UK Politics: The Edge of Destruction

[Heartofice]

Just now, Spockydog said:

Is it any more illogical than the shitshow we're currently witnessing?

Yes its FAR more illogical I'm afraid.

[mormont]

37 minutes ago, SeanF said:

I'm sure he can answer for himself, but the obvious point is that voters' views can change over time. 

They can. But do they? And do they move in the direction that this assumes?

29 minutes ago, SeanF said:

We may not leave the EU, in which case, people will be able to vote on doing so in the future.  And, if we do leave, people will be free to campaign to rejoin.

That's a colossal qualifier that largely invalidates the entire point. 

19 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Like you say it's just as likely that they will become less idealistic over time and more realistic

Surely this would lead to an increase in the Remain vote, which has so far been proven to be the more realistic position? 

[Spockydog]

1 minute ago, Heartofice said:

Yes its FAR more illogical I'm afraid.

If we were talking about the normal election cycle you would be correct. But this isn't a GE. This is a question not likely to be asked again for a generation.

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

So is the no deal crash out next week off the table now?

[SeanF]

17 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

He was a fucking idiot, who voted Leave then refused his chemo. I don't think I'll ever be able to forgive him.

Thanks.

Thinking about it, there's a perfectly good moral (and perhaps legal) argument that his vote should be expunged from the count. Or would someone care to tell me why his long-dead voice is more important than my eighteen-year-old nephew's?

I shan't hold my breath.

 

There's certainly no legal argument.  In fact, at every election, a proportion of postal votes that are counted on the day will have been cast by people who have died, after they have been posted.

As to the moral argument, we are all affected by decisions taken by previous generations of voters.  That does not invalidate such decisions.

 

[Heartofice]

3 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

If we were talking about the normal election cycle you would be correct. But this isn't a GE. This is a question not likely to be asked again for a generation.

 

So I guess in your system nobody with any serious illnesses or over.. say 50 should be able to vote, but we should round up primary school children and send them to ballot box. It makes a ton of sense.

But seriously, enormous decisions like this should not be made on the basis of referendums, I think we are in agreement there. It was a colossal mistake to hold it in the first place. But if you are going to hold once in a generation referendums then i don't know how else to do it.

[Spockydog]

Just now, Heartofice said:

So I guess in your system nobody with any serious illnesses or over.. say 50 should be able to vote, but we should round up primary school children and send them to ballot box. It makes a ton of sense.

...

1 minute ago, SeanF said:

There's certainly no legal argument. 

Given the state of things, there is certainly a moral one though. 

[Spockydog]

8 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

So is the no deal crash out next week off the table now?

I would say yes, but who the fuck knows anymore? 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

8 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

I would say yes, but who the fuck knows anymore? 

Jeez….

The UK and the EU are the couple that’s separated and know they need to end it, but can’t stop drunkenly calling one another and having dirty late night hookups.

[mormont]

No, it's more like the UK are the partner who's declared the relationship is finished, but won't actually move out. 

[polishgenius]

The actual fuck? Whoever that was should be named, sacked, and charged with a crime.

[john]

52 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

I would say yes, but who the fuck knows anymore? 

Woah, woah.  Don’t waver from your “brexit is dead” position. That’s the only thing cheering me up in this thread.

[SeanF]

6 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

The actual fuck? Whoever that was should be named, sacked, and charged with a crime.

Walter Harrison, the Labour Chief Whip under Callaghan, used to keep disguises so that Labour MP's could vote twice in really tight votes.  Callaghan was amazed by the number of times he won by one or two votes. despite being short of an overall majority.

[Seli]

On 4/4/2019 at 10:38 AM, Heartofice said:

....

Again, whether we could have been impacted or not isn't really the point. Up against the background of millions of migrants entering Europe, and a climate where seemingly anyone from Europe can move to the UK, its understandable that it increased the fear of future migration. 

...

They were refugees.

[TrueMetis]

2 hours ago, SeanF said:

I'm sure he can answer for himself, but the obvious point is that voters' views can change over time.  Most over 65's voted to Remain in the EU, in the 1975 referendum.  41 years later, their view had changed.

I don't doubt most voters in 2016 - Remain or Leave - voted the way they did because they saw it as being in the national interest.

Well no, their views didn't change, they died then other people voted in their stead. How did the 24-39 year old's vote. That's who you need to look at to see if views changed.

[Spockydog]

11 minutes ago, Seli said:

They were refugees.

...from conflicts we helped create.

 

[SeanF]

33 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Well no, their views didn't change, they died then other people voted in their stead. How did the 24-39 year old's vote. That's who you need to look at to see if views changed.

