Britain’s scientists are freaking out over Brexit
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The people voted to restrict the number of foreigners that can go in the country which is against the treaty of free movement that Switzerland signed with the EU which probably (it has been a while since I looked up the consequences) make lots if not all the other treaties that Switzerland and the EU signed invalid. For example the EU is threatening to cut research funding among other stuff like partnership in space exploration...
The people that were against the law didn't think it would pass and didn't really fight against it and now Switzerland and the EU have until the end of year to agree on something. I wonder how it will pan out... Maybe a revote ? You probably didn't understand the consequences of this law. Are you sure you want this ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus_Programme
Ironically, "the programme is named after the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, known as an opponent of dogmatism, who lived and worked in many places in Europe to expand his knowledge and gain new insights, and who left his fortune to the University of Basel in Switzerland.[1] At the same time, ERASMUS is a backronym meaning European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students.[1]"
Is Switzerland wants to take part in an exchange program with different rules, it should negotiate one with the interested parties (EU and others).
And don't get me started on respecting the EU rules. Let's talk about that once Germany starts paying big fines to the EU for violating its rules on running trade surpluses, shall we?
I quite agree that Switzerland and other countries should start bypassing the EU though. Erasmus is, at least, not one of those things where the EU demands exclusivity.
Actually, the EU is happy to negotiate treaties with countries outside the EU. Conditions usually include free movement of people. If the country negotiating does not agree with these terms, the treaty is void. It can try to negatiate a special treaty, but the EU is not usually inclined to do that, for multiple reasons, not least to avoid setting precedents, to avoid effort duplicity, etc
EDIT: I forgot the main reason, from my point of view. The EU has been built with the person, the human being, at its center, with the idea that we all have the same rights. And one important right is freedom of movement. A union were goods, money and services can freely move, but people are forbidden to do so is not worth the trouble.
Look at CETA or TTIP.
Not sure what your point is, but anyway it seems that the EU has already made up his mind on this matter and requires free movement of people for Switzerland to get access to the economic area.
But no, that's not what happens. The EU uses this as another bargaining chip, so it has the students and university faculty in its pockets. The strategy is obvious, and anyone who does not look through it is blind. No, don't sell Switzerland out. Autonomy is much more valuable than a couple of financial and contractual bribes.
Therefore, no, keeping the exchange program without EU membership and free movement is not easy, if possible at all.
Yes, because now the ability to control that program lies with the UE. That's how it works.
>The Swiss people voted for something, it would be unconstitutional and even illegal not to do it now.
Nobody is saying they shouldn't be allowed to do it, it's just that doing it violates an agreement Switzerland made with the EU and there are consequences for that. Consequences that were clear to people who bothered to learn about the issue before voting. This isn't some crazy contrived plot to exert control over the Swiss by the EU, it's just the Swiss having to face the consequences of their actions.
Look, just because someone has the ability and legal foundation to do something doesn't mean they aren't a complete douche if they do it. If I was the hackernews admin and would delete all your posts because I disagree with you, that would be a douche thing to do but I would have every right to do it. Similarly, I don't claim the EU does something that is forbidden, but everyone should unite and stand up to manipulative bullying strategies like that.
However, I do want to point out something peculiar, an assumption underlying your opinion.
> "every single shred of independence and autonomy".
> "The issue is that the EU bullies and pushes everyone in Europe around at its whim"
Why is that a problem? Are the people who govern the EU (or any large government structure) not the same as you are? Do you think they are malicious and exploitive? The loss of your independence is just arbitrary lines. It has happened before, it will happen again. Pushing policy is what it means to govern, people in the opposition will always decry the decisions of those currently behind the wheel by definition.
Maybe there is something to be said about undemocratic properties in the current EU structure, I wouldn't know.
A governing body could just as easily be ignorant or wasteful and the country ends up in the same position. Either way, you get rid of the cancer.
Also, pardon my ignorance on the topic, but other than the free movement treaty (and the others) that Switzerland signed itself, how does the EU control the country of Switzerland?
As a swiss this saddens me but I think the EU is right to use the big guns because free movement is the foundation of the EU. If the swiss get an exception it would be hard to deny it to other states. "Unfair ! I also want to restrict the number of polish going in my country"
I think that the swiss government should focus on punishing salary-dumping because that's what most people are afraid of when they think of foreigners: he's going to do my job for less money. I heard it's a big problem in Tessin.
