Probably by any rich country.
Yeah, that’s exactly what made me want to find out more, but imo concrete information just wasn’t there.
…final call for THE empire…the brits, once pretty proud, when posh was sexy…
i’m central europe…and i can tell, hey, we miss ya all…
but what can u do, if a country get’s fooled by their hi finance venture capital capitol, ur very own behind the curtain government, always acting from within the shadows, pretty much ur very own microstate right in the heart of ur “capitol”, vatican style full on…with good old prayers PLUS money makes the world go around…
global taxavoiding superheros need their loophole havens…they say cayman, u say jersey…
by now, we’re all the same fools, in the “west” anyways, so no reason for any sort of shaming…
we’re all trapped in very same transatlantic “brotherhood”…if we’re mainland or island…
but there’s always hope…scotland want’s their very own referendum repeated, voted against brexit as much as they could, but got assimilated and over ruled again, anyways…
if they get their indepandance, they will skip the pound, which lost all it’s dignity and dropped to eyelevel with the petro dollar that’s drowning in “debt” beyond all scale on purpose since ages, all for the greater good of free global markets and the wealth of the oldest business in human mankinds history…weapons.
if u want profits on war, u always need a boogieman to blame…war on global terror was yesterday, now we’re back to the good old tale of the always evil east…
meanwhile, scotland might have a shot…if they vote for independance again, it will be heard this time and england becomes two different countries…ooops…and irland, clever enough to always stick to the idea of a united europe, might end their very own innerwar and finally skip that “what kind of christian are u” northern inner xtra border “issue”, finally…
if we look at the netherlands and france these days, there, the “common folks” start to say no and come together…so will the scotts…
even in germany, the people finally start to see the global trickery…and it takes a lot of uberobvious trickery to get them to stand together against some “government”…
everything’s connected…and there is no black or white…let’s not be fooled again and again and again…it’s all happening to keep “us” separated…as long we tend to think, we’re not on the same boat, we don’t face the fact, that we’re sinkin’ indeed…alltogether…
so, hey, u guys better come “home”, u can keep ur island snobbery…it’s charming and does’nt matter…let’s look at the world map and realize, ur part of europe, too and anyways…
oh, and by the way, what happend to ur “we don’t pay for energy” movement ?..sounded like a good plan, to stick togehter and not pay the energy bills this winter…was born right out of the heart of ur society and a real option for more daily real life resistance…
we all still got lot’s to learn from each other…
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With all due respect, why didn’t you shut down the cryptocurrency thread?
The stocks thread? The cars thread?
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This 
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This is a measured response.
The echo chamber has been created by people on here making it difficult to have any reasonable discussion.
Any alternative opinion is aggressively shot down, flagged no matter if it has some substance that may be food for thought.
I did not vote for Brexit. However I can see that the main benefits that it could have given have not been acted on. ie lower tax country to attract investment.
Even tho I did not vote for it at the time, I can also see that the EU is unelected and unaccountable. That issue remains and I have major concerns now with all governments and their increasing authoritarianism.
The EU, UK gov, WEF are seemingly still working together in many respects to create a surveillance state - that should be peoples primary concern but they are distracted - by design.
A lot of the population have lost the ability to listen, ego rules and unless more people come to understand how the world really works ie divide & conquer and how they are being continually manipulated then we are all in trouble.
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Not sure why those would be on our radar … if we don’t read something and it’s not brought to our attention it doesn’t seem like an issue. Whenever Politics, especially divisive issues, are introduced here, there’s a lot of hot voices pushing the boundaries … I’m not interested in reading this, but we’re definitely not keen on nannying the topic if it gets fractious … reminding folk about this is a proactive intervention for people to reflect more carefully on how they post
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Those threads are highly political and divisive. I know, because I muted them.