I was unclear.  People who were aged 18-29 voted 61-39% in favour of Remain in 1975.  People aged 30-39 voted 65% to 35% Remain in 1975.  41 years later, their views had shifted strongly in favour of Leave.

[Which Tyler]

Now there's a surprise:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47833841

The government has not proposed any changes to the PM's Brexit deal during cross-party talks, says shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer.

Meetings have been taking place between Tory and Labour politicians to find a proposal to put to the Commons before an emergency EU summit next week.

But Sir Keir said the government was not "countenancing any change" on the wording of the existing plan...

[Werthead]

 

Excellent work on Dispatches this week. They confirmed that both BAE and RAF personnel are actively working with the Saudi military in the campaign over Yemen. RAF officers are in the Saudi Air Force headquarters helping with target selection and military planning, and BAE staff are refuelling the jets and maintaining them. This is in contradiction to the BAE testimony in committee that they have no involvement with the campaign other than selling the planes and offering minimal technical advice. 

Without Brexit, I suspect this would be a much, much bigger story. The British government is helping an unreliable ally carry out a legally and morally dubious military campaign which has killed thousands of civilians and triggered the world's worst humanitarian crisis. When challenged on this, ministers simply responded with, "They are paying us a fuckload of money and if we didn't do it, someone else would," which apparently makes it okay.

Quote

Its really just this deeply unpleasant rhetoric, that older voters are going to just die off and then the young voters with their ideas will take over. Its said with a sort of maniacal glee quite often. 

Like you say it's just as likely that they will become less idealistic over time and more realistic, and will also have a point of reference to judge the changes in their country. They might well at that point want to rejoin the EU of course, but they might not. 

Young voters turning into old voters is a cliche. It's rooted in the idea that young people with no money have no problem being idealistic and suggesting more tax money is spent on causes they believe in because they are not paying the taxes. The idea used to be that the second they did end up earning decent money (usually in middle age, having paid off mortgages), they wouldn't be so quick to dish out that money themselves. That's why (so it's theorised) so many right-on young celebrities who sign up to progressive campaigns and so on also shove their money into offshore accounts.

Fortuitously, the Conservative and Blairite process of transferring money to the ultra-rich means this isn't such an issue any more, and since more young people now have no realistic prospect of ever owning their own homes before they die, that should keep that idealism burning stronger for longer.

Unless the whole thing is bollocks and most people actually stick with their political voting choices for most of their life, except for unusual circumstances, which seems better-supported.

 

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The actual fuck? Whoever that was should be named, sacked, and charged with a crime.

Indeed, but we should also consider having a 21st century voting system which makes sense where such shenanigans are impossible to carry out.

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if we do leave, people will be free to campaign to rejoin.

If we do want to rejoin, it'll be with the Euro, no budget repayments and none of the exceptions the city of London gets for services. No more special snowflake status for the UK. So if we want to stay on our current, preposterously favourable terms, we have to stay. If we leave, we lose all of that extra incentive to remain, and we're not getting it back.

 

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I'm not sure how you want to carry out voting for anything using your logic.

One of the solutions would have been to allow 16-17 year olds to vote in the referendum. Why Cameron didn't do that, following the precedent set for the Scottish independence referendum, is still rather unclear. It's also unclear why they rushed the paper ballot system for British expats, meaning many of them received their ballots far too late to actually post their votes. They also didn't let EU nationals who'd been living in the UK for more than 5 years vote, which was really strange, since the changing date of the referendum meant those who wanted to become UK citizens to vote in some cases didn't have enough time to go through the process.

Cameron fucked up the campaign badly enough without arbitrarily doing shit that badly impacted on the Remain campaign he was supposedly leading, but he decided to do that as well.

[williamjm]

49 minutes ago, Which Tyler said:

Now there's a surprise:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47833841

The government has not proposed any changes to the PM's Brexit deal during cross-party talks, says shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer.

Meetings have been taking place between Tory and Labour politicians to find a proposal to put to the Commons before an emergency EU summit next week.

But Sir Keir said the government was not "countenancing any change" on the wording of the existing plan...

I'm not really sure what the point of it all was from May's perspective. She's antagonised her own party even more by sitting down with Labour, and then she also gets blamed for the talks not going anywhere while Labour can say that they were the ones attempting to find a solution.

Her request for an extension to 30th June is also ridiculous, she must know that's not going to be accepted. It's like she's desperately repeating all the things that didn't work for her before - at this rate soon she'll soon be rambling about 'Brexit means Brexit' again.