True, but that is very different to the ‘will of the people’, which implies a vast majority of all the people want it…’ it is an important distinction because it suggests a much stronger belief in Brexit than in reality. If we accept that, then folks get lazy in dealing with the issues and as we see, genuine concerns are swatted away with tokenism and cliched soundbites. IF brexiteers are genuine about wanting the country to unite to make the best of it, you dont achieve that by dismissing concerns, you achieve that by acknowledging them and discussing how these can be addressed in a logical and respectful way. The ‘Gove’ like approach where you just dismiss concerns (‘we have had enough of experts’) that is no different ‘shut up - its the will of the people’ and is frankly idiotic, immature, and the language and attitude of those who know they will struggle to find a rational argument to deal with a concern…
The fact that Leave had 38% of the electorate and Remain only had 35% is surely not the point here. No matter how much spin you put on it, no matter how you wrap it up, 38% is not ‘the will of the people’. It is the will of 38% of the people. That surely is an indesputable fact.
as is tarring all people who voted leave with the same brush and calling them thick and racist!!
the 27% of the electorate who didnt vote are, be definition, ambivalent to the result. By giving up their right to vote they are delegating the decision to those who did vote. Therefore the will of the people can only be determined from those who put an x in the box
you forgot Little englanders
I thought we were past that, having agreed that this was not the case?..
Sorry, but it’s disputable.
12m didn’t vote. They either didn’t know or weren’t arsed. Your position is predicated on those people voting Remain.
Not you but you read this daily outside of here.
Also, maybe the Eu and its supporters should recognise and address the issues which could only encourage 35% of the people to support the remain cause.
Or they could just ignore it and carry on regardless.
No dusputing that - I think the majority of the remain camp would be the first to acknowledge the large amount of shit and issues with the EU… but as has been pointed out, we never fully committed, were always looking to veto, get rebates, which meant our voice was never as influential as it could/should have been - or as part of the EU were we not also complicit in what was wrong with it? , yet now we have many brexiteers ignoring that fact, as if it was the all the other nations and not us? Which is it? Were we part of the shit and carry our part in that, or were we not invested enough to influence it… or both?
Either way, when something is broken, you can either take a lead in fixing it, or discard it. NOw I agree there are times when discarding is maybe best, but to make that decison you need to be sure that its right option, yet this country seemed happy to make that decisonon such a mess of mis-information… NO one expects 100% accurate insight, but what was presented to the electorate was apalling, and no one can dispute that…
?
I’ve been listening to Unleashing Demons, by Craig Oliver, Cameron’s right hand man in the EU referendum campaign. It’s interesting, if only as a study of how fucked the Remain campaign was from the start.
Like Tim Shipman’s “All Out War”, a book I recommended last year, it seems that Cameron was simply master to too many objectives. If he’d just gone out to win the referendum, he might have won. The problem is that he held back, leaving the Leave campaign in a position where they could insult Tories without fear of reprisal.
Theresa May is a suspect figure throughout, never fully committing to the cause.
Cameron wanted to win the referendum and leave himself in the position where he could rebuild the Tory Party. His real problem was that he could never have both.
Oliver is also scathing of the BBC and their definition of balance, which they saw as just keeping airtime roughly equal, and not enough time spent being a referee. It’s obviously an entire book full of self-justification.
Interestingly, Alan Johnson, leader of Labour’s Remain campaign, is barely mentioned.
Looks like the Irish (both bits) are going to be problematic to reconcile.
what exactly could be agreed that would be acceptable to both parties? Then yo7 have the arch opportunist up north waiting to pounce on any deal.
The sou5hern Irish position is an interesting one. If for instance they derail any deal over the border issue and we are forced into a WTO situation, surely they would be huge losers as we are a massive export market for them.
on a side note, Arlene Foster looks like cracker in drag
If it weren’t so tragic, it would be funny. Northern Ireland has less people living in it than the Liverpool City Region. The representatives holding the Tories over a barrel and the country to ransom represent one extreme of political opinion there. This is a clusterfuck of epic proportions. What Cameron didn’t plan for, May made worse.
How many MPs does Sinn Fein have?
None, effectively.
Something of a shame in this day and age. Their specific objections to serving in the Westminster Parliament is not wanting to swear allegiance to the Crown.
That would also disqualify a good number of people on this site.
There’s probably a fair bit of Schadenfreude going on over the whole Eire / Norn Ireland thing -
How many centuries has the UK, or rather England shafted / abused the Irish? Boot seems to be on the other foot at the moment. Perhaps England is about to get a taste of its own medicine? Probably a couple of centuries too late…
The Irish are emblemic of a paradox. You are completely correct. Over the centuries, our forces brutalised, either through outright conflict, day to day oppression, or in the case of the potato famine, practiced but deadly indifference on a grand scale, “we” have not been good neighbours.
The Irish are very much an abused partner. They have every right to feel aggrieved at us, collectively, for the sins committed in our name. The outrages of Cromwell and the Black and Tans are ancient history. They cannot legitimately be angry at us for things committed in some cases, hundreds of years ago. The problem is that our Troubles are more recent. The Good Friday Agreement has not reached its twentieth birthday.
If there’s a problem with the Irish, it’s that they haven’t fully comprehended the lesson they should have learned from us. In fact, I think their enmity has us has actually blinded them on several occasions. For the most part, we became emblematic of international abusive relationships, so much so that they couldn’t, and still can’t, see any other threat on the horizon.
Back when “Home Rule” was being proposed, the wag Unionist cry was “Rome rule”. How depressingly right that turned out to be. The Catholic Church treated the entire country as a theocratic Western petri-dish, committing all manner of sins from paedophilia to mass infanticide, establishing disgusting institutions, which essentially practiced slavery with unmarried mothers.
After finally freeing themselves of the yoke of Vatican influence, they’re now relegated to the tool of the European Union, or a honey trap for multinationals looking for a good Western deal. This whole border thing is a sham. We’ve had a common travel area since the establishment of the Free Irish State.
I love the Irish, and if there’s one thing I wish a British politician would do is stand up, give a complete account of our historical cuntery, apologise sincerely and make fucking nice with our neighbours across the Irish Sea.
I’ve been all over these islands, and in my humble opinion, there’s not a fag paper’s worth of difference worth talking about between any of us. The only economic union that makes actual sense to me is one that covers (politically correct drum roll) the Islands of the North Atlantic. They got farms. We got industry. Between us, we’ve a fuckload of international waters.
The obvious solution is right in front of us. Unfortunately, what’s behind us makes that virtually impossible.
I’ve been all over these islands, and in my humble opinion , there’s not a fag paper’s worth of difference worth talking about between any of us. The only economic union that makes actual sense to me is one that covers (politically correct drum roll) the Islands of the North Atlantic. They got farms. We got industry. Between us, we’ve a fuckload of international waters.
Ha ha ha ha ha
@pap claiming to be humble 
You know the actions of the DUP are typically European. I believe that each indivdual state in belgium has to ratify any significant change before the central belgium government can aagreed.
Juncker , Barnier et al should be used to this.
Anyway, this is by far and away not done. We haven’t heard from the Greeks yet. They are experts at lobbing down a demand at the 11th hour in return for there approval. Lets hope they dont have a debt renewal around the time we need their sign off.