54 replies to this topic

[Bofur]

The horrible thing is, it was mostly the older generations voting to leave, and younger people had an overwhelming majority voting to stay in the EU.

So the people who have the longest to live with this decision are overruled by those for whom it'll be of little consequence.

[Mathijs]

How entirely predictable that is.

[OmegaBolt]

Don't worry America, you're still dumb as bricks. http://www.huffingto...b08d2c5638e59b?

[Pasidon]

Hey, FOX is just the future of the BBC.  Now you folks can be just like us and ignorant of global issues too.  Let's make Briton great again.

[OmegaBolt]

Unfortunately you're literally right. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox, said he wanted the UK to leave so that his bribes in government would go further. And he's been for years trying to break up the BBC.

[duke_Qa]

A shame that will go down as one of the bigger mistakes of the century, I'm afraid. But at least Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales might get a chance of freedom, too now. It'll be interesting to see how England will handle Hadrian's wall being rebuilt from the other side

 

https://www.instagra.../p/BG_n6oAioFO/

 

This reminds me that we might need a embed for instagram images to the forums.

[Plokite_Wolf]

The horrible thing is, it was mostly the older generations voting to leave, and younger people had an overwhelming majority voting to stay in the EU.

So the people who have the longest to live with this decision are overruled by those for whom it'll be of little consequence.

But that would mean that old imperialist geezers and complete peasants are equal in numbers and voice to or more plentiful/loud than the progressive youth? If they didn't have that monarchy theme going, I'd confuse them for a fucking Balkan country.

[duke_Qa]

That things went as they went is probably all because of how the power is distributed in the UK: Rich boys clubs getting what they want, even if they don't know what they want.

 

https://www.theguard...iness?CMP=fb_gu

 

 

Remember as the pound plunges and the markets slide that this entire referendum was called by David Cameron to fend off Nigel Farage and his own Tory ultras. There was no public outcry for a ballot – but for the sake of a bit of internal party management, he called one anyway. He gambled Britain and Europe’s future to shore up his own position. With all the confidence of a member of the Etonian officer class, he thought he’d win. Instead he has bungled so badly that the fallout will drag on for years, disrupting tens of millions of lives across Europe.

 

If there was a sane democratic system to stop such things from happening, this wouldn't have been a problem. But here we are

[Pasidon]

Hey, if you're chatty about rich white guys that like to talk about succession, don't I got the perfect article for you:

 

https://www.rt.com/u...exas-secession/

[duke_Qa]

To be honest, things might work out positively, if the rest of the EU gets a grip and avoids similar situations. Britain is fucked, of course, and their economy will feel a hit. but hopefully this will cause the younger generations of England to rise up and demand a more democratic election system and better distribution of wealth than what they've had since Thatcher.

 

Both the UK and the EU might become more left-wing and people-oriented from this separation. That's about the only way I see this could work out well.

 

I fear that instead we're just going to see demagogues trick people into shooting themselves in their heads and leave power in the hands of un-elected elites again.

[duke_Qa]

Hmm, this theory is also interesting: http://indy100.indep...rue--bJhqBql0VZ

[OmegaBolt]

Here come the proper racists. http://www.independe...n-a7104191.html

[Mathijs]

They're just protecting their sovereignty.

[Ash]

I thought I'd wade in here, on behalf of the Brexiteers who -aren't- all cross-burning neanderthals. And, perhaps, even a little bit for those who are:

 

Firstly, let me set the way-back machine to the late 1970s and early 1980s. Britain was in the midst of a socio-political change, one which nobody foresaw the long-term consequences of.

 

The Cold War was in full swing, and at the time Britain was a somewhat left-leaning social democracy with plenty of worker's rights and an organised collective-bargaining group making the lives of workers better than they'd ever been. Britain had near-enough full employment (can you imagine that these days? UK governments celebrate a reduction in the unemployment figures in the tens of thousands). This meant that labour was getting expensive - when you can tell your employer to fuck off on Friday, go round the corner and start a new job somewhere else on Monday, and there aren't thirty people applying for the same shelf-stacking role at Woolworths (contemporary reference), employees are in a position to demand high wages.

 

Truth was, they didn't know how good they had it. The union men got greedy, and on balance they probably did have too much influence. But let's also take a moment to take a look at the way the labour market in the UK stacked up:

 

The railways were entirely owned by a public-sector organisation bearing the rather original name British Rail. All trains were owned, manned and run by this organisation. The rail track itself was owned by them, as was every station and everyone employed in the maintenance thereof.

 

All gas production, distribution etc was run by a public-sector organisation bearing the rather original name British Gas. Everyone paid their gas bill to British Gas, because that was the entire gas institution.

 

All oil production, distribution etc was run by a public-sector organisation bearing the rather original name (you can see where I'm going with this) British Petroleum. All oil drilling, refining, distribution etc was done by them.

 

All telephone lines, maintenance, connections and other means of electronic long-distance communication were run by a public-sector organisation bearing the rather original name British Telecom.

 

The postal network was run entirely by a public-sector organisation named Royal Mail. Score one for naming originality.

 

British Airways? Public sector.