Yes, there’s a failure to empathise to any extent with those of a contrary opinion - it’s not easy, and certainly not with strong convictions - therefore, it (from experience) goes nowhere as a ‘debate’
You can’t win Moderating this stuff, it’s a thankless task
I probably muted those too and have no inclination to browse, but they haven’t been taxing the Moderator inbox afaict
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…oh, and what happend to stew lee…?
have’nt heard of him since ages…he’s one of the greats in global stand up…!
really adore and miss british humour…
I have mates in the touring and promotion business and it has killed the UK as a base for big European tours. Putting aside any wider rights or wrongs, an absolute disaster for the support side of the music industry.
I don’t know any details about the demographic of leave-voters, but I have some general remarks to this assumption. While it is often assumed, that political knowledge and intelligence of voters are an aid to good political decisions, there is evidence, that the same group of intelligent and informed voters is also the most dogmatic and prone to ideologically motivated thinking. This is, they have a tendency to use their cognitive abilities selectively to protect their prior convictions and they seek to be politically informed, so they can weaponise this knowledge in arguments. The upshot is, that I don’t believe it’s clear at all, leave-voters are less intelligent, it just may seem this way, because they were wrong. But those biases described exist on both sides of a political divide. Possibly stay-voters were just lucky they happened to have mostly true believes about the consequences of brexit
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If some of the main benefits that they wanted from Brexit have not been acted on, ie lower tax to attract investment with less regulation and to maximise their positions as leading finance & tech havens…
then perhaps it’s unfair to discern in this way.
What we are experiencing with the increase in authoritarianism means that I questioned… would I now want the EU with their unaccountability and lack of democratic selection and the answer now is no, however I also see that our government have become unaccountable and so I don’t want them either.
I then look at the labour party and their leader saying that he would chose to listen to the so called elites at Davos / The World Economic Forum over parliament. That doesn’t sound accountable in any way. OR democratic in any way.
In other words - I now do not want any of them to rule over us.
We’re giving up too much in the name of being right - choosing a corrupt option because we don’t like the alternative.
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In a sense, we should be glad the Tories absorbed UKIP to such an extent and showed what a shallow pool of talent the far right have to draw from. By opting for a pig-headedly hard Brexit and having barely any plan beyond words and flag-waving, they have given us all enough pain to ensure we will likely rejoin much sooner than we otherwise would have. Maybe a dual joining ceremony with our good buddies Ukraine…
Had we remained in the Single Market and Customs Union, our trading and visiting rights could have continued with very little impact; those who had felt it suddenly important to be ‘out’ wouldn’t now look like they’d been conned into something they didn’t understand and hadn’t thought about.
And the refreshing lack of the Trump/Johnson carnival also means the USA is considerably cooler towards us as a trading partner and, indeed, any kind of serious friend. It’s been one hell of a lesson and I wish the ‘opposition’ could learn it faster.
Just a shame this all happened at all.
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AA Gill Summed it up best for me bit if a read but fully worth it
We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of that most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia
It was the woman on Question Time that really did it for me. She was so familiar. There is someone like her in every queue, every coffee shop, outside every school in every parish council in the country. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, over-made-up, with her National Health face and weatherproof English expression of hurt righteousness, she’s Britannia’s mother-in-law. The camera closed in on her and she shouted: “All I want is my country back. Give me my country back.”
It was a heartfelt cry of real distress and the rest of the audience erupted in sympathetic applause, but I thought: “Back from what? Back from where?”
Wanting the country back is the constant mantra of all the outies. Farage slurs it, Gove insinuates it. Of course I know what they mean. We all know what they mean. They mean back from Johnny Foreigner, back from the brink, back from the future, back-to-back, back to bosky hedges and dry stone walls and country lanes and church bells and warm beer and skittles and football rattles and cheery banter and clogs on cobbles. Back to vicars-and-tarts parties and Carry On fart jokes, back to Elgar and fudge and proper weather and herbaceous borders and cars called Morris. Back to victoria sponge and 22 yards to a wicket and 15 hands to a horse and 3ft to a yard and four fingers in a Kit Kat, back to gooseberries not avocados, back to deference and respect, to make do and mend and smiling bravely and biting your lip and suffering in silence and patronising foreigners with pity.
