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You are missing the point, Brexit was sold as a "Britania would rule the waves, Singapore on Thames selling into Europe, rah rah" to the public. However that's

by fenk85 6y ago

You are missing the point, Brexit was sold as a "Britania would rule the waves, Singapore on Thames selling into Europe, rah rah" to the public. However that's not what happened as it was never realistic or possible, and now the 46% of UK goods exports that go to EU27 are in a very tough spot, thousands of businesses and jobs at risk, direct and indirect. Not to say anything of services which are of course not included in tarrif free trade deal UK now has. anyways purpose of Brexit was not "sovereignity" or whatever other lies were told, the purpose was to distract from decades of mismanagement by political elites in what is a fundamentally undemoratic system (Monarchy with hereditary head of state, vs presidential republic, upper house made of lords vs elected senators, lower house composed of Etonian elites, no constitution, centralisation of power at expense of Scotland, Wales, N. England, well basically everywhere outside the M25)

LatteLazy 6y ago
Brexit was sold to different people as different things. You're right for some people but you're missing a much bigger voter block: the lazy and jealous. A shit tonne of brits haven't done much with their lives. They've just sat and grumbled that their job doesn't pay enough (while refusing to work harder or change employer or get a qualification). At the same time, for the last 30 years anyone who worked hard, invested, got skills, started businesses etc has been rewarded. The first group are really upset they're being left out. That's why you get all this talk about mysterious "elites". The first group voted for brexit to fuck with people just trying to get on. They're actually very pleased that those companies are struggling and their workers are suffering. The first group would never have started a small business exporting to the EU. They'd have stayed in the pub moaning over stale lager. This is result (and many more to come) is exactly what many brexiteers wanted and voted for: a fuck you for trying hard.
- agd 6y ago
  To suggest that inequality is due to people being lazy is not supported by the facts. Opportunity is not equally distributed and there’s a reason many people felt left behind.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    I didn't say inequality is due to people being lazy. It's not. Nor did I say equality was equally distributed. It's not. I just said a significant number of people CHOOSE (chose) not to take whatever opportunities they were presented with. Now they're upset because the world where you sit in 1 job for 50 year, get a pay rise every year, don't have to worry about anything, and get a nice house and to retire early is long dead. Some of the most deprived places in the country voted to stay in (London) because they choose opportunity. Plenty of well off rural areas voted out because people their don't like others succeeding. That's the great irony here. The people with the least opportunity and the ones at the worst part of the inequality problem mostly want opportunity. It's the ones further up the curve that are standing on the hose. Those who insist they're middle class but are really just workers who inherited a bit of cash or got a free council house.
    - radicalbyte 6y ago
      The North of England has suffered from generational lack of investment. If you follow the UK elections, there was a big fall of the "red wall", which put the Tories in power. That "red wall" are all areas which have been totally abandoned by the UK Government for the last 30+ years. For these people, the "elites" are people in the South East: people in Greater London who have benefited from enormous investment - the investment which should have been spread out more fairly. Because these areas have seen a lack of investment, they are cheap to live in. They also see a lot of Polish/Romanian/Hungarian immigrants who are doing seasonal / tough work (because it's cheap). So if you're going to get **d anyway, why not take some of those smug **s down with you? * Even TheGuardian are a great example of this horrible LONDON focus.
      - LatteLazy 6y ago
        So now we're right done here in the depths of grievance politics. That's where I thought we'd get to. That's what I was talking about above. Let me surprise you: I don't really disagree about the North getting a rough time. I'd argue about some definitions and whether that excuses crashing the rest of the country in revenge. But whatever. Here is the thing though: why do you think that makes you special? I am in Dagenham in East London. We were dock workers. Then the docks shut or went containerized and electric so there were no jobs and a lot of poverty. Westminster, less than 50 miles away did nothing for us. Ford came and opened a plant here because we were willing to work. They became the major employer. Then they shut. Central government again did nothing for us. So we went up into London, got jobs in insurance. We had to start at the bottom. We had to spend a lot of money and time on overpriced trains. We had to retrain, office work is nothing like assembly lines. Tell me I'm wrong. When a load of that offshored, we jumped to finance. Right now, they're building crossrail near me. The first investment we've had in a century. I don't doubt the North has had it hard. But so had the South. I agree Westminster is a bunch of toffs with no interest in the lives of real people. But I'm as much of a real person as you. The only difference here is we know no White Knight is coming to save us. Given the last 1000 years of history, I don't know why the North keeps thinking that the likes of Boris and Farage are "on their side". It's especially amazing to me that you call me and elite (first person in my family to go to uni, born and raised in one of Europe's most deprived areas, no inheritance coming for me) and not them? Your comment on immigrants underlines my point: immigrants getting on and working hard is exactly the sort of thing people who don't want to get on and work hard find maddening. Are you now ready to go to those fields and do that work? Or will you continue waiting for Westminster to save you? I've been quite blunt with you here. Its not because I don't like you. It's not because I think I'll win something. Its because this is where we are. Whether I like it or not, we're in this together now. The North, like everyone else, will need to get on and go. If you don't think the North got the investment it needed before, it won't get it now, so there is no point waiting. Its go time. This is the horrible truth that Farage and Bojo will never speak aloud. They'll keep lying and telling you it's the Europeans, the immigrants, the elite, the educated, the benefit claimants, and whoever else. Now tell me I'm wrong.
- mrlonglong 6y ago
  I'm pretty angry with the first group for doing this to the country. I've had to get an EU passport as it was vital to keeping my domains as a consequence. I shall keep fighting until the day the UK reconnects.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    Agreed. I think we're both in for a long "winter" until brexit voters basically die out.
    - iamacyborg 6y ago
      There are plenty of Brexit voters in their 20's and 30's. You'll be waiting a long time.
      - LatteLazy 6y ago
        They're really aren't. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36616028 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36616028 A nice fat majoring of people under 45 voted Remain. Edit: and that was when the bore happened, so that's not basically everyone under 50...
