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> nobody who actually lived in London wanted Brexit to happen 40% of the London vote did[1] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/912939/brexit-major-cities

> nobody who actually lived in London wanted Brexit to happen 40% of the London vote did[1] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/912939/brexit-major-cities-vote-share/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/912939/brexit-major-citi...

jokethrowaway 6y ago
It wasn't politically correct to vote Brexit, so nobody mentioned it and just voted. I couldn't vote as a European in UK but I would have voted Leave. I'd take a business / economic hit over having a political end economic entity rule my country, especially one which contains countries that are ticking bombs with no hope to recover. No amount of austerity will fix Greece's and Italy's economies and there are no plans of reducing their gigantic governments. Varoufakis has been speaking for ages and nobody is listening.
- spzb 6y ago
  > I couldn't vote as a European in UK but I would have voted Leave. Thank God for that, as you seem to not understand any of the issues involved. Greece's problems relate to the Euro which the UK had opted out of. And the notion that some central EU interloper has invaded us and taken over our legislature is just fantasy put about by Little Englander and disaster capitalists.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    It’s fascinating how many of the Leave arguments, as much as they exist, either boil down to not understanding how the EU works, or blaming the EU for mistakes that the UK government made.
    - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
      https://youtu.be/rvYuoWyk8iU https://youtu.be/rvYuoWyk8iU : almost 40 years ago, Sir Humphrey explains the EEC(EU)..from Yes, Minister.
    - anonymoushen 6y ago
      For 6 weeks in 2018 the EU ran a survey asking its citzens whether they want to the bi-annual clock change to stop. (Do you see it? I didn't). 4.6M (of the total population of around 448M) participated. With the exception of Germany (3.19%), Austria (2.94%) and Luxembourg (1.78%) all other countries had less than 1% of their population canvassed. The EU concludes that 84% of its population want Europe to stop changing the clocks[1]. The Commission proposed, the Parliament voted[2] (did you see that in any MSP election material? I didn't) and when the Council of Minsters approves, it will become law. That is the sausage-making of the EU laws: canvass 1% of the population who you'll know will support your argument and claim your democratic mandate. [1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_5302 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47704345 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47704345
      - ashtonkem 6y ago
        You're describing polling. The EU polling its citizens before passing a law is bad how?
  - jokethrowaway 6y ago
    I agree that, by not having adopted the Euro, the UK was outside of a lot of the mess. I still think the structural problems of weaker EU countries will cause more problems than benefits in the future for key nets contributors (like the UK was). The Covid 750B€ fund, aptly named Next Generation EU (repayments will start in 2028), is another example of a worrying redistributive trend that makes me want to not be in the EU.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, will you be able to remain in the UK, or will you be forced out after Brexit is complete?
  - jokethrowaway 6y ago
    I will be able to remain (as everyone else who moved to the UK before 2021). As skilled migrant, getting a work visa is not very hard from any country to be fair (albeit it costs money to you or to your employer and it's therefore likely to have a reflection on your salary). EDIT: Incidentally, I'm not planning to stay in the UK for much longer, but that's just because I'm moving to a country with lower taxes, not out of concerns for Brexit.
- ivraatiems 6y ago
