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The Brexit Thread

All these “rebel” MPs who will not vote for the deal,
Who apparently hate the EU and want to leave
If they don’t vote for the deal today they must know
There is no way we will leave with a no deal, all that will happen is a long long extension and we get tied to the eu for an indefinite amount of time.

Or these so called rebels maybe they actually want to stay in the eu really and they just lies to us.
 
All these “rebel” MPs who will not vote for the deal,
Who apparently hate the EU and want to leave
If they don’t vote for the deal today they must know
There is no way we will leave with a no deal, all that will happen is a long long extension and we get tied to the eu for an indefinite amount of time.

That's the general consensus amongst a notable amount of hardline Brexiteers. Jacob Rees-Mogg, for example, has been vocally against May's deal (which effectively turns the UK into a vassal state), but because Parliament seems adamantly against leaving on WTO terms May's option (which may one day allow the UK to be fully independent, maybe) looks to be the only thing that'll allow Brexit - even if it's a frankly awful idea which leaves us worse off than if we were to remain. Mogg even admitted as such in the past.

I try not to talk about Brexit outside of my own political sphere. I find it an incredibly toxic subject at times, whether it's calls from Brexiteers that anyone who is against Brexit must be a traitor. Or Remainers who hold Brexiteers in such utter contempt that they don't even hide it, referring to them as 'idiot racists' and that their democratic will deserves to be ignored.

As such, I'm not going to discuss what my actual thoughts on Brexit are. I feel my positions are nuanced, but this will be lost on the most hardline people I know. To clarify, however, I'm completely against a second referendum, because I feel it'll make what has become a toxic discourse much worse. Each side will take the worst aspects of both and amplify it. And the division it'll cause will last a very long time.
 
I don't think I've ever met a Brexiteer in person.
You have, unless you live in a box. They're not 'Brexiteers' who you can tell by certain traits, theyre just people who have voted differently to you for whatever reason.

The media displays everything with a certain over-simplified, insinuated slant and framework, that's probably the only reason you don't think youve ever met "a Brexiteer". Ignoring the awful gutter tabloids of course which yes, have a much more contrived but more obvious agenda flipped the other way around.


no Brexiteer has a good reason, except a vague dislike of foreigners, which is really sad in my opinion.
But this is simply not true. Yes, there are unfortuantely people out there who actually do hold bigoted beliefs, based on assumptions and baseless judgement. But to conflate that with the serious issues surrounding the EU debate is just yet another assumption about a 'group' of people. Do you really think HALF the country only voted for "a vague dislike of foreigners"?

By the way, this is probably one of the best and most informative debates (on both sides) about Brexit I've seen. On a theme park forum no less!! Haha
 
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Do you really think HALF the country only voted for "a vague dislike of foreigners"?

Not all Brexiters are racist, but all racists are Brexiters?

This is about the only discussion I've seen where Leavers have actually supported their reasonings... I don't think it's unfair to ask why people have voted a particular way, especially over something which has major affects over the country, but what has annoyed a lot of people is the lack of transparency you get with some Leavers...

There's also questions about their own beliefs... My cousin for example is a massive UKIP fan, yet our family is born of Irish and Maltese immigrants? Other half's family is Italian and Turkish, and one family member's reasoning was to "get rid of the Muslims", which is ridiculous to say when your own father is one...

In regards to Ian's life pre-EU, the problem is that the rest of the world has moved on... I do worry that our position in the world has been held up so high purely due to our membership, as many of those outside of it use the UK as a base due to the English speaking nature... Wouldn't be surprised if a few companies move to Ireland because of this, to avoid the tariffs etc. Amongst those that have already moved to the continent or are in process of consideration...

The problem always stemmed by the binary choice people were given, with no real understanding to the process that a leave vote would result in, or what it would mean... See the likes of Cornwall turning round to the Government and asking if they would fulfil the EU grant they received... A lot of cases we can say the turkeys were voting for Christmas, and we won't see the REAL effects (one of the worst things has been any increase in a thing pushed as a positive against remaining when we haven't left yet) until something has been decided in the government...
 
@IanB no worries, at least we can agree to disagree without killing each other, or worse still one of us calling the Police because they didn't like the other persons view lol. I'll probably be the same as you and struggle to understand why someone would want to continue to be an EU member, but alas, we have to accept that almost 50% of those voted, voted the other way.

I think regardless of which side the fence someone sits on, we can all agree on one, maybe two things, the whole thing has been a farce, and in reality we should never have been given such a stupid binary choice in the first place, my first reaction at the time when it was announced was "how's that gonna work with the Northern Ireland border then?" becaus my brother-in-law lives there with a proper Irish lass so it was relevant to us, yet I never remember the Irish border even being mentioned by either side, let alone a solution proposed if the vote went Leave, yet it in itself, was probably the single most important Brexit subject in relation to the Good Friday Agreement, even more so than any future trade deal between the UK and EU.
 
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Not all Brexiters are racist, but all racists are Brexiters?
Well in theory maybe. You're going to get baseless motives for voting whichever way, on whichever subject. But you got to put that in perspective when the result was a near 50/50 split across millions of voters.

If you broaden the spectrum of reasons people voted into the millions, surely racist motives are a minority? Unless others really believe millions voted that way because of a dislike, some way or another, of foreigners.

I don't know, but I doubt it and that seems like an immature way to dismiss any counter argument.

Of course, people on either side shouldnt vote on a 'characterisation' of one side or the other ("people who vote ___ are ___") even though some unfortunately do.