        Semaphor 6y ago
        https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/06/27/how-britain-voted https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/0... A majority, sure. But that’s still 29% (or 27% with your source) of 18-24 year olds. That is certainly what I’d call "plenty"
    - mrlonglong 6y ago
      Scotland is quite likely to leave the UK and join the EU. Hoping that happens within my life time
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  > A shit tonne of brits haven't done much with their lives. They've just sat and grumbled that their job doesn't pay enough (while refusing to work harder or change employer or get a qualification). This is neither fair nor accurate, and is the same kind of thinking that people attributed to Trump supporters in 2016. The reality is there are whole areas of the country that feel unsupported by their government. Jobs they held have been offshored as a result of globalalisation and deepening income inequality ensures that they receive smaller and smaller shares of the pie, despite worker productivity vastly increasing.
  - pwm 6y ago
    Do you think brexit will solve this?
    - iamacyborg 6y ago
      Not at all. I think politicians exploited the plight of workers.
- Tarq0n 6y ago
  You should read up on Dutch disease and how that might affect a country with a large financial industry and a highly regarded currency.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    Oh, I know only too well! If only we'd stayed in, we could have joined the euro and fixed that issue. As it is, places will have to compete or we'll need a second currency?
- brigandish 6y ago
  Where is the evidence for these two groups and the behaviour you describe? Anecdotally, my experience is quite dissimilar, so I'd be interested to know.
- foolmeonce 6y ago
  I don't really see that. Working very hard in the UK pays very little, less than most second cities in the US, and it generally requires living in or near London with one of the highest costs in the world. The general problem with the UK is that it has the expectations of being treated according to its legacy. It expects the world to keep throwing away money on financial services in London, because?! As part of the EU, if they switched to Euro, that could have made a little sense. I think the US also spent the last two decades going into that legacy rut where it expects it can sell high priced information while becoming increasingly disconnected from the actual places information is used. The US is quite lucky to have had some industrial restart thanks to greater automation.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    People buy financial services because they're really really useful and important. I don't know why some don't see that. But no one is paying bankers trillions just because of our legacy. I agree the uk and London are high cost. For the uk that won't change. For London, it's high cost and high wage. Maybe when the wages disappear the costs will fall. But I don't think that's what people want. At least not what they claim to want.
    - foolmeonce 6y ago
      Finance is important, a foreign national paying a premium for the inconvenience of services being conducted in London is a very old signal that is approaching worthless. It probably made a lot more sense when language barrier issues required a native English speaking intermediary. The wages in the UK are embarrassing, I think your reference must be within the UK and maybe part of Europe? There is simply limited capacity and a lot of old legacy things competing to occupy London. Plenty of east coast US cities are similar. Not enough going on, but insufficient housing stock. Rents take too much of the profits and are driven up by older businesses owning things they could not afford to rent at the market price on their income.
      - LatteLazy 6y ago
        I'm not following your point on finance, surely people paying a premium (either cash or inconvenience) for London shows London is either the only supplier or a very high quality one? Otherwise why not buy local?
cyberpunk 6y ago
Meh, the Monarchy has no power it’s just a ceremonial position, and as for the lords yes the process of becoming one is not great (it is no longer hereditary however) but it actually is a bit useful these days and many in the upper house are genuinely experts on some aspects of policy and do provide some valuable input. I don’t think you can really compare with the American system where you elect a de-facto king every 4 years...
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  Yeah I really don’t understand the American comparison in this case. The monarch is unelected but basically powerless while in America the president wields the kinds of powers that the U.K. has removed from the monarch since the US was founded. And while the House of Lords suffers from a lot of issues (eg nominating party donors or stuffing the house,) they are far more constitutionally limited than the us senate which means we don’t get the kind of gridlock and inability to pass legislation that the US has.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    I don't think they're arguing against monarchy because of the ceremonial ruler. The problem seems to lie within the Prime Minister who essentially replaced the king. It's no longer hereditary, but the position seems to have very absolute powers and just a few checks/balances. That level of power is impossible to gather in European republics, they don't view the prime minister as a ruler, it's merely a manager of ministers who are each focused on managing one aspect of the state, also with very limited power, and each minister has a non-political counterpart who's actually in charge of running the ministry itself according to law.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  How is the US president a king? Without the legislature, they can’t get any laws passed, and not even appoint people to important positions in the government. Both of the last 2 presidents were severely handicapped once they lost their party’s control of the legislature 2 years after being elected.
JeanMarcS 6y ago
Let's not forget artists that are also hit roughtly by Brexit. A good text by Fish "How Brexit Has Destroyed UK Artists’ Ability To Tour In The EU" [0] [0] https://www.facebook.com/derek.dick/posts/10157827728953587 https://www.facebook.com/derek.dick/posts/10157827728953587
matthewheath 6y ago
> no constitution We don't have a codified constitution, but we still have one; it's just made up of various written laws and unwritten things like conventions. I agree that the system isn't particularly democratic though: the executive (Government) can pretty much do what it wants when it has a majority in the Commons and the relevant promises in its manifesto (to bypass the Salisbury Convention in the Lords).
bassman9000 6y ago
Monarchy is a red herring. You'll find monarchies between top adjusted HDI and other indicators (like democracy quality) indexes. Monarchy tends also to be cheaper than presidential offices, in countries with president/prime minister (UK may be an exception). edit: grammar
tremon 6y ago
anyways purpose of Brexit was not "sovereignity" or whatever other lies were told, the purpose was to distract from decades of mismanagement by political elites No, that's missing the point too. The purpose of Brexit was very much sovereignty for the political elites. The entire point of Brexit was that the policital elites were ceding too much power to Brussels and they explicitly campaigned to "take back control". The Monarchy doesn't enter into it, they'd ceded their political power to the elites centuries ago.