Firms should be able to hire anyone they want but they should give them a swiss salary, swiss or not and pay a big fine if they don't.
This. I hope all countries will take this challenge seriously. It ties in with the whole challenge of inequality splitting our societies.
How exactly would you "punish" this (or otherwise prevent it)? I mean, it happens due to market dynamics, so it's either salary dumping, no free movement of people, or no capitalism!
A natural feeling of "saturation" that comes with it doesn't really seem surprising, racist or anything like that.
It's about 25%. If you look into the results of the original popular initiative you will see that the cantons with the highest levels of immigration voted the most strongly against the initiative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_immigration_referendum,_...
You might think that makes sense, but consider that if you are not Swiss you do not get a vote. The path to naturalisation in Switzerland takes at least ten years, which in some way explains the high relative level of foreigners in the country. There are second and third generation immigrants here who are still not Swiss due to the nature of the process.
Switzerland needs its Ausländer/Étrangers/Stranieri/Esters, a large part of the economy here would collapse otherwise.
My personal opinion, possibly misjudged given my age (mid thirties), is that the problems the UK is seeing (especially in the areas that voted leave) stem from the actions of the Thatcher government and have little to do with any of the arguments that passport-waving Farage and his ilk put forward.
The ripples from the destruction of industry in the north, the deregulation of the financial markets, and the tearing down of the unions are felt strongly thirty years later, especially in those areas that voted to leave.
I'm just flabbergasted that a generation that was screwed over thirty years ago would repeat the same mistake, and potentially screw over their own offspring's future. They ate up the arguments that somehow the local problems are all the fault of an external entity, and seemed to suffer from acute memory loss.
[1] https://leejo.github.io/2016/06/22/two_weeks_to_decide/ (the title is a lie, i was always going to vote remain).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)#Internal_con...
This appears to be the pattern most places, including Brittain and the US. If this indicates that people learn to live with each other, then it's probably a good sign.
The odd country out seems to be Sweden, where the "not much immigrated to" countryside seems to be more positive towards immigration than the urban areas. I'm still not quite sure why. Maybe they haven't been as good at distributing the immigration across the country?
> Britain has been a powerhouse of discovery since the age of science began. Newton, Darwin, Crick? They parted the curtain on gravity, evolution and DNA.
> Now comes Brexit, and to use a non-scientific term, the scientists in the country are freaking out.
Britain joined the EEC in 1973, the discovery of gravity, evolution, and deoxyribonucleic acid, all happened well before we joined the union and happened without EU funding. I don't think the sciences will suffer too much from a withdrawal of EU funding, since the government will want to remain a leader in these fields, the industries that will suffer will be agricultural and manufacturing, fields that are deemed to primitive for the current century.
It could be spin, the farmers I know though (I'm originally from a very rural town in mid-Wales) don't really understand what GM means, they're old school wellies and corn hanging out their mouth types.
http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/brexit
"Why there could be post-Brexit riots this summer"
"Ford to consider closing UK factories in Leave towns after Brexit"
"The only way to save Britain after Brexit? Stop London's dominance"
"Brexit blamed for Bank of Japan monetary stimulus plans"
"Brexit doesn't make me proud to be British"
"I've been mapping kindness across the country to tackle racism"
"Why our post-Brexit economy can't be saved by slashing interest rates"
"Revealed: the shocking scale of racist hate since the Brexit vote"
"Incident by incident – the grim litany of post-Brexit hate crime"
You say the BBC has "outright disdain" for Corbyn but in my experience BBC News does manage to do a pretty good job of being unbiased. Are you sure that they aren't just reporting an unfiltered flow of stories and many of them happy to be pretty negative, thus they may seem to be biased?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_genetically_modi...
It is not clear to the public this is a political policy, not an instrument of scientific thinking.
You shouldn't be so dismissive of the general possibility. Why not have a Renaissance? It's happened at least twice in recent European history.
