Is Britain about to leave the EU?

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I was truly revolted at Australia's ad frequency, and in Spain ad interruptions last invariably over 5 minutes. It has given me an appreciation for the lack of such.
 
Well, unless you explicitly wanted a Britain with absolutely no part in any European organisation, then yes, this is exactly what seems to be happening. I posted a link to a poll a ways back, which shows that a sizeable majority of people want to keep various European institutions/memberships, but the Government is seemingly only interested in grabbing every ball and running away as fast as possible.

Good for you. That means your government is not incompetent like the greek government was.
 
It's a conflict between two ideas of representative democracy. One school says that the representatives are supposed to vote for what their constituents would vote for, if they were all in the voting booth instead of their MP. The other (Edmund Burke's) says that people elect representatives because they're better at making decisions than they are, and so representatives are supposed to vote for what they think is best, even when their voters disagree with it. Most people and most MPs sit somewhere in the middle, but voting against something that a majority of your constituents had explicitly asked to happen (remember, this isn't a vote on the terms of Brexit, and doesn't preclude amendments to the bill) doesn't fit with most people's ideas of democracy, at least not these days.

This is the normal situation, but this is completely different in that MPs had a vote in parliament to allow the referendum to take place. This was passed by something like 550-50.
That was the MPs passing the baton to us to decide.
We then made our decision and have subsequently passed the baton back to them to carry out that decision.
All MPs, if they valued democracy, should respect that process.

Let’s imagine the Scots had voted 52-48 to leave the UK. Westminster would probably have had to vote on a bill to initiate the process – would any MPs vote against that? I doubt it. My guess is, no matter how much they hated it, they would have voted 648-1. (It should have been 650-0 but the one against would be Ken Clarke who has obviously lost his marbles and the one absentee would be Diane Abbott who mysteriously got a headache 5 minutes before the vote. :) )

Why do you think our MPs would almost certainly respect the Scottish vote and not the EU vote?
Answer: The EU is anti-democratic and authoritarian and head-in-the-sand Remainer Europhiles are likewise when it comes to the EU.


Didn't the leave campaign say Britain would stay in the single market(in other words soft brexit)? So that would be what they voted for.

Both sides maintained that leaving the EU would mean leaving the single market.

The LibDem leader Nice-but-Tim, was on the Andrew Marr show the other day and tried to maintain that ‘no-one voted to leave the single market blah blah blah’
And Marr’s reply: “Again and again and again in that chair, that very chair, there was Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne, and I asked every single one of them ‘does coming out of the EU mean coming out of the single market?’ And every one of them said ‘yes’.

It is about 4:30 into this clip:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04r5rf5
 
Why do you think our MPs would almost certainly respect the Scottish vote and not the EU vote?
Answer: The EU is anti-democratic and authoritarian and head-in-the-sand Remainer Europhiles are likewise when it comes to the EU.

Hahahahahahahahaha

The vote just happened and europhile MPs voted for leaving. But apparently that's linked to the EU being anti democratic somehow.

Hahahahahahahahaha
 
I was truly revolted at Australia's ad frequency, and in Spain ad interruptions last invariably over 5 minutes. It has given me an appreciation for the lack of such.

Nothing pisses me off about multiplex cinemas more. You pay 5-6$ for a ticket to watch 20 mins of commercials before a movie. I eventually mostly stopped going because of it.
 
Hahahahahahahahaha

The vote just happened and europhile MPs voted for leaving. But apparently that's linked to the EU being anti democratic somehow.

Hahahahahahahahaha

Keep up. Many europhile MPs didn’t vote for starting A50, including nearly 50 Labour MPs.
 
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So you're not satisfied with a 461 to 89 vote ? With 23 (not 50) labor votes against ?

Your premise is also wrong. There wouldn't have been a unanimous vote for Scottish independence, it would have been at best like this one. Most europhile MPs voted for brexit yet you complain. The level of hysteria on the leave side is truly amazing.
 
The vote went 498-114 including 47 labour MPs.
That’s ‘nearly 50’ in my book.

With all those ‘ha ha’s’ I think we all know who is getting hysterical around here. ;)
 
Apparently you're right and the first link I found was wrong.
Doesn't change the fact that I'm not sure what you wanted, when you're angry at a parliament overwhelmingly voting for what you want despite their own personal beliefs.
 
That's Brexit — the winners' unforgiving rage against the world, for winning.

An we're seen nothing yet. Just wait until the actual effects of it becomes clear…

First we need to go through a period of threats (more or less empty) by the British government directed at the rest of the EU of course.
 
It is quite strange to be talking about such a split in the Labour party over Europe when it is normally the Tories that have such a problem.

This brings me to another adjective used to describe the EU (apart from anti-democratic and authoritarian): divisive.

Corbyn recognises his party might well be overrun by UKIP (especially in the two by-elections later this month) and feels he has no option but to get behind the Brexiteers.