by fenk85 6y ago

LatteLazy 6y ago

Brexit was sold to different people as different things. You're right for some people but you're missing a much bigger voter block: the lazy and jealous. A shit tonne of brits haven't done much with their lives. They've just sat and grumbled that their job doesn't pay enough (while refusing to work harder or change employer or get a qualification). At the same time, for the last 30 years anyone who worked hard, invested, got skills, started businesses etc has been rewarded. The first group are really upset they're being left out. That's why you get all this talk about mysterious "elites". The first group voted for brexit to fuck with people just trying to get on. They're actually very pleased that those companies are struggling and their workers are suffering. The first group would never have started a small business exporting to the EU. They'd have stayed in the pub moaning over stale lager. This is result (and many more to come) is exactly what many brexiteers wanted and voted for: a fuck you for trying hard.

agd 6y ago
To suggest that inequality is due to people being lazy is not supported by the facts. Opportunity is not equally distributed and there’s a reason many people felt left behind.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  I didn't say inequality is due to people being lazy. It's not. Nor did I say equality was equally distributed. It's not. I just said a significant number of people CHOOSE (chose) not to take whatever opportunities they were presented with. Now they're upset because the world where you sit in 1 job for 50 year, get a pay rise every year, don't have to worry about anything, and get a nice house and to retire early is long dead. Some of the most deprived places in the country voted to stay in (London) because they choose opportunity. Plenty of well off rural areas voted out because people their don't like others succeeding. That's the great irony here. The people with the least opportunity and the ones at the worst part of the inequality problem mostly want opportunity. It's the ones further up the curve that are standing on the hose. Those who insist they're middle class but are really just workers who inherited a bit of cash or got a free council house.
  - radicalbyte 6y ago
    The North of England has suffered from generational lack of investment. If you follow the UK elections, there was a big fall of the "red wall", which put the Tories in power. That "red wall" are all areas which have been totally abandoned by the UK Government for the last 30+ years. For these people, the "elites" are people in the South East: people in Greater London who have benefited from enormous investment - the investment which should have been spread out more fairly. Because these areas have seen a lack of investment, they are cheap to live in. They also see a lot of Polish/Romanian/Hungarian immigrants who are doing seasonal / tough work (because it's cheap). So if you're going to get **d anyway, why not take some of those smug **s down with you? * Even TheGuardian are a great example of this horrible LONDON focus.
    - LatteLazy 6y ago
      So now we're right done here in the depths of grievance politics. That's where I thought we'd get to. That's what I was talking about above. Let me surprise you: I don't really disagree about the North getting a rough time. I'd argue about some definitions and whether that excuses crashing the rest of the country in revenge. But whatever. Here is the thing though: why do you think that makes you special? I am in Dagenham in East London. We were dock workers. Then the docks shut or went containerized and electric so there were no jobs and a lot of poverty. Westminster, less than 50 miles away did nothing for us. Ford came and opened a plant here because we were willing to work. They became the major employer. Then they shut. Central government again did nothing for us. So we went up into London, got jobs in insurance. We had to start at the bottom. We had to spend a lot of money and time on overpriced trains. We had to retrain, office work is nothing like assembly lines. Tell me I'm wrong. When a load of that offshored, we jumped to finance. Right now, they're building crossrail near me. The first investment we've had in a century. I don't doubt the North has had it hard. But so had the South. I agree Westminster is a bunch of toffs with no interest in the lives of real people. But I'm as much of a real person as you. The only difference here is we know no White Knight is coming to save us. Given the last 1000 years of history, I don't know why the North keeps thinking that the likes of Boris and Farage are "on their side". It's especially amazing to me that you call me and elite (first person in my family to go to uni, born and raised in one of Europe's most deprived areas, no inheritance coming for me) and not them? Your comment on immigrants underlines my point: immigrants getting on and working hard is exactly the sort of thing people who don't want to get on and work hard find maddening. Are you now ready to go to those fields and do that work? Or will you continue waiting for Westminster to save you? I've been quite blunt with you here. Its not because I don't like you. It's not because I think I'll win something. Its because this is where we are. Whether I like it or not, we're in this together now. The North, like everyone else, will need to get on and go. If you don't think the North got the investment it needed before, it won't get it now, so there is no point waiting. Its go time. This is the horrible truth that Farage and Bojo will never speak aloud. They'll keep lying and telling you it's the Europeans, the immigrants, the elite, the educated, the benefit claimants, and whoever else. Now tell me I'm wrong.