 

Building planes for BA? British Aerospace. Public sector.

 

Electricity? The National Grid. Public Sector.

 

Coal? British Coal. Public Sector.

 

Steelworks? British Steel. Public sector.

 

Shipbuilding? Public Sector in Bristol, Glasgow, etc.

 

Television? British Broadcasting Corporation. Public sector.

 

Water provision to homes? Public sector.

 

Education? Public sector.

 

All publicly-owned, whether actually directly controlled by government or a public-liability company (we tend to call them 'quangos' these days, thanks to the Murdoch Press - more on that later). Essentially the majority of the British workforce was paid -directly or indirectly- through taxation. On the other hand, most people lived in publicly-owned housing, run by local councils to whom they paid rent. The council built more housing stock for more people to live in. So you see that the vast majority of the money cycled from the government back to the national government through direct taxation or to local government through the old 'rates' system (similar to modern council tax and water rates) and sales tax. The much smaller private sector was doing OK but it wasn't fucking the country up the way it had (and ultimately would again) across the Pond.

 

Everything worked fine, until as I say the unions got a bit greedy. They knew that between them they had the power to cripple the nation. Particularly the coalminers. No coal = no electricity. No electricity = no everything else. So came strike after unified strike until pay went up.

Around the same time came Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a much-hated grocer from Grantham, not what one would call the nation's affluent area. She joined the Tory party, which back then just stood for the segment of Britain that worked for the private sector, though they were about seven orders of magnitude further left than the current crock of cunts. Until That Woman came along. She, unfortunately for everyone, liked what the US President Ronald Reagan was selling, which basically amounted to a massive firesale of national assets for short-term gain and capitalism/globalisation/neoliberalism for all. Think of it like the guy who sells his sofa, bed and TV to pay off his credit card bill; yeah, it'll work, but what are you going to pay it off with next month? Especially since now you've got to either buy new or rent a sofa, bed and TV off someone else.

 

So, she decided she'd do much the same. What were formerly British institutions were portioned off to private companies. BP became the oil conglomerate you know to day, run by a few wealthy individuals at the top. British Airways became a private entity. So too did British Gas (now owned by Centrica, which I believe is a French firm). With British Rail, she was especially sneaky - the tracks are still ours (you know, the bit that costs money) but the train services belong to private companies (you know, the bit that makes money). So, the taxpayer now subsidises the maintenance of the rail while getting none of the return for the investment. What's more, most of the companies that run the train services are now actually wholly or partly owned by French and Dutch public-liability entities! So much for the public sector being inefficient eh. Power generation, the shipyards, steelworks, literally everything that the country did and made for itself now belonged to private entities, most of them foreign in the long run.

 

And of course the coal mines got portioned off.

 

Of course none of these people liked it, so we had the miner's strikes. But the government eventually got what it wanted and turned the public perception against the mineworkers with the 'enemy within' campaign now being used so effectively against the police, against teachers and against junior doctors. All of those people ended up off the government's paybook (let's not forget that most of the income from that wasn't going into the paybook either but hey - the government didn't care so long as laying all those workers off because they were too expensive wasn't its problem!). Guess what happened when the British miners, steelworkers, engineers, etc., who were a) accustomed to and b) needed a certain wage to maintain their standard of living were discovered to be more expensive than their foreign counterparts?

 

You guessed it - back of the dole queue. It was cheaper to import coal from Poland than it was to mine it in Yorkshire, the West Midlands or Wales. So the (privately-owned) power stations decided to do that. Because companies have legal obligations to their shareholders to produce the biggest possible profit. Make no mistake, ye capitalists - companies couldn't give a toss about anyone but their shareholders.

 

Next job was selling off all the council housing stock. Though initially bought at absurdly-below-market-value prices by their former tenants, those tenants unsurprisingly noticed a fast buck in selling them on at a decent profit. To the wealthy, who thought to themselves 'hey, let's rent these out to the people who already owned them, just like already happens with the utilities and railways! and let's charge them twice as much as they paid the council!' A nation of landowners, indeed. Guess where the landowners who buy up most of the newly-available property in London now live. You guessed it- not in the UK.

 

 

OK so that's a rough approximation of where the country took a nosedive. Massive unemployment, housing costs through the roof, everyone who wasn't rich was dirt-poor. And yeah people had been dirt-poor for a long while but now they realised they didn't even know what dirt-poor was (the dole queue was costly, but was actually less expensive than paying them all a wage to be productive and make stuff the country could sell). A once-proud nation of people had been made irrelevant by its own government. Sure, they weren't that well educated but they were useful and lived productive lives. Now they had no skills but those they'd been using all their lives and there were more people than jobs. Cue wage crisis.

 

The country joined the European Common Market which became the EU without anyone noticing. Shit was bad enough nobody realised how much worse that would make it for the guy at the bottom.

 

Fast-forward to the mid-1990s. Who should step in, but the new European Common Market (not the political union yet), promising free movement of labour to anyone who wants a job? Why, this will be the salvation...for shitloads of continental workers who knew wages were better in the UK, were happy to live in squalor and send money home to feed the family. Immigration was welcomed by successive governments eager to see employment figures soar and the economy moving and attract the continent's best.

