Merged into discussion from a separate topic to avoid breaking the character limit. Yes, my response was too long to comply with the 20,000 character count limit.I like that the only reason people would vote to leave is because they're stupid. I love the... Bourgeoisie of it. The assumption that only those of high society know what's best for the plebes.
Except, the whole problem of looking at the people below you as plebes. And treating them like plebes. And calling them idiots. And then wondering why the proletariat keep revolting. Of course, the peasants have always been revolting, but now they're rebelling.
The unwashed masses eventually get sick of being stepped on and being told it's for their own good. The stay side did not convince people that staying was in their best interest. So people voted to leave. They are pursuing what they believe is best for themselves. Right or wrong plays no part in it. Truth doesn't matter, only belief. Belief toppled a Prime Minister, while truth got buried in the dust somewhere.
You have introduced those derogatory terms into the debate. Nobody else here has.
Remain lost this vote because of the following reasons:
1. The right/far right supporters of the Conservative Party/UKIP hate the EU and everything it stands for and voted to leave. They themselves are in a minority in the UK, but UKIP activists made sure to go around working class council estates in the north of England and other deprived areas to ensure that their xenophobic agenda about the migrants was heard.
2. Labour's core vote, much of which rarely votes now, turned out in force (see the working class comment in point 1) to punish Cameron and Osborne (who campaigned strongly for remain) because they felt their lives had been made worse by austerity. They weren't even thinking about the EU and just wanted to punish the government.
3. Some elements of Labour's core vote was whipped up into a frenzy about immigration by the press, the UKIP activists, and their own lack of understanding of the issue. They did vote against the EU, but based on a lie. They believed that a vote to leave the EU would stop immigration into the UK. It will not.
4. Remain's campaign spent too much time talking about negative consequences and not enough focus was given to the benefits of being in the EU.
Those are four main reasons off the top of my head. Others will emerge in the coming days.
I'll give you an amen. AMEN! How could I have misinterpreted someone saying that ignorant, stupid people vote for column A actually meant that only ignorant, stupid people voted that way. I'm sure there was a subtle implication that educated, intelligent people could rationally vote for leaving. Certainly no stupid, ignorant people voted to stay. Only well educated, intelligent folks voted to stay. There's no daemonization of the opposing faction, no sir! You must be much more clever than I. I just looked at the words that were there and took them at face value. Tea and medals for everyone... that voted to stay.
Please cut out the sarcasm, it's detracting from has been a very well framed and formulated debate.You've misinterpreted the point I was making, although to be fair to you I could have worded it better. However, you're making a universal sweeping statement based on something which I was applying to
some places. Please refer back to my post you quoted and you will see how I framed it.
Hartlepool is in an extremely run down area of North East England which has been in a very poor state since the collapse of the manufacturing and ship building industries decades ago. This was recognised by the EU, which has spent an awful lot of EU funding in North East England to try to improve the situation for people living there, but national government in this country has ignored the north-east and other areas of the north too for decades, and this adversely affected what happened in the referendum vote.
Let's also look at the analysis of the vote. Academics, pollsters, and other experts have the evidence to show that it was the lower someone's level of education was the greater the probability they would vote to leave. At no point did any of them claim that these people were stupid. It is a fact, however, that the level of education was a major factor in this referendum. Compared to general elections, many more people of a lower education turned out to vote (many are so apathetic about politics now they choose to stay at home), and this played a major role in the outcome. The more highly educated a person, the greater the probability they would vote to remain.
This does not mean that everyone with a lower level of education voted leave and that everyone with a higher level of education voted to remain. It shows the tendency of most people in these groups. You could see this reflected in the results. Areas with a lot of university influence generally voted to remain (Bath, Bristol, Newcastle, Oxford and Oxfordshire, Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire, and Exeter, for example). Also some cities dominated by working class Labour voters which did vote to leave, such as Nottingham, only did so by a small margin, owing to the presence of a large university and its staff and students living there.
It is, therefore, not about daemonising people. Far from it. That has already been done by the leave side and how it has treated the whole issue of migration. EU nationals living in this country are scared and worried about their future as are many British people living in EU member states. It's about explaining how and why different groups of people voted the way in which they did.