  > It wasn't politically correct to vote Brexit, so nobody mentioned it and just voted. I'm sure this is part of what I experienced, but we asked a lot of people and there wasn't much noncommittal "not sures" or anything. It was a lot of flat "no ways." > I'd take a business / economic hit over having a political end economic entity rule my country, especially one which contains countries that are ticking bombs with no hope to recover. I've heard this line of reasoning before, and it's never quite made sense to me. The EU is an enormous area populated mostly with economies that are doing relatively fine. They're not all going to be fine all the time. Britain hasn't always been economically super healthy - the 1970s, when it joined the EU, were a pretty poor period in its economic history - and it still got the benefit of being in the EU. I don't want my state to secede from the Union because other states elsewhere have problems I don't have (though obviously plenty of people have felt that way throughout history). It just feels like a lot of "I help mine and only mine" over "we all help each other," where "mine" means "people who are in the same geographical region as me, roughly speaking, with some exceptions." Who we decide to care about or not all feels really arbitrary, just as borders between countries are pretty arbitrary. I'm not saying you personally are selfish, or that British people are selfish, but it does feel like a deeply self-serving and frankly misguided impulse. Britain and so much of the world are as peaceful and prosperous as they are today is because of a safe, peaceful global environment based on mutual assistance. (That's not to say things haven't gotten worse in the last ~10 years - just that for as bad as things are in this downturn now, they were so much worse in the not-too-distant past.)
  - jokethrowaway 6y ago
    I really appreciate your answer! I think it's easy to frame this as a "selfishness" issue - and I'm sure a lot of people who voted for Brexit just wanted to get rid of immigrants. That's not my case, as I'm an immigrant myself (and son of immigrants in my mother country). I think we shouldn't have centralised form of governments because the more you move the problem away and try to generalise it, the more you end up with solutions that upset a minority of your consumers. If we take a democratically elected government that follow through with their promises, you're not upsetting a majority of your consumers, but you will likely upset a minority. On top of this, by centralising problem solving, you create a machine that has an excuse to be fed with everyone's money. And you can be sure a percentage of that, will be spent just on the inefficiency of the machine, which derives from not having competition and market forces driving down the price. The best solution to make everyone happy is then to have a society where any combination of rules is possible. People can naturally cluster based on the rules they like and make some compromises based on that. I don't think we should have anyone imposing laws or taxing someone else. We can get by with services provided by private companies. Private Health Care, private Protection Services, private Courts, private contracts between individuals. Voluntarily provided donations to aid those who have no money. If you put my anarcho-capitalist society on one extreme and the Soviet Union on the other, you can see that having a government per country is somewhere in the middle - and, IMHO, it's bad enough; having a single Union for several countries where the rules are all the same and decided by democracy, means moving more towards the Soviet Union model, where even more people are unhappy. If the problem is having import taxes and bureaucracy between countries, just get rid of them, you don't need to shift power far away to solve that. If the problem is that moving across countries is too complicated, just get rid of restriction, you don't need to shift power far away to solve that. I'm not happy with the world we have, and I know many people who believe in the European project are not happy as well. Still, I think the solution is LESS government, not MORE.

