Final Say Referendum appears to be gaining support

NDPP wrote:

"After the historic defeat of May's botched Brexit deal, here's why Jeremy Corbyn has tabled a vote of No Confidence. Watch and Share.

https://twitter.com/JennieGenSec/status/1085280466914234373

Whether you are for Brexit or against the idea that Labour can produce a Brexit "that works" is problematic. It seems that there is no consensus among those who want Brexit as to what that should look like.

The idea of a new referendum might be possible.

The problem with Brexit is that the EU is not obliged to offer what those who want Brexit are demanding and the support for Brexit is not high enough to provide any majority for any potential deal or no deal scenario.

In this situation it would seem that Brexit will be toxic to any government, unless there is a new referendum that can transfer the responsibility back to the people.

Put bluntly, there is no majority opinion in the UK to deliver to, and no deal to be had that any majority could accept. I am not saying the Conservatives have done a good job but it seems they may have done a bad job in impossible circumstances.

It is not as if Labour is not itself split between pro-Brexit and pro-EU. While only 3 MPs voting for a Conservative deal doomed to fail may not seem much it actually is significant when you consider that there is a variety of opinions in labour and these three did not vote for anything that was expected to pass and yet still broke with their party to do so. Labour voters are as split as the party is and not evenly either given regional splits.

Labour might prefer to get government after this impass is somehow resolved as Labour does not seem to have a plan to resolve it. It does not seem that Labour is incompetent either: the reason they have no plan is that there is no plan to be had.

My comments are not a judgment on any position here. I don't think you have to agree on positions to realize that there is a deadlock tight enough across the UK that splits regions, demographics, and cleaves parties and ideologies.

I would challenge anyone who thinks they have an easy resolution. A short term victory might lead to longer term political pain. The Conservatives have wrecked the politics of the UK and there is no easy fix available for an incoming party right now.

The least bad option may well be the "devisive and dangerous" people's vote option. As bad as that could be, it may be better than to further blow up the parties in the UK such that there may be no functional government on any issue for some time.

My own bias is that this was predictable: like many deals it is one thing to say it would have been better not to be in it and that it is problematic. It is another thing to track a way out of it without more pain.

This was the reason I was agaisnt the FTA in the first place -- for Canada, I did not believe the assurances that we could get out. We have seen that getting out would be extremely costly. The UK is in a similar situation. The original debate over the EU was one that ended with a deal some thought they could get out of easily. Now they know that was never true.

For those who may not remember: the UK tried to get into the European Community during the 1960s but France prevented this. Once the French President De Gaulle was gone, the opposition from France went with him. The UK joined and had a rethink a few years later and a referendum in 1975 confirmed they were in. Labour wanted to pull out in 1983, but lost the election badly to another Thatcher term. While the UK did not go for monetary union, they came close as they pegged the Pound to the DM using the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. This lasted till 1992 when the Pound was under extreme pressure. Maastricht treaty made the EC the EU in 1993. A referendum party was created to ask for a vote to pull out and in 1997 only got 2.6% of the vote and no members. UKIP was formed in 1993. It had more success in European election but did not do well in UK elections until defections from the Conservatives in 2014. It got 12% in 2015 election. This is the split that caused former PM Cameron to agree to hold the referendum he lost.

All of this is to say that Brexit has been a thing for 25 years growing to what it became but never having more popularity than it did during the referendum when a number of unrealistic representations were made about it. Since that time support for Brexit has come down somewhat but few in parliament have shown a desire to lead a charge to bring the vote back to the people although that looks like the only present option. The referendum has been called worthy of respect even though many statements made at that time have since been contested, finance rules broken, outside manipulation alleged, support has fallen, and the result was never legally binding in the first place.

My sense of this is that Labour will want to take power, try to negotiate to prove it tried, upon failing will move to a vote that will reject it. I do not actually believe that Labour wants Brexit as they know it divides them but they do not want to be seen as abandoning the referendum result without trying to deliver. Or at least being seen to try.