Nobody has a magic mirror where they can see why the entire population voted, so I suppose I can only speak from a personal perspective on this. Ive found there are no "kinds of leavers" really. I live in two parts the country so I jump around a lot these last few years, lived & worked around a mix of younger and older people, of different backgrounds and different personalities

I've never found much correlation between people who say they voted leave or remain. I really dont believe you can characterise people that way and it would be wrong to do so.

(one of the worst things has been any increase in a thing pushed as a positive against remaining when we haven't left yet)
That's true, but then at the same time there's always the "Oh no xyz has decreased, it's proof that Brexit was always a bad idea". Or that the difficulty in leaving somehow 'proves' we shouldnt leave. If anything, the stupid farce since the vote proves just how deep seated and powerful the EU is and how dysfunctional the UK Government is, that we can't even opt to leave if we wanted to.

But then I suppose that ties into the argument over what the definition of leave is!
 
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Will just leave this here for anyone who says the EU is undemocratic.
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In any case, Theresa's deal has been downvoted again so the country is really up the creek without a paddle. We're the laughing stock of Europe... we want to leave but we don't know how. And before anybody says the country voted to leave without a deal, that's not true. All the politicians were talking about deals before the referendum. They've only changed their tunes now it's become unattainable.
 
That picture really doesn't explain how the EU is more democratic @Alsty I'll go through it like a list as there's quite a lot there.

1) The Queen does not draft laws. As for the EU president. It fails to mention that he is not elected by the population. A EC majority vote means nothing, what are they voting him in for? I see a big lack of transparency.
2)The EC have literally no power in the EU lawmaking process whereas the UK gov cabinet do, so again, an unfair comparison
4) Well, both of those involve a lack of transparency between voter and politician.
5) House of Lords is bad but that's another issue. The European Parliament is incredibly weak. It's made up of huge coalitions (mainly the EPP and the PES) who are essentially forced to compromise on everything in order to get laws through through on QM voting. The EP integrates all member states and makes it hard for an individual nation state to oppose a law as the blocking minority requires 4 member states across the entire parliament which undermines nation state democracy. Oh, and the EP cannot draft their own laws unless the commission approves (something like 90% of laws are started solely by the EC which is telling!) , their only real role is approving and rejecting laws drafted by the Commission; and they also have very little time to debate, and as I said, most laws are passed through without scrutiny thanks to all the backdoor agreements between think tank groups and parties that are supposed to represent different ideologies/beliefs.
6) Same point as number 1).
7) Civil service size isn't an argument as the EU currently covers far less legislative areas (at the moment).

Bottom line is, in my opinion, I think the EU is a project ran by people who think that the population aren't knowledgeable enough to run their own lives. It has a serious lack of democracy.

I wouldn't lose any respect for someone based on what they voted, remain or leave for unless I thought it was for reasons which were blatantly extreme or racist. As said above, the idea that racism is some kind of monstrous rampant force in this country is a misguided and easily refuted one IMO. Sure, there are extreme racists out there, but this country in terms of the majority of the population has only ever really voted for moderate parties, and people voted in huge numbers to leave. In terms of 'all racists voted leave', out of the small minority, I'd say a decent portion of people who you could call racists probably did vote leave as most are ultra-nationalists. Some far right racists, however, believe in Pan Europeanism, and would probably advocate the EU as a means to achieve this. Why does this matter if they are such a small minority though?
 
Let's be real, both the leave and remain camps have been talking a load of nonsense as it seems no one as any idea what the hell they are meant to be doing.
It seems like we are now at a point in brexit preparations we should have been say 3 years ago!

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Let's be real, both the leave and remain camps have been talking a load of nonsense as it seems no one as any idea what the hell they are meant to be doing.
It seems like we are now at a point in brexit preparations we should have been say 3 years ago!

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If that's the case, and as there has been no plan for Brexit, we should have kept status quo, not launched ourselves into this mess of uncertainty.
 
Yeah, that again goes back to never asking the question in the first place, the majority in Parliament didn't want to leave, period, but Dave thought he knew best.

I heard the Conservative Chairman on BBC this morning saying "we need a deal to leave", no we don't, you want a deal, but we don't "need" one.
 
No we wasn't.

It's not for me or anyone else to judge why people voted the way they did, nor to say people didn't know what they were voting for.

The leave vote won by less than 5% of the votes. Even though many knew what they were voting for. It was also clear by what was being reported on the news as well as friends of mine, there were a small number of people that didn't understand what Brexit was all about and were undecided on which way to vote leading up to the day of the initial referendum. That figure on the side of the bus did influence the way that some people did ended up voting, and it could have made the difference in the final outcome.

The leave campaign was fined (which has now been paid for) for breaking the rules.

Nigel Farage did knew about the figure on the side of the bus was a big fat lie and chosen to keep his mouth shut about it until the very day after the leave referendum was won, when he revealed that was a lie. Nigel had many a chance leading up to the referendum to tell the facts on that bus figure. For these reasons, I do not trust Nigel as far as I would like to throw him.

As for the other suppose lies from both leave and remain campaign, no one knew what Brexit was going to look like, it was all speculation and a simple forecast of what could happen.

Despite the fact that we still haven't left, Brexit has already having an effect on our business, some have either relocated or planning to relocate to the EU.

At the end of the day, I don't like Merlin and don't wish to line their pockets with my money, but I wouldn't expect to visit Merlin attractions without a MAP but yet expect to enjoy all the same privileges and benefits. The same could be said for the EU.

At the end of the day, whether we like the EU or not, we still need to trade with them which means we will still need to trade under their rules, we will be far better off being in and enjoy all the benefits than out which will be more expensive.
 
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