The "stay" camp tried to win with well reasoned, educated, clever arguments. They lost to what appears to be fear and anger.
Many of them did, but Cameron and Osborne went too far with scare stories about the economic situation if the UK left, which did not help. Corbyn, by contrast, was lacking in any sort of conviction and passion, which didn't help to solve the problem of Labour voters defecting to vote leave.
Finally, if you want to talk about manipulation. Rummy made excellent points in his response to you about that. The most pernicious and harmful manipulation that has taken place concerns migration and has been carried out by both Vote Leave and Farage.
First Vote Leave's claims that it would spend £350 million pounds on the NHS instead of the EU budget. This was a blatant lie for two reasons. First, that wasn't the amount sent to the EU every week, because it did not include the British rebate (so a misleading figure) and second it was never going to be spent on the NHS. A prominent leave member of the Conservative Party, Sarah Wollaston (a former doctor) defected to the remain camp on the basis of that lie. Farage has also let the cat of the bag that this money will not be spent on the NHS, as Rummy has stated.
The less well educated in this country were sold a lie by Vote Leave and Farage on the NHS, and on public services in general, which, combined with Farage's horrific and grossly misleading poster on the subject, was one of the worst forms of manipulation of the voting public I have ever seen.
Well by applying a minimum participation rate, you basically make sure that only matters of public interest make it through to the point, where a binding decision is made.
You could also introduce a rule, that you need to collect a certain amount of signatures before a referendum is even started. Would also cut down on the costs for the public, since the person or organization trying to go for a referendum needs to organize a campaign to gather those signatures with their own money.
Who decides what a matter of public interest is? Who would pay for the costs of running regular referenda (they are expensive)? Who would formulate the questions and guarantee their objectivity? How would you combat voter fatigue? How would a turnout threshold be agreed to make the referendum valid? Would you make it compulsory to vote?
There are too many questions to answer about the concept your proposing and too much subsequently instability. Having substantial experience of the UK electorate I can assure you that they don't like voting on a regular basis. I really don't see this as a way forward at all.
The UK already has a better system for the second part of what you are proposing. Online petitions which attract more than 100,000 signatures must be responded to by the government in some way, and some even have to be debated in parliament.
Concerning the UK, all i can say is, that even if they truly decide to leave the EU, i doubt that it will hurt them too much long term. While the EU right now is all about blustering and "making an example" (which is an idiotic reaction in my eyes, as it just drives the UK farther away and will make coming joint projects all the more difficult and really just makes the EU look like a dick, after all the UK has been, and right now still is a net payer), there are a couple of tricks to circumvent the toll barriers and there will still be enough EU members willing to make bilateral contracts with the UK.
I disagree. First, I empathise with the strong reaction in Europe. The UK has messed the other member states around for years, demanding a rebate, being awkward about so many policy areas, opting in, opting out, and being generally obstructive in so many areas of policy making. It's, therefore, entirely understandable that the EU has reacted in the way in which it has.
You also have to take account of the fact that a message needs to be sent to other member states with right wing forces similar to UKIP that attempts to leave would not be easy. As a result, a lot of this is about sending a political message more widely, not picking on the UK in particular.
Also, nobody, to my knowledge, has stated that the UK will be 'made an example of'. Where did you read that? Juncker, Tusk, and Schultz have all just stated the facts in a very dispassionate and cold manner, yes, but that is all that they have done.
What might hurt is, if the scots and ireland decides to leave the UK, though i am no way deep enough into UK politics to know what the chances for this are (the scots recently decided after all to stay, though one of the reasons for the decision was the fear, that they would leave the EU, if they became independent, which is a mood point now of course) and what kind of impact this would cause.
The chance of Scotland becoming an independent nation in the near future is now high. There will be a lot of pressure put on the Westminster Parliament to grant a second referendum there. The SNP is very powerful in Scotland and is going to be hard to ignore.
There will be no referendum for the foreseeable future in Northern Ireland, for various complicated reasons linked to the troubled history there.