I believe that Labour knows Brexit is doomed and is trying to take power and limit the damage Brexit will have on the party and that is the reason they will take a position of trying to deliver even though they know it is impossible. I suspect that some in the party want to prove that it is impossible before giving up as there is real support among some MPs for a painless Brexit if one can be found. I do not believe that they believe in it anymore. I suspect nobody does now and everyone is going through the motions trying to not have it blow themselves up. The reality is that the population is so split given that the EU, naturally, is not gifting an easy Brexit, that no acceptable deal can exist.

The Leave side said that the UK government would be able to come to an agreement with the EU that would allow the UK to leave the EU under favorable terms to the UK. So far that promise has proven to be a mirage. If the UK government is unable to implement a favorable agreement with the EU, Brexit should be withdrawn or another referendum should be held.

But an election campaign is not like a signed contract, ie. there is no legally enforcable mechanism for what happens if the predictions made by the winning side fail to materialize. In a referendum like this, the voters just basically listen to both sides make self-interested predictions about what will happen, and decide for themselves which set of predictions is most plausible.

That being said, just as there is nothing legally enforcable about a campaign prediction, there is nothing, as far as I know, legally enforcable about the finality of a referendum. In other words, without even worrying about any legal or moral justifications, the British government COULD just say "Well, most people seem to hate the results, even a good chunk of the original Leavers, so we're gonna have another vote to make it all better."  

Now with THAT being said, as free as the British government might be to hold another referendum, I'm not sure what obligations that places on the rest of the EU to respect those results. Or, in the event of the UK being allowed back into the fold, to treat all further dealings with London with anything but a "Shut up and eat your porridge" attitude.

Brexit without an agreement simply reverts the parties to WTO rules which are perfectly feasible and probably considerably less costly than the billions of pounds the bankster-run EU kleptocracy is attempting  to extort from the UK in any 'settlement' package. 

Brexit: Establishment v People

https://youtu.be/FGEMMfGy4jA

"And the loser is..."

VIDEO: The European Union 2019

https://twitter.com/freddie1999/status/1085326532732698629

BREXIT!

NDPP wrote:

Brexit without an agreement simply reverts the parties to WTO rules which are perfectly feasible and probably considerably less costly than the billions of pounds the bankster-run EU kleptocracy is attempting  to extort from the UK in any 'settlement' package. 

Brexit: Establishment v People

https://youtu.be/FGEMMfGy4jA

"And the loser is..."

VIDEO: The European Union 2019

https://twitter.com/freddie1999/status/1085326532732698629

BREXIT!

And the winners should be racists like Nigel Farage?!?!

Why are some people on the left supportive of the Farages and Trumps of this world?

Belief in democracy and that governments should be free to adopt the policy they believe is best for their country's economy, and not be barred from doing so because of "free market" rules, is why Brexit is the right thing.

https://semipartisansam.com/2016/03/03/tony-benn-and-the-left-wing-case-for-brexit/

..there is a drawback to starting a new thread while the old is still relevant. in that you start the debates all over again. it's an exhausting, time consuming process where nothing is learned. a perpetual debate that never resolves. if you don't like the way the debate is going start a new thread. 

..from brexit 2 thread.

..from brexit 2

Picking the lesser evil

quote:

We need to situate this debate in relation to the urgent need to reform British capitalism. Anything less is an evasion. Life in Britain, before June 2016, was not working for millions of people. Capitalism wasn’t delivering. Official measurements showed a recovering economy, reasonable corporate profits, high rates of employment. This didn’t resonate with real life. There had been nearly a decade of stagnation in living standards, unseen since the nineteenth century. There was a crazed financial property market driving young people into a housing crisis. The public sector, especially the NHS, was being driven into the red. Every single NHS trust was reporting deficits and strains. Welfare cuts had driven a surge in suicides. Privatised energy firms were driving up prices. Public-private partnerships were sucking funds out of the public purse. There were serious and growing regional dysfunctions, with large parts of the north of England and Wales effectively shuttered and forgotten about. The financial sector, having crashed the economy, was empowered and largely unreformed.