We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty. It’s the knowledge that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian country house, no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as If, no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no politician better than Churchill, no view more throat-catching than the White Cliffs and that we will never manufacture anything as great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.
The dream of Brexit isn’t that we might be able to make a brighter, new, energetic tomorrow, it’s a desire to shuffle back to a regret-curdled inward-looking yesterday. In the Brexit fantasy, the best we can hope for is to kick out all the work-all-hours foreigners and become caretakers to our own past in this self-congratulatory island of moaning and pomposity.
And if you think that’s an exaggeration of the Brexit position, then just listen to the language they use: “We are a nation of inventors and entrepreneurs, we want to put the great back in Britain, the great engineers, the great manufacturers.” This is all the expression of a sentimental nostalgia. In the Brexiteer’s mind’s eye is the old Pathé newsreel of Donald Campbell, of John Logie Baird with his television, Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb, and Robert Baden-Powell inventing boy scouts in his shed.
All we need, their argument goes, is to be free of the humourless Germans and spoilsport French and all their collective liberalism and reality. There is a concomitant hope that if we manage to back out of Europe, then we’ll get back to the bowler-hatted 1950s and the Commonwealth will hold pageants, fireworks displays and beg to be back in the Queen Empress’s good books again. Then New Zealand will sacrifice a thousand lambs, Ghana will ask if it can go back to being called the Gold Coast and Britain will resume hand-making Land Rovers and top hats and Sheffield plate teapots.
There is a reason that most of the people who want to leave the EU are old while those who want to remain are young: it’s because the young aren’t infected with Bisto nostalgia. They don’t recognise half the stuff I’ve mentioned here. They’ve grown up in the EU and at worst it’s been neutral for them.
The under-thirties want to be part of things, not aloof from them. They’re about being joined-up and counted. I imagine a phrase most outies identify with is “women’s liberation has gone too far”. Everything has gone too far for them, from political correctness — well, that’s gone mad, hasn’t it? — to health and safety and gender-neutral lavatories. Those oldies, they don’t know if they’re coming or going, what with those newfangled mobile phones and kids on Tinder and Grindr. What happened to meeting Miss Joan Hunter Dunn at the tennis club? And don’t get them started on electric hand dryers, or something unrecognised in the bagging area, or Indian call centres , or the impertinent computer asking for a password that has both capitals and little letters and numbers and more than eight digits.
Brexit is the fond belief that Britain is worse now than at some point in the foggy past where we achieved peak Blighty
We listen to the Brexit lot talk about the trade deals they’re going to make with Europe after we leave, and the blithe insouciance that what they’re offering instead of EU membership is a divorce where you can still have sex with your ex. They reckon they can get out of the marriage, keep the house, not pay alimony, take the kids out of school, stop the in-laws going to the doctor, get strict with the visiting rights, but, you know, still get a shag at the weekend and, obviously, see other people on the side.
Really, that’s their best offer? That’s the plan? To swagger into Brussels with Union Jack pants on and say: “ ’Ello luv, you’re looking nice today. Would you like some?”
When the rest of us ask how that’s really going to work, leavers reply, with Terry-Thomas smirks, that “they’re going to still really fancy us, honest, they’re gagging for us. Possibly not Merkel, but the bosses of Mercedes and those French vintners and cheesemakers, they can’t get enough of old John Bull. Of course they’re going to want to go on making the free market with two backs after we’ve got the decree nisi. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
Have no doubt, this is a divorce. It’s not just business, it’s not going to be all reason and goodwill. Like all divorces, leaving Europe would be ugly and mean and hurtful, and it would lead to a great deal of poisonous xenophobia and racism, all the niggling personal prejudice that dumped, betrayed and thwarted people are prey to. And the racism and prejudice are, of course, weak points for us. The tortuous renegotiation with lawyers and courts will be bitter and vengeful, because divorces always are and, just in passing, this sovereignty thing we’re supposed to want back so badly, like Frodo’s ring, has nothing to do with you or me. We won’t notice it coming back, because we didn’t notice not having it in the first place.
