Discussed with Mrs Ex’s friends last night, they agree we should get out and the EU council dudes are wankers and understand our vote winning, heh, wining democracy dudes They are happy to stay in for the money at the moment, perhaps the EU could pay us to stay in, could be a soloution there
Not a clue except that being a Pro Remain FB page, I would have expected a high Remain vote. It has swung back a bit but still a remarkably high majority voting to Leave and now nearly 140k votes.
It is quite funny. Perhaps that’s why the government don’t want another vote, in case it comes back as just bloody leave will you (hopefully with a ‘stop acting like children option thrown in).
Divide and rule. Btw, we know you love Trump. How about Putin? Is he another strong leader to be admired or not??
Poor management, mission creep, dishonest dealings with member states, self-defeating protectionist economic strategies and a severe penchant for dogmatism over pragmatism. Off the top of my head. Here for you bud, always. Wow. Just wow. Divide and rule is the EU methodology. Divide up population of member states, categorise people through the use of identity politics, set them at each others' throats. Smash the homogeneity of traditional individual nations and rule over the dregs that are left. The EU is the very essence of "divide and rule". Or do you actually think the EU's strategy is to make us "one European people"? Cos if that is what you believe, I will have to leave you to it, OR. finderman I may be able to salvage, but not someone who truly believes *that*. Hating Clinton and everything she represents, being disgusted by everything that is wrong with the political class - crony capitalism, adventurism, crooked foreign dealings, cynical regime change plus subterfuge on an epically continental scale does not equal "loving Trump". Surely you are bright enough to see that? No? Putin is a thug and a crook and seeks to establish a rival political dynasty in the East in order to defeat the West, or at the very least, contain it. I haven't yet made up my mind whether he is an empire builder or he is just taking steps to create buffers against the EU and the US. He seems opportunistic enough to be inclined to both.
Wow, just wow. The extent to which you hate the eu and the conspiracy theories you appear to believe in just astound me. We can agree on Putin though.
It is possible to admire a strong leader without agreeing to everything they are doing, that's how adults do it. One question to you on putin old rider Ukraine before the split, was taking most of their oil and gas from Russia. When they had issues with paying the bills, Putin cut them some slack because they were ex soviet. Then when the eu started meddling in the Ukraine, Putin, rightly or wrongly and depending what country you are in, said eff you, the credit line has been withdrawn it's now pay as you go. Then when they couldn't pay and the eu went mute, he cut off their gas and oil supplies there and then. What followed was the annexation of Crimea and war in Ukraine which has left it divided. Now, knowing all of this, why would you think so many european countries under fund nato by not meeting the 2% gdp but more importantly, knowing what happened in the Ukraine, why would Germany and Merkel, strike up the Nord stream 2 pipelines at a cost of 11 billion euros just for the pipes, just to buy gas and oil from....Russia and Putin? https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-to-back-nord-stream-2-despite-ukraine-tensions/ https://www.cfr.org/article/nord-stream-2-germany-captive-russian-energy https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...r-europe-german-energy-minister-idUSKCN1MB25V If I were Putin, having the leader and controlling partner of the eu ,Germany, now so dependent on me, then I would consider I have more influence IN the eu than at any other time
Wow. Just wow. Your inability to see stuff right in front of your face is miraculous. You need to go to school. I have no hatred for the EU, I just see that they are catastrophically misguided in the actions and endgame, and that most of the 27 are sleepwalking to ruin. And is it a conspiracy theory when the EU is actually confirming what I am saying about it? Sheesh, you have a touch of the blinkered, religious zealotry about you. finderman will show you where you sit : o D
He won't see what you've written there, noobie. He simply won't recognise what you are saying, even though the sequence of events is demonstrably accurate. Religious zeal renders folks deaf and blind, they genuinely cannot see contra-indications even when they are smacked in the forehead by them. I feel a bit sorry for them, TBF.
There's always the Irish escape: The Common Travel Area is a long-standing arrangement between the UK and Ireland which means Irish citizens can move freely to live, work, and study in the UK on the same basis as UK citizens and vice versa. It is an arrangement that is valued on both islands. Both the Government of Ireland and the UK Government have committed to maintaining the Common Travel Area (CTA) in all circumstances. Under the CTA, Irish and British citizens move freely and reside in either jurisdiction and enjoy associated reciprocal rights and privileges including access to: employment healthcare education social benefits the right to vote in certain elections The CTA pre-dates Irish and UK membership of the EU and is not dependent on it. The CTA is recognised in Protocol 20 to the EU Treaties, which acknowledges that Ireland and the UK may continue to make arrangements between themselves relating to the CTA while fully respecting the free movement and other rights of EU citizens and their dependents. Protocol 20 will continue to apply to Ireland after Brexit. The Irish are rapidly starting to realise that without a signed deal, they are fucked! https://merrionstreet.ie/MerrionStreet/en/News-Room/Releases/No_Deal_Brexit_Contingency_Plan.pdf The EU Brexit team has probably led them into this position with false promises. The Irish leaders will be having some intense discussions in Brussels to maybe push for the required concession to enable May to get her dreadful deal through the vote. I sincerely hope that they remain as inflexible as they've been to-date.