jokethrowaway 6y ago

It wasn't politically correct to vote Brexit, so nobody mentioned it and just voted. I couldn't vote as a European in UK but I would have voted Leave. I'd take a business / economic hit over having a political end economic entity rule my country, especially one which contains countries that are ticking bombs with no hope to recover. No amount of austerity will fix Greece's and Italy's economies and there are no plans of reducing their gigantic governments. Varoufakis has been speaking for ages and nobody is listening.

spzb 6y ago
> I couldn't vote as a European in UK but I would have voted Leave. Thank God for that, as you seem to not understand any of the issues involved. Greece's problems relate to the Euro which the UK had opted out of. And the notion that some central EU interloper has invaded us and taken over our legislature is just fantasy put about by Little Englander and disaster capitalists.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  It’s fascinating how many of the Leave arguments, as much as they exist, either boil down to not understanding how the EU works, or blaming the EU for mistakes that the UK government made.
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    https://youtu.be/rvYuoWyk8iU https://youtu.be/rvYuoWyk8iU : almost 40 years ago, Sir Humphrey explains the EEC(EU)..from Yes, Minister.
  - anonymoushen 6y ago
    For 6 weeks in 2018 the EU ran a survey asking its citzens whether they want to the bi-annual clock change to stop. (Do you see it? I didn't). 4.6M (of the total population of around 448M) participated. With the exception of Germany (3.19%), Austria (2.94%) and Luxembourg (1.78%) all other countries had less than 1% of their population canvassed. The EU concludes that 84% of its population want Europe to stop changing the clocks[1]. The Commission proposed, the Parliament voted[2] (did you see that in any MSP election material? I didn't) and when the Council of Minsters approves, it will become law. That is the sausage-making of the EU laws: canvass 1% of the population who you'll know will support your argument and claim your democratic mandate. [1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_5302 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47704345 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47704345
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      You're describing polling. The EU polling its citizens before passing a law is bad how?
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  I agree that, by not having adopted the Euro, the UK was outside of a lot of the mess. I still think the structural problems of weaker EU countries will cause more problems than benefits in the future for key nets contributors (like the UK was). The Covid 750B€ fund, aptly named Next Generation EU (repayments will start in 2028), is another example of a worrying redistributive trend that makes me want to not be in the EU.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Out of curiosity, will you be able to remain in the UK, or will you be forced out after Brexit is complete?
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  I will be able to remain (as everyone else who moved to the UK before 2021). As skilled migrant, getting a work visa is not very hard from any country to be fair (albeit it costs money to you or to your employer and it's therefore likely to have a reflection on your salary). EDIT: Incidentally, I'm not planning to stay in the UK for much longer, but that's just because I'm moving to a country with lower taxes, not out of concerns for Brexit.
ivraatiems 6y ago
> It wasn't politically correct to vote Brexit, so nobody mentioned it and just voted. I'm sure this is part of what I experienced, but we asked a lot of people and there wasn't much noncommittal "not sures" or anything. It was a lot of flat "no ways." > I'd take a business / economic hit over having a political end economic entity rule my country, especially one which contains countries that are ticking bombs with no hope to recover. I've heard this line of reasoning before, and it's never quite made sense to me. The EU is an enormous area populated mostly with economies that are doing relatively fine. They're not all going to be fine all the time. Britain hasn't always been economically super healthy - the 1970s, when it joined the EU, were a pretty poor period in its economic history - and it still got the benefit of being in the EU. I don't want my state to secede from the Union because other states elsewhere have problems I don't have (though obviously plenty of people have felt that way throughout history). It just feels like a lot of "I help mine and only mine" over "we all help each other," where "mine" means "people who are in the same geographical region as me, roughly speaking, with some exceptions." Who we decide to care about or not all feels really arbitrary, just as borders between countries are pretty arbitrary. I'm not saying you personally are selfish, or that British people are selfish, but it does feel like a deeply self-serving and frankly misguided impulse. Britain and so much of the world are as peaceful and prosperous as they are today is because of a safe, peaceful global environment based on mutual assistance. (That's not to say things haven't gotten worse in the last ~10 years - just that for as bad as things are in this downturn now, they were so much worse in the not-too-distant past.)
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  I really appreciate your answer! I think it's easy to frame this as a "selfishness" issue - and I'm sure a lot of people who voted for Brexit just wanted to get rid of immigrants. That's not my case, as I'm an immigrant myself (and son of immigrants in my mother country). I think we shouldn't have centralised form of governments because the more you move the problem away and try to generalise it, the more you end up with solutions that upset a minority of your consumers. If we take a democratically elected government that follow through with their promises, you're not upsetting a majority of your consumers, but you will likely upset a minority. On top of this, by centralising problem solving, you create a machine that has an excuse to be fed with everyone's money. And you can be sure a percentage of that, will be spent just on the inefficiency of the machine, which derives from not having competition and market forces driving down the price. The best solution to make everyone happy is then to have a society where any combination of rules is possible. People can naturally cluster based on the rules they like and make some compromises based on that. I don't think we should have anyone imposing laws or taxing someone else. We can get by with services provided by private companies. Private Health Care, private Protection Services, private Courts, private contracts between individuals. Voluntarily provided donations to aid those who have no money. If you put my anarcho-capitalist society on one extreme and the Soviet Union on the other, you can see that having a government per country is somewhere in the middle - and, IMHO, it's bad enough; having a single Union for several countries where the rules are all the same and decided by democracy, means moving more towards the Soviet Union model, where even more people are unhappy. If the problem is having import taxes and bureaucracy between countries, just get rid of them, you don't need to shift power far away to solve that. If the problem is that moving across countries is too complicated, just get rid of restriction, you don't need to shift power far away to solve that. I'm not happy with the world we have, and I know many people who believe in the European project are not happy as well. Still, I think the solution is LESS government, not MORE.