'd think he'd be an important person for this debate. Currently there are 55 backbenchers under Leave.

[polishgenius]

TTIP is an utter disgrace, but even if a Brexit did mean the UK is excluded from it, there's no way something similar wouldn't eventually come along, probably with us making far greater concessions to our own sovereignty to get some of that sweet trade action.


Which is also true of the EU as a whole. I can't see a way leaving would and any other way than crawling back to the Union in a couple of decades, for a place at the table with far less power than we have now.

[Maltaran]

Quote

The Loony Party Postion for the referendum is clear.
We will have three options.
In.
Out.
Shake it all about.

Nice to have some clarity on this.

[A wilding]

5 hours ago, Werthead said:

If we do vote to go, I will have to consider leaving the country for somewhere else. But if we do go, at least Cameron would have to resign in utter, abject, humiliated defeat, which would be briefly entertaining ...

This does make it incredibly tempting to vote to leave, but I shall resist heroically.

 

[A wilding]

32 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

TTIP is an utter disgrace, but even if a Brexit did mean the UK is excluded from it, there's no way something similar wouldn't eventually come along, probably with us making far greater concessions to our own sovereignty to get some of that sweet trade action.

This.

The major UK parties are all completely pro TTIP (excepting the Greens). The recent history of both Labour and the Tories shows both to be very willing to support business interests. No significant politician has ever spoken against TTIP as far as I am aware. The chances of it being sneaked through parliament still look substantial, whatever the UK public currently thinks about international corporations (which the cynic in me strongly doubts will actually lead to any significant increase in the taxes they pay).

To our shame, most of the significant opposition to TTIP has come from Germany, so staying in the EU has to be our best chance to get something done about that corporate sovereignty clause at least.

 

[Sophelia]

36 minutes ago, A wilding said:

The major UK parties are all completely pro TTIP (excepting the Greens). The recent history of both Labour and the Tories shows both to be very willing to support business interests. No significant politician has ever spoken against TTIP as far as I am aware.

This Guardian article has Jeremy Corbyn speaking against TTIP (paragraph 7) in a reaction to Cameron's EU deal.

[A wilding]

2 hours ago, Sophelia said:

This Guardian article has Jeremy Corbyn speaking against TTIP (paragraph 7) in a reaction to Cameron's EU deal.

Now that it is good news. If this makes it into Labour policy, I might even consider voting for them. But I am not that hopeful of it.

 

[Spockydog]

5 minutes ago, A wilding said:

Now that it is good news. If this makes it into Labour policy, I might even consider voting for them. But I am not that hopeful of it.

I dunno. There's an air of crushing inevitability about the whole thing. I feel like we're trapped in the prologue of some horrible dystopian scifi.

[mormont]

5 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Here you go:

Major blow for Brexit campaign as US rules out UK-only trade deal.

 

Thanks. This does, as a veteran of the Scottish independence referendum, read to me like many of the articles published at that time giving completely contradictory (but absolutely definitive) legal opinions about which international agreements we'd still be bound by (EU membership, NATO membership, climate change targets, etc.). Most of them were bollocks, of course. They were, as this is, attempts at influencing the debate that don't necessarily mean anything.

What that statement does not do is say that Brexit means the end of TTIP or any similar agreement, possibly on even worse terms, as others have pointed out.

Even if it did, voting to leave to stuff TTIP seems to me to cutting off your nose to spite your face. Brexit is not going to take the UK in a direction of travel that reduces the influence of international capitalism on our social fabric. Quite the reverse.

4 hours ago, A wilding said:

This does make it incredibly tempting to vote to leave, but I shall resist heroically.

That seems a bit harsh on Wert.