Brexit

Mr. Magoo wrote:

You don't feel like maybe the honest intent of this was to have it debated, and (potentially) a resolution passed BEFORE the actual referendum??

The fact that people are still signing it a month later is because (as the site says) petitions stay available for six months, not because it's never too late to move the goalposts if you have sour grapes.

It is not a game, Magoo.Or a mixed metaphor

And both sides were expressing the need for a strong mandate. And have changed their tune following the results. Given that this wasn't even called for an honest reason, and was only intended for Cameron to consolidate power, there is no reason why the entire nation should have to pay for his recklessness.

If most people decide they want to step back from this they have every right to do so.

Some, in particular the Scottish National Party, are taking those steps already.

So what we learned last week is that racism triumphed at the ballot box
I definitely would not be doing any celebrating about Brexit

Paladin1 wrote:

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Remain supporters seem to want a do-over.

Just took a look at your link and noticed the protester with the sign "No Borders"

Safe to assume her house doesn't have locks?

Sure, and with similarly sound logic, it's safe to assume she doesn't use a password on her email account.

What is this alternative?....

Thanks for the question...I will try to lay it out as best I can...but the answer needs serious people reflecting on this collectively...I will be grateful for comments.......

Majority don't want a second vote.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/brexit-opinion-poll-reveals-majorit...

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Farage said so during the campaign.

Did he fight for it during the campaign, or insist on it during the campaign?

I mean, I totally get that if both sides disagreed on the threshold then (presumably) the more powerful side, or the side in power, could call the shots, but if both sides agreed that a higher threshold was necessary then I'm still a bit curious why one wasn't specified. 

Or, to put it another way, if both "Leave" and "Remain" agreed that a higher threshold was necessary, who fought them and won??

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And more importantly, at this point a sufficient number of petitioners have asked for it.

Yes.  The people who didn't get what they wanted have evidently crashed the petition website asking for it after they lost.

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And if they want to hold another referendum (though I expect they'd call another election first) they can do that too.

I somewhat facetiously suggested that upthread.  Somewhat facetiously because which party wants to be the one to tell the British electorate "Fuck you, if you don't vote how we hoped??"  On the procedural point of "could they?" I'll agree that they legally can.  But is that going to result in some kind of happy ending for someone?

swallow wrote:

The party that wants to say that would be the Liberal Democrats. 

[url=http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-eu-referendum-resul... Liberal Democrats will stand at the next general election on a platform of derailing Brexit and keeping Britain in the European Union, the party has announced.[/url]

Not a surprise. That party had the highest percentage of remain among the four main parties.

There was no technical threshold, Magoo.

Does there need to be a response? Of course. Cameron resigned. Not soon enough. And I'd say it certainly requires a new election at the very least. 

As for what this result has set in motion, this changed the situation enough for Scotland that they are calling another referendum. If nothing else, that prospect changes the situation for the rest of the UK as well.

As I said, this is not a game, and no point of honour compels them to silly walk off that cliff.

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As I said, this is not a game

No, it was a referendum.  Pardon any analogies -- you know how analagous they can be! -- but nobody has suggested that this is a game.

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and no point of honour compels them to silly walk off that cliff.

So the results are just some "point of honour"?  And not "results"?

I think the problem is that if the government were to choose to not "silly walk off that cliff" then, given the results that all can see, they'd need to come up with a very plausible, very compelling reason for why it's now the MINORITY that wins referendums.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

I think the problem is that if the government were to choose to not "silly walk off that cliff" then, given the results that all can see, they'd need to come up with a very plausible, very compelling reason for why it's now the MINORITY that wins referendums.

They did in California, in a binding ballot initiative, when the result was ruled unconstitutional.

For that matter, they did in Greece as well, for a different reason.

And the option is there for it to happen here too. I think some of those compelling reasons are dawning on people.

Whether it "cuts it" or not us up to them, not you and me. Likewise, expecting terms that will satisfy you is irrelevant, as there are no hard rules here.

Like I said, I'd expect at least a new government and a new mandate. But that is my opinion, which has about as much weight as yours here.

It seems the other EU members aren't in a waiting mood, though. So if it is a case of the power elite controlling everything and pushing their agenda, and railroading democracy, maybe they are playing hard to get in this case.

And it if fails it may become more our problem, if England shows up at 3 in the morning asking to kip on the sofa.,

Beginning to sound more and more like this whole Brexit thingy may be reversed Any way you slice it now it appears England is hooped

Interesting background on what the Eurocrats ambitions really are:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10559458/We-want-a-U...

