I just watched his talk. He lost. He fought that he can avoid crack in his party and anti-eu members will be pleased if he make this move - referendum. Then he thought he will get what he wants from EU and then all citizens will vote remain. He was wrong on all this points. He is the biggest looser in this situation and he really knows it.
Except he isn't, really -- he loses his political position, but he and his family won't be existentially affected by what's going to happen, as opposed to probably tens of millions of people all around Europe.
A lot of hate for him came from his inherited wealth. He had no idea how austerity was hitting people. Everyone I know who works has given up going on holiday, buying cars, buying nice food. We're all sick of it. There is plenty of money in the UK and watching a rich PM tell us to tighten our belts.... psh.
Really!? Everyone I know who works is very pleased with how the economy has recovered, many friends under 30 have bought a house (without parental help), many are nearing 40% tax bracket and my Facebook feed is full of people going on holiday. Not sure which UK you are living in but the one I'm in is pretty nice - well it was, until this vote.
And before you say I'm in some kind of elite I run a small factory in the north east of England and even my lower paid members of staff go on holiday once a year.
> many friends under 30 have bought a house (without parental help)
Wow really? Do you live up north? Or have rich friends?
I mean I think the UK economy is in pretty good shape (especially compared to the rest of the world), but let's not pretend that houses are remotely affordable.
Property market here in the north is nowhere as crazy as in London. Which is why the constant moans about it in national media are extremely grating for us (it's actually hard to flog houses, over here).
You can buy a house in the North for 100-200k without any problems, and saving 10k for a deposit is not exactly difficult if you have a job. I'm in the same situation as OP, live in UK, everyone I know is quite well off and the economy is doing very well for us(or was until today).
I think I'm one of those rare people who lurk on hackernews, but who's friends are normal working types. Nurses, janitors, teachers, teaching assistants, plumbers, electricians, carpetenters, fisher men. None of these people are on your facebook feed, or hackernews comment section. These are the people who have had enough of all this crap. We're not stupid. We're just poor.
I am honestly struggling to see how people believe leaving will make us richer (as has been the rhetoric from the leave campaign) - taxes will quite likely not change, that money will almost certainly not filter back into the pockets of the workers, and will be used to prop up other sectors of the economy that will suffer as a result of this, or to just pay down other debt (which whilst a benefit, still wont help most individuals over their working lives)...
I imagine that a lot of leave voters hoped that this will make them richer in the short term (though reality seems to be sinking in). I think the more compelling argument is one that is certainly felt, but harder to put into words - the British want protectionism back.
If you're a factory worker, you might not care that the EU makes the UK richer through free trade. That the EU benefits you overall doesn't matter - you would prefer a system where the pound is weaker, and imports/exports are tough, if it means that the manufacturing needs of British workers are served by British citizens like you. Having a manufacturing job, even if it is less lucrative, is more appealing than having no job and watching the rest of the country enjoy a slightly higher quality of life. Open borders mean you let in foreign doctors and scientists; it also means that you let in cab drivers and factory workers, in greater numbers. The British are pushing back against this. Unskilled workers would rather have a dose of protectionism than the possibility of a vacation in Spain.
For what it's worth, I think that the leave vote will not bring the kind of protectionism the British want.
Well you sure aren't going to get any richer now. This is going to have an unpleasant impact on the UK economy (not as bad as the gloom and doom of this morning's news, but
bad) and I can assure you that the pain is not going to be felt much at the top end. Get ready for your grocery bill to go up by 20% in the next few weeks and for a massive wave of redundancies.
At least something is happening. We didn't do it to get rich, we did it to stop the status quo, the endless rut of being so fucking skint all the time.
Putting petrol and groceries on the credit card is getting boring now. How many maxed out credit cards does one family need?
Rich folk keep saying "Why? Why? Why?" and we say "Why not?"
we did it to stop the status quo, the endless rut of being so fucking skint all the time.
As is (sadly) customary with major elections and campaign promises, I think you'll feel cheated again. There certainly are (were) good arguments to be made for leaving (the inability of the EU to fundamentally change its structure, the EP giving all of Europe the big finger when it happily elected Juncker as president instead of a reformist, the ideal of self-determination); but economics isn't one of those.
The vote wasn't to 'stop the status quo'. It was to leave the EU. There's no reason to think that will make you any better off.
"I'm fed up with being poor. I'm going to show those big-wigs that we've had enough! By voting to... leave the EU. Yeah. I'm like, 15% sure it has something to do with the EU."
Let me put it this way - I make 25k/year. My partner makes 30k. We can afford a house here in the north without having to save up for the deposit for a decade first. Are our salaries extraordinary? Are we rich? 1% of this country? Or maybe I just live in some bubble?
The UK where waiting times for A&E are at the longest they've been for years; where waiting times for NHS consultant-led treatment are at the longest they've been since they introduced maximum wait times; where there are no in-patient MH beds for adults (seriously, just last week all adult inpatient MH beds in the country were occupied. (This significantly increases risk of suicide)); where the rates of suicide are increasing (after many years of decline) (and we know that economic decline increases rates of suicide).
That's nothing to do with the EU. That's years of neglect, lack of investment and poor management by a series of UK governments both Tory and Labour.