Robert Tombs in Telegraph Hard-line Remainers reject democracy itself in elitist attempt to subvert Brexit The most disturbing aspect of the Brexit debate is not the risk of traffic jams at Dover or possibly having to pay £7 every two years to visit our beloved Continent, but the anger, contempt and loathing that has erupted on both sides. Each blames the other. Yet the two are not equivalent. Brexiteers have insisted – sometimes, no doubt, in outspoken terms – that our political institutions and practices should be respected, and that national sovereignty as understood for centuries should be upheld. As Burke said of the Glorious Revolution, it was done not to overthrow but to defend “laws and liberties”. Hard-line Remainers, in contrast, have been and are willing to push their campaign beyond legitimate politics as previously understood. First, they have encouraged foreign authorities to resist the policy of the UK, and have thereby done much to sabotage that policy. Second, they have attempted to delegitimise legal votes, using arguments that would take us back 150 years and more – essentially, that ordinary people are incapable of taking a major national decision and that they must therefore be overruled. I am a member of a group of academics called Briefings for Brexit, and we have been reflecting on this “Remainer Revolt”. We have noted that civil servants detest disruption. We have suggested that the issue has become one of “identity politics”, with vehement Remainers motivated less by affection for the EU than by contempt for those they think support Brexit – above all the white working class. We have identified Tory Remainers with those who think that all that really matters in politics is delivering material benefits to the masses. Yet I felt something was still missing. The penny dropped when I read the vocal Remainer and former MP Matthew Parris in the latest Spectator. For him, Brexit means “trusting the people”: “I don’t,” he writes. “Never have and never will.” Rejecting the idea of “an unseen bond between parliament and people”, he sees its job as curbing “the instincts of the mob”. The enlightened elite must govern by subterfuge if necessary. How far backwards elitist rejection – principled rejection, if you like – of democracy takes us. Even in the 1830s the prescient political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, aristocrat though he was, acknowledged that ordinary people had a shrewd grasp of things within their experience. Gladstone, our greatest liberal, considered the popular electorate more moral than the elite. Nearly 200 years after Tocqueville, how much wider is popular experience of the world than he could have imagined. Yet a lady in Newnham (Cambridge’s miniature Islington) told me recently that she had only understood Brexit because her Leave-voting gardener and cleaning lady had explained it: it did not occur to her that their views had any value – though her own were, to use an apt term, nebulous. She could not conceive that their experience of working and bringing up families could have given them a knowledge of the world as valid as her view from the ivory tower. If such arrogance had any justification, it would be the surpassing excellence of elitist rule. All those Old Regime states were run by experienced and sophisticated professionals, and all are on the scrapheap of history. What of their present-day successor, the European Union itself, that magnet for Europe’s new post-national aristocracy? Its boldest creation, the euro, condemns millions of Europe’s young to unemployment or forced migration. Its trading policies impoverish poor countries and add to the tide of migrants. Its supra-national power is undermining Europe’s fragile and painfully achieved democracies – the real danger to peace and order. And our own political elite: do they consider themselves so infallible and trusted that they can override a referendum and a general election? By what power could they legitimately do so? The phrase “the sovereignty of parliament” is freely bandied about, but that sovereignty is limited. Moreover, it is the institution of parliament that holds sovereignty, not its confused and disunited members. If they cannot in conscience carry out a programme on which they were elected, their honourable course is to resign, not to break their promises and certainly not to intrigue to undermine them. The Remain-Leave debate is no longer primarily about the EU, if it ever was. It has become, as Parris disarmingly admits, about who governs, and by what right. Not for the first time in our history, we have a relatively small but influential faction, utterly confident of its own intellectual and moral entitlement, which often appears to despise its own country and prefers to pledge its loyalty elsewhere. We saw it with the Puritans and their successors. We saw it with those who acclaimed Stalin’s Russia as a higher civilization. In each case, intellectual stubbornness blocked out reality. Shall we recover from our present political, social and cultural tussles? I believe so. But not through the usual British fudge, in this case presenting a surrender as a compromise. The readiness of the Government to let the EU pick our pocket – who can blame Michel Barnier for obliging? – has produced a “deal” that risks condemning us to years of internal recrimination and wrangling with our neighbours. A second referendum is so patently a ruse, and its leaders so politically discredited, that only the most blinkered or cynical could propose it as a means of reconciliation. The only way left to restore calm now is a “managed no deal”, for which all sides are preparing. Most Remainers are not hard-liners but understandably worry about economic apocalypse. If and when that does not materialise – and with sensible preparations it will not – then our politics will go off the boil, and ex-prime ministers will resume what Dr Johnson called the innocent employment of making money. We are not, after all, in as febrile a state as the United States, France, Italy, Spain or even Germany. The Brexit vote calmed down our politics, eliminating Ukip and strengthening the two main parties. Once carried out it can do so again. Merry Christmas and a Happy 2019! Robert Tombs is the author of ‘The English and Their History’
Agreed, I’d have expected a higher percentage to remain given it’s a remain page. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was a reasonably accurate reflection of the population at large though. Give or take a few percent. Basically it’s showing a large swing. 140k votes have been cast, even if you ramped up the numbers it’s unlikely to change the picture. And all the time in the back of my mind I keep thinking how catastrophic it was predicted to be when we didn’t join the Euro. Now look at it, we’re bloody glad not to be in it. I was a reamainer, without doubt. I mean, we didn’t have to get into this, I still think the whole process is nonsense, in this day and age. However... I respect democracy and moved on to thinking ‘well let’s get on with it then, let’s get it done. Let’s get an agreement and get out’. If we leave without an agreement, which is looking more and more likely and seems to be the will of the populous, there will without doubt be inconveniences (to put it mildly)and job losses. Global businesses will move production to the continent, unless we can make it more attractive for them to stay. Will it be as catastrophic as we’re led to believe, I don’t think so. It is after all the age of globalism and World Wide Web communication. Should we have got into it? No, but this is where we are. Above all, we need a decision.