"A campaign for the European Union to become a "United States of Europe" will be the "best weapon against the Eurosceptics", one of Brussels' most senior officials has said.

Viviane Reding, vice president of the European Commission and the longest serving Brussels commissioner, has called for "a true political union" to be put on the agenda for EU elections this spring.

"We need to build a United States of Europe with the Commission as government and two chambers – the European Parliament and a "Senate" of Member States," she said.

Mrs Reding's vision, which is shared by many in the European institutions, would transform the EU into superstate relegating national governments and parliaments to a minor political role equivalent to that played by local councils in Britain.

Under her plan, the commission would have supremacy over governments and MEPs in the European Parliament would supersede the sovereignty of MPs in the House of Commons."

Sovereignty over everyone, except perhaps the financial players invested in the Euro. 

NorthReport wrote:

Beginning to sound more and more like this whole Brexit thingy may be reversed Any way you slice it now it appears England is hooped

i tought it was hooped before the vote?????

btw just play along trying to intimidate people into following the 1%ers whims!!!!!!!!!!!!

 A Blow For Peace and Democracy: Why the British Said No To Europe  -  by John Pilger

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/24/a-blow-for-peace-and-democracy-wh...

"On the eve of the referendum, the quisling secretary-general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, warned Britons they would be endangering 'peace and security' if they voted to leave the EU.

The millions who ignored him and Cameron, Osborne, Corbyn, Obama and the man who runs the Bank of England may, just may, have struck a blow for real peace and democracy in Europe."

Labour had a chance to show leadership and become government but they are blowing it with their usual brain dead infighting

What is this alternative?  Is it closing trade deals and having high tariffs for more local production?  Or fair trade with other socialist nations only rather than free trade with any nation?  Or something else?...

The focus must be on more fundamentals...we will only get one chance in our lifetime to get it right!

Some fundamentals....we must respect and promote the nature of ¨natural economy¨ where a region or territory based on its natural resources, topography, watersheds and soils can build its agriculture, green energy and processing technology and tools fabrication appropriate to its region...this means autonomy at the local level...when I discuss comparative advantage, I don`t mean the globalization variety where someone builds mega factories, the rest providing raw resources, nor financial etc service industry....comparative advantage based on ones topography includes the right to develop its own industries appropriate to its culture and territory....

This means of course trading but a vastly reduced scale, as we buid autonomy and self reliance...

What is crucial for the mass industries and part of the Transition is for public control albeit decentralized over the key existing industries, above all else finances!

Credit and Money creation must be taken from the speculator parasites of a productive economy...interest rates a function of pure costs to serve the needs of an appropriate producing economy.....

To solve a problem you first have to understand what the problem is.

And so the Labour Party, instead of putting egos aside and seizing the moment, is more concerned with who is at the head of the party than actually doing anything to help the British people, or, of course, the bigger picture, the EC.  

Brexit was not about the EU. It was about Britishness

On the left, vocal supporters such as Yanis Varoufakis and others from Diem 25 (a movement led by the former Greek finance minister to democratize Europe, which comprise representatives of many leftist orientated European civic fractions) have argued for a vote to remain, on the premise of sticking together to reform the EU, to elect progressive governments and to block far right political ascensions.

The vote to remain was largely supported by the Labour party and backed by the U.K.'s major multicultural cities: London, Manchester, Bristol and Liverpool. The leave vote was supported by the majority of conservative MPs (not Prime Minister David Cameron, however) and Nigel Farage's far right U.K. Independence Party (UKIP).

However, the nationalist right was not the only one supporting a Brexit. Softer voices on the left, represented by radical and critical thinkers such as Tariq Ali and many writing forJacobin, vociferated their support for a Lexit (i.e. Leftist exit), on the premise that EU is an anti-democratic and autocratic decision making body, an institutional vessel of neoliberalism, dominated by Germany and France at the expense of Southern European countries, the same body that not that long ago imposed draconian austerity measures on Greece. Hence Brexit, like Grexit, is subsequently seen as a political statement against the EU and the overall public disenchantment with its neoliberal politics.

Yet the two are not as easily comparable (other than both being exits). While Grexit was directly about fighting austerity measures, hence indirectly about the EU, Brexit was directly about the EU and indirectly about Britishness. Brexit was the consequential result of a xenophobic approach to protect borders and to fight the rights of free movement within EU. It was less about subtracting from an autocratic, undemocratically run EU, but rather about imposing Britain as Britain, in relation to everything else. Étienne Balibar argued that the existence of political communities implies not only a relationship to themselves but also an external recognition by the others as such. Brexit was about affirming the right to Britishness as a political community, the right to exclude those who do not fit in; the right to outline who is part of Britain, who is out, who is included, who is excluded and who are the excluded that should be included.