That’s partly why the Brexit vote happened, but more importantly it is why the Left took control of the Labour Party for the first time in its history. The Labour Left’s agenda is not just a list of nice things: free education, higher wages, renationalisations, redistribution, modernised/green energy, shorter working week, democratised media, public housing, regional development, infrastructural upgrade, and so on.

quote:

So let me ask a seemingly stupid question. Why is the Labour leadership unwilling to leave the EU with “no deal”? Why is that self-evidently not on the cards? Why is any deal better than no deal? You’ll say, the economic consequences. The financial shock. British banks, acting as a clearing house for EU transactions, would reel into chaos. There would be a loss of investment, layoffs, shortages, price rises. Much of that is plausible, I think, with all due allowances for Project Fear. But it can’t be the whole answer. Left-wing economists like Larry Elliott will claim that these consequences are overstated and could be managed with sufficient state action. At any rate, the British economy tied to central Europe is not a particularly good or just economy. One couldn’t reform this without some sort of rupture. And one can see Corbyn and McDonnell, at a different stage in their career, agreeing.

I think the underlying issue is political. To make a hard Brexit work for the Left, not the apologists for Singapore-style capitalism, would not just be a matter of emergency programmes. It would require a fundamental renegotiation of the terms on which the economy, society and state operate. It would require a far-reaching radicalisation, a social rupture. Were there some sort of Oxi-style mass movement, precipitated by a direct confrontation with the European Union over a popular policy agenda, one can see how a hard Brexit could be a red Brexit. That would be an audacious experiment. But it is not where we are. Most of the direct conflicts that Labour-voters in this country have with the state are with the Home Office and the defence and security establishments. Most of our potential conflicts with the EU are, because long-range and mediated, rarely experienced as such. And, of course, since popular belief in the potential of a radical, expansive public sector is as yet underdeveloped, there isn’t yet a significant base for the kind of radical policies that would be necessary to make hard Brexit work for the poor, for migrants, for public sector workers, and so on.

quote:

This much isn’t a condemnation of Labour’s leadership. It is, rather, a status report on the development and cohesion of the British Left. But the situation is such that the Labour leadership now has to go beyond its six tests and set out in detail what it wants out of the negotiations and what it is and is not prepared to give up. And the grassroots Left has to start thinking about how, in the medium-to-long-term, it is going to do better than that.

As expected, Conservatives survive confidence vote.  Vote was 325-306.

josh wrote:

Belief in democracy and that governments should be free to adopt the policy they believe is best for their country's economy, and not be barred from doing so because of "free market" rules, is why Brexit is the right thing.

It seems to me that a country can be social democratic within the EU.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

JKR wrote:

josh wrote:

Belief in democracy and that governments should be free to adopt the policy they believe is best for their country's economy, and not be barred from doing so because of "free market" rules, is why Brexit is the right thing.

It seems to me that a country can be social democratic within the EU.

Some people in Greece and Spain would likely want to debate that idea with you.

...and some people in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria, would agree that a country can be social democratic within the EU.

..the important thing is the corbyn labour agenda. corbyn himself has said that the eu could not prevent the implementation of the labour platform.

Embracing Brexit would be a historic mistake for the left

quote:

The role of the state in the economy

The central critique of Lexiters is that the EU is a neoliberal project whose rules on state aid prevent and active and expansive role for the state in the economy. But anyone who thinks the EU prevents the state from having a role in the economy ought to meet Denmark, Finland and France. In each of these countries, according to OECD data, government spending was 55 per cent or more of national income. That means more of the economy was in the government sector than the state sector. This Conservative government’s plans are for government spending to be 38 per cent of national income in the 2020s. In Denmark and Sweden, the difference in income between the top and bottom deciles is fivefold while in France and Germany it is sevenfold. In contrast, the income levels of the top decile in the UK is 11 times that of the bottom (and 14 times in the US). On state intervention and equality, other European states are examples to us, not us to them. To think otherwise is to embrace the unpleasant combination of arrogance and ignorance that has long characterised English exceptionalism. It is the left’s mirror to the right’s ‘Empire 2.0’.