Consider the infatuation Britain had with the Roman Empire during the Industrial Revolution. Sometimes digging back into the past for inspiration is the right answer to tackling future problems. For politics I mean it in a quasi-mythological sense but it is clear that reaching back to reconnect to the past is partly responsible for every Golden Age.
As for whether this will occur or not, I am undecided but I suspect Brexit has more to do with avoiding an anti-renaissance.
I've already made the point on HN that Britain's successful attempt to recover a glorious past (Roman Empire) and Hitler's unsuccessful attempt to do the same thing should be held as comparable. Their motives were identical.
I realize such a comparison may seem despicable but we've got to deal with the fact that all ideas come from somewhere, and let us face it, it is not as if Hitler was an original thinker. He saw it worked for the British and attempted to replicate.
Obviously I'm not implying the British went to the lengths of the Nazis.
Compare and contrast Steampunk with Environmentalism. One is about the past and is highly exuberant. The other says to schoolchildren we're going to hell unless we use CFL lightbulbs and separate our organic from inorganic waste properly.
One of these views is impoverished! I too long for the return of pneumatic tubes for waste disposal. Whooosh! And gone. It always seemed like the future to me.
Two of those happened quite a long time ago, when the world and UK's power was quite different, and the scientists and their students in question are long gone.
It wouldn't be hard to show direct-line ancestry for many existing active british scientists to historically prominent scientists (well, OK, probably not Newton).
In other words: Would project X have led to a breakthrough if they didn't have A but A-B dollar?
Firstly, a group of businessowners. 'local' businesses though most have strong ties to the local port or northern regions of France. Pre-brexit they were mostly close mouthed on the issue, though personal conversations indicated a lean to leave. Post brexit they are generally quite happy; their foreign affairs are relatively easy to keep in order and they have just gained leverage on the local stage.
The other group is composed of PhD students and their professors. I'm a casual aquaintance to these people, mainly on the student end, and have dropped in for lunch a few times (and after work pints). These guys are all anti brexit. I know from the way they make up stories about why people voted out and then insult them - its quite unpleasant. From what I gather very little of their funding comes from the EU, but I'm not familliar enough with their funding system to judge them on it.
It seems we have a shit ton of echo chambers in this country.
Good to see your comprehensive survey supported your view :-D
In a similar vein I had a friend try to tell me that a 4% difference represented a landslide.
Just about this part: nothing has actually changed relatively significantly at all, yet. Article 50 has not even been triggered. The UK first has to notify the EU of intent to leave, then they have to actually leave, then the effects will slowly start trickling in (whatever they are), and in the mean time so many confounding factors will be mixed in that we will probably never find out what came whence.
> It seems we have a shit ton of echo chambers in this country.
Is that anything new? Humans everywhere always. And?
You dismiss the possibility that they are right. Many people do support Brexit for wholly racist reasons (e.g. my father who wants to 'get the poles out').
It's definitely protectionist and perhaps xenophobic but I don't think it's racist. (There is a clear distinction between xenophobia and racism - xenophobia is purely about an unjustified dislike for those from other countries while racism is an unjustified dislike for those who look different to you)
An example of what I mean:
'well you can imagine poor Joe Racist living across the river is now worrying about whether his boss can afford the harvest. That's what happens when you're stupid'
They will invent false characters with flaws that support their argument. They never claim they are real, they aren't basing it off some real observance or any real account.
It's not a useful discussion point and serves to further isolate that community.
As with so many things about the referendum, the problem could just be that a very vocal but actually quite small minority is getting all the attention. I know for a fact which way quite a lot of my friends and family voted, and in private with calm discussion I'd say the majority on either side are willing to debate the issues and often do find a fair bit of common ground if they do. However, many of the Leavers won't say anything about it publicly now, for fear of sustained attacks or even losing friends over it. That does mean that if, say, you look at the Facebook news feeds, they are heavily slanted towards strident Remain advocacy and topics like ignoring the result in Parliament and staying in or throwing Boris in prison, but that is certainly not representative of the overall sentiment among people I know, just the ones who are willing to state their position and live with the consequences.
If this is as bad as it needs to get for large swathes of people to realise the behaviour of parliament needs to change then it spells a bright future.
If it gets any worse though, or this isn't enough, then I guess we are pretty much doomed.
