BREXIT - leave or remain?

[Shadowmelded]

You're telling me that her first act as PM will be to push the Big Red Button that triggers Official Brexit, and throw the UK into recession?

Somehow I rather doubt it. It's 2016. Bold Politicians only exist in the history books. We mostly have people now who talk a good game, but when it comes to making the hard choices, they'll routinely do the least disruptive, most conservative (in the sense of not being a massive change of direction) thing possible.

I hope not but I can't see any other way, they've painted themselves into a corner and support for reversing or ignoring the result or even holding another referendum just isn't there, even among Remain voters. Going against the electorate would be a far bolder move and she can absolve herself of any blame when things go south because she campaigned for Remain and it was the previous Government that set things in motion.

[ranzino]

I don't trust politicians, I just know it would be political suicide for any politician in the UK to try and reverse the brexit vote.

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Easy solution: Dont do that as individual.

[Skroe]

I hope not but I can't see any other way, they've painted themselves into a corner and support for reversing or ignoring the result or even holding another referendum just isn't there, even among Remain voters. Going against the electorate would be a far bolder move and she can absolve herself of any blame when things go south because she campaigned for Remain and it was the previous Government that set things in motion.

As I said above, you don't go against the electorate... openly.

You just delay, delay, delay and do nothing, until sufficient political cover has accumulated to quietly announce on a Friday at 4pm that the government is "disbanding the Brexit Committee" (it will be forming / is forming), signaling an unofficial end to Brexit.

Governments in the West do shit like this all the time. And the thing is, it does work. Electorates never go nuts. The true believers do of course, but they would anyway. The vast majority though? They're more concerned with whats for dinner.

[Tinch]

You're telling me that her first act as PM will be to push the Big Red Button that triggers Official Brexit, and throw the UK into recession?

Somehow I rather doubt it. It's 2016. Bold Politicians only exist in the history books. We mostly have people now who talk a good game, but when it comes to making the hard choices, they'll routinely do the least disruptive, most conservative (in the sense of not being a massive change of direction) thing possible.

David Cameron was arguably bold with his two ill advised referendums. And look what that got him. The first, over Scotland, was only saved from Disaster by Gordon Brown, a Labour Scot. The second destroyed his reputation and career.

- - - Updated - - -



And that's why you don't reverse it outright.

You just do nothing. You talk and debate and kick the can down the road. Days become weeks. Weeks become months. Months become Years. You kill it with silence. You kill it with inaction. Brexit dies from neglect.

The further in time from the vote we go, the less likely Article 50 will ever be invoked.

I guess we'll have to wait and see, but I really don't think you have grasped the mood in the UK. In almost certain they will not be able to simply ignore the referendum

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[Skroe]

I guess we'll have to wait and see, but I really don't think you have grasped the mood in the UK. In almost certain they will not be able to simply ignore the referendum

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A week out? Of course not. "What Happens Next" is understandably at the forefront of people's mind. But who is talking a week?

I'll tell you when Brexit will be quietly killed. Next year. Around May or April. After months of arguing. After months of policy adjustments and new political leaders. After months of the US doing what we do best and making sure Europe doesn't do something stupid. When the wound is not fresh and people have moved on. When sufficient political cover has been laid. It will die when public attention turns.

[Shadowmelded]

As I said above, you don't go against the electorate... openly.

You just delay, delay, delay and do nothing, until sufficient political cover has accumulated to quietly announce on a Friday at 4pm that the government is "disbanding the Brexit Committee" (it will be forming / is forming), signaling an unofficial end to Brexit.

Governments in the West do shit like this all the time. And the thing is, it does work. Electorates never go nuts. The true believers do of course, but they would anyway. The vast majority though? They're more concerned with whats for dinner.

Oh I totally get the kick it into the long grass approach, but UKIP won't let this fizzle out. Any signs of hesitation will result in a UKIP landslide at the next GE, if there aren't significant defections from within the Tory party to UKIP before that (which could lead to a vote of no confidence and snap election). The disenfranchised who made up a large number of the Leave campaign won't be in a better position in the coming weeks and months, their anger will still be there. Perhaps enough of the people who voted leave for shits-n-giggles or who now totally regret their vote will be enough to steer things right but if it comes to a snap election, FPTP will fuck that over.

[Deleted]

As I said above, you don't go against the electorate... openly.

The problem is that though pushing the button will have a profound effect not doing so will be a continuous slide downwards in terms of withheld investment. Potential investors in Europe have many roughly similar options in many cases. Why pick the location with an extra, unresolved, uncertainty?