Moreover, building societies of equality, solidarity, and liberty has not been the task of a single government. It has taken our European neighbours 70 years of hard work, investment and political commitment to get there—a collective project across generations. It is magical thinking to imagine that a single government of any persuasion could match those achievements in a single term. It is pure fiction to claim that any modern economy could be restructured to such a degree in such a short period. For left and right, Brexit is the magical solution that fails to recognise that the problems we face are deep and structural and largely of our own making.

quote:

Who decides?

Lexiters rightly point out that European institutions and decision-making aren’t neutral and objective in the way that some liberals assume them to be. This is especially true on state aid, where the European Commission makes decisions on a case-by-case basis. But that is all the more reason for the UK to remain a member of the EU and to shape its decision-making. As one of the ‘big three’ member states, the UK has historically had enough political muscle to ensure decisions work to its favour. And with this country set to be Europe’s most populous state by 2050, Britain’s power is set to grow rather than diminish. And in just the same way, promoting Britain’s departure from the EU is not a neutral act: Brexit is primarily a project of the radical right, and leftists ought to think very carefully when they find themselves on the same side as Tommy Robinson and Jacob Rees-Mogg.  

If the European project has taken a neoliberal turn, it’s precisely because the British government has had its hand on the steering wheel. It has been the UK government that has been most rigorous in the application of state aid rules at home and most vigorous in its insistence that they are applied to others. The proposition that the only proper role for state intervention is in the case of market failure has its intellectual and political home in HM Treasury, the citadel of neoliberalism, rather than in Brussels. Every other EU state sees government support for business as routine industrial policy. And even if the neoliberal turn were substantially rather than anecdotally true, just as the left does not conclude that the election of a Conservative government means we should dismantle the state, a Europe that is heading in the wrong direction does not mean that we should exit the EU. This is why Varoufakis is right that the left should seek to mend the European project, not to end it.

quote:

Collective action

Some Lexiters breezily dismiss international efforts to tackle global challenges. They argue that issues such as climate change or conflict-induced migration will be solved by technology not by international agreements, and worse, that the very act of internationalism obscures the failure to address the issues. But this is an argument against collective action per se: it is akin to believing that we shouldn’t worry about the NHS because new drug discoveries will cure disease. In the modern economy, the policy framework has a huge impact on the direction of research and development investment and the pace of change in society. In the short run, new technologies can be cost additive—an approach that moves all economies in the same direction allows innovation to flourish because it prevents undercutting. Yes, it can be a painful process to try and improve conditions across the entire European continent at once. It is the incredibly difficult politics of raising everyone up. But the alternative of state-to-state competition rather than solidarity produces a race to the bottom and social dumping.

The common thread that connects the challenges of the 21st century is power. As recent IMF research has shown, corporate power has risen across all sectors in advanced economies over recent decade. Corporate mark-ups—a measure of corporate power—are up by nearly 40 per cent. Nearly half of that increase has occurred in the last 5 years. The extraordinary power of technology firms in particular show that this is the new arena for the contest between the many and the few. Competition regulators in the United States and the UK have been weak and craven. The only challenge to the rising power of corporation such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google has come from the European Commission. In the 21st century, only the EU has shown itself to be an effective bulwark to the rising power of global corporations. Whereas Lexiters see the EU as an instrument of neoliberalism, it may well be our last best hope to resist it.

WWWTT wrote:

I’m pissed off babblers take an interest in this imperialist country! Now, it’s no fault of the UK citizens but really, think about it!

This country has a blood sucking parasite draining the life out of it(the royal family) but they’re more concerned about the EU!

If you’re body is covered in leaches, any sane person will tell you that you’re going to have to get rid of them or suffer lots. But for some reason beyond my grasp of comprehension, the UK citizens are happy with their disconfigured parasite as if it was some kind of fashion accessory. 

But oh no Brussels, those assholes in Brussels, we got to get them! Let’s stick it to them. 

For someone who is pissed off that Babblers are taking an interest in this imperialist country you sure seem to be very interested in the UK!

epaulo13 wrote:

..the important thing is the corbyn labour agenda. corbyn himself has said that the eu could not prevent the implementation of the labour platform.