mrlonglong 6y ago
I'm pretty angry with the first group for doing this to the country. I've had to get an EU passport as it was vital to keeping my domains as a consequence. I shall keep fighting until the day the UK reconnects.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  Agreed. I think we're both in for a long "winter" until brexit voters basically die out.
  - iamacyborg 6y ago
    There are plenty of Brexit voters in their 20's and 30's. You'll be waiting a long time.
    - LatteLazy 6y ago
      They're really aren't. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36616028 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36616028 A nice fat majoring of people under 45 voted Remain. Edit: and that was when the bore happened, so that's not basically everyone under 50...
      - Semaphor 6y ago
        https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/06/27/how-britain-voted https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/0... A majority, sure. But that’s still 29% (or 27% with your source) of 18-24 year olds. That is certainly what I’d call "plenty"
  - mrlonglong 6y ago
    Scotland is quite likely to leave the UK and join the EU. Hoping that happens within my life time
iamacyborg 6y ago
> A shit tonne of brits haven't done much with their lives. They've just sat and grumbled that their job doesn't pay enough (while refusing to work harder or change employer or get a qualification). This is neither fair nor accurate, and is the same kind of thinking that people attributed to Trump supporters in 2016. The reality is there are whole areas of the country that feel unsupported by their government. Jobs they held have been offshored as a result of globalalisation and deepening income inequality ensures that they receive smaller and smaller shares of the pie, despite worker productivity vastly increasing.
- pwm 6y ago
  Do you think brexit will solve this?
  - iamacyborg 6y ago
    Not at all. I think politicians exploited the plight of workers.
Tarq0n 6y ago
You should read up on Dutch disease and how that might affect a country with a large financial industry and a highly regarded currency.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  Oh, I know only too well! If only we'd stayed in, we could have joined the euro and fixed that issue. As it is, places will have to compete or we'll need a second currency?
brigandish 6y ago
Where is the evidence for these two groups and the behaviour you describe? Anecdotally, my experience is quite dissimilar, so I'd be interested to know.
foolmeonce 6y ago
I don't really see that. Working very hard in the UK pays very little, less than most second cities in the US, and it generally requires living in or near London with one of the highest costs in the world. The general problem with the UK is that it has the expectations of being treated according to its legacy. It expects the world to keep throwing away money on financial services in London, because?! As part of the EU, if they switched to Euro, that could have made a little sense. I think the US also spent the last two decades going into that legacy rut where it expects it can sell high priced information while becoming increasingly disconnected from the actual places information is used. The US is quite lucky to have had some industrial restart thanks to greater automation.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  People buy financial services because they're really really useful and important. I don't know why some don't see that. But no one is paying bankers trillions just because of our legacy. I agree the uk and London are high cost. For the uk that won't change. For London, it's high cost and high wage. Maybe when the wages disappear the costs will fall. But I don't think that's what people want. At least not what they claim to want.
  - foolmeonce 6y ago
    Finance is important, a foreign national paying a premium for the inconvenience of services being conducted in London is a very old signal that is approaching worthless. It probably made a lot more sense when language barrier issues required a native English speaking intermediary. The wages in the UK are embarrassing, I think your reference must be within the UK and maybe part of Europe? There is simply limited capacity and a lot of old legacy things competing to occupy London. Plenty of east coast US cities are similar. Not enough going on, but insufficient housing stock. Rents take too much of the profits and are driven up by older businesses owning things they could not afford to rent at the market price on their income.
    - LatteLazy 6y ago
      I'm not following your point on finance, surely people paying a premium (either cash or inconvenience) for London shows London is either the only supplier or a very high quality one? Otherwise why not buy local?