[Jodmos]

I guess we'll have to wait and see, but I really don't think you have grasped the mood in the UK. In almost certain they will not be able to simply ignore the referendum

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Whoever pulls the trigger is kissing their career and their party goodbye. People who wanted to stay in EU will be against them because they pulled us out. People who wanted out will be against them because there is no way they'll be able to get access for trade/finance/services without the free movement and the economy would be up the creek without that access so the original pledges by leave are unobtainable.

[Slant]

I guess we'll have to wait and see, but I really don't think you have grasped the mood in the UK. In almost certain they will not be able to simply ignore the referendum

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You're looking at a minimum of 2 years of negotiations, more likely 4-6 years, between the UK and the EU. Skroe's not so far off possible scenarios. She's a remainer, yet she wants to honour the referendum. At the same time, she knows she can't consolidate the wish for full access to the single market without also allowing free movement. So what's likely to happen is that they'll bicker about this in negotiations and it drags on and on and on. The longer this takes, the more educated citizens will become. Not the nutjobs, but the ones that votes "leave" and now ask "What's going to happen now anyway?"

See, if nothing else, then this campaign and the referendum have the potential to teach everyone how the EU really works. And the longer those negotiations take, the more time people have to go "Hum, well, it's not really that bad if you think about it" and stop caring about the issue.

This is the thing with this campaign, voters are stupid. Like, monumentally stupid. You can polarise the country with almost any topic you like. Heck, make a referendum about Welsh not being allowed near goats any longer. If you spin it right and spread the appropriate lies, you can have a shitstorm just as bad as this one. People in the UK would never have had this whole situation in which they should be ignored (the 52% anyway) if some jackass hadn't called for this vote. They'd have kept on rambling and bitching about the EU like the rest of us. The problem arose when some idiot (Cameron) actually put the option of leaving on the table and people realised, hey, this sounds cool, I don't know what it does, but liberty, freedom and sovereignity? That sounds awesome! More of that, please! And that's where their thought process stopped. Anything else after that (Uhh, EU is giving you all of that) was just white noise to them...

[Skroe]

Oh I totally get the kick it into the long grass approach, but UKIP won't let this fizzle out. Any signs of hesitation will result in a UKIP landslide at the next GE, if there aren't significant defections from within the Tory party to UKIP before that (which could lead to a vote of no confidence and snap election). The disenfranchised who made up a large number of the Leave campaign won't be in a better position in the coming weeks and months, their anger will still be there. Perhaps enough of the people who voted leave for shits-n-giggles or who now totally regret their vote will be enough to steer things right but if it comes to a snap election, FPTP will fuck that over.

I think there is a precedent, granted in a different electorate.

In 2010 the Tea Party in the US was ascendant. In many ways, it is a kind of UKIP in the US. It was a far right, basically know-nothing political fundamentalist group.
In 2012, it peaked with a series of truly awful candidates across the country, and lost big in many places.
By 2014 it was completely in decline. The Republican Party mobilized against Tea Party figures. The Republican electorate at the state and local level (where the Tea Party was most prevelent) had enough with their sort of nonsense. Republicans won big in 2014, on the back of non-Tea Party members.
In 2016, some of the prominent figures of old Tea Party had joined with Trump's campaign, but Tea Party darlings Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were utterly routed in their national campaign. At the state and local level, the Tea Party is basically defunct.

Voters may do crazy for an election or two. But that's it. We've seen that elsewhere in Europe. I think we'll see it in the UK too.

[Deleted]

The problem is that though pushing the button will have a profound effect not doing so will be a continuous slide downwards in terms of withheld investment. Potential investors in Europe have many roughly similar options in many cases. Why pick the location with an extra, unresolved, uncertainty?

but things going to hell is also one of the reasons it will be pushed and then scrapped and people wont care - especially if you explain the EEA option to the people until people realize its just stupid.

[Floopa]

so since exiting EU:

> labour party destroyed, and hence will actually be a party with values once it's rebuilt
> racism/hate crimes have gone down (when actual figures got published)
> liberal pansies all across the UK are finally realising the world isn't fair
> i personally made a profit out of a weaker sterling

been a pretty good week tbh

[Jodmos]

Oh I totally get the kick it into the long grass approach, but UKIP won't let this fizzle out. Any signs of hesitation will result in a UKIP landslide at the next GE, if there aren't significant defections from within the Tory party to UKIP before that (which could lead to a vote of no confidence and snap election). The disenfranchised who made up a large number of the Leave campaign won't be in a better position in the coming weeks and months, their anger will still be there. Perhaps enough of the people who voted leave for shits-n-giggles or who now totally regret their vote will be enough to steer things right but if it comes to a snap election, FPTP will fuck that over.

And of course they wouldn't be able to put two and two together, that their situation is still bad due to the lack of external investment as nobody wants in a UK that's leaving EU. They'll just listen to what the Sun and Mail tell them to think.