Let's be honest here: unlike Greece, Britain was not a weak player at the EU table. The sovereignty of the weak can hardly be on equal foot with that of the powerful. Britain always had the power to impose its rules to play by within the EU. We can only look at the current refugee crisis, where the U.K. had an opt-out right under the Lisbon Treaty (it was bound only if it chose to participate) in relation to the European Commission relocation program of transferring displaced refugees across its members states.

In the Brexit case, it was the immigration topic that dominated the referendum debate. Between 2004 and 2014, immigration from Eastern bloc countries spiked, despite the fact that the U.K. introduced transitional curbs for the A2 nationals that joined in 2007 (i.e. Romanians and Bulgarians). There are over 800,000 Polish people in the U.K., about 175,000 Romanians and about 65,000 Bulgarians. The public rhetoric was for years opposed to Eastern Bloc migration, which was seen to have a negative impact on the British labour market (i.e. stealing jobs), the British state (i.e. claiming welfare benefits) and the British value system (i.e. engaging in illegal activities).

While the austerity argument has also been floating around in progressive leftist circles, it is impossible to know if austerity proper is what caused the xenophobic "symptom" that propped the Brexit. So far we have no longitudinal studies that measured societal attitudes pre and post austerity.

Historically, xenophobic insolences were well present in the U.K., prior to the start of 1980s neoliberalism and the 2008 austerity measures. We can think of the race riots of 1958 or the 1970 racist attacks against the Pakistani community, as examples; the Commonwealth Immigrant Act from 1968 which limited the right of entry to those with substantial connection to the U.K. by birth or descent and which ended up differentiating between black and white Commonwealth subjects, the Immigration Act of 1988 which controlled the entry of immigrant workers' families, or the Immigration and Asylum Act of 1996 which restricted the number of asylum seekers.

Over the years, both governments, Conservative and Labour, have systematically favoured restrictive immigration controls, on the pretext of deterring bogus asylum seekers and, lately, on premises of organized crime and terrorism.

Brexit was not about the EU nor against the EU. It was about British citizens representing their common and shared belonging, and about the affirmation of such belonging. It was about containing the British imaginary of the national as an ideal community, about confining the priority of nationals, in Balibar's terms, as an a priori guarantee against the degradation of their current (imagined as distinguished) status.

And it is Britishness indeed that only gave certain voters the sole right to cast their ballot on the matter, despite the hundred of thousands of migrants living in U.K. and supporting its economy. The right to vote was delegated to British and Irish citizens living in the U.K., commonwealth citizens residing in the U.K., and British citizens living overseas. A Canadian living in U.K. could vote, but not a migrant, who did not yet have the right to indefinite residency.

And when a vote becomes about assertions of citizenship, belonging and ideal societal imaginings, it makes for hard to sell point to talk about a socialist, anti-austerity exit, Brexit or Lexit for that matter. 

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/raluca-bejan/2016/06/brexit-was-not-abou...

@ iyraste

Like I said.... speculative fiction.

Sorry to burst the bubble, but how do you think that is going to happen given who is in control of the British parliament?

George Galloway : On the Coup Against Jeremy Corbyn

https://t.co/X4bGoRiHBJ

The new face of Britain. Good luck Brits as you are going to need it big time.

Nigel Farage says Britain heading for recession 'regardless of Brexit'

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/26/nigel-farage-ukip-britai...

Brexit: Can They Change Their Minds?

The results of the referendum are, in theory, not legally binding.

http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/06/brexit-can-they-change-t...

Sorry to burst the bubble, but how do you think that is going to happen given who is in control of the British parliament?

...why do you think people were that desperate to buck the elites, the media, the stars ad nauseum......desperation!

The system has failed the masses...just too bad people are so dumbed down in Canada to stare reality in the face...the same issues...unaffordable housing due to the housing bubble due to QE macroeconomics...a total disaster, collapse of the industrial system, the bursting of the EM bubbles crashing commodity prices...the wars and desperation of the immigration from the zones of conflict....

Control of British Parliament, with what the major parties now in conflict and division? With radical parties everywhere overnight coming to the fore and gaining popular support?

These are not the passive times of the past.....wake up and see the revolution going on!