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For a start the people who actually rule - the MPs in parliament - are predominantly remainers. When it comes to business leaders, they're as divided as everyon
by simonh 6y ago
For a start the people who actually rule - the MPs in parliament - are predominantly remainers. When it comes to business leaders, they're as divided as everyone else. A lot of businesses do extensive trade with the EU and stand to lose. The finance industry particularly risks losing a lot of business, although there are some sectors of it that might gain it's mostly through trading on short term volatility. They'll cash out before they're stuck in the same boat as everyone else.
The basic premise of the "it's an establishment stitch up" argument is that Britain will be weaker and poorer, but the establishment will end up with a much, much bigger slice of the smaller pie such that they gain overall. It's not clear to me how that's supposed to work though. How is this pie-grab supposed to work as the pie itself shrinks? Some people might manage to pull it off, but the whole establishment class as a group?
Anyway, this whole premise flies in the face of who we know voted overwhelmingly for Brexit - ordinary British voters, many of them up north and from working backgrounds - even as the actual political parties, majority of MPs and most business leaders were arguing against it. The evidence for an establishment stitch up rests on a few very specific data points, like the fact that Jacob Reese Mog and some of Nigel Farage's hedge fund friends have already and will continue to do quite well out of it. They're hardly "The Establishment" as a whole though. They're just some of the people I was talking about trading on volatility, and hardly representative of the financial sector as a whole that is getting screwed over by losing passporting.
- arethuza 6y ago"the MPs in parliament - are predominantly remainers." The Conservatives have a majority and are there any Remainers left in that party - I thought most of them had been purged before the last election?
- robin_reala 6y agoKen Clarke isn’t going anywhere.
- Nursie 6y agoYou know he's retired, right? Interesting guy, my opinion of him changed (for the better) when I found out he presented a regular Jazz show on the radio.
- robin_reala 6y agoWow, OK, I’ve been out of the UK for too long.
- Nursie 6y agoYeah, didn't stand for re-election last time around. He was the father of the house anyway, and at the age of 79, with the conservative party ripping the UK out of the EU I think he must have decided he was too old for this nonsense and didn't want to be part of it anyway.
- simonh 6y agoWe're talking about how the decision was made. At this point most of them have resigned themselves to the fact it's happened and we need to get on with it, as have I frankly.
- petercooper 6y agoMany flipped to the "winning" side. My MP still has posts on her blog about how ardently pro EU she was and how she believed staying in the EU was the best idea. Not long after the referendum and May coming in, she was fully behind Brexit and ready to do whatever it takes. A lot of Tory MPs will just go with the prevailing wind on everything and this is also how they stay in power because being progressive is not a vote winner in a broadly (small c) conservative country.
- M2Ys4U 6y ago> Many flipped to the "winning" side. And the ones that didn't were purged
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoMost of the "business" leaders who where pro brexit where outliers or ecentric's (Wetherspoons guy) and of course wealthy media tycoons. The vast majority of the city and other business leaders where asleep at the wheel - what they should have done is had a quiet word with Harry Peirce (MI5) at the club about these dangerous subversives.
- Silhouette 6y agoMost of the "business" leaders who where pro brexit where outliers or ecentric's (Wetherspoons guy) and of course wealthy media tycoons. I have always wondered how true this is. It is certainly a common claim, but anecdotally I know several small business owners who I am fairly sure voted Leave because they didn't agree with EU-style regulation such as the subject of today's discussion. And this is in the Cambridge area, which overall was literally the most pro-Remain place in the entire country. Most of those people did not talk much about their views on Brexit in public because of the peer pressure, which I think was unfortunate. Even if few minds might have been changed in either direction, it would have been better for the issues to have been properly debated.
- pjc50 6y ago> the people who actually rule - the MPs in parliament - are predominantly remainers This is false, because every time it was presented for a vote Leave won. If the majority were Remain, Brexit would necessarily not have happened. As for the alleged ordinary voters, what did they want out of it and what are they actually getting out of it?
- gmueckl 6y agoThat's also not the whole story. The House of Commons was completely divided on the issue to the point where the Remainers couldn't find a common position and any proposal going roughly in their direction was shot down by the other parties in their own camp because it somehow didn't represent their exact idea of staying close to the EU. It was so bad that the House had long phases where literally everything that might have meant the slightest bit of progress was consistently and summarily voted down. If this divide hadn't happened, Leave would have had a much harder time. They did play very dirty procedural tricks on the House of Commons as it was to try and force things their way.
- hayd 6y agoThere's a big difference between having voted to remain vs want to overturn the result of the referendum. Luckily most of those who actually were in the latter camp were kicked out by their electorates in 2019.