[Skroe]

The problem is that though pushing the button will have a profound effect not doing so will be a continuous slide downwards in terms of withheld investment. Potential investors in Europe have many roughly similar options in many cases. Why pick the location with an extra, unresolved, uncertainty?

A little bit of pain like that is preferable to walking through the one-way door that is Brexit.

If in 30 years, the UK changes it's mind and wants to rejoin the EU, there will be no special exceptions next time. And it will have to join the Euro, as all 'new' EU members do now.

[Deleted]

A little bit of pain like that is preferable to walking through the one-way door that is Brexit.

If in 30 years, the UK changes it's mind and wants to rejoin the EU, there will be no special exceptions next time. And it will have to join the Euro, as all 'new' EU members do now.

The old ones too - Denmark gets to join whenever it feels like, the UK has the only special exemption.
Sweden is obliged to join, the EU is just kindly waiting for us to vote to overturn our prior vote not to join. (we achieve this by intentionally not adhering to ERM 2)

[Shadowmelded]

I think there is a precedent, granted in a different electorate.

In 2010 the Tea Party in the US was ascendant. In many ways, it is a kind of UKIP in the US. It was a far right, basically know-nothing political fundamentalist group.
In 2012, it peaked with a series of truly awful candidates across the country, and lost big in many places.
By 2014 it was completely in decline. The Republican Party mobilized against Tea Party figures. The Republican electorate at the state and local level (where the Tea Party was most prevelent) had enough with their sort of nonsense. Republicans won big in 2014, on the back of non-Tea Party members.
In 2016, some of the prominent figures of old Tea Party had joined with Trump's campaign, but Tea Party darlings Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were utterly routed in their national campaign. At the state and local level, the Tea Party is basically defunct.

Voters may do crazy for an election or two. But that's it. We've seen that elsewhere in Europe. I think we'll see it in the UK too.

I sincerely hope so but I don't know if this comparison makes me any more hopeful since the mentality that the tea party helped launch onto the national stage has resulted in Trump :P The zealots are far more lockstep than everyone else and unless it's a one on one, the non-zealot vote will be split. Granted in a Parliamentary system it's more likely that in that scenario a coalition government would be formed which could hold off UKIP (provided they don't attain a majority), so I guess there's still hope.

[Jodmos]

A little bit of pain like that is preferable to walking through the one-way door that is Brexit.

If in 30 years, the UK changes it's mind and wants to rejoin the EU, there will be no special exceptions next time. And it will have to join the Euro, as all 'new' EU members do now.

That's the issue. We currently have far more control than other EU members because of exceptions that were agreed. We leave and we're stuck having to deal with what the EU want as I reckon they'll still have 500million as a bargaining chip elsewhere. Without the EU access the UK position worldwide for trade will be weakened

[Slant]

That's the issue. We currently have far more control than other EU members because of exceptions that were agreed. We leave and we're stuck having to deal with what the EU want as I reckon they'll still have 500million as a bargaining chip elsewhere. Without the EU access the UK position worldwide for trade will be weakened

Hmm, if only your brothers and sisters would see that. They still think the EU is in a weaker bargaining position. Because... Empire, I guess.

[Skroe]

Hmm, if only your brothers and sisters would see that. They still think the EU is in a weaker bargaining position. Because... Empire, I guess.

I don't know how they can possibly think that. Really. The EU's position is hysterically strong in this.

The UK has zero leverage. Zero is the actual number.

I mean even from the foreign policy side of things, the US is basically going "We love you both" to their faces, then walking in a room with the EU to figure out TTIP and telling the UK "we'll talk sometime next month".

The US is very happy to let the UK feel the bad consequences of their bad decision a bit, I think, to encourage a reversal. That's a far cry from the UK joining NAFTA, or a US-UK FTA by 2017, as the Brexiters deluded themselves to thinking.

Like that entire thought process doesn't even make sense. The US is negotiating TTIP and TTP, the two biggest free trade deals ever. It's best trade negotiators are going to be tied up for years. And Obama is on his way out and has little political capital left. Exactly who is going to staff the UK-US FTA squad? And who is going to spend political capital on it?

They might as well wished for unicorns.

[Jodmos]

Take car manufacturing for example. Without free access all the parts made here will cost more to move to Europe to assemble and vice versa. It would be stupid to think the car companies will just put up with that and not move plants elsewhere in the EU. Plus the City (I think I saw 12% of GDP somewhere) has a lot of EU transactions which without the passport they won't be able to carry out and that access sure isn't getting given without free movement as France and Germany are both in a position to take over what the city loses. I've also seen reports of banks looking at Dublin as a alternative too.