O/T DDay for Brexit..well sort of...

[wendun]

Doubt it.

Anyway when it counted it was only 48%.

I don't think it's so straightforward. 48% voted for the status quo. All of them knew what that was. 52% voted for change. But what change? As there are Leavers who want a WTO No Deal, Leavers who want WAB, Leavers who want a Customs Union and Leavers who want various oprions based on Canada, Norway and God knows what you can't just lump them all in. The proof of that is the Leavers themselves: large sections of Leavers are calling other Leavers "traitors" and worse. The idea that there is a form of Brexit that satisfies the disparate elements in the 52% is rubbish. Whatever form Brexit takes it's pretty obvious that 48% plus probably around 20-25% ("betrayed" Leavers wanting a different form of Brexit) are going to be against it. How is that democratic? Why cannot the people be allowed a say on the ACTUAL form of Brexit finally decided upon?

[ragingpup]

I don't think it's so straightforward. 48% voted for the status quo. All of them knew what that was. 52% voted for change. But what change? As there are Leavers who want a WTO No Deal, Leavers who want WAB, Leavers who want a Customs Union and Leavers who want various oprions based on Canada, Norway and God knows what you can't just lump them all in. The proof of that is the Leavers themselves: large sections of Leavers are calling other Leavers "traitors" and worse. The idea that there is a form of Brexit that satisfies the disparate elements in the 52% is rubbish. Whatever form Brexit takes it's pretty obvious that 48% plus probably around 20-25% ("betrayed" Leavers wanting a different form of Brexit) are going to be against it. How is that democratic? Why cannot the people be allowed a say on the ACTUAL form of Brexit finally decided upon?

Spot on Monty. Summarises the whole mess - extremes on both Leave and Remain refusing to compromise and it looks like it will run for years. Having exhausted the cross party talks, I have to concede that Kerr was right earlier in the thread and would now go along with the compromise to get it through, with at least some concessions to Labour's concerns (albeit quite tokenistic ones). I can't see any other way other than going back to a new referendum but with more explicit terms on what Leave actually means. But how can we even get to this without parliament passing that motion to happen and is that even possible? There isn't a majority for anything, so I guess the only way is to find out what option (hard, May deal, remain) has the most support (in parliament but I guess most democratic would be the country as otherwise it would be seen as a stitch up). But even if that happened, we'd have set a precedent that referendums can be overturned, so the battle would still go on I imagine. So I think the most sensible thing would be May's compromise. At least then we would have left = diffusing all but the hard brexiteers in future agitating, and giving some concessions to the remainers. Very unlikely to happen though.

What a mess.

[wendun]

raging, "What a mess" sums it up perfectly. The sheer incompetence of the whole political class is staggering; hardly any had an inkling of what was involved and the Irish dimension was given little attention. Where this will end I have no idea.

[Exiletyke]

I think it would be a good idea if you read the WA rp all 500+ pages

[great_fire]

The WA is designed to be so bad that the British people will want to rejoin the EU, isn't that obvious?

[Exiletyke]

This sums it up

"Whitehall’s Mad Hatters have made sure Leaving the EU is worse than Remaining

The WA is so full of absurdities that neither Leavers nor Remainers could possibly accept it. Remainers immediately called it the “worst of both worlds”. So can we make sense of this? We can if we look through Lewis Carroll’s eyes.

The WA has been drafted with the support of pro-Remain civil servants using the Mad Hatter strategy of putting forward proposals that are completely barking – leaving the EU, while still having to obey all EU laws, but without a vote or veto; claiming this is the only way of having “frictionless trade”, when WTO rules mandate this very thing; then claiming it is the only way of avoiding a hard border in Ireland, when the UK, Ireland and the EU have all said that they will not impose a hard border; and finally maintaining the notional freedom to negotiate trade deals with other countries, but on terms that no other country could possibly accept.

The clear purpose of this strategy is for the population to begin thinking that, if this is what Brexit means, we’d be better off remaining in the EU."



And I believe this was the end game all along which I am on record as saying

[Exiletyke]

The WA is designed to be so bad that the British people will want to rejoin the EU, isn't that obvious?

Yes it is
Well it's convinced rp

[wendun]

I think it would be a good idea if you read the WA rp all 500+ pages

Exile, I really enjoyed that Blue Tango you posted for me. However, I'm a little hurt by the implication here: if you read my recent paper in the Journal of Socialist Studies, "Brexit, a revolution in one country?" you would see that I have read WAB not once but several times.

[wendun]

The WA is designed to be so bad that the British people will want to rejoin the EU, isn't that obvious?

I'm not quite sure why you believe there is a clique of civil servants desperate that the UK remains in the EU. There isn't. I should know as I was one. The Civil Service has no preference either way. That is not how it works. The "absurdity" at the heart of the Brexit experiment has nothing to do with Whitehall Mad Hatters but accurately reflects the absurdity of Brexit itself. It cannot be achieved without serious political , social and economic consequences.

[great_fire]

I'm not quite sure why you believe there is a clique of civil servants desperate that the UK remains in the EU. There isn't. I should know as I was one. The Civil Service has no preference either way. That is not how it works. The "absurdity" at the heart of the Brexit experiment has nothing to do with Whitehall Mad Hatters but accurately reflects the absurdity of Brexit itself. It cannot be achieved without serious political , social and economic consequences.

The EU is run by bureaucrats, why wouldn't British bureaucrats prefer that to a democracy with the pesky electorate getting in the way?

Many of them aspire to be bureaucrats in Brussels as well.

Olly Robbins is a bureaucrat and he's desperate to stay in the EU.

Mark Sedwill is a bureaucrat and he's desperate to stay in the EU.