Unfortunately, it has become dangerous to hold conservative opinions publicly in certain places. There have been too many highly public witch-hunts, and not toeing the line on the established orthodoxy will result in being painted with the brush of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, idiocy, bigotry, or whatever the latest outrage of the week is.
In that document it states that most of EU's research funding for the UK ends up going to higher education, and it accounts for 9.7% of their total budget. This doesn't sound like much but it's a considerable amount of money and it isn't spread equally over all areas of research.
Of course there is also pan-European research in/from the UK which will be hit by far the hardest (and one could argue is among some of the more important research).
So depending on their area of research your PhD student/professor connections might have a good reason to be upset.
Of course it is bad for anyone to take out their feelings on other people by making up stories/insulting them. But then again I question what your own motives are in posting this comment online. Especially considering that there are plenty of people who seem to have the opposite experience.
With your last sentence i wholeheartedly agree (as sad as it makes me). These days it seems that most people aren't even aware that they place themselves in a position where no one disagrees with them (see Facebook).
I'm actually surprised that its as low as 9.7%, though of course that is direct funding and won't account for losses from businesses and who move (large banks bankroll the local Uni) or reduce spending.
What is notable in the funding is a decidedly different attitude to dealing with the problem, though this may simply be that researchers can't do much to affect funding wheras business iwners can.
As for echo chambers specifically - it can be heart-wrenching to be amongst several groups. The previous Scottish referendum caused significant damage to my family relationships, and the brexit is doing the same to my friends. There are few people willing to consider they don't and can't know all the facts.
They're not post-Brexit.
Currently the will be reaping the benefits of the low pound for exports, plus still have access to the European market, plus still be able to employ nice cheap Eastern European labour if they so wish.
Let's wait until they are actually post-Brexit, shall we?
"Worse than a possible dip in funding is the research community’s fear that collaborators abroad will slink away and the island’s universities will find themselves isolated. [...] The community is asking: Will the foreigners continue to be welcome in British laboratories and will British researchers continue be partners with collaborators from abroad?"
Funding can be replaced, but if foreign researchers have a harder time getting into Britain, that could be a problem for research in the UK
Maybe the UK needs to rethink that "blame anyone but UK" part. The current Brexit discussion is too close to the Euro Sausage movie of Yes, Minister: away from reality, but political maneuvering to put blame on non-UK entity for internal squabbles. The U.K. Politicians worked to outsource its politics to the EU.
Back to free movement:I do not see reasons to rethink or restrict free movement; without it life will be more red tape and bureaucracy. I do not want free movement to be reconsidered.
Indeed mostly the choice of Tony Blair which he still defends: http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/666822/Tony-Blair-migrants-...
I would note how the UK government did not want to raise steel tariffs to support Tata's Talbot plant. The reason was that it would increase prices for every consumer of steel. So the UK government blocked the EU's increase of steel tariffs.
What was Boris Johnson's plan? I can't find the interview, but he shared he'd increase tariffs to support UK steel. These are the same tariffs UK's autonomous government blocked - the same tariffs that he 'outsourced the blame' to Brussels for the UK autonomous decision.
Politics are hard for me to understand.
The difficulties of getting non-EU nationals into the UK to work are already pretty much top of the complaints list of folk I know who run significant IT companies.
I don't know about the academic sector, but in general UK immigration law is already very harsh, and the exit from the EU was largely driven by a desire to limit immigration.
That's .5% increase in our population per year. Per year! The net migration to the UK has gone mental since 1996.
It's simply not sustainable. House prices are crazy, council services and the NHS are struggling as we cut funding due to austerity and you're complaining about how hard it is to get into the UK when we've actually been letting in massive amounts of people.
Unbelievable.
http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/statistics-net-migration-sta...
The immigration process is not easy for Non-European nationals. It requires sheafs of paper documentation and significant fees.
(I should say: this should neither be taken as "I now believe everything you say" nor "and now I will find reasons, no matter how arbitrary, to dismiss everything you've presented".)
I agree that an increase in population requires an increase in funding to the NHS (or at least keeping the funding stable per capita) and more housing.
But I don't see why those things are impossible, given the political will to make them happen.