If we want a good health service and good schools then we need to invest. There problem is the only way that is going to happen is if we borrow the money (Labour tried that - no thanks), or you raise taxes. Raising taxes political suicide, which no party wants to do, especially the Tories. Then it needs to actually be managed wisely with a clear plan of operational action for a longer period than five years between each national election. These things take time, and each time we swap leadership they throw out the plan and start from scratch. It's like a constant series of pivots in no particular direction.
We live in a world where a few percent GDP drop is a recession. It does not mean _everyone_ suddenly lacks money to buy a plane ticket. But when a few percent means tens of millions of people, I don't really think we should base our (economic and other kind of) policies on some dude's Facebook stream.
There are working people who will just get laid off, because they have been hired to - let's say - coordinate a "shared service center" enlargement, but now that won't happen, because the company will instead freeze every expansive project in the UK due to the suddenly increased uncertainty, and that guy (gal) will probably won't go on holiday, though he (she) will have a lot of free time to like the holiday posts of others on Facebook.
The EU's common agricultural policy was actively favoring and subsidizing large EU based multinationals and blocking entry into the market by small scale farmers and producers in developing countries. Seems to me like a huge new market called "the UK" just opened up for genuine and fair trade. So overall, this is probably good for hundreds of millions of people around the world.
The policies don't have to change. It's not like the UK severs all the connections with everyone. Multinationals will stay and ensure the new policies and trade treaties allow them to continue.
Just what.
Poland pretty much had only small scale farmers (Apart from some post-communist behemoths that were gangrenic) when it joined the EU. Our farmers have never been better or stronger, 15 years ago going to a countryside was like time travel to 1950. Now the countryside actually is a place to live. Same in Austria or Italy. The cooperatives there function properly. What are you on about?
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the agricultural policy of the European Union. It implements a system of agricultural subsidies and other programmes.
It has been repeatedly criticised for its cost (€57.8 billion in 2014)[1] and its environmental and humanitarian effects, including raising food prices and stalling development in poorer countries by preventing them from exporting food to the EU.
Not without trade agreements that may take years to negotiate.
Also, UK farmers get over half their income from EU subsidies. So many of them are going to go bankrupt unless they get bailed out/supported by the government.
There is nobody left to pick it. We are about to throw out ask the Romanians and Bulgarians who do that hard graft, because no Brit will do the hard work for little money.
As someone from Ireland I'm really not sure I could be bothered dealing with all the shit that could entail. Would prefer if they just went independent and joined the EU as a separate country.
Unfortunately Northern Ireland doesn't have the economy or infrastructure to realistically function as an independent state at this point. You never know about the future, but it's likely not on the table any time soon.
Why does it need to be large to function independently? There are a bunch of far smaller nations in the EU/Europe: Luxembourg, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, etc. If Northern Ireland became independent, it could just join the EU (regular Ireland is also an EU member), so they wouldn't have to maintain their own currency at least, and would benefit from the free trade. If Luxembourg can function as it is, I don't see why Northern Ireland can't do the same.
This may be offset by the fact that Ireland will be the English speaking country in the EU in which multinational corporations can maintain a base of operations.
> With emerging talk of Irish unification and Scottish independence after the referendum, some legacy he is going to leave behind.
As much as Sinn Fein might like to think they could exploit the pro-EU majority to push Irish unification, it seems to me that NI still has a unionist majority, and that those who are in the pro-EU/unionist overlap are predominantly going to favor staying with the UK instead of Ireland at the cost of the EU over joining the EU at the cost of unification with Ireland.
Never going to happen. The Britain transfers about GBP £11 Billion a year into Northern Ireland, to keep it afloat. The Republic could never afford that and the people in the Republic would never vote for it. Never mind the Unionist community up North.
This is ridiculous. London and Scotland overwhelmingly voted to stay. I have no love for labour after the alternate vote referendum but anyone who blames this on labour is clearly trying to rewrite history for scumbag David Cameron.
I'm not sure you can characterise Scotland as Labour anymore. Largest party in the Scottish parliament are SNP, second largest Conservative, Labour are a measly third place.
As much as London is Labour supporting it's only a very small part of their supporter base, their traditional heartlands are Wales and the North of the UK, both of which overwhelmingly voted to leave.
I'm no defender of Cameron, but the Labour party in the UK have absolutely failed – both recently and during their last period in government – to engage with long-term problems of identity, especially in the north of England. A huge number of traditionally Labour-voting areas have opted to leave the EU, and the party have to bear some responsibility for that.
As a Swiss this argument kind of baffles me. Governing according to the people's will should be the norm in a democracy, not some kind of strategic play.
The clear implication is that £350m per week is available, and that it will be spent on the NHS.
£350m is the gross figure, it ignores the > £200m per week we get back.
There is not going to be any increase in NHS funding. Anyone who voted leave because they thought there would be an increase in NHS funding hasn't been paying attention - the NHS has seen deep cuts in recent years and those are only going to get worse after Brexit.
Exactly. If the majority want out then we should come out - and I say that as a Remain voter. Really interested to see what the future has in store. Thankfully us tech people should weather it better than most.