Nine out of 10 economists say ‘remain in the EU’
You won’t wake up on June 24 and think: “Oh my word, my arthritis has gone! My teeth are suddenly whiter! Magically, I seem to know how to make a soufflé and I’m buff with the power of sovereignty.” This is something only politicians care about; it makes not a jot of difference to you or me if the Supreme Court is a bunch of strangely out-of-touch old gits in wigs in Westminster or a load of strangely out-of-touch old gits without wigs in Luxembourg. What matters is that we have as many judges as possible on the side of personal freedom.
Personally, I see nothing about our legislators in the UK that makes me feel I can confidently give them more power. The more checks and balances politicians have, the better for the rest of us. You can’t have too many wise heads and different opinions. If you’re really worried about red tape, by the way, it’s not just a European problem. We’re perfectly capable of coming up with our own rules and regulations and we have no shortage of jobsworths. Red tape may be annoying, but it is also there to protect your and my family from being lied to, poisoned and cheated.
The first “X” I ever put on a voting slip was to say yes to the EU. The first referendum was when I was 20 years old. This one will be in the week of my 62nd birthday. For nearly all my adult life, there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t been pleased and proud to be part of this great collective. If you ask me for my nationality, the truth is I feel more European than anything else. I am part of this culture, this European civilisation. I can walk into any gallery on our continent and completely understand the images and the stories on the walls. These people are my people and they have been for thousands of years. I can read books on subjects from Ancient Greece to Dark Ages Scandinavia, from Renaissance Italy to 19th-century France, and I don’t need the context or the landscape explained to me. The music of Europe, from its scales and its instruments to its rhythms and religion, is my music. The Renaissance, the rococo, the Romantics, the impressionists, gothic, baroque, neoclassicism, realism, expressionism, futurism, fauvism, cubism, dada, surrealism, postmodernism and kitsch were all European movements and none of them belongs to a single nation.
There is a reason why the Chinese are making fake Italian handbags and the Italians aren’t making fake Chinese ones. This European culture, without question or argument, is the greatest, most inventive, subtle, profound, beautiful and powerful genius that was ever contrived anywhere by anyone and it belongs to us. Just look at my day job — food. The change in food culture and pleasure has been enormous since we joined the EU, and that’s no coincidence. What we eat, the ingredients, the recipes, may come from around the world, but it is the collective to and fro of European interests, expertise and imagination that has made it all so very appetising and exciting.
The restaurant was a European invention, naturally. The first one in Paris was called The London Bridge.
Culture works and grows through the constant warp and weft of creators, producers, consumers, intellectuals and instinctive lovers. You can’t dictate or legislate for it, you can just make a place that encourages it and you can truncate it. You can make it harder and more grudging, you can put up barriers and you can build walls, but why on earth would you? This collective culture, this golden civilisation grown on this continent over thousands of years, has made everything we have and everything we are, why would you not want to be part of it?
I understand that if we leave we don’t have to hand back our library ticket for European civilisation, but why would we even think about it? In fact, the only ones who would are those old, philistine scared gits. Look at them, too frightened to join in.
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Not a direct comment on ‘intelligence’, but there appears to be statistical evidence that leave voters, in aggregate, are lower academic achievers than remainers.
Also, being more supportive about your idea of assumptions, that leave voters turn out to have been proved wrong (arguably) by the current turn of events, does not lead to the inference that they were less intelligent. Another large factor was that they were influenced (manipulated) by large and powerful media empires that were owned by a few individuals, a financial elite in other words, that were serving their own agenda.
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this doesn’t necessarily mean the people that voted for Brexit are less intelligent though, might just mean they come from backgrounds where they are less likely to attend university (for example).
I mean, it seems pretty obvious that judging people on how good a school and university they went to is a fairly big part of the UK’s problem.
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I think I’d argue with this statement.
Don’t know if I can be bothered though.
It’s not like anyone’s gonna be on here looking to have their mind changed about anything.
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You can’t tell me what to think! Here’s my opinion…
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