cyberpunk 6y ago

Meh, the Monarchy has no power it’s just a ceremonial position, and as for the lords yes the process of becoming one is not great (it is no longer hereditary however) but it actually is a bit useful these days and many in the upper house are genuinely experts on some aspects of policy and do provide some valuable input. I don’t think you can really compare with the American system where you elect a de-facto king every 4 years...

dan-robertson 6y ago
Yeah I really don’t understand the American comparison in this case. The monarch is unelected but basically powerless while in America the president wields the kinds of powers that the U.K. has removed from the monarch since the US was founded. And while the House of Lords suffers from a lot of issues (eg nominating party donors or stuffing the house,) they are far more constitutionally limited than the us senate which means we don’t get the kind of gridlock and inability to pass legislation that the US has.
- emteycz 6y ago
  I don't think they're arguing against monarchy because of the ceremonial ruler. The problem seems to lie within the Prime Minister who essentially replaced the king. It's no longer hereditary, but the position seems to have very absolute powers and just a few checks/balances. That level of power is impossible to gather in European republics, they don't view the prime minister as a ruler, it's merely a manager of ministers who are each focused on managing one aspect of the state, also with very limited power, and each minister has a non-political counterpart who's actually in charge of running the ministry itself according to law.
lotsofpulp 6y ago
How is the US president a king? Without the legislature, they can’t get any laws passed, and not even appoint people to important positions in the government. Both of the last 2 presidents were severely handicapped once they lost their party’s control of the legislature 2 years after being elected.

JeanMarcS 6y ago

Let's not forget artists that are also hit roughtly by Brexit. A good text by Fish "How Brexit Has Destroyed UK Artists’ Ability To Tour In The EU" [0] [0] https://www.facebook.com/derek.dick/posts/10157827728953587 https://www.facebook.com/derek.dick/posts/10157827728953587

matthewheath 6y ago

> no constitution We don't have a codified constitution, but we still have one; it's just made up of various written laws and unwritten things like conventions. I agree that the system isn't particularly democratic though: the executive (Government) can pretty much do what it wants when it has a majority in the Commons and the relevant promises in its manifesto (to bypass the Salisbury Convention in the Lords).

bassman9000 6y ago

Monarchy is a red herring. You'll find monarchies between top adjusted HDI and other indicators (like democracy quality) indexes. Monarchy tends also to be cheaper than presidential offices, in countries with president/prime minister (UK may be an exception). edit: grammar

tremon 6y ago

anyways purpose of Brexit was not "sovereignity" or whatever other lies were told, the purpose was to distract from decades of mismanagement by political elites No, that's missing the point too. The purpose of Brexit was very much sovereignty for the political elites. The entire point of Brexit was that the policital elites were ceding too much power to Brussels and they explicitly campaigned to "take back control". The Monarchy doesn't enter into it, they'd ceded their political power to the elites centuries ago.