Inevitably it also sometimes winds up with a wrong decision due to some technicality or administrative error, and I've heard nightmarish stories from friends who had to deal with that situation because of some issue at work. Some received advice about not using the official appeals process, because it's cheaper and faster to just start over. I've even heard of company reps having to go abroad themselves to resolve some visa problem with a foreign worker because there was no process to speak with anyone within our own government in our own country who could sort it out.
This is not to say that the general principles the system is supposed to operate under in theory are necessarily bad, or that no-one can successfully navigate the system in its current form; obviously hundreds of thousands of people do every year. But it's not working well in practice, and right now at least colleagues from other EU member states don't have to deal with it. So there is legitimate concern that if we lose the freedom of movement aspect of EU membership post-Brexit and the visa and immigration system isn't dramatically improved, that whole group of people will be greatly inconvenienced in practice.
The article concludes May will probably kick the problem into the long grass which she seems to be doing by saying it won't happen without Scottish agreement which probably won't happen.
Sturgeon painted her comments that way, but what she said was a solution that worked for the whole nation, nothing about Scottish agreement or consent.
If Brexit doesn't happen then the mainstream will be handing power to UKIP who will, quite rightly, be able to say that democracy in the UK is a sham. I don't want that, Brexit must happen.
She can't say that. If she said it openly, it wouldn't be a viable strategy.
The problem we've got right now is that multiple political power centers are locked into a multi-way game of chicken over Brexit, which can only be resolved by pulling the trigger on Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty or by definitively ruling it out -- and whoever takes responsibility for making it happen (or not happen) will catch a career-ending shitstorm of abuse from the other side.
Except that there is also a large amount of people that had no idea of the consequences. Lots of people were calling for a re-vote afterwards because "oh shit this is actually not so great after all". Which is okay, actually -- it should be possible to change your mind when you see something doesn't work the way you want it (it'd be great if politicians did this more).
A marginal advisary vote on which headline campaign points on the winning side were demonstrable lies? I don't think that demonstrates our representative democracy is a sham.
It is a shambles, but your conclusion is unsound.
If the populous now would vote the other way, how is pressing for exit of the EU democratic. All you're proving is that good liars can pervert a vote.
David Cameron, "I will not resign even if the vote is out". He resigned immediately.
Osborne, "if you vote out there will be a 'punishment budget' of huge spending drops and tax rises". Reality: he was gone immediately.
"If out wins Boris will be Prime Minister". Reality: May is PM.
"You will go to the back of the queue", Obama. Reality: State Department immediately reversed the US position. "I think given what has happened, the president is going to try and do both [trade deals with the EU and UK] at the same time," Kerry said. "He knows how to multitask."
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/state-dept.-in-damage-cont...
Osborne again: "EU will cost every household £4300 a year". Reality: this claim was garbage and was quietly retired after focus groups showed that nobody believed it, not even pro-EU campaigners.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36073201
"Leaving the EU means migrant camps moving from Calais to Dover". Reality: Le Tocquet agreement is independent of the EU, exists for practical reasons and France has confirmed it will remain in place.
Economists in general: "here are some models. believe them". I posted about what Krugman thinks of this elsewhere in the thread, as he has shown the problems with the way economists have behaved better than I can:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/the-macroeconomi...
The public believing something is totally unrelated to how true it is. This kind of facile populist attitude is what people are criticising about the Leave campaign.
Denialism is not a useful response to our current situation.
Long-term though the plan must be that once the NHS privatisation has been forced they allow much more immigration of those with medical training, the private health companies will need workers. At that point they're going to be losing the right and left wings of the party.
Screwing up Europe will buy May's Tories an extra term I imagine so they presumably don't care beyond that.
"Our new PM was a remainer" - but, she was eurosceptic her entire career, the very first thing she said was literally "Brexit means Brexit", she has repeatedly confirmed it's going to happen and she has set up an entirely new ministry to ensure it does. Meanwhile the EU is so impatient for it to happen they are demanding it starts immediately. There is no way back.
With respect to "it's difficult to leave without screwing the economy", that seems hard to justify given the number of countries that are not in the EU and yet which are not "screwed".
It's not just general public sentiment that constrain's May. Many of May's own back bench MPs care far more about making Brexit happen than they do about keeping the Tories in government (the number of single-issue anti-eu diehard Tory MPs is greater than the Tories majority in parliament). They will bring down her government if she doesn't move towards Brexit.