Except that EU rules bar member states from nationalizing anything, and Corbyn campaigned on re-nationalizing the UK's railway system.

Brexit: Goodbye United Kingdom, Hello Dis-United Kingdom

https://on.rt.com/9mex

"...What was once the United Kingdom is now the dis-United Kingdom, with those previously mentioned national and regional differences informing its peoples' identities and worldview over the identity of class to an extent previously unseen.

The illusion  that Brexit is actually relevant to the needs of those who've seen their lives devoured by the beast of neoliberalism and bludgeoned by austerity must soon give way to the unvarnished truth that the UK as we know it, is past its sell-by date.

'A reactionary,' the great postwar Labour figure Nye Bevan once said, 'is a man walking backwards with his face to the future.' Surveying a political class presently engaged in ripping itself apart over Brexit, who could argue otherwise."

Increasingly, the Canadian political class and those all too easily led by their noses after them, can be observed walking backwards in a very similar manner. Best not to follow...

Labour Leavers’ claims that EU blocks state takeovers are rejected by experts

quote:

Labour Leave backer Kelvin Hopkins, arguing against Labour policy and his leader’s official position in favour of staying close to the single market, has called Brexit a “necessary condition for a left government to be able to do what I think a left government should do”, which is to put the state back in the driving seat of economic recovery.

But a legal assessment of Labour’s 26 specific economic proposals by Andrea Biondi, director of the Centre of European Law at King’s College London, found that the effect of remaining inside the EU “would likely be negligible”. Writing with Andy Tarrant, a former Labour adviser on Europe, in the quarterly social democratic journal Renewal, he said: “Particular concern has been expressed by supporters of ‘Lexit’ concerning state aid rules preventing those parts of the Labour’s current programme which favour nationalisation.

“This is not the case; nor would Lexit in any event be a mechanism for avoiding state aid laws, which are requirements of World Trade Organisation membership and form part of the EU’s negotiating brief for any trade agreement with the UK.”

The EU has a policy that prevents a national railway monopoly, but this is to make sure a pan-European freight network thrives, which is something Labour supporters would probably back. Most European countries have a nationalised railway system.

..things immediately change once a corbyn labour gov comes into play. from #83:

quote:

If the European project has taken a neoliberal turn, it’s precisely because the British government has had its hand on the steering wheel. It has been the UK government that has been most rigorous in the application of state aid rules at home and most vigorous in its insistence that they are applied to others. The proposition that the only proper role for state intervention is in the case of market failure has its intellectual and political home in HM Treasury, the citadel of neoliberalism, rather than in Brussels.

..even if your right josh, neoliberalism is the state of the world. in or out of the eu makes little difference. brexit itself is a neoliberal project..from the get go. some argue that labour can make a better brexit but there is no evidence that it can. it is only speculation. the debate for gb is to choose. but don't be thinking there aren't clear or legitimate arguments to stay with the eu.

..no one is throwing up their hands as you well know. it deciding how to move forward. which is the best vehical to use. and over and over again i come back to the corbyn labour platform. brexit is both a distraction and threat to that platform. in any case we watch it unfold.

JKR wrote:

WWWTT wrote:

I’m pissed off babblers take an interest in this imperialist country! Now, it’s no fault of the UK citizens but really, think about it!

This country has a blood sucking parasite draining the life out of it(the royal family) but they’re more concerned about the EU!

If you’re body is covered in leaches, any sane person will tell you that you’re going to have to get rid of them or suffer lots. But for some reason beyond my grasp of comprehension, the UK citizens are happy with their disconfigured parasite as if it was some kind of fashion accessory. 

But oh no Brussels, those assholes in Brussels, we got to get them! Let’s stick it to them. 

For someone who is pissed off that Babblers are taking an interest in this imperialist country you sure seem to be very interested in the UK!

I don't think making 2-3 comments qualify as interest? Just pointing out the hiddeous parasite on the necks of the UK citizens, the royal family.

Sounds reasonable Michael Moriarity. Up until I pull a coin out of my pocket and I see the queens face on it.  The queen of England is the official head of state for Canada. So therefore, the royal family is also a parasite onto Canadians.