I live in the UK at the moment. They won't fucking shut up about WWI/WWII. It's one reason why the brexit negotiations have been such a mess: parts of the govt are still under the delusion that they're some sort of plucky saviour of Europe.
Irish tensions are resurfacing now too. A sticking point is the Irish/Northern Irish border. The government is being propped up by 10 fanatical, conservative unionist MPs (not the Tory kind) and have literally tanked what could have been significant EU progress.
Now the feeling is that the unions hold disproportionate power over the UK government and that doesn't play well with a fragile good Friday agreement.
Same story with Scotland. Now that NI potentially had single market access plus customs union, which those in power in NI didn't want, Scotland wants this too. Independence referendum was won based on "better together" and yet it seems they are now being dragged out of the EU against their will.
What a mess!
Not very ridiculous. The EU decision making process is a mess, and Germany controls the votes of many "proxy" states.
The main things people get annoyed with in the UK are parts of the single market agreement that we signed up to such as free movement of people and the inability to cut our own independent trade deals but that stuff was there from day one.
That is pretty much a bit of a special case, but I expect there exists a plethora of those special cases. Since Germany and France I believe have the most representatives (since they are the biggest countries) the thinking goes that they have more power than smaller countries such as mine.
The funny thing is that the UK is one of the biggest countries in EU in terms of population and thus have a lot of representatives in the EU parliament.
>Originally proposed by Winston Churchill and drafted mainly by British lawyers, the Convention was based on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ( https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/what-european-convent... )
The fact the individual countries are mostly sovereign and sign up to agreements is not that appreciated. Many have the idea that we can negotiate with Merkel/the EU and say give us free trade without free movement of people or we won't take your Mercedes and BMWs but they don't have the power to do that sort of deal. The EU trade agreements are what the 27 countries signed up to and they can't just go and change them after the event without getting everyone to sign up to a new agreement.
But it's ironic that Scotland got f'd over by England taking most of its petrol resources and Scotland got pretty much jack for it. So now their balance sheet may not qualify them for joining the EU alone, not dissimilar to how Greece probably wasn't but it wasn't caught in time because they cooked their books and banks looked the other way.
Not before the recent squeeze:
the Barnett formula already allows Scotland to sustain higher levels of per capita public spending relative to the rest of the UK, which is approximately equivalent to its disproportionately high annual contribution of tax revenues to the central UK Treasury from Oil production.
However Scotland's per capita spending growth, relative to the rest of the UK, has in recent years, been nominally reduced by the operation of the Barnett formula, in order to bring public spending levels into line with the UK average, in a phenomenon that had been dubbed the "Barnett Squeeze"
Due to once owning an overwhelming empire, I think a lot of people forget "British culture" is inherently "multicultural". A national British dish is chicken tikka masala, a curry, and nobody can tell if it was invented in India or the UK.
This highlights the ambiguity. There is no single multi-culture - it is an adjective that can apply to many distinct mixed cultures.
Some of the pushback is because some multicultures are better than others.
This photo is particularly striking:
https://i.redditmedia.com/2ZKJnNVW1-Mn41TE8dqXFMten1_L6gBZ7I...
Family eh?
How does it seem that?
I believe you mean that the "unionists hold disproportionate power". Your statement will, however, probably hold true after the next general election...
Productivity, wage growth in the UK is a problem. Is that going to get fixed by carrying on as we are? Should the workers not have more say?
I don't subscribe to the idea that what's best for the corporation and board of directors is what's best for everyone. Thats how we're operating. I think the next general election will change the record i.e what's best for workers, for the average person, for the sick and disabled, is ultimately best for the corporations. After all, a happy, healthy worker is a productive worker.
There's a review here: https://overland.org.au/2010/07/non-fiction-review-%E2%80%93...
That part. It was a long time ago.
I know a bunch of British people who've visited the continent, and the only place they could think of to visit was Normandy, Dunkirk or the Somme. Their entire mental framing of Europe is around the wars, and their grandparents or great-grandparents. And the poppies! Always with the poppies.
Insularity is real and many people, possibly a majority, outside the major metro areas are deeply incurious. The wars are the biggest semantic nodes in their heads associated with Europe, followed swiftly by something about bent bananas from Brussels.
Secondly it is a bit insulting to blithely state that anyone from a non-metropolitan area is some sort of country bumpkin thicko.
It's not even ignorance, per se; it's disinterest, combined with prejudice, in the literal sense of judged before the evidence.
The kids going to Ibiza are just visiting a sunny British resort with funny accents. I'd barely consider that abroad, for the amount of cultural adjustment it entails.
Secondly, I wouldn't even say British holiday making habits are especially different to those of other major European nations. If you want to paint a picture of the UK being uniquely backwards and insular then fine, but it doesn't seem to be based on anything outside snobbery and prejudice.
It is easy to claim that people you disagree with have all kinds of moral faults, but in doing so you become what you affect to criticise.
Data from Wikipedia.
WWWII deaths:
Russia: 20,000,000 to 27,000,000
UK and colonies: 450,900
USA: 419,400
WWII Military dead:
Russia: 8,668,000 to 11,400,00
UK and colonies: 383,700
USA: 407,300
At the time the population of the US was roughly 3X the UK, and the USSR was roughly 1.4X the US.
edit: I wondered, and found that about 25% of US casualties were in the Pacific theater. http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/Casualties/Casualtie...
What terrible goddam war. Anyway, it's not like the Brits hid in a hole while the Americans saved everyone. No snarky comments at imaginary cocktail parties, please.
I thought this was going to be a joke about lend-lease!
Took bad Stalin felt like he needed to match that count during his subsequent extermination of "political enemies."
Or doubled...
1: http://www.ibtimes.com/how-many-people-did-joseph-stalin-kil...
A great example is the Battle of Kursk. A defining moment when Germany lose as offensive capabilities in the East. It was a decisive win for the USSR, but the casualty numbers are astounding.
German loses - ~54,000 deaths USSR loses - ~180,000 deaths
The USSR's plan was to invade the whole of Europe anyway (Stalin was preparing for it well before Operation Barbarossa started - you can look it up, they had the largest tank division in the world back in the 30s, well above Germany, and with much more powerful tanks that were obviously not going to be used for peaceful purposes).
So presenting them as "allied forces" has always felt amusing to me. They showed their true colors anyway right after Germany's defeat.
"The American delegate is here? Late as usual"
Keep them coming...I love dragging up the old jokes