Of course, all of this assumes May's intention to not exit.
There is a counter argument that says the new ministry is set up exactly to ensure that brexit fails to happen whilst the government "tried it's best and gave full resources". It is also a convenient way to completely destroy Boris for good.
James Hacker: You mean no.
It's kind of prophetic that Hacker goes from Minister to PM on the back of some anti-EU stuff whipped up by the tabloids. Of course it's basically BS and nothing much changes with the EU. We'll see how it works out for May.
Never having been in the EU is a totally different situation to being in the EU and leaving. No country has ever done that.
I agree that May does intend to Brexit.
Incidentally on the denial thing I voted remain but bet leave would win at the bookies. I'm predicting a Norway solution as the most likely bet rather than my preference.
I agree that there will end up being some compromise, eventually: one that involves free trade without freedom of movement a la CETA. The question is only how long it takes to get there. The EU is starting to realise that leaving is in fact thinkable, and is caving on issues that might upset local populations. Eventually it will realise that blocking European co-operation and blaming it on a country that wants to sign deals isn't going to fly.
I think being outside is not what hurts. Leaving hurts. Business loves stability and brexit is anything but.
Roughly translated to: "an undefined portmanteau means an undefined portmanteau."
Well, nothing else to expect of European "Redo votes until we get expected result" Union.
The whole Brexit hoopla was filled with dishonesty and anti-intellectualism that would make likes of Trump proud
no wonder scientists are suffering, sure who needs experts...
"I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong"
Gove was clearly talking about a very specific subset of all possible 'experts' here - the ones from various (mostly governmental) acronymed organisations who have a long track record of making incorrect forecasts and yet still claim to be able to predict the future using their 'expertise'. The campaign was full of absurdly precise predictions like "leaving the EU will cost each household exactly £4300 a year".
Gove's position is not unreasonable or anti-intellectual. Post-vote, Paul Krugman started laying into economists and the economics profession as a whole, saying essentially that economists didn't deserve to be trusted because they so often made arguments that were just intellectual-sounding nonsense.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/the-macroeconomi...
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/07/02/more-on-the-shor...
The question was about the following "experts" (it was Gove who defined them as experts not the interviewer):
>The leaders of the US, India, China, Australia, every single one of our allies, the Bank of England, the IFS, the IMF, the CBI, five former NATO secretary generals, the chief executive of the NHS and most of the leaders of the trade unions in Britain
And experts from organisations with acronyms? As oposed to those from organisations without acronyms?
This looks like he wants to hear opinions from his preferred kind of experts.
You watch the clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGgiGtJk7MA&feature=youtu.be...
The actual quote is:
"People have had enough of experts from organisations with acronymns saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong".
By implication, those "experts" aren't actually experts because they get it consistently wrong. But sure, it's easy to mis-quote him and cut the rest of the statement to make the leave voters sound like knuckle draggers because that's the agenda a certain set of the remain voters wanted to push. Leave voters are stoooopppppidddddddd.
That tactic didn't work well.
Gove was talking about experts who get it consistently wrong. So many of these "experts" have suddenly gone "oh, we wrong, X won't happen now after all", all the threats, punishment budgets and dire consequences have dissipated like the nonsense fear-mongering they actually were. And we also now get a report about the IMF being irrationally pro-Euro, destroying Greece in the process, and we were supposed to listen to them as neutral voices about Brexit consequences? Turns out they had vested interests, just like so many of the other "independent" "experts".
What we have now seen, and Brexit has really shone a light on this, is that the political elite across the world seem obsessed with European political integration and will spout utterly unsubstantiated rubbish to justify it.
So, he was kinda right. Which is very disappointing.
I voted remain.
Sadly, both official campaigns were the worst kind of politics, with a lot of negative campaigning, full of half-truths and sometimes outright lies, frequently trying to make voters fear consequences that were highly unlikely, and frequently more about personalities than policies. The same was true of many interventions by various foreign leaders, mostly advocating Remain but again often through negativity about Leave rather than a positive message; their rhetoric was also being walked back within moments of the actual result being known.