Let’s not forget, the EU played a major roll in bringing down three British governments (Thatcher, Major and Cameron). Not content, it is now in the process of helping in the destruction of the Labour party.

No matter how much you hate the Tories or Labour it should our prerogative to bring down governments and to destroy parties, not some club we happen to be a member of.

Now whilst I appreciate that Corbyn is doing his level best to destroy the Labour party himself, it seems that the EU might well be applying the coup de grace. Let’s hope not.

@ Adrienler & Verbose
Has the EU brought down any of your governments by any chance? Or is it just a British (& Greece) thing?
 
Wikipedia on why Thatcher was brought down : "However, by 1990, opposition to Thatcher's policies on local government taxation, her Government's perceived mishandling of the economy (in particular the high interest rates of 15% that eroded her support among home owners and business people), and the divisions opening in the Conservative Party over European integration made her seem increasingly politically vulnerable and her party increasingly divided. A Gallup poll in October 1990 showed that while Thatcher remained personally respected there was overwhelming opposition towards her final initiatives – 83% disapproved of the government's management of the National Health Service, 83% were against water privatisation, and 64% were against the Community Charge, while various polls suggested the party was trailing Labour by between 6 and 11 points. Moreover, the Prime Minister's distaste for "consensus politics" and willingness to override colleagues' opinions, including that of her Cabinet, emboldened the backlash against her when it did occur."
So it wasn't the EU that brought her down. At best you could say that her idea of how the UK should interact with the EU was a part of why she was outed.

Major was brought down by the election of the opposition party, and the EU was only a small part of the election.

Cameron left after a referendum HE organized, and that the EU never wanted.

I really don't understand how any of those amounts to "the EU bringing down the government". Those governments brought themselves down, with no help from the EU (and sometimes with the EU advising them not to do the thing they did to self destruct)
 
No Irish government has fallen because of an argument over the EU as far as I know.

We are used to having regular referendums and EU negotiations happening over extended periods so the no votes to Nice and Lisbon weren't fatal to the government of the day.
 
@ Adrienler & Verbose
Has the EU brought down any of your governments by any chance? Or is it just a British (& Greece) thing?
So it would seem. I.e. no, it hasn't, and Sweden is STILL in the Eurosceptic segment. Just not to the extent that rationality has been put on apparent hold. (But then Sweden got over its empire already in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, and cannot afford too much self-delusion. Sweden polls 52% in favour of continued EU membership, 31% against, 17% uncertain to fight for; 56% oppose a referendum. It's on no political party's agenda, except the Left (former Communist), and then only in principle in some unspecified future).

The vast majority of Swedes think the EU is not working out as currently is. But that's another matter.
 
Cameron left after a referendum HE organized, and that the EU never wanted.

Moreover, there was no general election and the same party stayed in power. If that's "the EU bringing down the government", the EU is clearly far more incompetent than I thought.
 
Adrienler
I said ‘played a major part’ in the bringing down of our governments.

Cameron would not have called the referendum if we weren’t in the EU so he would still be PM as we speak (if we weren’t in the EU).

Some of us of a certain age remember the ‘savaged by a dead sheep’ speech by europhile Geoffrey Howe (the final nail in Thatcher’s coffin).
And also John Major, Maastricht and his ‘bastards’.


But, here you go:

From The Guardian

The downfall of David Cameron: a European tragedy
His predecessors as Conservative prime minister were both ousted by strife over Europe, so he knew the dangers

<snip>

All of that is likely to be forgotten in the European tumult. The warnings from history could not have been clearer. Party divisions over Europe had been the undoing of both Cameron’s predecessors as Conservative prime minister. Margaret Thatcher’s fall in 1990 was triggered by her increasingly anti-European rhetoric and stance. John Major’s long slide to defeat in 1997 was powered by his inability to prevent poisonous divisions over the Maastricht treaty on European integration. Right from the start of his own rise to the top, Cameron knew the dangers.


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/24/david-cameron-downfall-european-tragedy
 
But no one in the EU ever tried to change the UK government. It changed itself because it did something stupid, and in the case you mention because it did something stupid that was linked to the EU. Trying to blame it on the EU is complete nonsense.
 
But no one in the EU ever tried to change the UK government. It changed itself because it did something stupid, and in the case you mention because it did something stupid that was linked to the EU. Trying to blame it on the EU is complete nonsense.

You are perfectly right that the EU never did anything directly or intentionally to effect our governments.
Our problem has been that we have always had a very noisy eurosceptic majority. The 52-48 vote confirms that.
I am not saying: the EU is evil, look what it has done to us – I am saying look what our membership of the EU has done to us. We just don’t belong.
 
If it was always a noisy eurosceptic majority, how come Thatcher's anti-European rhetoric caused her downfall?
 
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