 

Meanwhile (and up to present day), in sunny Yorkshire/Wales/West Midlands, the older lot never recovered from what happened. They see their children and their chldren unable to find jobs or being out-competed. Former cornerstones of the British economy reside elsewhere. They see handouts and benefits going to those who haven't been in the country long enough to have even worked for it. They see their neighbours pass away and their neighbours' families leave in search of work and be replaced by foreign nationals with whom they hold absolutely nothing in common, not even a common language (a person who speaks multiple languages is called a polyglot, a person who speaks two is called bilingual, a person who speaks one is called English). Those private landlords are quite happy to take the housing benefit (meant to subsidise low earners to pay the new, much higher, rents that the councils would otherwise have basically paid themselves were the houses council-owned), and so the houses get taken up by those foreign labourers who are arriving faster than local children come of age. From the perspective of the local, they are being crowded out of their homes where they've lived all their lives, their jobs (which now pay fuck-all comparative to outgoings and are topped-up by the government as a result) and the entire world as they knew it has changed around them.

 

And the government lack the political will to do anything about it. What little is left in public ownership is being sold off again, and nothing has been done to address the concerns of Average Working-Class Joe. To them, nothing's changed since they lost the job that they had, their father had, their grandfather had and so on.

 

So, when the Murdoch Press (Thatcher and Blair's bezzy mate) blames immigrants and the EU for the country's ills, and everything they have ever known has changed before their very eyes they're going to think that way, rightly or wrongly. When the ordinary man on the street cannot perceive any benefit to himself of the EU - or at least that the costs of people for whom he has not voted and has no control over their policies and who probably have as little in common with him as a native American from the 1700s were he to meet such an individual using a time machine, is it any wonder that he would vote out?

 

Worse still, the establishment is equally to blame, and they're all staunchly pro-EU. If the government had openly and publicly supported Team GB at the Olympics people would have been rooting for other nations' athletes. It's impossible to actually comprehend just how much the government is hated by the people, who all feel powerless to oppose it because striking rules are now worse than they were under Thatcher and set to get even worse, and the unemployed and impoverished are getting a kicking when they're down, like always.

 

We can talk all day about how the EU has created jobs - most people out in England don't work in those jobs. Oh, London sees the benefit alright because there's loads of multinationals there and they're quite affluent as an area. Most of the rest of the UK aren't so affluent, and don't perceive that the EU has offered anything positive to their lives. Their employers' lives, maybe, but not theirs.

 

We can talk about free movement working both ways - sure, that's great, but Brits living in Unskilled Labour-land don't often do that. And they don't speak the language. The ERASMUS project was hailed...but then, it's deeply unfair. I went to uni with a French lad who paid EUR300 to study at my university. If i were to study at his alma mater it would have still cost £3000. No appreciable benefit for the similar transferable skill.

 

We can of course mention the unelectedness. Which, yeah, is kind of a big deal for me. I know that none of those in Brussels are looking out for me. I know the same of Parliament, but if we can cut off one layer we're on to a win. You can only fight one battle at a time. Hopefully the grossly unrepresentative voting system we have in the UK is next for the chop (but turkeys don't vote for Christmas so we can hardly expect Tories - or even Blairites - to shake up the status quo)

 

We can talk about the common market. Yeah, it's a hit, but Britain doesn't produce fuck all anyway so I'd wager it won't make as much of a difference to our real economy (I don't include the speculative nonsense that happens daily on the stock market. The sooner institutions like that are prevented from gambling in this way, the better off the global economy will be) as claimed. Certainly not that's noticed by man-on-the-street.

 

What -isn't- being talked about (but should be) is tax havens. The Irish Republic and the Netherlands are both very popular tax havens where dummy corporations are used to pass tons of money through rather than paying tax in the UK. I'm not saying that leaving the EU will solve that problem, but not having a free trade agreement might mean that some gets lost through tariffs making it potentially less attractive. When twice the GDP of the fucking planet is passing by untaxed, it's probably important to go after it.

 

Now, I don't say any of the arguments I raise in defence of Brexit are 100% right, or that Brexit is the magic bullet we're all looking for to solve all problems as claimed by the likes of that reptilian twatbadger Michael Gove or that self-caricature Boris Johnson. Neither do I say the EU is totally to blame. What I will say is that from the perspective of the man on the street, when faced with such upheaval before his eyes and the untimely intervention of the Murdoch Press it's no wonder he thinks immigrants are to blame for all his ills rather than successive governments. But the EU's played a complicit role in the fucking up of this country. And it's rotten to the core and as full of vested interests as any legitimate sovereign national government in the EU (the UK government has vested interests in spades - I can't speak for Germany or France, but I'll bet both my balls and my right eye they're there). I'd like to think that it collapsing and being remade by people who actually give a shit about the people in their own country and other countries might make it better.

 

Not that Brexit will even happen, in spite of the vote. Life will continue much as it always has.

[Mathijs]

Some of this sounds eerily familiar to a Dutchman's ears.

 

Good to see you post, Ash.