I've had a few interesting discussions with friends and friends-of-friends, before and since the referendum itself. I've heard views, often strong ones, for both decisions articulated based on reasonable principles and rational arguments. I've seen intelligent, well-informed people reach either conclusion. However, many of the issues that ultimately persuaded those people one way or the other were hardly mentioned by the official campaigns, both of which focussed on the short term and on the economy and immigration for the most part.
Something I've seen many people, voting either way, agree on is that we don't really know why people chose to vote the way they did, which was always going to put whoever was in government after the vote in a tricky position because they would have a mandate to do something but little other guidance on how to set out the details. For example, in my personal experience I've met plenty of people who value the collaborative arrangements with our European neighbours on issues like trade and freedom of movement and the scientific research we're talking about in this discussion, yet who strongly dislike the EU as an institution because of some other aspects of membership. So far, I'd say roughly half of those people voted each way in the actual referendum, based on which outcome they thought was most likely to achieve the middle of the road path they really wanted. However, I have no reliable way to determine whether this sentiment is just a small clique around my own social network, or whether actually most people who voted had similar views and the hardline pro-EU Remain and anti-immigrant Leave voters who are getting most of the press are small but vocal minorities.
"they're both as bad as each other" in political discussion is a facile position, and usually an unhelpful one.
Would you like to comment on the substance of my post, which was about how there was actually plenty of rational thinking and reasonable debate going on among the voters regardless of the official campaigns, and how the big problem now is how to set future policy since the result itself doesn't necessarily tell us very much about what the voters really wanted?
In political opinions, particularly for US politics, you see a lot of ritualistic opening with words to the effect of "both sides are terrible", "they're both equally bad", which is facile even-handedness, and unhelpful when they're differing kinds and degrees of bad. Knocking it back as facile is also becoming a trope, though probably still a necessary one.
When 'respectable' institutional economists make predictions like this:
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...
It's pretty clear that they don't even want to be right.
Can the UK do something like that i.e. get the best terms possible from the EU and then put that to a vote?
They already did that. EU was (understandably) tired of UK wanting to get yet more special treatment, so didn't offer much to Cameron when he went round.
Same negative characterisation the Greeks were given when they dared defy the EU. Can you give me any example of treatment wrt the EU and UK that was unfair?; The UK didn't seem to get as much out of the EU as many continental countries.
It seems like brexit is a pretty big decision to make witout knowing exactly what you're agreeing to but hey, that's just me.
The details of leaving are yet to be decided, but we have voted to do it, so we will.
That was already supposed to be the case.
David Cameron, as then-Prime Minister, went to the EU with as strong a mandate to seek substantial change as any British leader was ever likely to receive. Because of the imminent referendum, he also had as strong a negotiating position as any British leader was ever likely to have.
The deal he came back with was regarded as underwhelming by a large part of the population, with nothing fundamental really changing much in the long term. That probably convinced quite a few moderates that their first preference, reforming a less than ideal EU from within, was never going to happen, and we know the rest of the story.
In a University you work with many people from all over the world, and success depends on doing so.
Of course you end up favouring international cooperation at a policy level. Your values are shaped by your personal experience.
This is the thing I don't quite understand about the position described in the article here. We already do have partnerships with other researchers from all over the world, not just the EU. I've seen some academics talking as if it will suddenly be impossible for colleagues from other EU member states to come and work in our universities, or vice versa. Sometimes they were literally making that argument with a colleague from a US university sitting on one side of them and a colleague from Japan on the other!
There are plenty of legitimate concerns that will need to be addressed, and the uncertainty in the near future affecting those planning longer term projects or research funding isn't helpful. However, the idea that it will become dramatically more difficult to collaborate with colleagues from the other EU member states or to run research programmes together seems paranoid at this stage.
Same as investment in the NHS, which although not funded by the EU has badly needed structured investment for decades. Never happens. Successive governments just blame their predecessors or bad management and on this the cycle.
Getting those back will cost more than staying in, and already has.
The NHS is currently underfunded, to the extent that Darzi walk in centres are closing and some important targets are going to be loosened because trusts have no hope of reaching those targets.
If they leave they have £5 more money in their pocket! They should leave right, rather than wasting that £5??